Moving WordPress: redirects
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June 30th, 2005 by Alex
I recently moved my blog from http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/blog to http://www.alexandrasamuel.com. That involved not only moving my actual WordPress program files but also figuring out how to redirect visitors following outdated links to my old content.
Today the ever-helpful Boris Mann pointed out that the way I had originally set up redirects totally messed up my RSS feeds and search engine results. He pointed me towards the beauty of 301 redirects, which do a nice job of preserving past and current search results.
So for the record, here is THE simple how-to for handling redirects after moving a WordPress blog (it’s been a couple of weeks since my original move so I can’t remember the steps that were required to move the WordPress install itself, but I think there’s info out there on that.) I’m basing my example URLs here on what I just went through, i.e. moving WordPress from a subdirectory (www.yoursite.com/blog) to the root directory (www.yoursite.com)
- Open your .htaccess file (in the directory that houses your newly moved WordPress files) and edit in either your host’s file manager interface or by downloading to your local machine.
- Insert a line at the top that reads:
redirect 301 /blog/ http://www.yoursite.com/
Make sure to insert the opening and trailing / at the beginning and end of the originating path (e.g. /blog/) and to insert the trailing / at the end of the destination path (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com) - Save your .htaccess file (and if you’re editing on your local machine rather than on the server, re-upload it).
- Load your old WordPress URL (e.g http://www.yoursite.com/blog) to make sure this worked.
- Enjoy the redirecting goodness.
I admit it’s a bit counterintuitive that the path you’re moving from needs to be input as just a path (e.g. /blog/ with no http://URL before it) while the path you’re moving to needs to be input as the full URL (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com). Maybe it’s just my server? But the Internet is a capricious and mysterious creature so I don’t ask, I simply do what works.
Thanks to the helpful article on 301 redirects at Taming the Beast for pointing me towards the right syntax.
International Conference on Engaging Communities
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June 30th, 2005 by Alex
The UN is sponsoring the International Conference on Engaging Communities in Brisbane, Australia, from August 14-17. Speakers include Stephen Coleman and Robert Putnam.
.bed
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June 29th, 2005 by Alex
Our headboard needs an ICANN-accredited domain registrar. We always come up with the best domain names as we’re falling asleep, and forget them by the morning.
No godaddy jokes, please.
This sheep talks back
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June 27th, 2005 by Alex
On my way back from this weekend’s meeting of the Online Deliberative Democracy consortium I had a chance to enjoy the ever-increasing vigilance of US airport security. At the end of my last US visit I ended up at the airport with a colleague who relayed the observation that while the elaborate rituals of airport scanning — unpack your computer, take off your belt, empty the change from your pockets — do little to increase security, they do an excellent job of turning thoughtful citizens into obedient sheep.
Through the lens of this observation I found myself irritated with the screening process, whereas I’d previously accepted it on the grounds that a minor hassle is a small price to pay for any possible increase in security. I fell back on my favourite mechanism for coping with life’s minor (and major) irritations: mentally composing the blog post that tackles the politics of US airport security.
I had barely packed away my laptop on before I started second-guessing the wisdom of such a post. My dissertation research on hacktivism included an investigation of hacktivist protests (PDF) against Echelon, the early name for the rumored electronic surveillance of electronic communications. That has left me with a not-atypical case of progressive paranoia about who might be reading my blog posts, e-mail, or web site.
Then I second-guessed again: after all, in the two days I’d just spent with my fellow e-democrats, we’d done a lot of hand-wringing about the current disconnect between the blogosphere and the political sphere. For all the energy and hype around blogging as a form of personal publishing and political discourse, there’s little evidence that policy-makers keep an eye on the blogosphere as a source of grassroots citizen input. Sure, they may read a few blogs from the Technorati Top 100, but that’s more in the spirit of anticipating the next media crisis than as a way of hearing from the proverbial little guy.
While the participants in the ODDC meeting all acknowledged that bloggers are hardly a representative population, many were also (like me) very interested in the possibilities for capturing the energy and spontaneity of blog-based political discussion — and finding ways to make that discussion more constructive. One of the most exciting upshots of the conference is a plan to experiment with blog-based deliberation — something that could provide a model for policy-makers seeking to incorporate the spontaneous political utterances of bloggers into the structured processes of policy-making.
The juxtaposition of my mental blogging on airport security and our excited planning for blog-based deliberation led me to a couple of possible axioms:
- I should be able to be as reasonably hopeful that the government is scanning my blog for political and policy inspiration as I am anxious that it’s taking my blog posts as security threats, OR
- I should be able to be as reasonably hopeful that the government is not taking my blog as a security threat as I am skeptical that it is drawing policy or political inspiration from my blog posts.
At the moment, I confess that I’m confident in neither option. I do feel nervous about posting this — yeah, I’m paranoid, but I also have to cross the border a fair bit — and I would feel astonished to learn that US policy-makers were considering my blog posts the way they might consider an e-mail or letter I sent to a congressional representative. But I’m looking forward to further discussion (and action!) on how to make blogging a policy input, and I can’t imagine living as an American who was too scared to blog.
My 10 sites
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June 27th, 2005 by Alex
As promised, I’m picking 10 sites for my bookmark bar; in fact they’re pretty much there already. Here’s what I’m going to try to live off of for the next week, with no search and no typing addresses into the address bar:
- My blog’s admin page
- My del.icio.us page
- My Bloglines page (with links to all my blog and news sources)
- My web banking login
- My Yahoo groups page
- My spurls
- MyTelus
- The admin page for You’re It
- Omidyar
- MacFixit
I can already tell this is going to be annoying, despite the fact that I can reach about 98% of my web destinations via the first 3 links in my list alone. I suspect that the value of this exercise is going to turn out to be the discipline it imposes on my bookmarking. While I tend to use del.icio.us a lot for things that I want to read, I tend not to bookmark sites that I actually want to use — like my bank, my local movie info (via MyTelus), and Omidyar. This week may push me into bookmarking more sites and learning how to use my bookmarks more effectively.
Take the 10-site challenge
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June 25th, 2005 by Alex
I’m blogging this from Mike Weiksner’s sidekick and it is painful not to have one, bluetooth or no bluetooth. (Its one major shortcoming.) The phenom of mobile browsing - which makes typing a little annoying - reminds me of a favourite question of mine: if you were stuck on a dessert island with access to only 10 websites, which 10 sites would you choose?
Are you sure? Now here’s the challenge. Put links to all ten in your browser’s toolbar. Now, see if you can go one week without entering another address in your address bar…or doing a text search. That’s right: I want to see if yiu can survive a week with link-only navigation…starting from only those ten links in your browser.
I’ll post my picks tomorrow. Report to follow…and I look forward to hearing from other brave browsers.
e-Democracy skills training
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June 25th, 2005 by Alex
I was part of a break-out group discussion today on making online deliberation tools accessible. We discussed three facets of this challenge: tool design, user training, and motivating participation.
Our conversation began and ended with user training issues, becuase that’s what we came back to throughout our conversation. The question of motivating participation was simply too broad for our group to meaningfully address: ultimately it came down to the same kinds of motivational challenges that affect every form of on- and offline participation, not only in politics but in work, society and personal life. Tool design, on the other hand, seemed to be too specific a challenge for us to meaningfully address: ultimately the design and usability issues have to be addressed tool-by-tool, project-by-project, and developer-by-developer.
Training was the middle ground: an issue with broad applicability to many different kinds of online engagement projects, but an issue where we could perhaps take some concrete and constructive steps. The three possible ideas that emerged for ODDC work were:
- Training guidelines for e-democracy: Some sort of written guidelines that might guide training efforts by community networks and other social or nonprofit technology trainers, that would encourage a focus on tools and skills that increase capacity for online civic participation.
- Training initiative: Seek a grant or organization to fund a centralized effort at developing training and trainers who could foster online skills for increasing civic capacity.
- Grassroots training: Create some tools, like how-to guides or screencasts, to faciliate self-organization by volunteers with some technical skills (like bloggers) who might organize their own community tech training sessions if it was easy and obvious how to do it.
In our plenary discussion we heard that our ideas about training guidelines and materials have been partly fulfilled by the Bristol e-democracy project, which produced some e-democracy training materials.
In the plenary we also talked about what had been done in terms of usability analysis of e-democracy projects. One suggestion was to come up with usability “juries” to get input on usability of different e-democracy projects. Another was to see if we could get a usability lab or studen to do some evaluations. Todd Davies described a recent usability workshop for six teams of open source developers.
Online tools for ODDC: URLs
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June 25th, 2005 by Alex
I’m in Minneapolis for the Deepening Online Deliberation workshop hosted by the Online Deliberative Democracy Consortium.
We had a terrific conversation today about some of the tools available for online deliberation and for collaboration among deliberation researchers and practitioners. Some of the URLs mentioned include:
Conversate– a new tool for spontaneous conversation. I set up this link for us to try out Conversate as a space for ongoing ODDC conversation.
Jerry Michalski’s “boot camp for the new millenium”
Alex’s introduction to tagging and social bookmarking (Tagging 101)
You’re It — a blog about tagging (Tagging 201)
Alex’s 10 steps to RSS (RSS 101)
The Online Deliberation 2005 Conference blog
Gataga - a search engine for finding tagged content.
43 Things is a tool for creating lists of personal goals and networking with people who share goals.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking system that lets people share web resources, for example on deliberation
For an interesting political application of wikis, see the dKospedia project to review files on Guantanamo Bay detainees. Volunteers are helping to review thousands of documents on the detainees, and are keeping notes on a wiki so that multiple readers can cross-check and edit each write-up, as seen here
Ambush kills U.S. troops in Iraq
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June 25th, 2005 by Alex
Snip: The suicide car bomb and ensuing small-arms fire killed at least two Marines and four others were missing and presumed dead. At least one woman was killed, and 11 of the 13 wounded troops were female.
The ambush late Thursday also suggested Iraqi insurgents may have regained a foothold in Fallujah, which has been occupied by U.S. and Iraqi forces since they regained control of the city from insurgents seven months ago.
The women were part of a team of Marines assigned to various checkpoints around Fallujah. The Marines use females at the checkpoints to search Muslim women “in order to be respectful of Iraqi cultural sensitivities,” a military statement said.
The demise of Technorati politics?
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June 24th, 2005 by Alex
What’s missing from the new and improved Technorati? It seems as if their overview ofpopular blog conversations still includes movies, books, and the top 100 — but where is their politics page?
Until the redesign, Technorati was home to a nifty slice of political debate on the blogosphere, organized by “conservative” “liberal” and “other”. It was one of the few places where you knew you could find blog comments that didn’t fall into Republican or Democrat camps, because that middle category was explicitly an “in between” group. Anyone where how to find it, or how we can get it back?
Where social software meets social activism
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June 22nd, 2005 by Alex
A lot of my recent reading and thinking has focused on how social software — community-building online tools like blogging, wikis and social networking — effect small-p political change by allowing groups to self-organize more easily and powerfully. Today, Wired has a story about how a wiki is being used to do big-P Politics:
A group of volunteers has begun using collaborative wiki software to expedite the process of perusing thousands of pages of complex documents related to detainees held by the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The group, which has coalesced through the influential liberal blog, Daily Kos, has taken it upon itself to vet documents about Gitmo detainees the American Civil Liberties Union received as a result of a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request. The organization has been slow to review the documents itself due to a lack of manpower.
Given that the ACLU has recently hired Jed Miller — one of the pioneers of online civic engagement — as its Director of Internet Programs, it will be interesting to see whether the ACLU finds a way to harness this grassroots venture.
The true hazards of blogging: beyond the EFF
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June 21st, 2005 by Alex
The EFF’s recent release of a legal guide for bloggers gives bloggers in the US a great tool for assessing and managing the legal risks of blogging. But as the EFF itself acknowledges, its guide only speaks to the US context:
This legal guide is based on the laws in the United States, where there is a strong constitutional protection for speech. Many other countries do not have strong protections, making it easier to sue for speech.
The possibility of getting sued for libel in the UK (the foreign example given by the EFF) is a minor headache compared to the kinds of penalties faced by bloggers in non-democratic countries. To get a picture of the legal risks that bloggers take on every day, check out the Committee to Protect Bloggers, a blog that spotlights persecuted bloggers around the world. The Committee’s advisory board includes Rebecca MacKinnon of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, as well as Syrian author Ammar Abdulhamid and Hossein Derakhshan, a Toronto-based Persian blogger.
The cases profiled on the CPB site are a reminder of why blogger rights matter. Visit the site now to sign a petition for the protection of Omid Sheikhan, an Iranian student who was jailed and tortured in response to his blog posts. Or join the list of signatories on a petition to Motjaba Saminejad, an Iranian blogger who was jailed for blogging about the arrest of fellow Persian bloggers.
The site is also a great reminder of why blogs themselves matter: because they really do constitute a challenge to existing power structures and information control. Governments don’t throw bloggers in jail so that they’ll have someone to keep notes on their correctional facilities; they throw bloggers in jail because the content and reach of blogs poses a profound threat to centralized authority.
So the next time you hear someone dismiss blogging as a waste of time, remind them that governments rarely crack down on time wasting — and that the real waste is that bloggers are doing time when they should be spending time writing.