Blogging

There are 133 posts filed in Blogging (this is page 9 of 14).

Back in July 2022, Dave Winer said he never suggested people should run their own web server. However, in the last week, he tweeted a link to this post from 2015 where he says “If you’re a journalism educator, please make sure every new journalist you graduate has the ability to run a server, install blogging and river software”. Just saying…let’s be consistent…

What does “two-way RSS” mean?

I read Dave Winer’s post on Two-way RSS earlier today, and I agree with the concept (publishing tools should allow other editors to create content), but I am not understanding referring specifically to RSS. In the Micro.blog site, a user can publish to a timeline from a RSS feed. However, all the editing in that context occurs in the tool creating the RSS feed. In past posts, Dave Winer has advocated for publishing tools to allow other editors to create content for that publishing tool. I am just having difficulty seeing how allowing “inbound RSS” solves the problem.

How easy should it be to create a website?

I read this in a post by Ton Ziljstra today, referencing a conversation between Ton, Aaron Parecki, and Tantek Celik. I think the correct answer is “it depends on what you want”. Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik are recognized as the co-creators of IndieWeb.org, and leading figures in the IndieWeb movement. The context of the question from Ton’s post is that you can do it on social media silo sites, but what about on the open web? I think that Tantek and Aaron would like to be able to see this happen on the open web, but they mentioned a third party silo (Linktree) as a solution.

I think that people like to get stuff for free. They like to access web services for free. So when someone thinks “I would like to have a website”, their first thought may be to look to a free service. However, in many cases, they do not “own their data“. They may not even own their own URL. To own your data, to own your URL, has a cost. It can be a small cost, but there is a cost. I would say that creating a site on WordPress.com, and paying a fee to have your own URL and to not have ads on your site, is the simplest way to have a site and own your data and URL. To totally own your web presence requires a little more cost and effort (I wrote a book on how to do it!), but again this is totally doable. Ton says he would create a small site writing HTML in Notepad. He could, but then he would need web hosting and a URL (see my book for how to do this cheaply!). Again, it comes back to the answer “it depends on what you want”. If a person is willing to let another site host their words for free – go for it! If you want to have more control, host it yourself, or pay for a site you control (like Micro.blog or other hosting sites).

The urge to fiddle around

Every so often (well, at least once a week….), I read about different blogging tools and think “I would like to try that out…”. Then, I remember this picture, and think “My WordPress setup is just fine, I don’t need to look at other blogging tools” (he says as he types this post in Drummer to publish with Old School). But…I had some time this weekend (Memorial Day holiday), so I spent some time looking at two tools related to Drummer.

The first tool was drummerCMS (a shell for the Old School blogging tool to connect with Drummer). Some time ago, I saw that Scott Hansen wrote a post about running drummerCMS locally, and that it could generate a set of files from the OPML blog file. I set it up per his post a few weeks ago, but had a problem, and set it aside. This weekend, I reached out to Scott Hansen, and he said that his original post had an error in the build URL, and he had updated the post. I tried it again, and it did create a set of files, but not the finished product I was hoping for (a set of HTML files that I could upload to a hosting site). I did a little looking through Old School, and saw that the tool is tied into uploading to Amazon S3, and although parameters related to that could be changed, the tool seemed to do the final render as part of the S3 upload. Sigh…setting it aside again… 

The second tool was written by Antranig Vartanian, and was using an XSLT style sheet to style an OPML file from Drummer as a blog. I took a slightly out-of-date copy of my blog.opml from Drummer, copied it to a folder on my web hosting service, copied the XSLT style sheet, added a link to the style sheet within the OPML file, and was able to create this rendering of my Drummer posts. Fun!

I guess a batting average of 1 out of 2 is not too bad…must…stop…fiddling….

Troubleshooting Brave mobile browser problem

When my main site got switched to https, I had some problems with sub-domain sites. One of them was my Old School Drummers river of news site. I cleaned up some http/https references, and got it to appear on desktop and mobile, but the mobile version did not show the text. I used Developer Tools in Brave and cleared up what I think is the remaining issues, but it still does not display in the Brave mobile browser for Android (that is, news items do not appear). It does work in Google Chrome for mobile. Lazyweb – any thoughts?

Trying to get my WordPress site back

Earlier this week, I wanted to start posting again on my website, AndySylvester.com. When I went to log in, all I saw was a white screen. After some searching, I found that this was a thing for WordPress sites (“white screen of death”). Ugh – just what I needed! I found a few articles (https://themeisle.com/blog/cant-access-wp-admin/, https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/fix-wordpress-white-screen-of-death, https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/fix-locked-out-of-wordpress-admin-issue)

and did the following steps:

• Added a line in wp-config.php to increase memory to 64 MB
• Checked my WordPress core files (they were up to date)
• Renamed my plugin and themes directories
• Added a DEBUG MODE statement to wp-config.php

At this point, I was able to see some error messages:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-login.php on line 462

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-login.php on line 478

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6828

However, I still could not log in. I spent some time with Bluehost tech support (both chat and phone support), but did not get much help there. As part of their troubleshooting, I turned SSL support on and off (that had a side effect, will discuss later in this post).

Per this post, I removed the closing PHP tag in wp-config.php.

Per this Stack Exchange post (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42832860/wordpress-utf-8-without-bom), I resaved wp-config.php and wp-login.php to force UTF-8 encoding without BOM. At that point, the error messages were removed, and the login fields remained, but now I was getting messages related to cookies, and saw some redirection in the URL field in the browser. Read through these articles (https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/215032/cookie-domain-setting-confusion, https://wp-staging.com/how-to-fix-the-error-cookies-are-blocked-or-not-supported-by-your-browser/).

I tried to get Bluehost to turn off SSL for my site (although I already de-selected that). They said they turned it off, but subdomains on andysylvester.com still showed up as secure sites, which messed up some of the display (had links to http which were interpreted as “unsecure” – arrrgh!).

I decided to change the URL of my site in the MySQL database from http://andysylvester.com to https://andysylvester.com.

Also, per this post (https://themeisle.com/blog/add-wordpress-https/) , I added the following line to wp-config.php:

define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);

After I did this, I was FINALLY able to log into my site – whew!

I do not know how this whole thing started, but I am glad to get back to posting!

How to organize information for use

Ken Smith had two recent posts (“For the team” and “Or maybe not“), discussing the ideas of forming a community, collecting information on a topic, processing information as a group, and providing a summary of that information. I think the collection and processing tasks are attainable and occur on a regular basis. The task not being performed well is the curate/share/maintain steps.

As an example, I started collecting information on the topic of personal book lists in a Github repo. I provided a chronology of recent posts on the subject, collected tools and techniques, and also created some tools of my own. The recent Github repo for Drummer stuff would be another example, as well as other “awesome-fill-in-the-blank” sites on Github. A mega example of this is a tech guide put together by Stephen Downes on resources for creating an online community, class or conference. 

Perhaps the main thing is to start a “beach-head” of some sort where people can collaborate, then publicize and support that beach-head. Thoughts, anyone?

(cross-posted from my Drummer blog)