Andrew weighs in on the ways in which the web and the world are changing
This is one of several new features recently added to WordPress.com. Here’s why it’s good. Now people can send you an email without you ever publicly displaying your email address.
My first thought was that it might be even more useful in the sidebar than in posts or pages. A response to that is that, once the contact form is in a post or a page, you can link to it from the sidebar. I might just do that.
Anyway, here’s the contact form. Whatever you type in here will be emailed to me.
The title of this post is of course a reference to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” in the Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze. The curious incident in this case is the lack of spam blogs on WordPress.com.
The incident is analyzed by Jonathan Bailey at his Plagiarism Today blog. He finds the lack of spam blogs at WordPress.com remarkable, given that the service is free. He reports three mechanisms for keeping it free of spam blogs. One is its use of Akismet. A second is its banning of ads, including AdSense, from blogs hosted there. A third is simple vigilance against spam.
Notes: Plagiarism Today isn’t hosted at WordPress.com, although it is a WordPress blog. This blog is a WordPress.com blog, although it has a .org URI; that’s because of domain mapping, one of the premium services for which WordPress.com charges. I saw Jonathan’s post via Toni’s.
Is the absence of javascript widgets from WordPress.com a gaping void? Is the consequent absence of Hugh MacLeod’s gapingvoid widget from WordPress.com blogs a great pity? My answer to the first question is that it’s not as big a hole as the security hole javascript poses for sites like WordPress.com.
I provided my answer to the second question on a blog on which I could have used the gv widget, but chose not to. The best way to destroy what’s special about HughToons is to succeed in having them all over the place… by which I mean, in the sidebar of too many blogs.
Although I don’t subscribe to gapingvoid these days, I enjoy dropping by now and then to read something like this recent post. My favorite HughToon is Mistakenly, by the way.
The blogging about WordPress.com being an OpenID provider, but not (yet?) an OpenID consumer, goes on. We can see (here and here, for example) the conversation turning to the question of whether a site should be a provider only.
My main thoughts on the issue are:
Many have already written about WordPress.com becoming an OpenID producer. For example:
There’s a new entry on the WordPress.com FAQ today: What is OpenID? The answer is that it’s “an open standard that lets you sign in to other sites on the Web using your WordPress.com account.”
In other words, WordPress.com is an OpenID producer. As the Jyte user who claimed that WordPress should support OpenID, I have to hail this as a step in an excellent direction.
I hope that it won’t be the only step. A second and even more welcome step would be WordPress.com becoming an OpenID consumer. That would mean that WordPress.com would accept (with the appropriate caution) OpenIDs at login.
Some specific examples might help. http://changingway.org/ is now an OpenID. This illustrates that: an OpenID is a URI; and that WordPress.com domain mapping applies (that URI maps to changinway.wordpress.com). http://claimid.com/andwat is also an OpenID. claimID is an example of a service that is both a producer and a consumer of OpenIDs.
Four stages of adding AddThis to this WordPress.com blog: (1) attempt; (2) hey, it seems to work; (3) no, it doesn’t; (4) providing bonus links; (5) returning a few weeks later and adding AddThis to the sidebar.
(1) Original post was as follows. Right now, I’m just trying to see if WordPress.com will allow use of an AddThis blog button… will edit this post later.
(2) Here’s the later, rather optimistic edit.
You’d like people to bookmark your stuff, especially if they use a social bookmarking service. So you’d like to put a button (or other link) on your blog (or other site) to make it easy for visitors to bookmark you. The trouble is, there are so many social bookmarking services that you don’t want to include a button for each of them.
So you’d like one button to rule them all. AddThis provides such a button. Actually it provides several, the smallest of which appears in this post. Now, down to business, via TechCrunch.
AddThis is gathering some very interesting data that can form the core of a business model now that they have fairly deep penetration. They’re releasing some of this data… AddThis also sees what stories people are bookmarking.
I’m considering putting the AddThis button on the sidebar of this blog. That’s saying something, given my current minimalist tastes.
There is an AddThis blog. The current post tells us that AddThis is now serving over 2 million buttons each day. The blog uses WordPress. I hope that this will encourage AddThis to continue to produce widgets that don’t use JavaScript. (Such widgets aren’t allowed on WordPress.com, although they are allowed on WordPress blogs hosted elsewhere.)
(3) On later checking, the link from the button doesn’t work. A new window comes up, and allows me to choose a bookmarking site. But when I select a site, and get to it, the URL of the blog page isn’t there. So, apparently WordPress.com does strip out some of the AddThis code.
(4) There’s a thread on AddThis on the WordPress.com support forum.
(5) It now (a few weeks later) seems to work, so I’m putting the button in the sidebar.
I used MyBlogLog on my previous blog, and thought it was pretty neat. I don’t use it here. That’s partly because I checked the MBL widget and found it used JavaScript, which is not allowed here at WordPress.com. But it seems that you can use MBL on WordPress.com after all.
Then there are a couple of things that make me less keen on MBL than I was a month or two ago. The first is ease of spamming. Techcrunch reported a demonstration of this by Michael Jensen. My own email box is starting to show evidence of MyBlogSpam.
The second is that MyBlogLog WILL be moving to Yahoo IDs for login purposes. This doesn’t make my life more complicated, since I use a couple of Yahoo services already. But one of the things I liked about MBL was that it was independent of any one blogging tool or provider. I’d like to see it using OpenID rather than, or even as an alternative to, Yahoo ID. On a related note, it’s annoying that the spam email I get from Yahoo-owned MBL is not caught by my Yahoo email spam filter.
Having said all that, my main reason for not using MBL here is that I like my Simpla theme, and don’t want to make it less simple. Hence the sidebar content is sparse, and will remain so.
I don’t know if the whole of WordPress.com was down, but this blog certainly was, and so was the main page of the site. It lasted for about 20 minutes, I think. We seem to be back now.
Update: Matt not only commented here right after the outage, but also posted to the WordPress.com blog, describing and explaining the outage, and describing the impressive and growing hardware powering WordPress.com.
This is the third in a series of posts about the current appearance of this blog. The first post explains why I’m blogging here at WordPress.com, and using the Simpla theme. The second post explains the custom CSS I use.
This post is about the sidebar widgets I use. For example, there’s the popular Categories widget, which does what you’d expect: lists the categories in use at the blog.
Most of the widgets I use are what I would call “HTML widgets,” but which go by the official name of text widgets. Such a widget gives me a box into which I can type heading text, and a box into which I can type HTML.
At the top of the sidebar is a widget with the heading “My Identity” and HTML including an image from, and a link to, claimID. Rather than having lots of About and Profile pages for the multiple blogging and other web services I use, I want to have one main place, and claimID currently seems to me to be as good a host as any for that. I find it strange to call things like this “text widgets” because, apart from the heading, there is no text in this particular widget.
Right under the categories widget is… another text/HTML widget. Under that comes the Search widget. This blog is part of a family of blogs, and it probably makes sense to direct most search at the family rather than only at the currently active member. I’ve used Google to create a custom search engine to do just such a search.
Google provides code to include custom search engines on web sites. Unfortunately, this code includes javascript, and so is not allowed by WordPress.com. My workaround for this is to provide a link to my custom search engine page, and to put it in a text widget. There was a recent discussion about this at the WordPress.com forum.
Right under the text widget linking to the custom search is the Search widget, which provides search of the current blog.
The widget with the heading Subscribe and the feed symbol is another text widget. No, it’s not the RSS widget. You use a text widget to put your feed in your sidebar. Yes, I too was confused at first.
The Share heading and the Creative Commons license comprise the last text widget in the sidebar. There is a Creative Commons widget, but it’s not available at WordPress.com. I wish that it was.
So now we’ve reached the end of the sidebar and, for now, the end of this little series. There will probably be a fourth episode of the trilogy, especially if anyone actually reads the first three. Thank you for reading this far.