Posts in purgatory

Things have been moderately busy lately, as the state of my blog may suggest—that or blog apathy.

Nevertheless I have nearly 200 drafts in various stages of completion; from titles to ideas to half written essays to completed—but not published or proof read. Unfortunately unless I complete an article near the time I begin it, and post it at the time, it may end up being ignored for several years. Work and family will continue to demand time, and I would like to get some reading done, so in the next week I thought I would see if I could find half a dozen drafts or so that are complete, or near to it, and publish them.

We'll see.

Blogging from 4000 feet

I have wanted to do this for a while; writing a post while flying. I am writing from my smart phone as I didn't need my laptop today. There are no issues using a phone in flight as it is a chartered flight and the phone doesn't interfere with the electronics on some older planes (not so certain it's a problem on the newer ones either?).

Here's a photo of the sunrise over Otago. Will have to insert it later, blogger won't grab pictures off my phone.

Travel and post scheduling

I am having some family time in warmer climes sans adequate internet access. I will attempt to use the scheduling feature on Blogger with which I have variable success. I am unlikely to respond to comments or remove any inadvertently hung in spam.

Blogging on Genesis

I have been keen to write more posts on the earlier chapters of Genesis. I have several posts half written. So as time and inspiration allow I hope to publish a variety of posts on creation and the Fall during the coming year. These may cover a range of issues such as the meaning of the text, the implications in history or doctrine, or other related issues.

Blogging 3 years on

I started blogging at the beginning of 2007. I had thought about it for some time prior but was cautious as I was uncertain if I would sustain it. I have managed to thus far, though have wondered whether it is a good use of my time.

I was and am a reasonably avid reader. While I may read more online and less on paper than previously, I continue to read a significant amount of material. Some time before I started blogging I felt mildly guilty for this; not so much the reading, but that I was not doing anything of value with such information. Though I no longer think like this, blogging is an outlet.

Generally I wonder whether specific tasks are a good use of my time. I think Christians should enquire of God what they do and act on the answer. There are reasons for this belief which I won't get into here, but the question remains: How do we know the answer? I tend to be slow to make decisions or act. A friend of mine suggested trialling things to see where they go, being prepared to drop them. I attempted a couple of things that did not continue. I am uncertain whether my blogging antedated my friends comments but it seems to have continued.

Still it takes up a lot of time writing posts. Checking sources for ideas you think are true, finding useful links, writing the post, and proofreading (something I possibly do too much of, I am not certain I quite get the nature of blogging). One should review his activities from time to time. Even if I enjoy it, it may not be the best use of my time. Or it may be a pointless waste of time; feedback is much different online. For now I plan on continuing and here are some thoughts I have had over the last few years, that may be of interest.

I have thought that blogging likely peters out for many. I have not seen figures but this seems to happen frequently. I did not assume I would necessarily be different. So my plan was to post on a sustainable frequency. I thought weekly would be a moderate target, which can be harder than it seems depending on the type of posts one writes. I have managed to average twice weekly over the last 3 years.

I enjoy clever quotes, but have too many for a monthly quote, I plan to go to weekly, though I hope to maintain weekly posts otherwise.

Scheduling is useful. I may write in spurts, and don't finish a lot of what I start, at least not for some time. Using scheduling allows for smoother posting rather than 4 posts in one day then none for a month. And it is useful when holidaying, though I still have to write them beforehand.

I don't have the problem of not enough to write about. Apparently some people do. I have more than 100 draft posts in various stages of completion, and many more ideas that have yet to make it to the keyboard. I think that carrying and using a dictaphone to record thoughts as they arise would be beneficial, though probably a little eccentric.

Should one be anonymous? The decision for anonymity is difficult. Some people insist that real names reflect honesty. But it may limit what you wish to write about. Employers, friends, acquaintances, parishioners are prepared to make judgments and act on them, even if they don't understand or misinterpret what you are writing. I think on balance it is preferable to choose a moniker initially. More information can be revealed at a later stage, but it cannot be removed.

As mentioned, feedback is different online. More people read your blog than comment (I think). But who and how many read? I installed a counter sometime during the first year. I recommend this, though WordPress keeps blog statistics. I don't think one should get too focused on the statistics, however they provide some idea of whether people are reading your posts and what is popular. Nevertheless comments are helpful. Even if you do not add much to the post, comments are feedback to minor players in the blogging world. Bloggers do well to acknowledge comments from newbies, something I am not consistent with.

I guess many bloggers desire traffic. I appreciate traffic, but I think increasing exposure is possibly preferable. What do I mean in distinguishing traffic from exposure? I think I write stuff that may be of interest to some people, and hopefully may be helpful to a few. So it is not so much the numbers (traffic), if I bore you, go somewhere else that you find more interesting; it is getting those who do not know you exist but who share some common interest to become aware of you (exposure) that is the difficulty. One possibility is to search out other sites, read a few posts, and comment on the sites you find interesting. Some of those people may find you moderately interesting.

Importing Haloscan comments to Wordpress

As I previously mentioned, I have imported my Haloscan comments to a WordPress blog. I have no intention of switching from Blogger to WordPress at this stage, but this is the best I can do currently to retain online access to my old comments.

As I have been asked how this was done I will provide a brief outline here with the links to the pages I referenced. It is not particularly straightforward and I did this with the assistance of stratman.

Haloscan has been purchased by JS-Kit. They initially offered to transfer comments to an upgradeable free account. I understand that this commenting system is integrated into Blogger which suggests comments would have been transferred back to Blogger's commenting system. This was not available until one was notified of the transfer, by which stage it was Echo commenting which was a paid system. Not too unreasonable I guess, but given they can possibly insert the comments into Blogger that would have been a nice option.

My steps

I downloaded comments from Haloscan. You should do this first, and probably do it anyway in case of future need. Comments download as an xml file which you can view in Notepad. Blogger does not recognise the comments in this particular xml format, though the comments are indexed by the blogpost code determined by Blogger.

I needed to set up WordPress blogging software. WordPress develop free blog software which is very versatile. The software needs to be uploaded to a webhoster which I don't have. They also have their software on their own webhoster conveniently (or confusingly) called Wordpress.com. This is less versatile and is insufficient for the import.

Not having a webhoster I needed to host the software on my computer by having it act as a server. I downloaded WampServer which is open source software located at SourceForge.

I installed WampServer following this guide. Although I did not create virtual hosts; the default is a single localhost. And be careful about creating a password. You probably do not need one. If you create a password the file you need to modify (config.inc.php) is not in the www\phpmyadmin\ directory that it must have been in the 2005 version of WampServer. It is currently located in the apps\phpmyadmin3.2.0.1\ directory.

WordPress downloads as a zip file. After unpacking, the files can be copied into the www/ directory. Alternatively you can follow these directions.

WordPress blogs can be viewed and modified from within a browser. It is reasonably straightforward but more details here. I went to Tools/Import and imported posts (and old, pre-Haloscan comments) directly from Blogger. You need to give WampServer/ Wordpress permission from Blogger to do this. Even with permission I got an error. Work around was to open the php.ini file and find the line

;extension=php_openssl.dll

The semicolon (;) indicates this is a comment. Decomment by removing the semicolon and save the file. Reboot WampServer and WordPress can import directly from Blogger. Alternatively you can export the file from Blogger then import to WordPress.

Next I installed a WordPress plugin to import Haloscan comments. Essentially Blogger uses unique numeric codes for blog authors and blog posts. Haloscan uses the same blogpost codes for comments. Blogger codes are lost on the import to WordPress. The plugins identify the blogpost codes and attach the Haloscan comments to the correct post. Here are the pluggins and instructions for importing the Haloscan comments. They worked fine other than adding > to the beginning of post titles and the first paragraph of the post body. Because of timeouts I set the thread identification pluggin to only grab 10 posts per time.

There is some development code to import WordPress to Blogger. It involves installing Python, and apparently does not keep the comment dates intact, so I have not used that. Thus I do not have my old comments in Blogger. I have a WordPress blog which I uploaded the posts and comments to, which will have to suffice. It is unlikely people other than me will use it. But perhaps this post may be helpful to those who use WordPress rather than Blogger.

Back to Blogger commenting

Haloscan are stopping their free commenting system. I switched previously from blogger to haloscan to allow more control over commenting. I wished to allow easy commenting without anti-spam codes, but therefore need to be able to delete comments. But back to blogger commenting for now. Will see how easy it is to work with their system. Blogger allows commenters to delete their own comments. As administrator I can delete any comment.

I wanted to import my haloscan comments but this is proving quite difficult. For now the comments are on a wordpress blog which mirrors this blog for the last 3 years. I may write about the process at some stage. I suggest that others using haloscan at least export their comments so they have a copy on their own hard drive, perhaps future software will be able to make use of it. Exporting now is important as the information may not be obtainable in the future.

Internet interlude

I will be away from the internet for a fortnight. I have some posts scheduled to come up, but I am unlikely to respond to comments.

Layout modification

I have made some changes to my blog appearance as you can see. Despite doing a reasonable amount of prior work on my test blog, the change still took some time. I had to transfer haloscan commenting system which fortunately worked. Though apparently haloscan is shifting to JS-Kit at some stage. The comments will then get stored again on blogger which may be preferable.

I have been wanting to switch to a 3 column layout to separate out blog related access (see left) and external links (see right). Following that schema means that recent comments should be on the left but it seems to fit better on the right because of the word count. I got the template from ourblogtemplates but have modified it moderately. It has way too many options, especially for colours, and I will have to weed it out at some stage. I also need to modify some of the colours such as mouseover. The width may be slightly large for some monitors at 980 pixels, though only 3% of my visitors have a resolution as low as 800 pixels.

Charity police

Jugulum makes an interesting observation. I have noticed this but I wonder if it is predominantly confined to Christian blogs. Blogmasters vary in what they expect of commenters; some blogs are freer in the range of tone, though curt language tends to be less tolerated from newbies and will likely result in a response in kind. Others expect more courtesy and will remove offence or ban offenders. What is amusing are commenters whose sensitivity buttons are grossly oversized. They expect kind language but are harsh in enforcing it. Jugulum notes,

If you read many blogs on the internet, you will find people who speak very uncharitably–they’re constantly unnecessarily harsh in tone and unreasonable in how they interpret others. You will also find people who are obsessed with accusing others of being uncharitable. You can call them charity police. And those guys can be some of the least charitable people around–accusing others of uncharity at the drop of a hat or the slightest hint of language that isn’t excessively polite. Majorly unreasonable & oversensitive.

This often true. Most of the problem with charity police resides in their own personalities.

I will add that exacerbating the problem is that text communication is intrinsically blunt. Thus one finds his comments less blunt due to the fact he is writing what he is thinking and others' comments more blunt because he is reading what they are writing. One should reread what he has written to get an idea of tone. Always assume the tone is slightly harsher than it reads. If you think someone will find your comment a little blunt and you don't know how to tone in down, consider using (as much as I am not particular fan of them) emoticons.

Blog subscription recommendations

I was looking at Google Reader today. I am not really certain how it works, I presume it aggregates websites one is interested in and locates them on a personalised page.

It offers recommendations based on one's "web history", whatever that means. I don't generally use google as my search engine so presumably it is based on my blogger account, i.e. my posts. Interestingly I had previously heard of all bar one of these blogs or their authors and had visited the links. These are the suggestions for me. The number is the current number of subscriptions to the feed. My blog has 7 subscribers.

• Difster 8
• internetmonk.com 851
• The Pan Galactic Blogger Blaster 14
• Introspectives of an Arminian Christian 8
• Around the World with AiG's Ken Ham 327
• Ben Witherington 1,302
• Pros Apologian 450
• Answers in Genesis Articles 569
• Examining Calvinism 13
• Creation-Evolution Headlines 106
• Kiwiblog 493
• The Ranting Room 23

The one I had not heard of? Examining Calvinism, though I will pay it a visit.

Commenting on blog posts

Have switched to HaloScan for commenting. I have commented with both HaloScan and the default at Blogger and I find the later less smooth.

I wish to allow all comments. To facilitate commenting the process should be smooth, fast and unmoderated with no character verification. In Blogger my settings were set thus but the process of commenting is stilted.

No moderation will allow unwanted comments and spam but Blogger does not seem to have the ability to remove these comments subsequently. Moderation delays the process and there is the psychological barrier that the blogmaster may not allow the comment to pass. HaloScan can be set with moderation on or off, but allows removal of comments subsequently. It gives more freedom in timestamping (code rather than a limited number of set options) but template design is better in Blogger. And I would like for a larger comment box but this does not seem to be available in the free version.

An improvement in commenting would be to show the preview as one types so mistakes in html code could be seen prior to publishing. I have seen this but can't remember where. Even easier would be formatting buttons similar to wikipedia.

The downside to this switch is previous comments are lost (or hidden somewhere in cyberspace).