Carthik Sharma

Remember the article I wrote about the BlackWing 602 pencil earlier? Well, I was curious to see how the sale ended, and popped into ebay. Then I searched to see if any other BalckWing 602s have surfaced for sale. There is one.

In the item description, the person who has posted the pencil for sale quotes me! Above Boing Boing – take that, Cory Doctorow Mark Frauenfelder!

Weird are the ways of the web. For what it’s worth, I am no designer, or pencil expert. I was wondering what makes a pencil SO special, and I still do. Running into your name serendipitously is weird. Really weird.

The long dawn of Indian internet activism — jace.seacrow.com
The long dawn of Indian internet activism

And so a week has passed. We kicked up a ruckus, got mainstream media to back our case, appealed on television, made various government babus look like idiots, rattled their departments, extracted their precious document, made it public, set them off on a blame game, and finally, got the ISPs to restore access to our blogs.

Have you ever seen a long, detailed, well written article, with every single phrase in the article being a link to some informative article somewhere? Read the above article. It is the first such I have come across, and speaks of the recent Indian Govt ban on some blogs and websites. Information and opinion should be free for democracy to prevail.

Amazing, I wonder how long it took for him to put this article together, and how many tabs he had open when we wrote it.

Everybody’s made their point about how great RSS (or Atom) feeds are, and how they help folks syndicate content and keep in touch with a lot of websites in a very efficient fashion – problem is that everybody seems to not like to think about how to manage the syndicated content they read. The cool thing about feeds is supposed to be that you get easy access to a large amount of information, which you then should be able to process and digest sooner than you could have by just visiting each individual website and scanning or reading all the articles! With current feedreaders, the usage flow is like that of browsing – just that instead of clicking on, say, a bunch of bookmarks in your browser, you click a bunch of feeds in one panel that then open up a list of articles from the feed(blog) in another panel! It saves you some time, but not too much.

Alright, so you get the feeds from a lot of websites, but right now, things are getting out of control – at least for me they are. I cannot read updates from 200+ websites within an hour. Also, I don’t want to read everything written by everyone I find interesting. When such a large set of data is involved, I would expect to be able to manage and trim the data down according to my personal preferences.

So, basically, can we please have a feedreader with some intelligence, please? RSSOwl is neat in that uses Amphetarate to “rate” articles, but you have to manually rate what you read, and that is such a pain. There is a dropdown menu for the ratings, so it takes a few additional clicks and some moving around of the mouse to rate articles. I dislike how the UI is designed as well, and how one has to double-click a feed to read the contents. Needlessly complicated. Findory.com is neat too, but then it is not easy to use it to read a bunch of blogs. Searching for the blogs you want to read is so difficult in Findory! Adding a set of blogs you want to subscribe to is tough in findory – not intuitive in any case. I would love to see a desktop (or online) feed reader that learns from my behavior – what do I like reading?, what articles do I spend the most time reading?, without having me do anything extra besides just reading the articles in the various feeds. This is the only way I can keep on adding feeds of interesting sites, and hope to catch everything interesting in a reasonable amount of time. I suppose computer science is advanced enough to have thought about problems of organizing large amounts of data in an intelligible fashion, and that there must be folks who work on analyzing and utilizing usage patterns. This will be the next killer internet app – a feedreader that is intelligent, and magically presents you with the most interesting articles published the last day or two – by understanding who you are and what you like.

I cannot be the only one missing Reinvigorate’s tracker, now can I? All I want is a simple system that lists out the referrers one after the other, as and when folks visit the site. I do not care about the other details quite as much. I do not care about systems that give you a list of “top referrers” or bunch the referrers together. A trickle of referrers in the order in which they occur is what I want. What do you use in the place of reinvigorate?

I couldn’t help laughing when I read Mako’s adventure with spam. What if a Nigerian email you, sincerely requesting collaboration on a project, or expressing a business interest in what you do? Well, this is what happens – your spam filter does not mark the mail as spam, while you do.

Mako’s blog makes me smile – almost always, and is now a daily read for me. How I wish he linked to individual entry pages from the title of posts. Each time I want to write about something he wrote about, I end up looking through the :

06:22 | reflections | # | Comments: 0

at the bottom of the post (for which I have to scroll down, first, or I don’t see them), and then i have to figure out which of those links is the right one for the post. WordPress has spoilt me, I tell you!

Mako’s blog is powered by Bloxsom, which is not GPLed, or as far as I can tell, distributed under a free-software license but is released under the MIT license, which enables folks to redistribute modified versions. It also does not put a “generator” tag in the source of the feeds it produces, and is the first tool I have noticed that doesn’t put that feed in there (there may be more). A discussion with Matt a long time ago had concluded with the reasoning that looking for the generator tag in the feeds was the best way to identify the tool used to publish a blog. Not any more, I guess.

Alright, so Mako, want to step into the wonderful world of WordPress? Moving is easy.

P.S. This post started heading towards one destination and ended up somewhere I never intended to end up when I started writing it. Sort of like how I spend my days – lots of things are accomplished but the plan usually goes out the window – have to fix this.

A map of connections between the members of the #wordpress IRC channel, updated to the second. Neat, eh?

My ambition was to set a science fiction book in as far into the future as I could imagine, while not assuming anything presently known to be impossible.

– John C. Wright. (from Jef’s web files). What can I say about a man, who has two children called Orville and Wilbur Wright? Or who, when asked “What writers influenced your novels?”, replies “Whom am I copying, you mean?”. Interesting, perhaps?

I started finding out a little after I ran into a post at Ryan Boren’s blog about the Golden Transcendence, and my first thought was, “What a pompous title!”. I did, however stop by at the Amazon page for that book, read a few reviews, searched a bit and promptly decided I will not be a peace till I read the books and make up my mind as to how good the books are.

Ah! but we are digressing! I helped Ideal Rhombus move to wordpress by writing a hacked version of an import script for Matt, the blog’s owner. He was kind enough to do the most inexplicable thing – show appreciation of my work. He has bought me not one, not two, but all three of the books by John C. Wright that I wanted to read. Thank you, Matt.

I was able to help Alan move, too, and he has promised me some Mexican tamarind candy in the mail. Alan is a graduate student in Chemistry at Berkeley, and has an awesome collection of Soda bottles and other bottled drinks from all over the world. I look forward to getting him a “Goli” Soda when I next go to India. Oh the joy of learning the art of drinking from those bottles without getting the latest contagious disease!

All this may sound exciting, but what really made my day was reading a hundred things about Nuclear Moose. Craig is the funniest, most lovable member of the WordPress crew, and I was really surprised to find that he took the time and the effort to type a list that long, in reply to a comment I left on his blog.

All this makes me feel like a thousand people hugged me (and I don’t mean “crushed”).

While trying to use the Press It! bookmarklet with FireFox 0.9, I got the following error :

Deprecated method document.getSelection() called. Please use window.getSelection() instead.

So I fixed the bookmarklet to be :

...createRange().text:window.getSelection();}void(window.open('http://...
where it said
...createRange().text:document.getSelection();}void(window.open('http://...

(changed document.getSelection() to window.getSelection() )

To fix yours, if you are using FireFox 0.9, right click on you Press It bookmarklet in the BookMarks toolbar, click on “Properties” and edit the code as I did above in the “Location” field.

The Codex MT import Guide now contains detailed directions, with links.

Mena says It’s about time, and I can’t agree more. It’s about time Movable Type users moved to WordPress.

A lot of MT users might want to move to WordPress, but may have a lot of questions and doubts regarding the move, and about WordPress. I thought a short post with essential resources, tips and answers will come in handy to at least a few people, so here goes.

Downloading and Installing WordPress:
WordPress 1.2 “Mingus” is now ready, get it from The sourceforge download page.

Importing MT entries:
You can import all your MT entries into WordPress using the import-mt.php script that ships with WordPress, which can be found in the wp-admin folder.
Updates:

1. MT exports the entries with the dates set wrong. The dates do not carry AM/PM or 24 hour information. There is a Fix for the date problem at the MT support forums.
2. WordPress uses UTF-8 as the default encoding. So if your MT blog uses ISO 8859-1 or Latin – 1 to encode posts, convert the posts to UTF-8 before importing, to ensure that all characters display properly. Optionally you could also set an Option (Option -> Reading -> Character Encoding) in WordPress to set the Charset for the WP weblog to ISO 8859-1.
3. The import-mt.php that ships with 1.2 had a couple of bugs, which I fixed. The new import-mt.php is available for use. Read the post at scriptygoddess. Use this to ensure the backslashes in your posts are treated properly, and the “——–” strings in your posts do not break anything.

The MT import tutorial is there if you need help, and be sure to read the notes at the end to see how you can refer visitors to your new WP powered blog from the old MT urls, and other such bits and pieces.
Edit: If you are having trouble importing all the entries at once, getting timed out on the import etc, this thread has some pointers regarding how to work around it.

Modifying your template, stylesheets:
1. LaughingLizard’s Well commented index.php should be helpful in understanding the wordpress index.php file/template.
2. The template tags are explained at the template tags wiki page, and Gregory Auld has written a nice article comparing the MT and WP “template tags”, which should also be of help.
3. NuclearMoose’s Annotated default CSS and podz’ Graphical CSS are excellent guides to the default css stylesheet that ships with WordPress.

Growing wings:
A few very useful wordpress links:
1. The WordPress Wiki – I find myself here at the beginning of a search for a hack/plugin/technique all the time.
2. The Support Forums – search and you shall find
3. AlexKing.org WP styles competition – for awesome ready-to-use stylesheets (…and how to use them).
4. WeblogToolsCollection.com – The blog with loads of tips and useful links.

A few answers:
Multiple blogs using WordPress:
From the trackbacks to Mena’s post above, it seems like a lot of people think it impossible to use WordPress to run multiple weblogs. It is possible to use wordpress to run multiple weblogs off of the same server, with just one MySQL database. I have 7 WP weblogs running on one server! All it takes is to install wordpress multiple times. Each blog would have a different MySQL table prefix. Installing a wordpress blog takes less than five minutes (I agree it could take longer to get the template and stylesheet modified), and so, it’s not only possible, but really easy to have more than one blog powered by wordpress on your server.

Rebuilds and pages:
WordPress does not have to rebuild any pages each time you update your blog. It uses PHP to dynamically create pages on the fly, and is real quick, too. (You can see how much time it took to create and display this page at the bottom of this page)
This also means that all you need to have is one template – index.php. The individual entry “pages”, the archives and everything else is created by WordPress depending on the parameters passed to the index.php file.

Keeping your MovableType links:Last Edited July 10th, 2004
You can redirect visitors to pages on your old Movable Type blog to the correct ones on your new WordPress blog using some readily available solutions. If you are only concerned about search engines, most of them will catch up with the changes in the URLs within a certain amount of time. The following solutions work for both kinds of urls, ones that use the ‘post_id’, like so — http://example.com/000121.html, and the ones that are ‘dirified’, like so — http://example.com/archives/2004/05/12/this_post . For some solutions for the former type, you may need to keep your MT installation around until the search engines are updated to reflect the changes in your blog. This is because of the fact that the MT export file does not provide the ‘post_id’ s for the posts. For dirified urls, there should be no problem.
Update: If your MT permalinks had the post ids in them, then with a little code-fu, you can get wordpress to use the same post ids as MT, and the detailed directions, complete with required changes is available at Dr. Bacchus’ Journal.

1. Alex King’s MovableType template to redirect visitors
2. Matt’s Solution.
3. Idly.org’s solution

Licensing and other issues:
WordPress is distributed under the GPL, and will remain Free Software. Period.

Please leave a comment if you have any questions, or if you find a resource not listed here very useful in making the transition.

Ping-o-matic is this awesome service Dougal and Matt setup for bloggers like me and you who don’t really want to spend more time hunting down various blog update notification services, and their ping URIs, than writing articles. It’s ridiculously easy to use and the benefits are many. I started using it not so long ago, since it’s a recent arrival on the internet.
I was muchly surprised to find that the 10,000th ping was mine! I was on the #wordpress IRC channel, and Matt suggested I get screen caps, which I think is a good idea. May I go down in history as the guy who sent the 10,000th ping through ping-o-matic. Alright, I’m kidding. I know I still have a shot at many really ridiculous acheivements and records, and if nothing works out before I die, I will try my best to get a Darwin Award (I can kid more than once in a paragraph, you know).
Obligatory screencaps