John Ryan’s Blog

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In this blog digest I have a bit of a diverse selection which I would also recommend subscribing to in your feed reader. Feel free to add your own in a comment and I will update this post.

Food: Organic Yum-Yum -

I’m hoping that this blog will help you find out why organic food is better, which organic foods taste best, and where to buy it.
I will do my best to find the answers to all the common questions about organic stuff.

Muslim: GOREY MUSLIM COMMUNITY -

Dear Brothers, Sisters and respected visitors - welcome. This ‘blog’ is our humble effort to introduce ourselves to the worldwide Ummah, to keep you informed of events and to provide a link with other Muslim communities in Ireland.

Town Planning: An Irish Town Planner’s Blog -

This blog is full of necessary bits needed by and of interest to planners.

If you are new to blogging you may not have yet used a desktop editor for editing and creating posts, a desktop editor will allow you to work offline if you choose, and comes with all the functions you need to create a full blog post, such as text formatting, image formatting, and so on. Then any good writer will allow you to upload and publish the entire post from your desktop, or if you prefer you can also save a local copy to your PC.

If you have have used a desktop editor previously, you will most probably have given up on them, as many editors do all sorts of funny things to the text formatting, meaning when you try to publish the post you find it contains a great deal of unnecessary formatting tags. However some advances have been made to sort out this messy formatting and there are now a few desktop editors that actually work very well. Windows live writer is one such tool.

There has been a lot of criticism in relation to windows software in the past, this aside, windows live writer is simple to use, smooth to operate, works for many different blog platforms and is expandable using Plug-ins.

The most interesting feature perhaps is the way text formatting is displayed on the editor, which is set to reflect the CSS font used in your blog, giving you a feel for the final output, this is done automatically, but can also be disabled. Additionally there is also a preview function which will show you how the post will look on your site, without actually taking the post live. In fact there are four views on this desktop editor:

• Normal - Excludes CSS and shows a standard output.
• Web Layout - Includes your blog CSS formatting, as defined by your theme.
• Web Preview - Displays what the post will look like on your blog.
• HTML -Displays the code behind the post.

Windows live writer feels like a premium editor which is surprisingly free. Although created as a complement to Windows Live Spaces, the functionality to edit posts and pages on other platforms are included. Wordpress, Typepad, Sharepoint are all supported, but I have only tested on wordpress.

The plug-ins feature allow you to expand the editor, although there is a limited number of these, popular plug-ins such as the ability to insert Flickr images are available.

For those who prefer to make a few changes to their post on their platform editor, the desktop editor even comes with a ‘post draft to blog and edit online’ feature, allowing you to make those additional changes if you publish!

Do you use a blog writer, or do you prefer to use your platforms editor from your web-browser? Please comment and share your views.

Recently, I was sent an e-mail from a ‘cyber agent’ informing my blog software has a flaw in it, that this ‘cyber agent’ had gained access to the administration panel, to prove this I was provided with the encrypted password and my username with login details. While, it turned out that this was not my main blog and just some blog software I was testing at some stage and never bothered to upgrade - so I was always safe - in that respect, as I always stay up to date with software renewals on my main sites.

This did start me thinking about blog security, or perhaps more importantly if something did happen are my backups ready if the worst happens, and if so does this mean I can turn back the clock and have my blog fully restored. As a wordpress user there is a few simple options you can utilise, but no matter what software you use the following rule is golden.

Check with your web-host, how often do they do full backups of your sites data, meaning your database and all files you have associated with your website, and should you need access to these files to restore the data ,what is the required process. If you are in Ireland check out Letshost.ie who have a great backup policy. Some hosts have cPanel installed which will allow you to run a full backup also.

Step 1 - The database

The wordpress backup plugin, is a great tool for backing up your wordpress database - that is everything you have written on your blog, and the actual database that supports this. You can use this plugin to schedule a regular backup - which is e-mailed to you on a specified basis. Once activated you will find a backup option under the manage menu, I would strongly recommend against saving the backup to the server, as this may be publicly accessible, having it e-mailed is a good idea, or better still saving to your PC. I find deleting spam before backup is a great idea to speed up the download, particularly relevant for those with slower connections and you really don’t need a spam backup, easy to do if you use Askimet. Remember this backup process does not include any themes, plugins, images, or wordpress php and config files.

Step 2 - The files

Getting the rest of the files is the next part, using your favorite FTP client, such as FileZilla (free), log on via FTP to your wordpress installation and copy the entire folder including subdirectories, ensuring your themes, uploaded images, plugins and modified files are all in there, which they should be anyway, and copy to your PC. This process may take a while depending on the amount of data and your broadband connection.

The files should then be backed-up to a CD or external hard-drive , it seems unlikely but a server and a PC going down does happen. You should backup your wordpress database often using the schedule on the plugin (or manually if you prefer), unless you do not post very often, every week/month  is a good starting point, and also backup your wordpress files, this - maybe once a month is ok, but if you make template changes and wordpress changes you’ll want this reflected in your backups and so backing up at that point is wise.

Points to note

You don’t need to become a backup freak, but just remember to do it, a simply entry to Google calendar to remind you when to do it is a nice idea, they even send you text reminders, you have no excuse really.

Unless you do both steps above you really only have a partial backup of your blog.

Thanks for the power Irish Rail! They now have power points beside seats on their Limerick to Dublin service, perfect for someone who must have Laptop access on boring 3 hour trips. A+

Lorelle points out how frustrating it can be to find misleading post tittles on webfeeds and that those posts usually turn out to be “rattling-on posts” with no relevance to the title.

Of course this also causes mild annoyance to the Google searcher -finding search results with no actual relevance to the topic.While the problem seems to be more with the fact that the title can be misleading in that it never gets to the point, Lorelle has touched on a somewhat sensitive topics for some authors - we like to rant or ‘rattling-on’ a little.

Are these the most popular posts? Does a bear shi* in the woods?

I bet there are a ton of authors who are out and about, come across a predicament and think ‘I’ll rant about that tonight on my blog’, there’s nothing wrong with this, some posts are interesting, others are mind numbingly boring, but at the end of the day it’s your blog so enjoy, if people don’t want to read it move on, I tend to write a few “rattling-on posts” myself.

Below are a few ideas I came up with to prevent too many “rattling-on posts” which I wrote out for myself. Feel free to use or ignore these at will.

• Write about experiences of interest to you and your audience with a positive note, rather than moaning about an issue, although some times this is unavoidable, note what attracts you to your favourite blogs.
• A picture is worth a thousand words - no I don’t mean to put down the book and pick up some magazine rag - on many occasions a picture can say more than the words every could. Have your camera phone on the ready, pictures brighten you up your blog and helps attach a persona to it. The old saying is don’t judge a cover by its cover, but we all do this.
• This brings us to presentation, not so much the theme, we can all pick out the wonderful themes on the net, but keeping it tidy, all those  blog-plugins are great fun, but don’t try to cover up bad content with too many nick knacks.
• Use Google Reader - for inspiration.
• Subscribe to johnmryan.com’s blog - because your under my mind control.

I did say it was just a few ideas, feel free to comment in your own ideas on keeping your blog interesting and I’ll update this post if there any good ones.

Six Apart has launched TypePad AntiSpam, available for both Movable Type and Wordpress this open source software hopes to combat all your spam problems.

Being open source, including the back-end must be a worry to potential users, as its main competitor Akismet is not open source and has proved a success for the most part. However we are promised there are parts which are not exposed  which could allow the system to become compromised by spammers.

“We aren’t sharing all of the rules and logic that we run with our implementation of the TypePad AntiSpam engine. We are open sourcing the core engine, allowing others to build on top of our system allowing them to build and operate their own spam service.”

The self learning system has already been adopted by the likes of ProBlogger who recently asked his readers to report any problems, and as of writing this there seemed to be very little. Time will tell, having an alternative option is always a necessity with software. This blog will however be sticking to a proven winner - Akismet, who has of today prevented 30,151 pieces of spam.

Dublin Street writing by eircom, originally uploaded by johnmryan.

Some people tend to look at the ground while they walk, some do it - avoiding peoples gaze, and others are lost in day dreams, a few fear dog doo on their shoe.

Well those people are now being targeted by advertisements written on the pavement, this seems like a new marketing strategy to sell a product – in this case involves Eircom writing in what I can only hope is semi permanent chalk, advertisements on the pavement all around St Stephens Green area, in frot of the park. Is it really the same as vandalism?

I had to laugh – its now raining!