Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

I recently bought a new compact camera - a tiny casio elixim Z1050. Historically I have always been disappointed with the performance of compact digital cameras, mainly because of shutter lag. This one is much better, with only a tiny lag at 10 megapixels. Although one day i’d like to get a digital SLR, for now I just wanted a compact to carry with me to snap pictures I can use for web sites, and also to take a few skateboarding pictures. One feature that has proven to be excellent for the latter is the high-speed continuous mode with takes several shots a second at 2 megapixels, allowing me to grab a sequence (like below, or just take the best frame from several, to get the best action shot.)

Best frame - original pic is 2 megapixels - fine for snapshot prints and web stuff:-

I’ve recently revived my skateboarding blog after leaving it for over a year, I won’t repeat my reasons for doing so here, as it’s all on that site. It’s another wordpress blog - migrated from the old blogworks xml blog using RSS import. I created a wordpress theme based on the old site - not quite finished- and I haven’t copied the comments over yet - i’ll need to write something to do that manually unfortunately. I also have a load of static content, photos and video to move over too at some point.

A new term for my web buzzword vocabulary today: “splogger” - a term I just saw on scobelizer, apparently used for “someone who uses a system to automatically copy blog posts from other people”. I am doing something similar with the “skatevine” page on dfr skate zine, but I prefer the term “news aggregator”. I’m not profitting from this as I don’t currently carry advertising on DFR - my reasons for doing it were basically:-

• make the site more useful, a source of skateboard news for people who don’t use an RSS aggregator (or even know what one is)
• a platform to experiment with RSS aggregation tools in plone (currently using CMFSin, shortl^h^h^ eventually to be moved to feedfeeder)
• To provide links back to the sites it aggregates content from in a useful way.

I can see that some people might get annoyed if their content appears on other sites without their permission, especially if the site in question is passing the content off as their own and/or using it to drive ad-revenues. Site owners who carry advertising may also worry that people reading their content on other people sites aren’t going to see (and click on) their ads, but the flipside of this is that if they do link back to the original content, this will boost the pagerank of the original content, therefore making people more likely to see it and click on the ads - this wouldn’t happen if everyone used a personal news aggregator).

I can also see how it can be annoying if search engines rank the aggregated posts higher than the original posts (which was the point of Scobles post I think….), I guess if they got this sorted it wouldn’t be such an issue.

At the moment, my pet plone project DFR skate zine is still live, but because netsight have some devious plans for the server it is on, I am trying to upgrade it to the latest version of plone. The site is current running plone 2.1.1 (tip: if you can’t remember what version of plone your site is running, go into the ZMI and click on portal_migration - you’ll find lots of useful info there, including the plone version).

Initial attempts didn’t go well, but I haven’t given up yet. I’m now trying a different approach - creating a blank plone 2.5 site and trying to bring the content over bit by bit. Some of it imported just fine and other objects are throwing various key and attribute errors.

This blog post by Andreas Jung looks like it could be quite useful - my version jump is nowhere near as big as the version described here, but the technique looks interesting - particularly the script for cloning a tree of objects.

I have some fairly radical plans for the development of the DFR site, I was actually thinking of recreating the skin and content type products from scratch, because a) I want a single skin for public and admin view now and b) because the archetypes content types were patched together in a bit of an ad-hoc way, and now they seem a bit.. well… unclean, and basically I think I can do better now..

so… the masterplan at the moment is to extract the content into some format that I can get to the data easily (as I still find it very confusing trying to get to data “lost” in zodb, when the site is broken), then write a script to populate the new site from the data. Obviously xml fits the bill (along with files and folders for media content).

Marshall and XMLForest have been whispered to me on a need to know basis! If I can crack this i’ll be much more confident about maintaining plone sites long term, in the same way that I am confident with CMS’s that use a SQL database for storage.

for your viewing pleasure, a poor quality cameraphone video of me skateboarding at st george skatepark in Bristol yesterday.