Alister Cameron // Blogologist

Changing the world. One blog(ger) at a time.

Disqus is not ready for Wordpress

I’m sorry, but as much as I want Disqus (and have installed it for testing) it’s just not ready for Wordpress… not until it can import existing WP comments. I’m rather surprised they don’t have that sussed yet. Disappointed, even.

Find me on Alltop

Featured in AlltopNeenz and the great team at Alltop have added Yours Truly to the Alltop blogging category. Just in time for my determined return to a more aggressive and consistent blogging schedule. I have more planned than I can begin to tell you right now, but all I can say is, you’re going to want to a) make sure you’re subscribed to my RSS feed, and b) make sure you’ve added me as your friend in Twitter and Facebook!

Frank Arrigo wonders if Ray Ozzie is back in my “good books”… he is!

When I’ve had a really good look at Microsoft’s exciting new Live Mesh I’ll post a proper reply to Aussie Microsofter Frank Arrigo, who wonders if I’m still disappointed with Ray Ozzie… Looks like I have serious reasons to reconsider! It does indeed look like the Groove successor to die for!

Semantic Markup/Microformats Pop Quiz - how good are you?!

“Code is art.” That’s the tagline over at W3 Markup, which is a well-presented coding service of a web design crew called W3 Edge. They must be doing something right, as they got the gig to do “custom markup” on Neil Patel’s blog. But if this Smashing Magazine markup example is anything to go by, they’re not quite there yet… Who can tell me what needs to be improved there? Use line numbers in your answers, please.

How smart is Google Maps?

My buddy Cyrus plotted a point in the middle of Port Philip Bay, and asked Google Maps to give directions from there to a location in St Kilda… Turns out Google Maps knows about the ferry!

Ray Ozzie, I am disappointed.

This is Ray Ozzie. He’s Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect. I pictured him kind of younger than that… but Microsoft ages you like nothing else. I mean, just look at Steve Ballmer!

Anyway, see that link on Ray’s page… top right in the sidebar… yeah, that links to his blog. Click it.

You’ve arrived at a page dated November 16th and you’re reading a post where Ray is talking about this, his first post in his third attempt at blogging. He hopes he will do ok this time around:

So … if I couldn’t sustainably blog the last two times I tried, will it work this time? I guess you’ll just have to stay tuned to find out. I certainly have a much more complex life now than I did then, with much less flex time / whitespace within which to blog. Conversely, I’m involved in many interesting and varied issues here that have potentially broad impact, so there’s probably a lot more I’ll want to converse about.

So how’s he going, you might ask? After that somewhat underwhelming reentry to the blogosphere…

Well, how about I told you that the datestamp you see at the top of that post — November 16 — is from over two years ago?! You got that right, folks… Ray’s official bio page links to his blog, and directly to a post he wrote waaaaaaaaaaaaay back in November 2005!

Ok, so maybe it’s a silly oversight to link directly to such an old post. Never mind… so let’s go to his blog’s homepage

Now we’re looking at a blog post datestamped April 1st, and I’m sorry to say but indeed the joke is on us. That’s a post from April 2006. It’s coming up to two years old! And if you count the posts as you go down that page, you’ll find a grand total of six posts. Period.

But it gets worse…

Because Ray’s blog carries (what I assume is) the default Live Spaces blog template, there is a long list of Month/Year archive links running down the left-hand sidebar. They go on forever. And one after the other — if you can be bothered clicking on them in the vain hope of finding a blog post — they come up blank, except for the sad words:

There are no entries in this archive.

No, indeed there are not. None… Not since April 2006. It’s all quiet on the Redmond Front. Verrrrry quiet!

Now here’s the deal. If Ray’s not blogging, I can handle that. If he’s too busy, I’m cool with that. In my consulting I am as much convincing executives not to blog as I am challenging them to consider it.

But hey, if you do have a blog, here are a couple of thoughts:

  1. Build it on a real blog platform that doesn’t create empty month archives by default and deceptively hide the year in post datestamps!
  2. Don’t for goodness’ sake link to it from your Executive Bio page on your Corporate web site if the most recent post is almost two years old.

Heck. I say kill it! Get it off the web. It’s not doing you any favours.

How Ray Lost His Groove

Here’s the other reason why I am disappointed, and it’s got nothing to do with blogging, but I’m still sad.

Before Ray was with Microsoft he was with IBM and Notes. But in-between he built what I thought was one of the most funky cool amazing things called Groove. You can think of Groove (at least as it was then) as a P2P “team workspace” with really nice encryption, SDK, pricing model, UI, etc. The technology was gorgeous, and the power of it was really impressive. We’re talking shared documents, built-in voice conferencing, whiteboarding, project management, etc. And all that run over a peer-to-peer architecture with high encryption and more cool stuff that I can no longer recall.

Now, maybe I’ve got it all wrong, but I feel like since Groove was taken over by MS and Ray got the CTO gig, Groove has just vaporized. Here’s proof of what I mean… I’d like to show you the promo video on the MS site… but the link is broken :( That’s the introductory Groove video, no less!

Ray, are you seeing this?!

Here’s a writer for Red Herring, who last week both praised and damned Ozzie and MS in consecutive paragraphs:

One of Microsoft’s most significant acquisitions was Ray Ozzie, now the company’s chief software architect. We won’t hold it against Mr. Ozzie that he created Lotus Notes, a classic example of packaged software bloat that IBM still foists on unsuspecting customers. That wasn’t why Gates and Ballmer pulled him in.

If you want to see the future of Microsoft, look at Groove, the startup Ozzie built after Notes. Groove was an on-line collaboration platform that allowed users to quickly create shifting groups of workers with finely-controlled access. They could share documents, edit them together, hold meetings and discussions while they looked at documents.

This writer is confused enough to suggest that Groove is a vision of Microsoft’s future, yet speaks of it in the past tense, which might suggest that even technology journalists out there are unaware that Groove still exists and is part of the default install of MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition.

I’m just wondering… why is Groove hidden away in only the Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Office 2007?! Why is it locked into Office and not also strongly promoted and sold on its own merits?

What’s that Big ‘G’ in the Rear View Mirror??

Microsoft has pretty must lost me. I bought a Mac last month. I dumped Exchange Server about 18 months ago and everyone here’s on Google Apps now. On the Mac I never even looked at Entourage, opting for Thunderbird and Gmail via IMAP.

So what did I do today (for no particularly strategic reason)?? I emailed Google and told them I thought it was time they implemented a Groove-style P2P VPN client app (perhaps delivered with Google Pack) so that Google Apps users can collaborate in a more elaborate, encrypted and “offline-tolerant” way than is currently possible.

And the thing is, I’d be surprise if Google was not already working hard on something like that.

So here’s the deal, Ray. I do still think (and agree with our journalist friend above) that Groove is a sign of things to come in the future… except that I’m afraid it will be Google’s future, not Microsoft’s. I have not seen Google make the kinds of mistakes you’ve made recently… like burying some of your best technology in the bowels of Office Enterprise (where it’s guaranteed never to be found by the vast majority of your customer-base)… like screwing up an executive blog on a screwed up blogging platform.

So please… bring Groove back from the wilderness! Reposition it for “groups” (not enterprises) and work out how it’s everything Sharepoint will never be (but that’s another sad post for another day). Give Google something to really feel challenged about, for a change.

I am convinced in principle — but not in technical detail — that Groove is just at that cozy point of equilibrium… of client app married to rich online services, which Google Apps right now is not. It solves the online/offline question, it does security wonderfully, it’s lean, it’s extensible and so forth.

If Groove is not the (kind of) platform for online apps that stands a chance of winning folks like me back from Google, what will?! Assuming it’s O/S platform agnostic, of course :)

I’m sure you get my point.

Oh, and I’m a blog consultant. I can help you sort that blogging thing out too. But just know that I’ll start by trying to convince you to get rid of that horrid V3 thing immediately.

Over and out.

Photo Dropper Wordpress Plugin - perhaps the easiest way to add images to your blog posts

Photo Dropper is brilliant! It’s a Wordpress plugin for adding Flickr photos to your blog posts, and it pretty much does it all for you. Can it get any easier than this?!

Call for Alpha testers for the next-generation Wordpress theme

I’ve been talking for months now about the integration of the wonderful Sandbox and the Yahoo User Interface CSS library. Well, I’ve done it.

Codename: Vanilla

It’s codenamed Vanilla and it’s in “closed Alpha” just for now.

But with all things new, I need some people to step up to the mark and help me test it, refine it and so on. You can do that in the comments below (more about that in a moment).

So what’s the big deal?

The BIG Deal: One Theme, Many Layouts

To my mind, the “Holy Grail” of Wordpress theme design is to create themes that look great and are truly flexible. Sure, there’s all that stuff about standards, but bloggers first and foremost choose themes that make their blog look good, and allow them a degree of straightforward flexibility when it comes to making their own customizations.

Up until now that flexibility has been pretty limited. It’s meant being able to change the header graphic, some colours here and there, and so forth. But I reckon we can do better than that!

So Vanilla adds a simple admin screen offering most of the layout options available with the YUI grids. This means that theme developers can now create new Wordpress themes (or retro-fit old favourites) so that they can accommodate any one of dozens (maybe hundreds?!) of different layout combinations.

This means Bill the Blogger can use the same theme for his “no-nonsense” one-column blog (with sidebar content at the bottom of the page), while someone like me can choose a three-column layout with, say, both primary and secondary columns on the right-hand-side, or one column on each side, or whatever!

Think about how a theme built on top of the Vanilla platform is more useful and flexible to a newbie blogger than all of the themes out there now!

Think about it… the whole reason why the Wordpress Theme Viewer groups the themes according to how many columns they have is because they’re hard-coded that way! You can’t change them to a different column layout without some serious coding, and most bloggers are not up for that.

(Maybe the Wordpress Theme Viewer will need to include a new category for Vanilla-built themes… “universal” or something!)

If you’re a theme designers, you might like to consider how many bloggers are not using a given theme of yours, just because the layout/column setup is not to their liking (much as they might have loved the overall design).

Well, no more!

Vanilla gives you the best of both worlds: firstly it’s built on the Sandbox, which is hands-down the best semantic markup you could hope to built a Wordpress theme on. Then there’s the YUI CSS library, not least the Grids system, which provides the awesome power to create one theme with a huge number of layout options.

Here’s what the Vanilla Settings page looks like (in Wordpress Admin):

Vanilla Theme Settings

Vanilla’s settings page (in Wordpress Admin) lets you rapidly choose a one-, two- or three-column layout, along with a number of options for page widths and column positions. This gives you literally hundreds of layouts (i.e. column combinations) to choose from!

Here’s what the settings form looks like. Just three select-boxes does the trick:

Page Width:
Outer Column (fixed width):
Inner Column (relative width):
Page Width
This setting determines the overall width of the entire content of your page (not the browser window width, of course). You have three fixed-width options, which are all centered, and one full-width (100%) option.
Outer Column
The outer column can be set to one of three fixed widths, and either to the left or right of the page. It is a quirk of YUI CSS Grids (and related to IAB “standards”) that these widths differ slightly between the left-hand and right-hand positions on the page.
Inner Column
The width of the inner column is measured relative to the width of the main content area. For the three fixed page width options, the inner sidebar also has a fixed width, however for the 100% page-width option, the inner sidebar width is “fluid” and will proportionally resize, relative to the browser window (as will the content area).

Layout Notes

  1. The leftmost sidebar column will always contain the primary sidebar, meaning that if both sidebar columns are used (whether set to the same side of the page or not), the primary sidebar will always appear to the left of the secondary sidebar.
  2. For a one- or two-column layout (where either the outer or inner sidebar column is set to “none”, or both) the displayed column will contain both the primary and secondary sidebars, the latter following on immediately from the former. In the case of a one-column layout (where no outer or inner sidebar column is used) the primary and secondary sidebars will appear below the content area.

(Understanding the “why” behind these points requires an appreciation of how YUI CSS Grids have been designed to work.)

Using the YUI Grid Builder

By far the easiest way to play around with Vanilla’s layout settings (and to learn how the Grids work) is to use the YUI Grid Builder. Once you are happy with what you see there, enter those settings into the form on the Vanilla settings page and you’ll have the same layout structure in Vanilla.

Important note: Vanilla’s use of the YUI CSS grid system is limited, compared to the YUI Grid Builder (in terms of row and column options). This is reflected in the range of choices available for the inner column (a couple of the YUI CSS Grid options you can play with in the Builder make no sense for a blog layout).

Theme Developer Notes

Design one theme with many layout options.
If you know your CSS well enough you should be able to design a great looking theme that won’t break, no matter what layout options are selected above. Go on, I dare you!
You’re ahead before you’ve started.
The YUI CSS library means your theme development starts ahead of the rest. The strange differences between browsers have been cleaned up, there’s a rock-solid grid to build off, and the optional Base.css file gives you a headstart on default CSS settings for the most common elements.
Very minor differences from the Sandbox.
Vanilla is based on the Sandbox theme, with just four renamed elements:

  1. div#wrapper is renamed div#doc/doc2/doc3/doc4
  2. div#header is renamed div#hd
  3. div#container is renamed div#bd
  4. div#footer is renamed div#ft
  5. Err, nothing. That’s it!

YUI CSS requires the addition of extra DIVs and classes, but these need not be styled, as a rule.

Tricked up sidebars, but they take care of themselves.
Vanilla’s “logic” controlling the display of sidebar content (and the surrounding HTML markup) is, well, messy. But the good news is you’re still just styling div.sidebar and/or div#primary and div#secondary.
Converting existing Sandbox themes (skins) is easy!
In light of the above, you should by now realize that converting an existing Sandbox theme to Vanilla is pretty easy. (I converted Sandpress–the Sandbox competition’s winning entry–in just a couple of hours, having never looked at the CSS before. And this wasn’t just a conversion to the grid, but to YUI’s Reset CSS as well.)

So Who Wants To Play!?

Vanilla will remain in “closed Alpha” for as short a time as possible. The purpose of this is to avoid releasing the theme with too many embarrassments to myself! No, but seriously, I’d rather get some key theme designers to give it a run through its paces first, so we can iron out the most obvious issues. I’d rather fewer bug releases at the start so what people get first up is at least stable and tested.

Secondly, I’m hoping Vanilla can go to beta with a few simple themes ready for release, which demonstrate these exciting new capabilities.

For all this to happen quickly and with little fuss, I’d like to send out an invitation to accomplished Sandbox and/or Wordpress theme developers and designers, who’d like to take Vanilla for a serious “spin”. My simple criteria are that a) you have already created at least one Wordpress theme for public consumption, and b) you have time to either play around creating a new one on Vanilla or retro-fitting an existing theme for Vanilla.

If you have developed a popular Wordpress theme that you’d be prepared to rework for Vanilla, I’d especially like you to get involved.

Either way, please apply to join the Alpha test in the comments below, or via my contact form, or by email to .

Let’s make this BIG!

(Oh yeah, and I won’t be emailing people with updates and stuff. Please subscribe to my RSS feed for that.)

Watching the suicide of a company in real time… Yazsoft

You’d think a software company would know that the internet changes everything when it comes to respecting your customers. Well, no. Yazsoft is doing it wrong better than anyone I’ve seen in a long time. They won’t recover this lost trust any time soon… or maybe ever.

What happened to Upstart Blogger??

One of the best Wordpress themers is Upstart Blogger. But where’d he go?!