First of all, I wanted to apologize to anyone who may have been on Adrian3.com yesterday (March 9, 2008). I have been playing with a new redesign and that always causes things to be broken and fixed here and there. I find it easier to just do a redesign and all the troubleshooting that goes with it on the live site. It may break things for a little while, but it saves time and gets my new design up before I tire of it. I still have some bugs and additions that I will implement in the coming days, but it is 90% there.

This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design.

This design has a lot of white space, limited color, minimal decoration, and incorporates some of my more abstract photography into the header. I sometimes get into a habit of wanting to control every pixel of a site and while that is usually a good thing, it can result in a bit of a “heavy” design. For this one I wanted to let things breathe. Web typography is always a challenge and I feel pretty good about how the type looks on the page. The other thing to notice about the redesign that you will notice is that I added links to the social networks I use. If you are on one of those sites add me as a contact.

A couple notes about content management:
I was seriously looking at alternatives to WordPress for this site’s content management but ultimately decided against it. In my book, WordPress is firmly in the lead in the battle for best blogging platform. Movable Type slipped into second with there latest version (although I still use it for all my other sites) and it is just slow and clunky. It would be nice to learn Drupal for use on more corporate sites and I may take another look at it in the future, but for now I can’t afford the rumored “learning curve” that comes with it. Textpattern looks good, too, and I will test that one eventually. I also looked at Radiant and Mephisto because they run on Ruby on Rails. I have been teaching myself the basics of Rails and it seemed like a blog would be a good place to start improving my skills. While I was right about it being a good way to learn, it wasn’t the best way for me to run a blog. I liked the simplicity of Radiant’s interface. Mephisto is maybe a little better for blogs. Unfortunately, it took too much work to setup a server with Rails and all the hassle of installing them was too much. Once you finally get them installed they are still a little underdeveloped and lacking the database of user contributed development. WordPress and MT have been hacked and tweaked by their community of users so much that you can pretty much do anything you want with them. Maybe Radiant or Mephisto will get to that same point, but in the meantime you need to be a Rails whiz to customize it. For use on corporate sites I don’t see the initial setup time being worth the hassle. You can have WordPress running in under half an hour without any heavy lifting. I don’t usually have the luxury of a development team so the simpler the better.

Most of the blogs I read are written by people I don’t know. There is something fun about being anonymous. I am guessing that there are a few of you that do the same thing with this site. I don’t mind if you lurk, but it would be nice to know who reads this site and maybe make some new friends. Now is your chance to make a comment and introduce yourself. Or if you use one of the social networking sites below add me as a friend. Or just send me a note and say hi!

Here are some of the places where I meet and neglect my friends, in the order of how much I use them:
Flickr
LastFM
FaceBook
MySpace

Thanks for lurking!

The longer you have a blog the harder it gets to upgrade your blog software. With hundreds of entries and thousands of comments you have a lot to lose if something goes wrong. That is why I have been hesitant to upgrade to the new version of Movable Type (4.0). I waited until I had a free weekend and enough time to do everything right. I uploaded all the new files and ran the upgrade script and got the following:

Upgrading database…

Upgrading table for TrackBacks records…
Upgrading database from version 3.3.
Upgrading table for Job Exit Status records…
Upgrading table for Asset records…
Upgrading table for Asset Placement records…
Upgrading table for Job Function records…
Upgrading table for TrackBacks records…

Error during upgrade: failed to execute statement CREATE TABLE mt_log ( log_id integer NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY auto_increment, log_author_id integer DEFAULT 0, log_blog_id integer DEFAULT 0, log_category varchar(255), log_class varchar(255) DEFAULT ‘system’, log_created_by integer, log_created_on datetime, log_ip varchar(16), log_level integer DEFAULT 1, log_message mediumtext, log_metadata varchar(255), log_modified_by integer, log_modified_on datetime ): Table ‘mt_log’ already exists at lib/MT/Upgrade.pm line 1855.

I didn’t know what any of that mean, but it was obvious that the upgrade failed! That is when I started to panic. Had I lost everything? I desperately searched for anyone experiencing the same problem with out luck.

As a last resort I decided to look at my MySQL database and see if I could tell what was wrong. I logged in to PHP MyAdmin (something I know nothing about) and I noticed that the mt_log table said “in-use.” That seemed strange. One of the options was to “Repair-table.” I wasn’t sure what that would do, but I was desperate enough to take a chance. I repaired the table and reran the Movable Type upgrade script. To my great relief it worked without errors!

I am writing this post in case it helps somebody who has the same error when upgrading to Movable Type 4. My advice is to back up your database before you upgrade. You never know what is going to go wrong. Oh, and Movable Type 4 is pretty cool. The best new feature is that you can add “pages” similar to WordPress. It is pretty nice but I am still on the fence about which is better between WordPress and Movable Type.

I while back I added a new feature to Be A Design Group that created a list of the top commenters on our blog with a comment count next to the name of the comment author. It seems like it would be a native feature of Movable Type, but it isn’t. In my search for a plugin that could do the job I found some conversations about plugins called “CommentLeaders” and “mt-leaderboard”. The plugin were no longer listed on Movable Type’s plugin directory, and they don’t seem to be available anywhere else online.

Finally I found a thread on Six Apart’s community forum that eventually led to the comment leader board plugin. The conversation wanders through several suggestions and improvements, but there isn’t a clear cut solution. I thought I would attempt to save you some work by explaining the solution that worked for me. I know just enough to make this work, so I apologize in advance for not being able to improvise beyond the following steps. Here it goes:

The first step is to create a page called “connect.php” that will be used to access your Movable Type database. In a text editor, create a file with the following code:

<?
// name of your database
$database = "databasename";

// connect to database
$db = mysqlconnect("localhost", "dbuser", "dbpassword")or die ('I cannot connect to the database.');
mysqlselect_db("$database",$db);
?>

Be sure to change databasename, dbuser, and dbpassword to your specific info. Save and upload to your server as connect.php.

Next create a php page called “leaderboard.php” with the following contents:

<? include 'connect.php';

echo "$authorlink ($comment_count)<br />\n";
} ?>

There are a couple things to notice. First make sure that you have the correct path to your “connect.php” file. Next, you can exclude commenters from your list by replacing “name to exclude” with the name of the author who’s comments you don’t want to appear in the list. This is very helpful because if you are active in the comments of your blog you are probably the top commenter.

If your blog id is not 1, change “blog_id=1” to reflect the blog id number of the blog you are adding the leader board to. Another thing to notice is that this will link the commenter’s name to the url they entered when they made a comment. If no web address was specified then their name will not be linked to anything. It would be simple to link the name to the email address of the commenter, but that would expose their email address to spammers and is probably not a good idea.

Finally, at the spot in your blog where you would like the Leader-board to appear, add the following line:

<!—#include virtual=”path/to/your/leaderboard.php” —> .

If you are lucky, you now have a list of the top commenters on your blog. Like I said before, I just barely got this to work, so if you need help, you are pretty much on your own. If anyone decides to try this, and has suggestions about how to make this tutorial better, please let me know. Good luck!

References: Six Apart’s community forum www.thegirliematters.com

Somebody tell me if something like this already exists…

I would like to be able have comments I leave on other people’s blogs appear on my site. It could work really well in a sidebar (although I don’t have one at the moment) as a “See What Adrian Is Saying Elsewhere in the Blogosphere” section. Not the catchiest name, I know, but it is a work in progress. Ideally, it would look something like this:

Adrian recently said, “Listen to the commercial. It says “I am a Mac. I am a PC.” They clearly don’t say “I am a mac user.” They aren’t supposed to represent the users, they are representing the products! It is a pretty simple concept, so I am amazed by how you misread it so badly….”

On a post called “The problem of smugness”
over at www.cultureby.com
on Aug 30, 2006 at 10:26:15 AM

Easier said than done, I am sure. When I am on a blog and hit the button to publish my comment the plugin (or whatever is powering this crazy idea of mine) records the comment and lets me preview and edit what it will post to my sidebar. Kind of like a bookmarklet (Do they still do bookmarklet’s or is it called something else now?) except it would work for comments instead of entries. I don’t think there is any money in this idea, but it would be pretty handy. Ok, somebody go make that for me…

I hate compromise. I try to blog with conviction, and not let anything stop me from saying what I believe. I have avoided this, my personal blog, because I knew that I was being forced to not say what I really want. I have always been pretty confident that everything I write on my blogs is protected by freedom of speech. I still do, but I had the first legal encounter with someone threatening me because of what I wrote. It is a relatively harmless situation, and I am kind of a wuss for backing down so easily, but the stupid thing has been on my mind for about a week now, and I just want to get it behind me. You can read the nasty letter here if you want the dirty details. I can’t tell you how much better I feel just for publishing the lawyer’s letter, even if I stripped out the names. I think that was the best thing to do, but it is still a compromise, and it stings. Part of my wussyness has to do with the fact that I don’t want to make a scene since I still work for the agency where I did the work in question. Job security aside, the blogger in me just wants to paint it in the sky and really make them pay. But I didn’t. I compromised. I backed down. I gave the faceless corporation a pass. I failed. Please forgive me for my compromise, and I promise to never do it again. I hope.

Comments are my favorite part of blogging – usually. On my photography blog, Found Photography, I just reached a new milestone. I passed the 50 comment mark on one of my entries. If you had to guess, which entry do you think it was on? The logical guess would be the tutorial about the camera I made out of Legos. After all, it was featured on Boing Boing, Metafilter, Engadget, Make, Flickr’s blog, Digg, and over a couple hundred other sites. I am telling you this not to brag (ok, well maybe a little) but because this ISN’T the post with the most comments. That honor goes to an entry I made reviewing a piece of garbage camera called the Philips Keychain Digital Camera. I basically just wrote about how worthless the camera was and urged people to avoid wasting their money on it. So why has this post become so popular? The answer is because a camera this junky isn’t supported by Phillips. Nearly everyone who bought this camera does a Google search and finds my entry near the top of the results. The typical comment goes about like this:

“hey I bought this phillips camera its very good do you know were I can download the software because I lost mine
Please email me back.”

There is a huge temptation for bloggers to tailor their writing to match what they think their audience wants. While this seems logical, it leads you to base the concept of your “reader” on the kind of comments your site is getting. Based on my blog’s comments, I would make the mistake of thinking my readers were inconsiderate fools that blatantly disregard capitalization, punctuation, grammar, and common sense. Since I know that isn’t true and since I have no ambition to write reviews of crappy cameras, there is this conclusion: Blog comments don’t represent the readers.

The vast majority of the people who read blogs don’t leave comments. Unfortunately, that means that there isn’t a reliable way to know what your reader’s want. So how do you know what to write? Easy. Stop writing what you think people want to hear, and write what you care passionately about. Not only will it be easier to write, but it will also be more interesting and attract more readers. Don’t let the loud commenters persuade you to change your style. Don’t get mad if your blog’s comments don’t reflect the kind of reader you want. The readers you want will find your site. They might be silent, but they are there.

Remember that Seinfeld episode where George is afraid that if his two worlds (his dating world and his friend world) would collide it would be the end of him? “A George divided against itself cannot stand!” Well, blogging is kind of another world for me. Almost noone in my daily life reads my blogs. I rarely go out of my way to talk about it, and I doubt that there is much here that would interest them anyway. I actually like it that way. It is kind of a fear of “world’s colliding” thing.

Recently I was invited to lunch by someone who had read my blog. Not only had he read my blog, he read a post I made that criticized him. Needless to say, I was a little nervous about meeting him. What can be said in private that can’t be said on a blog? Plus, he had the ability to do plenty of homework on me, while I had no way of knowing what to expect from him. If he hadn’t of been persistent in his invitation, I would have been more than happy to keep the blog world separate from the physical world. (Sidenote: I read a post earler last week that said, “If you talked to people the way advertising talked to people, they would punch you in the face.” I think the same thing could be said about blogs. I don’t know if that is necessarily a bad thing, but blogging does have the fortunate side effect of me not getting beat up when I tick someone off!)

Well, I went through with it. I let the worlds collide, and to my delight, it was a very pleasant lunch. We easily worked out our differences, and the conversation made a smooth transition from conflict to recognition of similar beliefs and attitudes. Actually, I couldn’t believe how much we had in common! If there is a point to my story it is this: If you have a blog and are ever given the opportunity to meet a reader, jump at the opportunity. Let the world’s collide! You will survive and you might even meet someone that you have more in common with than you might expect.

After making another round of tweaks to adrian3.com I thought of one piece of advice for anyone thinking about starting a blog: Don’t wait until you have your templates perfect to start your blog. Building a “perfect” website takes an incredible amount of time. If you wait until you have the perfect templates and every little feature you are wasting valuable blog time. Get your site up and running and worry about perfecting it later. For one thing, this allows you to start building content. It also lets you understand what your content will be and how it is going to work. Once you know that you can build your design accordingly. I would even go as far as to say don’t start customizing your site until you have written for a while. Use one of the default templates to start out with and slowly build and modify it until you have a decent site. Think of designing a blog as a neverending redesign. Never stop thinking of ways to improve your blog’s layout. That is the philosophy I have taken with Be A Design Group. I have constantly tweaked the site and still have a ton of little things I would like to do to improve it. If I waited until my templates were perfect BADG never would have started. So what are you waiting for? Start your blog today.

Bits and pieces from my trip to Indiana:

Toll Booths
I took the toll road to the airport. I managed to scrape together $0.75 for the first toll and hoped that the other toll booths had attendants who could give me change. Luckly they did, but I always wonder what you do if you are stuck there without change. Why don’t they have a change machine? Or make the toll be $1? Or take credit cards. Otherwise, you either have to flag down another car to ask for change, or speed on by and hope you don’t get caught.

Dinner
Dinner was a box of Junior Mints and sour gummy worms. I didn’t feel like overpaying for a McDonald’s burger at the airport.

Reading
Creativity’s top 50. Hoping most of the names will sink in so that next time I hear the names, I won’t feel like an idiot for not knowing who they are talking about. Hoping to finish Free Culture finally.

Rental Car
They gave me a brand new PT Cruiser with less than 200 miles on it. The interior was stylish and pretty cool, but I don’t think I would ever buy one. I can’t really explain why, though. It seems decent enough…

Hotel
I am staying at the Essenhaus here in Middlebury. It is my first time here, and it is nicer than the nickname it has in our office: “The F’en House.” They said they were hit by lightning a little while before I arrived. A fire alarm was going off downstairs from my room. It took them until past midnight before they could turn it off. Internet was down until this evening which is why I haven’t posted sooner.

Extended Forecast
It has been raining hear since I arrived. Supposed to rain most of the week. It hasn’t dampened my spirits though. I had a successful first day of photography capped off by a nice dinner with Craig Lamson. Ready to do it again tomorrow…