Britblog May 12, 2008
Posted by cathrynsymons in : Blogging , add a commentIf you have a moment or four, do wander over to Redemption Blues and have a look at her thorough summary of the best of British blogging for the week. Be annoyed at the Daily Mail, worry about Boris, groan at BBC innuendo and find your inner Hungarian. Something for everyone.
Embedding a Youtube video March 12, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging, Camden , add a commentThis should be really simple. Just take the embedding code from the video and paste it in.
and indeed it is. The only catch is to make sure you’ve turned off the use of the visual editor for the user so that Wordpress doesn’t rearrange the
By the way, this video is a trailer for the new Shane Meadow’s movie Somers Town, you might remember that I was interviewed for a documentary that is supposed to be on the DVD when that comes out. It was shown at the Berlin Film Festival in February, but there’s no word about when or how it will be released in the UK.
Comment delays March 2, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentThanks to everyone who leaves comments, its a real buzz to know that there’s someone out there! I’m sorry it takes so long for them to come up. I’ve switched on moderation, so if its the first time you comment, I have to approve it first. That’s because about 95% of the comments are pure spam, most of it just junk, some quite offensive.
Once you’ve done it once, future comments come straight on through, so please do keep popping in!
Neglected blog February 4, 2008
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , 2 commentsPoor, neglected wee blog. New Year’s resolutions don’t seem to last too well, so perhaps I should have a new month resolution to post a little more often.
I do not like January in England. It’s not natural. Dismal days, with the sun going down at about 4pm mean that all I want to do is curl up with a DVD, the cat and a bottle of port. But now it’s February, and somehow everything seems brighter, even though its actually colder now than it was a couple of weeks ago. I guess its global warming to blame for such a mild winter.
There are lots of things to blog about. I seem to have booked lots of tickets, so expect reviews of many Royal Shakespeare Company productions, the LSO next weekend, Laurie Anderson in May and just possibly Richie Haven in a couple of weeks time. Daily revelations of the surveillance society on the rise, and political corruption, give plenty to get annoyed about (though Guido Fawkes does the latter so much better than I could, even if he is a libertarian). My stock portfolio doesn’t bear thinking about, though I need to do another pension investment soon.
I found a new word the other day - telapathy - the sense of ennui that comes from watching too many episodes of a television series in one sitting. That describes it beautifully. Time to kick self in the posterior and come out of hibernation, I think.
Securing a bulletin board October 25, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , 1 comment so farI host a small, private bulletin board for a group of friends using the open source community software phpbb. Out of the box, it’s not too secure, and so today I did some tidying up. This blog is to note what I’ve done, and may be of interest to anyone who uses the software.
First of all, read this very good post on the phpbb forums. Spambots, which automate registration and then try to post junk on the board, are constantly laying seige to boards which allow self-registration, and there are ways of keeping them at bay. Our big problems were having the membership list visible to anyone who came in, and spambots registering themselves. The standard software allows you to stop the spam registrations from posting, but can’t prevent them from registering.
I’ve now applied two modifications to the standard software. The first prevents anyone who isn’t logged on from seeing any part of the board. I put it into every page on the site, not just the ones listed here, so now whereever you try to go, you’ll be redirected to the login page.
The second was a little more complex, but adds extra security to the registration so that spambots can’t register. This works well for our small forum, which is invitation only, but would be more constraining for a larger site.
Applying the modifications is an automated process, but because the first wasn’t verified for my version of phpbb, and the second hadn’t been verified at all, I did them manually.
This level of work on phpbb requires moderate skill. You should be familiar with editing files and have a working knowledge of php. It was fairly simple, and well worth the effort. If I install phpbb again, I’ll probably just add these on to the installation.
Wordpress 2.3 problem fixed October 22, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a commentI upgraded to the latest version of wordpress, and found myself getting errors when I tried to post - the code was looking for a table called ‘camdenkiwi_post2cat’ which didn’t exist.
A quick look in the Wordpress support forums revealed that the problem was probably due to the Google Sitemaps plugin I use to get google to properly index the site. And an upgrade to the latest version fixed it. Its one of the things I love about this software - there are so many clever people using it that if I ever find a problem, someone else has already had it and solved it.
Online in the real world June 4, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , 4 commentsI am walking through Leadenhall Market at lunchtime today, when a tall bloke in a suit with bright green sunglasses comes up to me. ‘Cathryn’ he says. ‘Hello’, says I, madly trying to work out where I know him from. ‘Camden Kiwi’ he says. I think about backing away slowly.
He explains that he works for my current client, and shows me his pass, so he’s kosher. He found my blog through a technorati dearch he has on the client’s website, which I must have mentioned here and has since subscribed to this blog, my work site and my del.icio.us feed. Having seen me around, he’d been meaning to introduce himself. He knows my online persona quite well.
We chat for a while about online social networking and how rss feeds haven’t caught on as well as they should have. I’ve deliberately made my online presence fairly easy to find, partly because the work side of it is a marketing tool, but somehow, this feels a little wierd. A permeable membrane, rather than a brick wall, lies between offline and online worlds, but normally I point offline friends to the online world, rather than the online world suddenly appearing on a city street.
So John, if you’re reading this, it was lovely to meet you. Sorry if I seemed taken aback, it was just a little odd.
[edit to tidy up messy html from another tool]
Kerblog, drawing Beirut June 1, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging, Politics , add a commentI first came across Kerblog during the war in Lebanon last summer. His succinct, poignant drawings seemed to say more about those sad events than the reams of newsprint. Put him on your rss feed.
And today, I am worried that he is waiting for the bombs again.
Technorati Tags: beirut, kerblog
Visual Quickstart Guide to Wordpress 2 - Maria Langer and Miraz Jordan September 2, 2006
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging, Reviews , comments closedWay back in February, when I’d only been blogging a few weeks, I was rather chuffed to be approached by the authors of this book and asked if I’d mind them using my blog as an example. Now, many months later, its appeared and there is Camden Lady (the older, wordpress.com version of this blog) right there in the introduction.
I was absolutely amazed when one of the authors, Miraz Jordan, turned out to be a friend of my mother. Sometimes its a very small planet indeed.
Maria kindly sent me a copy a couple of weeks ago, and I’m pleased to find that there’s still a lot to learn about Wordpress. My next project is to convert my business site to run under Wordpress, and chapters in here on customising themes and useful plugins will help a lot with that. Maria’s already done it with her sites, so I’ll be following the hints on her blog as well.
The book is useful for beginners as well as those who have a little more experience, for those with some technical knowledge and those who are setting up in Wordpress.com and don’t ever want to do more than use a browser and fill in forms. It’s very clearly written and, unlike many guides to software packages, is a reasonable 294 pages.
If you’re new to wordpress, or wanted to build your knowledge further, this book is so much easier than wading through pages of blogs and websites. It’s highly recommended.
EDIT Sept 2007 - I’m getting really tired of all the spam comments on this post, so I’ve closed the comments. Nasty little spammy people - a viral pox on all your servers!
Google Adsense
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , 2 commentsWhat do you think of the little ads at the top of the list of articles?
It’s an experiment, and I want to see if anyone actually clicks through them, and also if they are properly targetted.
When I first set out to do this blog, it was partly to learn about the technology and advertising revenue is an important way that many sites fund themselves. I’d like to see if anyone clicks and, when they do, if its worth my while.
Please let me know what you think?
