Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

Prior to my discovery that you can post to a Habari blog with Safari on the iPhone, I purchased iBlogger for the iPhone. It’s from the same developers of ecto, a desktop blogging client. It’s currently only priced at $0.99, which for me is a price I’m willing to pay to test an app. It supports all of the popular blogging platforms, as well as the generic metaweblog API, for which Habari has a plugin available.

Connecting the app to my Habari install was very easy, if I recall it even auto discovered the endpoint (example.com/xmlrpc).

As far as functionality, I do not know if because the generic metaweblog API is being used, and sites using engines like Moveable Type or WordPress, but the options are currently pretty sparse (as of v 1.0.7). Habari’s plugin doesn’t support posting images, so the only options really are:

• adding your location - the app inserts a link which opens to a Google map
• adding links - an easy UI for adding a hyperlink.
• tagging - this “feature” seems very weak. It doesn’t pull the existing tags from the site, a common feature in desktop blogging clients, and in my testing, keeps the previous post’s tags on subsequent posts. Might be handy if you expect to tag all of your on-the-go posts the same thing, but I don’t see it that way.

iBlogger does support multiple blogs, otherwise, I have not found any additional elements. For $0.99, I suppose one can’t complain. Since all of my personal sites are on Habari, I haven’t had cause to look at any of the other iPhone blogging clients. I understand the WordPress app is free and open-sourced, I’m sure at some point, most likely out of boredom, I will look at it. Ultimately, as many people have pointed out, typing on the iPhone doesn’t lend itself to the phone being a real blogging device.

However to get that in the moment feel, having a stable option with with a decent feature set would be nice to have. Thank goodness with Habari and in iPhone, you don’t need a secondary app.

So I was looking at mobile blogging apps, assuming I couldn’t post directly from Safari on the iPhone, but alas, it seems I can!

Holy cow, I can even post from the Flickr silo!

This kinds blows my mind. Certainly not a primary mode of blogging, but to be able to take a photo with the camera, upload to Flickr, then write a blog post is kinda amazing.

Edit (not via iPhone) To be clear, my amazement isn’t in the iPhone, rather, in the quality of design and code of Habari that it just works, even in the mobile Safari browser.

Little did I know that I needed to create a separate feed for comments at Feedburner for it to actually work with the Feedburner plugin for Habari. So if for some reason you wanted to subscribe to site wide comments vs a single post, it’s now working. I’ve also added recent comments to the sidebar, complete with a spiffy excerpt of the comment. Thanks to whomever created the summarize function, it only took a PHP n00b like myself a couple of minutes to figure out how to have a separate comment content excerpt in Habari.

First, I’ve oft meant to write something about Twitter, specifically since I read Zeldman’s “Self Publishing is the New Blogging”.

And ch-ching was heard in the land. And the (not citizen) journalists heard it, and it got them pecking into their Blackberries and laptops.

And then the writers and designers, ashamed at rubbing shoulders with common humanity, discovered the 140-character Tweet and the Tumblr post. No stink of commerce, no business model, nothing that could even charitably be called content, and best of all, no effort. Peck, peck, send.

I discovered “blogging” and the culture surrounding it just before what I assume is the time when “…(not citizen) journalists heard it…”. It was an exciting discovery, which ultimately lead me to the career I (usually) enjoy now. And as much I probably contribute to the not citizen “pecking at their Blackberries and laptops”, and as much as Twitter has long lost the purity of “not having a stink of commerce”, I personally enjoy the freedom of 140 character rants, without any concern whether anyone is reading them or not. I use Twitter solely because there’s a certain cathartic release in firing off something like “trying to explain browser differences on form styling is like swimming in 3 day old mashed potatoes”.

Anyway, that wasn’t the original intent of this post. Rather, there really is another reason I enjoy Twitter. It’s a compelling way to get a glimpse into the lives of people that you’ve crossed paths with and whom you find interesting or share common interests with, but haven’t had the opportunity to really get to know.

Then something like today happens. I’d been away from technology the last twenty four hours, and wanted a light hearted way of catching up with what was going on in the world, and the web in particular. Plus, there’s always a few good laughs along the way (see @hotdogsladies).

Then this tweet came across Twitterific. First, I’ve not really ever met either Chris or Sean. Chris I began following after he began following me at blogOrlando3. I wasn’t even sure who he was until the brief encounter we had at the after party. (Chris was the lucky guy handing out the drink tickets. Everyone’s best friend for at least 5 minutes.) Afterward I realized that he helped Josh Hallet with the the conference. I, like many people, truly enjoyed blogOrlando, the vibe surrounding it, and felt anyone who put that together or were involved I’d like to eventually get to know. So I follow several people that were at blogOrlando, including Chris, Josh, and Jeremy.

Sean I first encountered in the Habari IRC channel when he came along looking for help with getting some patches committed so he could fix the s9y importer and migrate his blog to Habari. Always excited for a new user/community member, I committed his patches, and soon noticed him hanging around the channel. Long story short, Sean is now part of the PMC of Habari, and can commit his own damn patches now ;-).

My point? I guess after writing this I don’t have something profound to say. I’d just never seen a correspondence between Chris or Sean on Twitter in the time I’ve been following both. Certainly I don’t know either well enough to know if they actually have met, which wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for two developers (who also share a love of great beer, another reason I enjoy their tweets) to have met.

But it gave me one of those smiles and six degrees of separation moments.

Oh, did I mention it gave me a smile after a couple of shit weeks?

As my online endeavors grow, I find myself with different sites floating around, doing nothing, as I have so many ideas for each site, I wind up not posting to any of them. I originally started Blogging Meta because I thought I wanted to have a personal site, and a site that I could focus on tech related blogging. Well, as I’ve said, neither came to fruition, and I’ve found myself lately feeling as if I had some dual personality that were just spinning their wheels.

So tonight I decided to merge the two sites, and really try to gain some focus. I still have my cooking site, which I still intend to further focus on, but hopefully by committing to using this site again for everything not cooking related, I just might be able to accomplish both.

The rookie mistakes came from the fact that since Habari doesn’t have an importer in place yet to import one Habari install into another, I was faced with the only option of deleting the existing database, which was basically an import from the original WordPress installation, then dumping the bloggingmeta database, doing a quick search and replace for urls, importing that file directly into the database, then re-importing the old wordpress database using the importer plugin. What I failed to do was check what was active in the plugins. I already had the twitter plugin installed, so I’m guessing that it kept the settings from the old site, thus upon import, all the new posts were twittered. Complete…rookie…mistake. Couple with that that I also left the pingback plugin active, it tried to ping all the posts while importing. Another party foul. So not only did I spam Twitter, my import royally failed, so I was faced with doing the whole process over again, albeit this time I deactivated the offending plugins, and the import went off mostly without a hitch. I might have lost a few old posts and/or comments, but all in all, I’m pleased with the outcome considering I’m doing this at 2 a.m. in the morning, and my focus might not be what it should be. I wish I could write it off as having had a few adult beverages, but alas, I would be lying.

Over the next few days I will be doing some tweaking here and there, and shutting down the other site (and doing a 301 redirect). I really like the typography of Ali’s theme, so I most likely will try to find the custom image I had made for the bottom, and trick out a few plugins. At least for now.