Kiesow 7.0

Hint: at the time it probably had something to do with telling stories.

This comes to mind as I spent the week moving the paper’s blogs from the LifeType platform to WordPress Multiple User (WPMU) the same platform that powers wordpress.com. The project was a whole lot of fun as we had to figure a way to export all of the users, posts and comments from 20 blogs. Did I mention that LifeType does not include a simple export feature?  In the end we found a sample script that sort of worked and had a freelance developer customize it to go Lifetype-to-WPMU. It still involved a fair amount of exporting and importing SQL files, but the heavy lifting was all scripted as part of the Wordpress import feature.

The nail in the coffin on the project was trying to redirect the correct URLs for every blog and post from old to new. Considering that our Lifetype setup was fond of underscores and SEO and WP dictate that hyphens are preferred, some mod_rewrite was called for.

Not being a developer and not knowing much about mod_rewrite - it took me about 12 hours to finally find a combination that worked. So - this is why I am in journalism now - finding solutions, learning new things, and telling stories.

Here is the code - it is the “good enough” solution. But, any programmer would probably tell you it could have been solved in about half the lines:

#
# Rewrite old permalinks to new location
# FROM: /web_notes/2008/07/28/more_on_comments/
# TO: /webnotes/2008/07/28/more-on-comments/
#
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5-$6-$7-$8-$9 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5-$6-$7-$8 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5-$6-$7 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5-$6 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$1/$2-$3-$4 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$1/$2-$3 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(((.*)_(.*))(?!wp-\b))/(\d\d\d\d/\d\d/\d\d)/(.*)   http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$3$4/$5/$6 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(((.*)_(.*))(?!wp-\b))/ http://blogs\.nashuatelegraph\.com/$3$4/ [R=301,L]

Wow - comments seem to be a popular topic around the old Journo-blogosphere this week.

It started with a radio piece on NPR: On the Media: Comments on Comments

It got kick-started by Jeff Jarvis: Comments on comments on comments

Kevin Anderson followed up with a post reviewing the whole thing: On the Media and Comments on Comments

And of course it spilled over to blogs and forums and Twitter and Google Reader and Friendfeed and ad infinitum. Hey, the medium IS the message. Wow.

By coincidence - we changed our commenting policy on Monday. Changed it slightly. Our approach has always been to start with the most open system possible and then gradually adjust ‘as the situation on the ground’ dictates.

We have been using Disqus.com to host our comments for about six months. Based on the feature set they offer we have gone with a hybrid approach to moderation. If you are a registered user, (with a verified email address) you can post directly, automatically, immediately, without moderation and without delay directly to any story on our Web site. If you are unverified, you can post but your comment gets put in a moderation queue awaiting review.

Not surprisingly we have very little trouble with registered users. Also not surprisingly it is the unregistered (unverified) commenters who try to spam the site with obscene, racist and libelous comments, not to mention the dedicated collection of sock-puppets we have attracted.

Disqus also has some reputation management tools and a ‘report offensive content’ button - but I think the simple act of verifying an email has been the strongest deterrent to bad behavior. Keep in mind, we do not require real names - only that if you pick a screen name you stick to it.

So after six months of this system, our biggest problem has been that the volume of comments makes it difficult for us to keep up on the average day. We have had an informal policy of reviewing and approving comments whenever we could. So, it could be three times a day, or three times an hour, depending. Unfortunately, as policies go that one is not very scalable or sustainable.

So, in the new policy announced yesterday - we are going to start moderating unverified comments twice daily. This will greatly reduce the stress on the approval system in the office, but hopefully it will also encourage readers to actually go and register for an account.

We can only hope that requiring commenters to be the owner of a working email account is not too high a barrier to participation.

Spent most of the week migrating our multimedia (about 343 projects) from a home made Flash player we got via Zach Wise over to Castfire.com.

Still a fair amount of work to do - the process involved downloading all of the media assets, renaming them, pulling all the metadata from a separate RSS feed, combining it all on a spreadsheet and then reuploading. Fun.

The best thing about Castfire is the API and the ability to slice-and-dice feeds. Castfire can feed out video and audio in RSS, ASX and XSPF. Below is the share-this-video embed version of the player:

Just finished the blogroll at the bottom of the page. Looks simple, it wasn’t.

I am really bored with static lists of blogs. Tough to tell what is worth clicking on if you are not already familiar with the writers.

So - to put this together - I exported an OPML file out of Flock (same one I use in Google Reader) containing 30 or 40 journalism bloggers. Then - I filtered the whole thing through Yahoo Pipes. This let me narrow each individual blogger to one latest entry each, sort by pub date and generally mix and match the needed fields.

After dropping it back into WP - I now have a dynamically generated blogroll that is ordered by latest post and when you hover over each name - provides the title of their latest post. Clicking takes you to the post, not to their front page.

Not bad for only 4:22 a.m.