Julianna Yau’s blog

For several months, I have been looking for something (anything) which can post a digest of my Ma.gnolia bookmarks to this blog.

My first attempt was with Feedburner‘s link splicer, which does that…but only integrates the content into the blog’s feed. Although that’s useful, it isn’t the functionality I want.

Then I tried Ma.gnolia‘s own blog posting tool. Although it worked wonderfully, I stopped using it when my host upgraded to ModSecurity 2. This was a problem because modsecurity needs to be deactivated for the xmlrpc file so that WordPress will accept remote posting, but ModSecurity 2 can only be disabled by the host and for my entire site. This posed a security risk I wasn’t willing to take just to get digest posting of my bookmarks.

I was manually creating digests for a while, but that couldn’t be a permanent solution.

And then I searched through the WordPress plugins again and found that Postalicious had been updated to handle not merely De.licio.us bookmarks, but others…including Ma.gnolia!

At this time, it looks like Postalicious only supports one account from De.licio.us, Ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit or Yahoo Pipes.

You can select:

• the WordPress user acount to attribute the post
• the categories for the post
• whether pingbacks are allowed
• whether comments are allowed
• the minimum number of links a post can have
• the frequency of posting (no limit, max of x bookmarks per post, minimum of x hours between posts, or post once every x days after hh:mm)
• whether to publish after the criteria are met, or keep in drafts
• whether to edit an existing post or start a new one if the author publishes the draft
• allow/disallow a custom list of html in bookmark descriptions
• post only or no bookmarks with a custom list of tags (no spaces, comma separated)
• whether to use bookmark tags as the tags for the post
• whether to always use the same custom list of tags for the post
• date format, based on PHP standards
• post slug template
• post title for single or multiple days
• bookmark syntax (e.g. bookmark link – description – custom text)
• tag syntax
• customizable post template for single or multiple days

Overall, I would say the available options have been very thoroughly considered, and the plugin works wonderfully.

Todd over at Ma.gnolia picked up on a nice little article about the UK’s National Consumer Council’s concerns with unfair EULAs (End User License Agreements) and another about Autodesk being sued for misusing the DMCA to supress resales of software due to EULA terms.

After quite a bit of work, I managed to get almost everything for my websites back to normal. The main thing which took longer than expected (and continues to be unresolved) is being able to use the Metaweblog API to get my Ma.gnolia bookmarks posted to this blog. I have since discovered that ModSecurity 2 does not play nice with Metaweblog API. This means, although I love Ma.gnolia’s blog posting feature, I will probably not be using it until there is a way for the Metaweblog API to work with ModSecurity active for everything except my xmlpc file.

My bookmarks continue to be available here, and individual feeds are available for the tags.

Here are the links I’ve wanted to post since my server upgrades:

• John Degen on the CMEC proposal
• Lawrence at Northworthy challenges the concept of “fair” copyright
• The Office of the Privacy Commissioner discusses potential privacy issues with the new enhanced driver’s licences (EDLs) available to eligible B.C. residents.
• William Patry argues that a photograph of an object is the depiction of the object rather than a derivative work.
• An article on the “art bug”. This seemed very familiar to me, and I had to check the date several times to ensure it was current. Why was it so familiar? This was something which was discussed at the Visual Arts Summit! Sadly, the article is now behind the pay wall…but is still free to read at your local library.
• More studies on art & culture. This one is from Kelly Hill, a presenter from the Visual Arts Summit
• Art News Blog: Urban Art Auction. The second half of the story covers an exciting collaboration between Banksy and DJ Danger Mouse.
• Counterfeit Chic: But New York Doesn’t ♥ Gucci
• The Art Law Blog notices a recent ruling in the Kurtz case (the one with the bio materials used in art).
• And Maurice Agis is charged with manslaughter because of a malfunction with his inflatable sculpture.

Oh, Google, how you disappoint me. First with YouTube’s unnavigable help pages, then with a product which, despite being in beta, fails to do what its help pages claims it does.

Now that I have two (and soon to be three) laptops (!), and after discovering that free WiFi is spotty at best, I thought I should look for a feed reader which will allow me to access feeds on several computers and offline. After a bit of research I narrowed my options to Liferea and Google’s Reader. Because I didn’t want to wrestle with figuring out how to synchronize Liferea on two computers (I suspect I would need to have the user files on an SD card and transfer the card from one computer to another), or getting Liferea onto Sugar, I decided to try Google’s Reader first.

The first frustration was that, unlike Thunderbird, Google’s Reader only imported posts as of the day the feed was added to Reader. After giving it some time to play catch-up, I found that (a) it will import older posts, (b) there is no option to permanently remove a post from Reader (only an option to mark it as being read), and (c) there is no option to mark a post as unread if it’s date is prior to the date you added the feed to Reader. This means if I am not reading a blog from the day it was created, I need to use one of Reader’s other features (like starring or tagging posts) to keep track of older posts which I have not yet read.

I did find that starring items is great for “bookmarking” posts I want to revisit later, particularly for the many posts to which I want to respond in my blog. The “add tags” option has potential, but seems cumbersome. I suspect it is meant to supplement Reader being alternative to social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia, when used alongside the option to “share” a post (and have it show in your public profile). This would be quite good for anyone who almost only reads blogs and doesn’t have the need to bookmark non-feed webpages… but I have yet to figure out if it’s possible to integrate Reader’s sharing feature with another Google bookmarking option to be a complete social bookmarking option.

Trying to get the offline feature to work was another exercise in frustration.

Installing Google Gears managed to send Firefox into a potentially infinite loop.

When you click on “offline” in Reader, Google explains how the offline mode works, tells you that you’ll need to install Google Gears, and warns:

This installation requires that you restart your browser, so we recommend you close all other windows before you begin.

After you confirm, a window opens with the splash page for the Google Gears installation. You again need to confirm that you want to proceed with the installation of Google Gears. After confirming again, there is are TOS to be accepted and the installation will then finally begin. The instructions are to allow the installation, and again:

Close and restart your web browser (be sure to close all browser windows).

What they fail to explain is that if you simply use Firefox’s built-in restart button for add-ons, and don’t close the Google Gears installation page prior to restarting, Firefox will try to install Google Gears again when you restart. Fun. I guess that’s why they keep trying to tell you to close all your browser windows.

The offline feature itself does not allow you to “even exit your browser and open it again later while you’re offline.” If it does, it totally wasn’t working for me. I was able to successfully go into offline mode in Reader, then in Firefox, and to be able to read posts in Reader. But no combination of going offline in Reader, Firefox and/or disconnecting from my internet connection allowed me to access Reader after closing Firefox and using it in offline mode after starting it again. Their help page simply indicates that I need to navigate to http://www.google.com/reader/ and it will magically work…but Firefox disagreed, telling me that “Firefox is currently in offline mode and can’t browse the Web. Uncheck “Work Offline” in the File menu, then try again.”. After trying one too many times, Reader now tells me that “synchronization has failed” when I go from offline mode to online mode.

Trying to get help from Google was, not surprisingly, as good as impossible. Their help page for offline mode maintains that:

You can even exit your browser and open it again later while you’re offline. Just enter http://www.google.com/reader/ in your address bar the same way you do when you’re online. (Note, however, that the http://reader.google.com/ form of the address will not work when you’re offline. You may want to check your bookmarks to make sure you have the correct address there.)

If I try to provide feedback that the information was not helpful, I have a maximum of 100 characters to tell Google “how [they] can make this better”. Although it’s an interesting challenge to summarize all of this in 100 characters or less, I don’t think it’s worth the work effort.

Hopefully, testing Liferea will be a less frustrating experience.

You may have noticed some changes to my blog yesterday/today.

Last night, I installed the In-Series plug-in for WordPress so that I can organize my posts on deconstructing copyright. This works very well, and I have since moved the table of contents to the bottom of the posts to reduce clutter. Now, you can navigate to the previous or next post in addition to any other post in the series. I have also expanded the post titles because I found “part x” was not very helpful in finding an old post for reference.

I have been itching to use Ma.gnolia‘s blog posting job feature, which is currently in beta. They had a bit of a system glitch with it over the holidays, but it seems to be up and running again.

The blog posting job allows Ma.gnolia users to send their bookmarks to their blogs as a single post. You do need to link your blog via its API, and Ma.gnolia provides easy-to-follow instructions on how to do that.

Here are the user-definable options for the postings:

• frequency: daily, every three days, weekly or every two weeks
• blog: which blog to post to (currently, only one blog is linked, but it looks like they’re planning to allow for multiple blogs)
• post category: choose a category from your blog which will be assigned to the posts of links (currently, only one category can be assigned to the links)
• post title: whatever you want the post title to be, with the option to add the date of the post
• date format: several options for the format of the date (to be used in the post title)
• leading text: the option to preface the links with some text
• include link to your Ma.gnolia bookmarks (a yes/no option)
• remove CSS styles (a yes/no option)
• the option to include only posts with a specific tag, up to a combination of 3 tags
• the option to include or exclude: descriptions, tags, thumbnails and/or ratings

Because it’s in beta, there are still a few kinks. Overall, I find that it works very well and I’m loving the feature. I was using FeedBurner‘s link splicer for a while, but it was problematic because it only shows in the feeds and any email subscriptions sent by FeedBurner. Ma.gnolia, on the other hand, posts the links directly to my blog and the different customization options allow me to control what gets published to my blog and how it shows.

For example, I have started using the tag “blog it” for any bookmarks I want to show on my blog. This means I can bookmark all of the weird and wonderful things I find, but the readers of my blog only see what’s related to my regular blog topics because I setup the job to only send bookmarks tagged with “blog it” to my blog. By having the option of what to include in the blog postings, I can keep the clutter to a minimum by not including a thumbnail of the bookmark or the rating.