I have just had a lot of trouble with Thumbnails on one of my blogs. It turned out that I had to install the package php5-gd and restart Apache before thumbnails would even be generated. The package php5-gd (or php4-gd) is “suggested” by the Debian WordPress package and it’s not a dependency, so the result of apt-get install wordpress will be that thumbnails won’t work.

I’ve filed Debian bug report 447492 [1] requesting that php5-gd be a dependency. Another slightly controversial issue is the fact that the MySQL server is not a dependency. I believe that it’s correct to suggest MySQL as the database server is commonly run on a different host and WordPress will clearly inform you if it can’t access the database.

An alternate way of solving this bug report would be to have WordPress give a warning such as “Thumbnails disabled due to lack of php-gd support” which would allow users to make requests of their sys-admins that can be easily granted.

• [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=447492

I have previously written about some of my efforts to counter sploggers [1].

Since then I have had a particularly brazen splogger copy one of my posts entirely and claim to have written it. The only reason I noticed the copyright violation (my blog license is on my About Page [2]) was because the post in question linked to other posts of mine and I saw the links. I was offended by the flagrant violation of all aspects of copyright law (breaking the license and infringing my moral rights by not attributing me as the author) and by the fact that the splog in question was hosted by Dreamhost (who have offended me by refusing a DMCA take-down request). So I decided that merely issuing a DMCA take-down was not enough. I went through the splog and identified content copied from several major journals (including by a journalist I regard as a friend) as well as by one multi-national corporation – and I notified all the relevant people.

The splog in question deleted all it’s old content the next day, and immediately started copying new articles from other blogs. I have informed the people who appear to be copyright holders for some of the new articles…

I recommend that other people who deal with sploggers also go to the extra effort of notifying other victims. It’s usually quite easy to do you just select a random bit of text from the copied article and paste it into your favourite search engine – usually you get only a single result. Some of the splog posts are edited in small ways so the first search may fail – if so then you merely need to search for a second piece of text. If you only request that your own illegally copied material be taken down then the splogger still has a good business model. They can keep copying content in violation of the license, occasionally take a post down when they get caught, and both the splogger and the ISP continue to make money. If you notify other victims (many of which won’t have the skills to find the content themselves or the background knowledge sufficient to recognise the benefits in having it removed unless you explain it to them) then the splogger loses a lot of content at one go and the ISP will have a more difficult time claiming to be innocent of the process.

Also when you notify multi-national corporations you can expect that they have some decent lawyers and a budget assigned to such work. While I would be extremely unlikely to sue an ISP that repeatedly hosts unauthorised copies of my copyright materiel the same can’t be said for a corporation.

For more information on splogging see the Wikipedia entry [3].

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2007/10/11/dreamhost-and-the-dmca/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/about/
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_blog

Don Marti has written his own equivalent to Technorati based on links from blogs that he reads, and my blog comes in at #40 in the list (last place) [1].

Don does note the fact that such lists mean little and links to a post by Doc Searls [2] which makes the same point more strongly. But it’s still interesting to note.

Also if Don chose to release the Perl script in question (or host is as a cgi-bin script) to allow other people to make their own top 40 list then I’m sure that many people would appreciate it (I’ll write such a script myself and release it if he doesn’t). He notes when publishing his list that a blog may be included even if he never reads it. I believe that if a blog is highly ranked according to links from blogs that you read then it’s quite likely that you will be interested in reading it, it may be a blog that is opposed to your beliefs (for example I’m sure I’m not the only person in the Linux community to link to an official Microsoft blog) but if it gets enough links then it would be worth reading at least once (if only to discover why you don’t like it). While I can’t tell Don to read every blog on his top 40 list I’ll certainly read every blog on my top 40 list at least once when I create the list.

• [1] http://www.linuxworld.com/community/?q=node/1447
• [2] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2007/10/04/ranklings/

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3. When using Konqueror (my favourite browser) the comment approval is slightly broken (when I tag a comment as spam it usually just turns red and doesn’t disappear from the main Comments tab) and I have to refresh that window more often than usual to make sure I got the result I desired. Also the Sidebar Widget editing is totally broken in Konqueror, I guess I’ll have to login with Firefox to get the new tags feature working.

Also I have got a few WordPress errors about the table “$table_prefix” . “post2cat” not existing. The table in question doesn’t exist in any of my blogs.

So far this is the worst WordPress upgrade experience I’ve had (I started on 2.0).

When I started blogging I used Blogger [1]. After some time I decided that it did not offer me the freedom I desired. I could not easily make changes (I could have created new themes, but it would have taken an unreasonable amount of work). I currently use WordPress, it’s still a lot of work to change themes, but at least it’s CSS and PHP coding which can be used for other things. Blogger offers no statistics on web use (I tried adding support for Google Analytics but couldn’t get it to work properly), what I want is Webalizer or something similar (which is easy to do when running your own server).

Blogger is a reasonable way of starting blogging, but if you use it then you want to make it easy to change to something that you own. Blogger has a feature of using a DNS name in a domain that you own for the name of your blog (which is much less obvious than it once was), I regret not using that feature as I still have my old posts on blogger and don’t want to break the links.

Blogger has in the past had problems with time-stamps on posts, when I used blogger I had some complaints that my posts were staying at the top of Planet listings for unreasonable amounts of time (I never tracked this down before switching to my own platform).

Hosting your own blog is not as difficult as you might expect (initially at least). It becomes difficult when you want to install lots of plug-ins, but then any blogging solution would be difficult if you want to do that. The WordPress [2] package in Debian works well and has good support for multiple WordPress blogs. There is a separate product named WordPress-MU [3] which is designed for people who want to run a service in competition with Blogger, some people recommend that you use WordPress-MU if you want to set up blogs for several people. I disagree. If you are setting up blogs for a small number of people then you can use the standard WordPress package and create a file named /etc/wordpress/config-whatever.example.com.php which contains the configuration for whatever.example.com and then create a new WordPress blog by using the web-based interface to do the rest. It would not be difficult to create the configuration file in question with an M4 script if you have a moderate number of blogs to host (maybe a hundred or so). I think that it’s only if you want to host thousands of blogs that you need the features of WordPress-MU. Note that MU is not as well packaged as the base WordPress and has some rough edges. Last time I tried to set up MU I was not successful.

This is not to say that WordPress is inherently the best program, there are many other free software blogging platforms out there. WordPress is the one that I use and am happy to recommend but if your requirements differ from mine then another platform may be better for you. I also suggest that WordPress be used as the base-line for comparing blogging software.

Blogger does not require significant resources. A virtual host with 256M of RAM should be more than adequate to run WordPress plus MySQL. Such virtual hosts are getting quite cheap nowadays, and one such host could easily be shared by a number of bloggers. My blog uses about 1.2G of data transfer per month. vpsland.com offers virtual hosts starting at 150G per month data transfer with 192M of RAM being the minimum. Prices start at $US15 per month. While I can’t compare vpsland.com to other virtual hosting providers (having never used any other such service) I can say that they work reasonably well and I have a client who is happy with them. So it seems that a minimal plan with vpsland.com would host 20 blogs with the same traffic as mine (with RAM being the limiting factor) and a slightly larger plan (with more RAM and more bandwidth) that costs $US30 or $US40 per month could handle 100 or more blogs that are similar to mine. If you get together with some friends and share a virtual server then blogging would not be expensive. Incidentally I had previously read a blog comment about people being hesitant to share servers with their friends (as they apparently would rather grant some unknown people at a faceless corporation the ability to snoop on them than people that they know). The advantage of a blog server in this regard is that everything is public anyway!

If you have good technical skills then I recommend using WordPress as your first blogging platform. If you find that you don’t like it for some reason then you can convert to another platform if you own the domain. If you are setting up a blog for a less technical user then WordPress is also a good choice. My sister uses WordPress, not that she made much of a choice (I had set up a Blogger account for her some time ago which she never used – I guess that could be considered as a choice to not use Blogger) but that I set up a WordPress blog for her and she seemed to like using it.

• [1] https://www.blogger.com/start
• [2] http://wordpress.org/
• [3] http://mu.wordpress.org/

I have just added two new categories to my blog, one is for the most popular posts [1] (as indicated by the number of hits on the permalink pages). The other is for the best posts [2]. My criteria for adding a post to the best-posts list is that it provides some information that is new or some analysis that others do not appear to have performed, that it doesn’t get refuted by someone else (sometimes an idea seems good but someone points out a flaw), and that there is some level of interest in it from readers (based on page hits, comments, and links from other blogs).

Both of these categories may be added to posts some days or weeks after they are published. So adding the feeds for them to a syndication configuration might not be a good idea as they will always include posts that are old. I expect that a typical Planet configuration would never display posts from those feeds.

I suggest that other people consider adding similar categories to their blogs. It will allow readers who quickly browse your blog to see the posts that you regard as your best content and other bloggers in the same space to see what gets the most hits (which is worth-while if you don’t consider blogging to be a zero sum game).

I expect that someone will suggest that I only write posts that are eligible for the best-posts category. However this is one example of a post which I don’t consider to be eligible but which will still be useful to some people.

• [1] http://etbe.coker.com.au/category/most-popular/
• [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/category/best-posts/