Gerrybot

I’ve been dying to use this Live Writer thing for a while now!

I’ve been mucking around with a domain for a while now, somewhere I can build a collaborative blogging effort for people like myself. It’s not ready for primetime just yet, but its getting there. PopOpinions.

Two big things about PopOpinions that I want to share:

1. The collaboration thing is so that the blog doesn’t depend on any one blogger - the community powers the site. I’ll build in some more social features along the line to support interaction between the members.
2. It’ll be mostly about OPINIONS and cover a variety of topics - politics, entertainment, showbiz, religion…you name it. I want this to be a place where people can let rip their ideas about whatever takes their fancy. You can review stuff, or you can shout about something you heard on the news today.

Anyway, that’s all I’m saying for the moment. If might accept beta testers if anyone’s interested. Drop me a comment on this post and I’ll get in touch.

Unreality TV has been going great guns for the last 6 months. SEOmoz (a huge Search Optimisation company in the US of A) recently published their monthly stats and I was overjoyed to discover we were whomping them month on month!

I love the SEOmoz blog, by the way.

Anyway, we’ve been toying with other blogging ideas and the most likely at this juncture are blogs on music and regular telly. So let me introduce you to two of our works in progress:

1. Unreality Music - Soon to be a place of music reviews of current tunes and past classics. I’ll be taking the lead on the music blog, and I want it to feature not only established acts, but unsigned acts a la MySpace. We’ll also be accepting guest reviews and contribution, particularly of recent gigs.
2. Unreality Primetime - Lisa’s going to be taking the lead on this new blog, looking at other popular TV shows like The OC, Desperate Housewives, all that stuff. It’ll be a much bigger blog than the reality TV one, but it’s good to watch alternative shows too!

You can conclude from this that Lisa has definitely got square eyes. As do most of our readers! But we love them all and they love us back!

There will be boards on the Unreality Forum to support all of the new areas we’re covering.

We’re excited about how the Unreality blogs are unfolding. We’re going along to press conferences, working with production companies, getting 300,000+ eyeballs on our blog each month, not to mention the thousands of comments people have been compelled to leave for us and even for reality show contestants. These additional blogs will hopefully complement what we already have while creating a spot for people to discuss different types of music and television.

If you want to become a contributor to Unreality, please do get in touch with me.

Well, after my well-documented gripes with Dreamhost, I’ve started to pull the plug. I’ve signed up for the Media Temple Grid Server service, which will comfortably combine all my domains (up to 100 sites, actually) under one account.

Fantastic!

Anyway, I’ve taken the liberty of writing up a little instructional for those who are considering moving away from Dreamhost too.

Finally….I get my own domain.

Actually, I’ve had it for some time now, but I’ve been sitting on it without any idea what to do with it. Now, I’ve moved it to my new Media Temple account and I’ve done an installation of Drupal. I came across Drupal at first on the Performancing site, and I’m intrigued at the mix of forum/blogs that it allows you to create.

So, as a long time WordPress aficionado, I’m crossing into uncharted territory with this labyrinthine content management system.

I am grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat this evening, for earlier today I did my first ever interview for Unreality TV, with Lucy, one of the singers from The Unconventionals.

Initially I tried to record it so that I could do a podcast, but I had such a small timeframe between setting up my computer and starting the interview that I couldn’t get it right. I’m using a combination of Skype and a program called PrettyMay, which helps you record Skype conversations among other things!

The lesson to be learned is to prepare for this in advance. Although I was given a remarkably quick timeframe today, I’ve wanted to look into podcasting before now, but haven’t bothered. I’ll have it nailed next time!

Anyway, the interview was great fun. The Unconventionals were one of the finalist acts in this year’s X Factor, and they were booted off last night’s show by Simon Cowell. I thought they were very original and was disappointed they went out of the competition so soon.

Lucy was great to interview, very chatty and natural and more than a little surprised in the interest in her and the group. I hope they go on to better things!

I love this part of my job!

(satisfied sigh)

I notice that Dreamhost is still having trouble bouncing back from their recent network troubles.

Reading the comments in their blog post, I was surprised by the number of people who were sticking up for the company on the strength of a couple of blog posts issued after the disaster. Some folks seem oblivious to the fact that downtime of the sort Dreamhost has suffered recently is actually unacceptable.

I wonder if some of these people are blog kiddies who don’t appreciate the importance of uptime for a business website. Who ignore the issues of lost revenue and reputation an online business can face. Dreamhost didn’t deal with these issues in their blog post. Apparently belated openness will soothe the complaining customers!

Dreamhost Dropping Negative Comments

The reason I’m writing this post is because I tried to post a comment on the blog today and received a message that I’d triggered a spam filter. Bizarre? You bet. No profanity in my post at all, no links, nothing that I can think would trigger a spam filter.

Anyway, I’ve decided to repost my entire comment here, lest Dreamhost conveniently delete it from their filters instead of allowing free speech on the blog:

I’m surprised at the immaturity of some of the people posting here. Attacking Karen for expressing her point of view is wrong - she has perfectly valid points.

While I applaud Dreamhost for their blog updates, they’ve conveniently sidestepped the issue of compensation for business customers who’ve lost income through this downtime (and my sites were hit hard).

And yes, there’s a veiled admission of incompetence in this post that doesn’t give much confidence in how the network will be rebuilt! There’s a group of DH users running around with rose-tinted specs on when it comes to this!

And you can make all the claims you like about ‘getting what you pay for’, but when I signed up I didn’t see any warnings on the front door saying “Not suitable for business users” or “Unreliable uptime - non-critical sites only”.

I do hope you get the problems ironed out once and for all, but like others I’m shoping around.

Update: I actually forgot to post this a couple of weeks ago, but checking for my comment as detailed above I notice the Happy Dreamhost Sneaky Comment Deleting Team have sneakily deleted my comment. So much for opening conversation in the blogosphere between customers and suppliers!

What would Mr Steve Rubel have to say about that?

Brian asked me about the number of blogs I had the other day when we were out visiting him. It got me thinking I’ve been using the Interweb for over a decade now and my various profiles are all over the place.

So, in an effort to rein in some of my online activities, this is the big list of me…on the web:

My Blogs

• GerryBot: This blog - my personal one.
• Unreality TV: My reality TV blog and music, now primetime television as well.
  
• The Northern Ireland Guide
• Scribble Designs: My web design site
• Family Of Five

Professional Profiles

• Currently using LinkedIn as a way of promoting my professional skills online. It’s a great social networking site, and if you’re a member, please look me up or add me to your network. My LinkedIn profile.

Social Bookmarking

• StumbleUpon: Embarrassingly, I managed to email everyone in my contacts list from Stumbleupon - I will insist it was software misdirection, not user malfunction, until I die.
• Del.icio.us: The daddy of social bookmarking tools and still my number 1!
• Reddit, an up and coming social bookmarking site. Similar to Digg but not so many a**holes.
• Ma.gnolia
• Digg: A more tech oriented site, lots of interesting articles and discussions. Can be juvenile.
• Shadows: An interesting social bookmarking, let down by too many spam links.
• Simpy: Not the prettiest online bookmarking tool.

Blogs and Forums

• Performancing
• Digital Point Forums

Photography

• My Flickr Page and Profile

Reality TV

• Unreality TV Forum
• Popsugar Profile

Late last August, totally on a whim, Lisa and I threw together a reality tv blog called Unreality TV. I did a quick WordPress theme and some cartoon-type illustrations and we were live within a couple of days.

From September onward, Lisa spent her evenings blogging about the 2005 series of X-Factor. I approached the site as an experiment in Search Engine Optimisation, dividing up categories and giving pointers on how to make best uses of keywords in each post.

From these inauspicious beginnings, we continued to put on new posts diligently and keep the site up-to-date.

Now, almost a year later, it’s high season for reality tv shows in the UK: Big Brother is in full swing and Love Island has just started. Unreality TV has taken something in the region of 114,000 hits in June and at this mid-point in July, we’ve had 64,000 visitors. Traffic has been building month upon month and we’ve just opened the doors on our long-awaited reality tv forum.

We’re interested in taking Unreality TV to greater heights. Two things we want in the immediate future:

1. Sponsors/Advertisers: We’d like the site to be earning a decent living so that we can concentrate on creating better content and forging better links with the reality tv industry. To that end, we may have to kill Google AdSense in favour of direct advertising.
2. More visitors: We’ll be focussing on getting Unreality TV more visible and encouraging participation. The forum is in it’s early stages right now, but I’ve already started using it to point out other great reality TV writing on the web.

This part of things is definitely outside of the old comfort zone: getting this amount of hits so far has been amazing, but pushing it further is new territory for us. It’ll be exciting to see how things progress!

I was over in Downpatrick recently and visited the talented and aspiring media mogul Brian Mullan. I’ve known Brian for just over 10 years now, and we played in a band (Outhouse Cookie) together for what seems like a lifetime. I’m not sure how long the band actually lasted for.

Anyway, Brian kept plugging away with his music and recorded new material with Gary Connolly back in March, in a studio in Dublin. He’s posted two of his Outhouse Cookie-era songs on MySpace along with one of the new tracks on which he sings.

The two Outhouse Cookie songs are Love Declared and No Guarantees, featuring a guitar solo from Seamy “Asmodean” Meredith that still gives me goosebumps today. I wish I could conjure up Seamy Meredith one last time and tell him that. He seems to have disappeared from the Internet, though…

Anyway, check out Mullan’s music over at MySpace and let me know what you think. Whenever I get a moment, I may post the other Outhouse Cookie songs here.

Lisa and I have been talking about doing a guide to Northern Ireland for the last couple of years now. We’re out and about most weekends seeing what the province has to offer.

Contrary to popular belief, Northern Ireland is a fantastic place to live! I personally don’t think there are enough websites spreading this message. We are not oppressed, repressed or depressed people, so don’t listen to what you hear in the news. Take it with a pinch of salt!

So, without further ado, we present to you The Northern Ireland Guide - our journal of everything Northern Ireland: culture, events, tourist attractions, things to do and place to eat, sleep and party.

The site has only been live for a couple of days now, but we’ve had a positive response from quite a few people who’ve come across the blog and want to help out, either by way of providing backlinks or submitting material to the site. I’m glad, and I hope the support continues.

I think I’m starting to get bitten by the Squidoo bug. I’ve created a couple of lenses for different things I’m into like Reality Television, Northern Ireland and Web Design.

Interesting to be able to pull together content from across the web and have it display on one wee portal page. Seth describes it as a starting point for your topic - people get the real information by following through the links from your lens.

Anyway, cool idea.

I’ve been messing with this blog for a while now, and it’s been a lot of fun! WordPress.com has been fantastic and it’s been a great experience to play with this hosted version of my favourite blogging tool.

Yes. I’m moving elsewhere.

I’ve registered the domain Interweb World and with immediate effect, I’ll be blogging over there. I’ve ported across most of the content from here, but I’ll leave the duplicates on here for a while too before I eventually delete the account.

Come and visit me at Interweb World!

Gotta love this. Two juicy Google-related pieces out over the last couple of days:

• Via Paul Stamatiou, TechCrunch is carrying screenshots of the new Google Calendar application, provisionally known as CL2.
• Now, Google have bought Writely, the web-based word processor. Shrewd move, Writely is a very popular Web 2.0 app. Nothing I’d like more than to log on to it with my Google account details.

Now, is it just me, or does this lend serious weight to the argument that Google is planning it’s own OS? Let’s face it, with Gmail, a calender application and now a word processor, all they need now is a spreadsheet program and something to manage tasks and that’s Microsoft Office effectively replaced.

And guess what, interoperability issues (in documents) would fly out the window, because everyone would be using (X)HTML. And platform would be irrelevant, because it runs via your browser! Of course, you’d be completely screwed if you ever lost your Internet connection…..

I’m not going to go down the “Microsoft should be quaking in their boots” route, but since Office is a bread and butter product for Microsoft, an essentially free alternative via the web is an attractive proposition. It might also be attractive to those millions out there currently using hacked versions of Office!

Bozpages aren’t unique. A webpage that displays a list of recent posts in RSS feeds? Why not use Netvibes? Or the Google Personalised Homepage?

Well, the Google IG page is as ugly as hell, for a start! Personally, I swear by Netvibes, because it gives me my Flickr galleries, my del.icio.us bookmarks and my gmail as well as the ability to add RSS feeds.

So, why use Bozpages?

There’s no reason at all, really. Technorati have just launched their favourites service which does pretty much the same thing - a river of posts syphoned off your favourite blogs. (Mine’s here)

Having said that, I love the design of Bozpages. Good whitespace. The page isn’t too cramped, and the title elements use some fresh colours.

I’ve been using it for a couple of days as a portal for some of my own blogs and sites I look after. It’s definitely a nice interface, although it needs some work on the usability front, as it’s severely lacking in on-screen documentation! You need to visit the Bozpages Wiki for more information. My Bozpage is here.

technorati tags: RSS, bozpage, Web2.0, Technorati, Netvibes

Christine Davies has announced a new ‘vanilla’ version of Ultimate Tag Warrior for WordPress.

UTW is possibly one of the most useful plugins for tagging your blog content. For the uninitiated or the ignorant, tags are like keywords on steroids. They add another dimension to how you classify the posts on your blog. Sure, you can use categories, but too many categories clutter up your sidebar. Categories are broad.

Tags are specific to the post. They don’t show up in the navigation, but you can create a ‘tag cloud’ which shows frequently used tags in larger type and less-used tags in smaller type. They also tie in with the new breed of Web services like Flickr, Technorati and Delicious, all of which use tags to organise content.

Tags can offer a richer user experience whether linking back into the blog to display related posts, or linking out to Technorati to find additional material on other websites.

I prefer to use tagging internally to provide an alternative means of navigating the blog. I’ve used this recently on Unreality TV and will be using it on a forthcoming website, The Northern Ireland Guide.

technorati tags: WordPress, Tagging, Tags, Web2.0, Technorati, Flickr, Blogging

On first glance, the Flock web browser only seems to allow you to set up one blog account. If you’re like me and you manage more than one blog, this is a big limitation!

Fear not, there’s another way to add extra blogs. It’s hidden away in the options, but it’s there!

How to add additional blogs in Flock

• First, go to Tools, Options
• Click on the Blogging button (second from last) and the Accounts tab should be the first one to load.
• Click on the + icon and the Blog Account Setup Helper will appear. You’ll need to give it the URL of your blog and the username and password to log on.
• That’s it. Simple, wasn’t it?

I’ve been meaning to play with Flock for a while now, but never quite got around to it. I’m using it to generate this post and it’s all going swimmingly.

One of the big benefits of not being in the wp-admin area is that I’m not tempted to check my stats, comments and all that stuff that distracts me every day.

Anyway, more on Flock later. 

technorati tags: flock, blogs, blogging, wordpress

…but apparently only from the WordPress.com community!

I got a weird message in my Gmail that someone had added me to their wordpress blog. They must’ve been testing of made a mistake, because they promptly removed me again!

Anyway, this prompted me to check in my own wordpress.com blog (the one you’re reading) - and the screenshot below is what I found. This feature seems to have appeared out of nowhere on the Authors & Users tab. Basically you type in the username of the other person, allocate the type of role you want to give them, etc and they get a confirmation email when you’re done. After that, you can log into the blog and add posts, or whatever your permissions allow you to do.

I’m probably nitpicking, but I’d have preferred to add users from outside the community. Surely an existing member already has a blog? Anyway, I don’t see much benefit to that! I’d like to add someone who’ll contribute to my blog rather than someone who’ll have split blog loyalties!

Anyway, I just checked the WordPress.com blog, and nothing’s mentioned there, so this is either in stealth mode and just been released, or it’s been available for ages and I’ve just not noticed. What do you think?

Bet that I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and it’ll be gone. Things like that always happen me….

Kubuntu Linux has the root account disabled by default for security purposes. Users are encouraged to use the sudo command as an alternative whenever root-level priviledges are needed.

Now, maybe I’m too old-skool, but that’s just plain irritating.

Edit the kdmrc file

The first thing you need to do to enable root logons in Kubuntu is to modify the /etc/kde3/kdm/kdmrc file. However, to change this file - guess what? - you need root access! Here’s how to do it:

1. Press alt+F2 to call up the Run Command. Type in /etc/kde3/kdm to call up the kdm folder in Konqueror.
2. When the folder opens, you should see a file called kdmrc. Right-click it and select Actions, Edit As Root. You’ll be prompted for the root password (which should be your own password)
3. The file should open up in a text editor (KWrite on my installation). Broswe for the line AllowRootLogin=false and change false to true. Save the file and close it.

Enabling Root Logins (Modifying the Root User Account)

The second step here is to actually enable the root account for login, because it is disabled by default. There may be a quicker, more linux way to do this, but this is my method:

1. Press alt+F2 to call up the Run Command. Type in kuser to start up the KDE User Manager.
2. Double-click on the root entry to bring up the account properties and uncheck the Account Disabled checkbox. Click OK to save the changes.
3. Exit the KDE User Manager.

And that’s it! If you log off, you should now be able to login to Kubuntu as root.

Why Enable Root Logins?

Yes, I know that in an ideal world I would use sudo. Why did I absolutely require root access? Well…

1. I don’t know Linux very well. I can hold my own, but I don’t speak the command-line-lingo like the pros.
2. Elements of the GUI in Kubuntu don’t work so well. In particular, the network configuration utility ‘forgets’ the default gateway entry.
3. Some graphical tools also have an Administrator Mode button. I found in some instances that this didn’t work. You would type in credentials and it would return you to the same greyed-out screen, indicating that authentication had been rejected. Very frustrating.
4. Being fairly unfamiliar with Linux, I didn’t know the command equivalent for these graphical functions, so I couldn’t very well sudo them, could I?

If anybody reading this has any links to good newbie linux resources, let me know!!!

Kubuntu is a branch of the up and coming Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution. Where Ubuntu is based on the Gnome desktop system, Kubuntu is based on KDE (hence the K).

I’ve not used Linux in a long while, and fancied a bit of a mess around, perhaps to mess about with it as a LAMP web server. I initially downloaded and installed Ubuntu, but I’ve never liked the Gnome interface. I was about to ditch the idea completely when I discovered there was a KDE-based offshoot.

The biggest irritation for me is the default security option - the root account is disabled by default. The first user is granted superuser privileges which they can execute via command line using sudo and the command they want to execute. In some of the GUI consoles, there’s an Administrator Mode button which doesn’t seem to work very well as far as I can tell. I’ve managed to hack the system so that I can logon as root and make administrative changes that way. Not totally secure, but less hassle. I’m not using it for anything critical at the moment anyway.

Kubuntu: A Viable Desktop Operating System?

Is Kubuntu a viable alternative to Windows XP? Not quite at the moment, but it’s gaining momentum.

Two major failings are:

1. Still not enough major-label software available for Linux. That includes driver support for contemporary hardware devices.
2. K/Ubuntu has a few frustrating bugs that need to be squashed. While ‘us techies’ will be able to work around them, normal Joes will end up irritated and potentially walks away.

Still, there’s so much potential in a system like Kubuntu. For an average user - my wife, for instance - all she needs is a web browser, word processor and possibly an email client, although with Gmail that’s not such an issue. For me, I’d be looking for my Dreamweaver, my Photoshop and a host of other applications that I rely on to do my work, and although there are ways to make Windows applications run on Linux, I’ve not had the time to explore this. I suspect regular users won’t want to waste time with it either.

Anyway, the jury’s out on Kubuntu Linux. I’m giving it a trial on an old machine, so if there’s anything interesting with Kubuntu, I’ll post it here.