Archive - 2008
July 22nd
Orient Lodge designated historic
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 14:01While we were on vacation, we got a couple phone calls from friends that let us know that Orient Lodge, our old house that we lost in foreclosure, not this blog, was on the front page of a Stamford newspaper.
The article was in the Stamford Times and talked about, “the board of representatives voted unanimously in favor of designating the home a local historic property”.
It talks a little bit about the person who bought the house. An old friend from Stamford commented here that there is some sort of connection to the school my kids went to and the church we went to.
It is great to read about the new owner falling in love with the place and about his plans for renovating it. It may seem a bit strange, but when things started moving towards foreclosure, I was more concerned about what would happen to the house than what would happen to me. I know that I will get by. The right opportunities will come along soon enough.
Yet the house, it needed someone special to love it, someone who would save it from being torn down and replaced with a McMansion. Now, it is protected as a local historic property and has a person who will help restore it in a way that I never could.
July 21st
Marilyn Moore Addresses Trumbull DTC
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 22:29This afternoon, I received a phone call asking if I would accompany State Senate Candidate Marilyn Moore to the Trumbull Democratic Town Committee meeting. Having worked with many campaigns, I’m used to these sorts of calls. Candidates should not attend meetings unaccompanied, and I’ve accompanied several different candidates to all kinds of different meetings.
I had not met Marilyn before, at least to the best of my memory. However, my wife Kim has spent a lot of time talking with Marilyn on various subjects and she speaks very highly of Marilyn. In addition, many other friends have spoken very highly of Marilyn, so I agreed to go along.
Marilyn is running in a primary on August 12 to be the Democratic nominee in the 22nd State Senate District, which covers parts of Bridgeport, Monroe and Trumbull. Her opponent is the Town Treasurer for Trumbull so the meeting had the potential to be interesting.
There were around 18 people attending the meeting, which started off with approving the minutes of the previous meeting and a brief treasurer’s report. Marilyn was given a chance to address the DTC and she spoke about working for the phone company, her role as head of the Witness Project which provides culturally competent community-based breast and cervical cancer education programs, and then her role as an assistant to State Senator Ed Gomes from Bridgeport.
After she spoke briefly, State Representative Tom Christiano asked her about her ability to serve constituents of both Trumbull and Bridgeport. She spoke about how her service with the Witness Project has helped her work with people from all across Fairfield County and how she looks forward to serving not only the constituents of Trumbull and Bridgeport, but also of Monroe which is the third town in the district.
After she was done speaking, a representative from the Himes campaign spoke about the listening tour that Jim Himes is doing across the Fourth Congressional district. When the speakers were done, they were offered to opportunity to stay or leave. Marilyn and I decided to stay and we were glad we did since subsequent topic was the resolution by the DTC calling on the State Legislature to pass the health care bill. Marilyn’s background in health care with the Witness Project makes her a particularly strong candidate to address these issues.
Other standard DTC issues were addressed, including nominating people to various committees and discussions about fundraising. Nonetheless, it was a quick meeting, even with the speakers, and it was soon over. Afterwards, Marilyn spoke with various people about the issues in the town before it was time to leave.
I spoke with her briefly afterwards. It seemed as if the evening went very well for her. I’m not surprised. She is bright, articulate, caring and an all around great candidate. I am glad I received the opportunity to accompany her to the Trumbull Democratic Town Committee meeting and got to know her much better. She will make a great State Senator.
Upgrading to Laconica 0.4.4
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 14:19Today, I’m upgrading micro.orient-lodge.com to the latest version of Laconica. Given the frequent updates to the core, I figured I needed to come up with a better way of doing these upgrades, so I’ve split my tarball into two different pieces. laconicadepends.tar.gz and laconica044.tar.gz.
The laconicadepends tarball are all of those little files, that you would normally install using PEAR or by hunting around that laconica depends on. The second tarball is a straight tarball of the current darcs repository. In theory, you should be able to combine the depends tarball with just about any standard repository to have a version that runs on many shared hosts. If you do set up a site using this, let me know how it goes.
Setting up Darcs for Laconi.ca Development
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 07/21/2008 - 11:10Before I went on vacation, I was writing a bit about laconi.ca and about my efforts to make it easier for developers to start contributing. One of the first hurdles to face is getting used to the version control system.
Many people I’ve spoken with are used to using CVS or SVN to get and submit code from a version control repository. I don’t know as many people that are up to speed with darcs. In my case, my hosting service already has CVS and SVN installed, but darcs is not an option. So, I spent a little time playing around to see what I could do.
July 20th
Comments
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 07/20/2008 - 20:57EntreCard and SezWho
While I was off on vacation, EntreCard announced a partnership with SezWho. EntreCard is a site where bloggers can drop cards on one another as part of an advertising scheme to drive traffic to their sites. The folks at EntreCard note that adding comments is another key part of how to drive traffic to a site. So, they’ve partnered with SezWho, which is a site aimed at driving traffic through comments.
SezWho has gotten some mixed reviews early on. Apparently, early on, they had some distributed denial of service attacks which slowed down everyone who has using SezWho. In my case, I’m using Drupal for my blog, and their support for Drupal is in beta. So far, my experiences it that it is probably better to think of it as Alpha code.
When you install SezWho for Drupal, you need to go through the regular steps of a Drupal install. Then, you need to edit a configuration file, go in and tweak your theme files and hope things work.
In my case, they did not seem to work at all. The blocks showed up, but that was about it. After digging into the code, I found that it actually had synchronized some of my content, but a very limited amount. The posts that it synchronized didn’t have comments, so I couldn’t see what was going on. To complicate things even further, it seemed to have my content attributed to my old Optonline email address, while my comments were being attributed to my Orient Lodge email address, as was my registration and my EnterCard connection. This remains an outstanding issue which I hope will get addressed when their Drupal person gets back.
As I explored further, I found that their synchronize software only synchronizes content for non-blog nodes for the website as a whole. Since Drupal can have multiple blogs, SezWho has separate synchronization for each individual blogger, and that separate synchronization applies only to blog posts. In my case, I’m the only person using this Drupal site as a blog, so I didn’t set up a separate account for the site as a whole as well as for my individual blog here. So, it didn’t find any of my blog posts, just a few random other pages. I changed the synchronization program to synchronize blog posts for the main account, and now it shows all my posts as being synchronized. That is, at least, in the database. I had to tweak a few other places to force the blogid to zero to get other content to show up, and even with that it is spotty, either lagging or failing, and not managing to handle comments at all.
Later, I tried tweaking parameters another way, adding my Optonline email address to my SezWho profile and setting up a separate blog on the SezWho profile for my blog entries. Convoluted. Also, it hasn’t made any apparent difference.
Oh well.
General discussion
So, now I’m tied into three different comment systems. If you follow me on FriendFeed you can add comments there. I’ve tweaked Drupal to pull in those comments. There is a little bit of a lag. I like the way FriendFeed integrates with all the other life streams. I just don’t like the lag, or the difficulty of finding a place to add a comment initially.
You can also use Disqus. It seems to work pretty well, but for some reason, it is flagging some very old content as new. I’m not sure why that is happening. However, the comments can be added from the Drupal site and it seems to work pretty well. A nice plus is that if you use Seesmic, you can add video comments. The downside is that comments are stored on their server, and my access and control of the content is limited.
Then, there is SezWho. What is nice about SezWho is that they are supposed to integrate with the Drupal comment system, so comments stay part of Drupal. I can control them however I wish. The downside is that SezWho just doesn’t seem ready for beta testing.
So, for the time being, you’ll have different options for adding comments. None of them are perfect. All of them, hopefully, will be evolving to be better systems in the future.
