Importing Plain Text into Mountain Lion Reminders App

Posted on February 25, 2013 by bluedepth

I have created a new project to enrich the tags in my WordPress blog using the WP Calais Auto Tagger that I mentioned in this previous blog post. To do this I am working on pages of old posts in my WordPress dashboard and so I wanted to track just which pages I had completed and which ones still need my attention. I’ve got 48 pages of blog posts and so this is going to take some time to complete.

The first step was to create a list of text lines going from Page 48 to Page 1 like a countdown. I did that in OpenOffice using the Spreadsheet app. All you need to do here is type in two lines where the number series example can be made and then you can select these two cells and then grab the autonumbering control on the spreadsheet and draw it down, this is a great way to quickly create very repetitive lines where the only thing that changes is a number at the end. With this list, I copied it into a plain text file with each line on it’s own and saved it as “tagging.txt” on my desktop.

The next step is to use AppleScript to tell the Mountain Lion Reminders app to create entires automatically based on the file you just made in OpenOffice. Technically the Reminders app has an import mechanism but that’s only meant for ICS files, and that’s more trouble than it’s worth as far as I care to pursue it as a solution. Here’s the AppleScript:

set theFileContents to read file "Users:andy:Desktop:tagging.txt"
set theLines to paragraphs of theFileContents

repeat with eachLine in theLines
tell application "Reminders"
tell list "Tagging Project"
make new reminder with properties {name:eachLine}
end tell
end tell
end repeat

The only part you’d have to fix is the file location part and the list name part. Otherwise it works well. The only gotcha is it doesn’t seem to import the tasks in order, but at least they are in there.

Here are some helpful sites where I got a lot of this code and hints on how to talk to Reminders instead of iCal:

Benguild.com Page

MacScripter Page

Tagging

Posted on February 25, 2013 by bluedepth

I’ve been blogging actively on and off for years. Much of it started in LiveJournal and when SixApart, the company that wrote LiveJournal were sold to a russian company it was time for me to leave. I left for a few reasons, one was because I didn’t trust my writings to a company that was owned by a foreign country – the laws get murky once your thoughts and opinions leave the USA; the other reason was a general eroding of english users as more cyrillic users started to appear on LiveJournal. The language barrier between english and russian was the little push that I needed to leave that and get on with WordPress.

My use of WordPress continued a-pace until one of my work blogs was tagged as suspect by a WordPress.com robot and the company deactivated my blog. After explaining what I was using the blog for, they re-enabled it however that identified a problem for me, mostly that my blog was being measured – if not by a person then by an automatic process and as such, it had a definite stink of censorship about it. At work, and in my private life I already had a separate hosting company and that’s when I discovered WordPress.org, the DIY blog platform based on the technology that powers WordPress.com. I installed a constellation of new blogs both for work and for personal use and that had a bunch of added extras – specifically unlimited storage of rich media which I would have otherwise had to pay for with WordPress.com as well as direct control of the content. There were no robots or censors wandering around turning off accounts willy-nilly in this other arrangement. Also, and more to the point of this blog entry, the shift over to WordPress.org also enabled the use of plugins which really extend the WordPress platform even further than the nice presentation that the WordPress.com system provides. I’ve been having a devil of a time remembering to tag my WordPress blog posts. I went fishing for a new plugin to maybe help with tags and I found the WP Calais Auto Tagger and so far I’m quite impressed with it’s quality. Now when I make a post, the post is sent to OpenCalais where it is processed for relevant tags and I get a list of possibilities that I can elect to use or not. I take the category part of my blog posts very seriously and now I can rely on this bit of technology to help me with the tags as well. If you run WordPress blogs, I suggest you look into this.

Generally speaking, if you are a friend of mine and would like a WordPress.org blog for your own, I’m more than happy to help you out. I can set it up quickly and support it even – if you are interested, just drop me a line. Those that know me know how to reach me. I suppose everyone else could leave a comment. This offer isn’t valid for anyone at Western, sorry.

The Forum Comic Crashed and Burned

Posted on December 23, 2012 by bluedepth

I’ve set up Google Analytics on many of my websites, including my work SP site, along with my new WordPress.org site and my tumblr accounts. I’ve only been collecting information for a little while on the tumblr accounts but it’s really clear to me just how generally widespread some of that traffic is. People from all over the world, including Turkey and Bosnia. I’m really looking forward to writing more in my journal and branching out when it comes to subject matters.

When I’m on vacation I have lots of free time and so I start coming up with ideas for blogging. The biggest challenge I have is balancing these moments where I have lots of free time and can blog prodigiously versus those times when I am so busy I can’t possibly blog. It’s either feast or famine. There are times when I wish services like Plinky had some sort of tracking ability. I hate the idea of having to keep a list of what Plinky prompts I’ve taken up as blog assignments and which ones I haven’t and the site doesn’t seem to have that as a capacity. Is there anyone out there who would like me to write about specific items maybe? I just blog about what occurs to me or things that are remarkable in my Pocket queue.

I’ve been kicking around several ideas including more work-related blog posts, especially when it comes to getting things accomplished, using our ticket system, and running a help desk in general. I think that will take more planning because I have to tread carefully. Work tends to get rather picky about what I write and share, and there has been heavy drama time in the past and I’d rather not have to deal with that malarkey again if I can help it.

I also have to remind myself now that my blog is all paid and all bottomless. I can share pictures and even video all by myself without having to deal with YouTube or any of that “passing under the eyes of a censor” kind of thing. Then again, I don’t think that recording video would be the best thing – but maybe so – I’ll really have to come up with things worth talking about if I’m going to do that. Unless I open up to Q&A and swing the doors wide open for anonymous Q&A.

So many ideas… thankfully I have a lot of time to plan and put these things in operation, or not. 🙂

Dust a Meeting

Posted on October 1, 2012 by bluedepth

Meetings are insatiable productivity black holes that complicate lives and ruin workplace flow. I recently tried a collaborative online system called Basecamp in order to asynchronously develop a software strategy at work. What I wanted and what I observed diverged so thoroughly that there was absolutely no point in continuing with Basecamp as it was just in the way. The entire endeavor made me a little sad, not a huge fan of failure.

Meetings themselves are time vampires. I loathe them with every fiber of my being. They are massively interruptive and obnoxiously presumptive. You set aside a date and time and a place where people have to attend to discuss some topic. A meeting is a monster even when it’s in the cradle, being thought up by someone who desires to meet. Out of their heads pop a snarling tentacled beast with sharp fangs that serves no purpose but to interrupt flow and get in everyone’s way. Even the birth of a meeting is an arduous agony, with each participant (or combatant) the multiplexed temporal complexity grows. Two people can find a time to meet. Three people and it’s an order of magnitude harder. I was attempting to arrange a five-person collaboration and I wanted to avoid a five-person meeting with every ounce of willpower I could muster. My intentions were to establish a five-person collaboration which leveraged technology (Basecamp) to achieve speed and productivity because all five collaborators could function asynchronously. You could contribute what you felt you had to when it was right for you. It respected flow and was not supposed to be interruptive or presumptuous. Alas, the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this particular road lead to the very specific hell of a worthless unwanted but agonizingly unavoidable and loathsome meeting.

So now my efforts to avoid a meeting inexorably landed me right into setting a meeting up. Of course it was obvious that right after the first few responses I could tell the tell-tale sloppy-wet-sucking-sounds of a baby meeting unfurling it’s tentacles in my midst. The first agony of course is finding a time when everyone is free for a meeting. So right off the bat, two weeks went down the toilet as we had to wait for everyone to be ready. Then assembling it was a pain. It used to be easier with Groupwise, as a meeting organizer could see the public calendars of all the participants and select the time that would be best and then send it to all the participants which really reduced the interruption of flow quite a lot. Alas, we led Groupwise out behind the barn and we did-what-must-be-done. After we were done burying the corpse of Groupwise we were back to the way it was before – so A emails B, C, D, and E. Then they all reply, and then A shakes the magic eight ball and everyone agrees that in three weeks, we’ll all have time. It’s a lot of back and forth and this and that and it creates a nasty haze of meaningless email exchanges. So, the meeting is ripe for tomorrow at 3pm. Great.

So now I wait. I have a list of all the software we currently use and instead of spending the past two weeks discussing, asynchronously, the merits and flaws and coming up with a solution in at most a weeks time, this nascent baby meeting will likely take another month before there will be any resolution. Tomorrow is just going to be the First Meeting, where we trot out the new baby time vampire and give it a good feeding.

It’s a terrible way to do work. It trashes flow, it lowers morale, and it sucks time down a toilet drain. At least people aren’t fond of the parliamentary species of time vampire meetings, where you spend the first few iterations of the meeting discussing protocol on how subsequent meetings are to be held. That form of meeting is older, and much worse. I really must count my lucky stars that we usually only have the easier-to-cope-with modern meetings where the first three get-togethers aren’t set aflame with discussions on what words mean, how we are going to proceed, or what the definition of is, is.

There is wreckage however, even with a modern meeting. The person who had a problem and started all of this still doesn’t have what they need to get work done – we’ve been waiting for that special moment to arrive when we all can pet the baby time vampire and let it ruin our working lives. I can’t really get worked up very much, as least not as loudly as I used to a long time ago when I felt I could change things. It was pretty much obvious from the start that when the discussion immediately derailed with that most hated of questions “So, when shall we meet?”, heh, that was it. I knew that asynchronous collaboration was not going to work.

What’s really quite sad is that the technology has developed quite well and very elegantly. You see the edits and the collaboration realtime, there is “What’s new” and “Catch up” features, it’s free for 45 days, all of it – right there. Ready, willing, able, and if used, the promise of reaching a solution sooner-rather-than-later can be realized. Instead of that path however, we are going to have a meeting.

Not that anyones life is on the line for the work that has to be done, just the soul-crushing dread of having to endure another time vampire meeting. Having to go somewhere at a specific time, putting everything else on hold while we all waste our time and energy. The wry humor in the idea that we could have been already in the yea/nay phase and quite possibly be sending orders out to finalize the entire project, it could have been that way.

What have I learned? That I won’t ever do this again. Part of the agony of watching a grand design fail is watching it fail in flames. Modern business culture just isn’t ready for the kind of asynchronous ease and productivity that these tools can provide. I’ve written before, tongue-in-cheek that hateful meetings are like intellectual memetic herpes. It’s a theme that we play over and over again, not because actually having meetings leads anywhere but that instead we’ve always had meetings and our peers seem happy and life goes on, so why seek out anything else? It’s an idea, a meme, that is replayed again and again. The fact that meetings are time vampires that suck all the happiness and color out of life isn’t actually a part of the deal. Nobody seems to notice. Every once in a while one of us wakes up and shakes their head and asks “Why the hell are we having these stupid meetings?” and then tries something novel. Then that detestable question, “So, when are we meeting?”

That question should be engraved on a gun. Instead of asking it, just load one bullet, spin the revolver chamber, clack it home and pull the trigger. So, in the end this is all so much bellyaching over nothing. Asynchronous collaboration isn’t ready yet, or more specifically we aren’t ready for it, yet.

Not every industry has this problem however. You see companies like Automattic, which is the parent company that manages the WordPress technology – they make use of the P2 theme which is a central driver (so they say) in how they manage their projects and such. I’m sure Automattic has meetings, but I suspect that they use asynchronous collaboration a lot more elegantly than is done in higher education or the non-profit sector. When I first started exploring Basecamp, for example, I was blown away. I could collaborate with my assistant and material would build because when we were both working on the project and working together as a team brought a kind of science-fiction cool to the dull things we were collaborating on. There is something quite breathtaking about watching an entire project morph and change and grow as you sit there and watch it. Like timelapse only in real-time. Another little bit that I really found super-compelling was how these technologies enabled asynchronous collaboration and respected workplace flow. There was no interruption, if you were in the middle of a task you could polish it off quickly and confidently because time wasn’t important. The collaboration could occur at any time. It also occurred to me that asynchronous collaboration might also benefit from the differeing themes of cognition during different parts of the day. That you are more clever for some things right after dinner than you are before tea, or if you wake up at 11:30pm with a sudden Eureka moment, you could hop on to Basecamp and share your stroke of genius.

Alas, this is all just prattle against the memetic herpes epidemic that is the meeting.

It warms my heart to imagine a world without telephones and no rooms in which to meet. It would preclude meetings completely and banish them to extinction and force asynchronous collaboration. *sigh* It’s only a dream I suppose.

Blogging on iPad with Byword and Bluetooth Keyboard

Posted on April 24, 2012 by bluedepth

Thanks to how silly my workplace is when it comes to access to the Internet I now have to use multiple devices to access many of the services that I previously used to run on my work machine. They have instituted a 100 connection throttle on all inbound and outbound TCP/IP connections. This explains a LOT about why I’ve been having such problems accessing the network.

Of course I won’t change my habits, I’ll just shift some of what I do onto other devices. In this case, pressing my iPhone and iPad into service. They’ll be responsible for the more social apps like Google Plus, Twitter, and such.

One thing that intrigued me was trying out Byword for the iPad using a Bluetooth Keyboard. How is blogging on my iPad different than blogging on my iMac? Byword makes this almost a seamless move. I type and the text appears on my iPad, since there are no network issues for my iPad there really shouldn’t be any lag, beach balls of death, or anything else getting in my way when it comes to blogging. The bluetooth keyboard means I can kick back and relax, put the keyboard anywhere I like and the iPad will still hear it and respond well. I don’t expect there to be any issues with WordPress. The app may be a little crunky around the edges but I can post by email just as well as open the app and copy the text into that. Sometimes I think that the post-by-email feature is more compelling for me than the application is.

At least with a bluetooth keyboard at home and at work I won’t have to lug one back and forth when I go back and forth from home to work during the day. I will however take my bluetooth keyboard with me on my upcoming work trip and see how well I can use it to do office-type things with just my iPad.

My trusty 1st Generation iPad, which by the way, still works great, has great resolution and fits me perfectly. Apple, you missed out on planned obsolescence when it came to this device!

Time to post this sucker…

Abandoning Google Plus

Posted on April 12, 2012 by bluedepth

Yesterday I opened my Google Plus page and discovered to my surprise and initial pleasure that Google had brought a new interface to their social network system. As I started to explore this new interface I started to immediately notice that things had changed not for the better, but rather for the worse. Google had unilaterally included their chat system on the right side of my browser window, it’s something I rarely ever use so that system is all wasted space. I noticed that the stories in my circles, the things I really care about are now shuffled off to the left in a column that lost 10% of space on the leftmost and 50% on the rightmost, being moved over for some controls at the very top of the page that now occupy this dreaded whitespace region on my Google Plus page.

It’s this whitespace, and the meaningless chat talker system that I can’t stand. Facebook attempted a similar move by presenting me with a chat-talker screen on the left side as well months ago, when I still used Facebook. When they made the changes to their interface, along with privacy concerns and workplace issues with social networking I left Facebook. Now it just languishes as an identity marker, if content gets on my Facebook page it’s wholly accidental. Twitter’s web page also underwent this columnar approach, as they reconfigured the entire interface out from underneath their users. For Twitter, I stopped using that because it was more noisy than useful, the people I wanted to engage with were just human billboards, and the interface changes were really the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So what is there to do? Complaints about the interface changes are really the only channel you have to express how much you dislike when a service does this to you – but you have no real power. Just complaining is one easily ignored tiny little voice in the darkness and doesn’t amount to anything at all. The only real power that any single user has is the power of choice. In the end, the only choice I have to make is, do I want to still use the system? It’s actually a matter of abandonment. I abandoned Facebook. I abandoned Twitter. Because they changed the interface and made it less useful to me, I am facing the idea of abandoning Google Plus. I don’t need these social network systems to give my life meaning. They need me, or rather, they need aggregate me’s, lots of people, to give what they do meaning. The less people use a socially networked system the less appealing that system is to everyone else. Facebook is only compelling because everyone uses it. There is no real value inherent in Facebook itself. This is a lesson that the classic business models these companies use can’t take into account – that their popularity defines their success. If they make a grossly unpopular change to the interface, then people will flee and their success will go tits up.

I don’t care to encourage other people to abandon these systems if they like them. Each of us has to make these kinds of decisions on a wholly personal level. I find it obnoxious that Google, and Facebook, and Twitter for that matter all force interface changes on users without giving the user any control whatsoever. It would be more elegant if there were a batch of controls we could select from and build our own interface. Put the bits and pieces where we want, opt out of things we don’t care for and make the interface work best for us, as the users. None of these sites have done that, they all behave as if they have global fiat to make changes willy-nilly. The end user who has to contend with these changes can’t do anything really except make that singular choice surrounding the issue of abandonment.

So where do I go now? It’s comic, but in many ways I am looking forward to going backwards. There is one system that I’ve used, mostly as a category but the people behind what I currently use I regard as being the platonic form of that category, and that is WordPress. Going back to blogging. What does the WordPress infrastructure have that attracts me? It’s got stable themes, the site looks very much like it always has. There are changes, but they aren’t as gross in scope as these other systems have perpetrated. I can share links on WordPress, I can write long posts, short status updates, and WordPress has a competent comment system already in place.

So I will give Google Plus until May 1st to do something better with their interface, to recognize the value in the stream and give us users the choice of what systems we want to see on our Google Plus page. Google should give us the ability to turn off the whitespace region, we should be able to turn off the chat talker region, so that we can maximize the stream region. If they fail to correct these glaring human interface deficits I will do to Google Plus what I did to Facebook. I will abandon Google Plus. I will keep the account running but I will no longer actively use it. Things that end up on Google Plus will end up being the same sort of things that end up washing up on Twitter, specifically links to content on my WordPress blog. Google’s loss will be WordPress’ gain. WordPress has always done right by me, and I respect them. I do not respect Twitter, nor do I respect Facebook. My respect for Google is quixotic at best. I used to believe in their “Do No Evil” company mantra, but that has been shed as Google has done some very evil acts, they aren’t what they once were and this sullying of their image makes the pending abandonment easy.

Will my abandonment hurt Google? No, of course not. I’m not so full of myself as to think that me leaving will change anything about the service, that Google will even notice my absence. However if I can inspire other people to give another look at WordPress, maybe see that progress forward can be achieved by regressing to earlier systems may be a worthy pursuit if what you get in the trade is interface stability. That this single raindrop encourages others to fall. The raindrop doesn’t believe it is responsible for the flood. I can only hope that I help the flood along. These massive changes that these social network sites perpetrate on their usership should be punished! We want it all, we want to use the service and we want to control it as well. We want the interface to be regular, logical, useful and static. When we want to make a change, we want to be the ones making it. We do not want to be victims of someones good intentions, Google! I would say this for Facebook as well, but that’s a lost cause.

So time is ticking away. If Google does not act, then the stream on that service is terminal. If that comes to pass, I will be migrating to my WordPress blog.

I hope to see some of you there.

Mopping Up

Posted on March 16, 2012 by bluedepth

At work we have moved to a new “Engagement Platform” called iModules. Some of you already know something about this as I’ve shared stories about it with some of you before.

The system is up and running. I have to admit that I’m quite glad that the implementation phase of the project has reached a conclusion, as it took six months to get this wobbly-legged foal up on it’s feet and bouncing around.

This entire project still has some pieces to mop up, most notably the mopjob that I have to do surrounding our old platform, WordPress. Honestly I’m sad to see our use of WordPress in this regard come to a close as WordPress has been a wonderful platform and still is for my personal blog here as well as my “Captains Log” blog. I still maintain the “Captains Log” blog, but there have been lessons in using that as well. That particular one uses WordPress’s own P2 theme and for a time I opened it up and made it publicly available. This turned out to be a great mistake. I got heat from nearly every corner, mostly to do with keeping technical details private to non-maliciously violating an email clickwrap nonverbal unsigned unread agreement. I admit that the draw that the WordPress platform provides, free clouded hosting can’t be beat as far as I’m concerned. So for the “Captains Log” P2 blog, it’s gone private which makes all the previous gripers go silent as they can’t get past the “Please Login” barricade. So, once again thanks to WordPress I’ve found yet another way to “Have my cake and eat it too”.

We have moved the work stuff off to iModules and you all can see the efforts at our new site, MyWMU.com and thanks to our students and our staff who moved the contents off of our WordPress site and onto the new site, the speed of which was honestly shocking to me. Now the mopping up is all that remains. There were three blogs, Old WMYou, WMYou, and Western Express. The first and third have been backed up and purged from the system, but the middle one is stuck and I have a support ticket opened up with WordPress to help address it. We’ll see how that goes.

I will continue to update my personal blog, of course, and I will continue to enrich the P2 “Captains Log” and I really think other organizations should make use of WordPress for this great feature. It’s a great way to keep information handy, and takes the onus off the staff to remember the past as the system does it for you, time and date stamps, tags, categories, and the commenting system – not that the last part is really used for our P2 blog, but still. Not having to worry about hosting, cost, security, not to mention the ubiquity of ways to access the WordPress system make it the most compelling way to manage the working log of any business or help desk.

The only thing that I would like from WordPress, but would likely start running into real money (which I would pay, mind you) would be a Help Desk CRM overlaid on top of their P2 theme system. Some way for people to email problems or browse to the site and enter issues and the system gives them a trouble ticket number for tracking and we can lurk in the dark, hovering over this blog. That would leverage the logging goodness of P2 and it’s great usability and I don’t think it would be all that hard to code. I know there are Help Desk solutions for WordPress.org, but I really REALLY prefer to use WordPress.com. Perhaps someday in the future WordPress.com will get around to something like this. Time will tell.

Work Doing

Posted on December 6, 2011 by bluedepth

I won’t ever forget anything at work ever again.

It all comes down to adhering to a rather involved procedure to keep my work tasks organized, people connected, and to leave a cookie trail behind me so that if I have to ever refer to what happened in the past, there is an easy way to get at it.

At work I use the Mail.app on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, on my work iMac. Technically since I use IMAP the application itself is irrelevant, but this is where I do most of my work tasks day-to-day. WMU provides a web-based interface called Webmail Plus, but I really prefer to not use that. I get more mileage out of Mail.app.

Everyone has learned that the best way to alert me and my staff to things that they need is by email. Email creates a kind of digital documentation, a little slip of virtual paper that people write up and tack to our door. It doesn’t get lost and serves as a reminder of things we have to do, with details that we need to complete the tasks. It’s really the best way to go since email is so ubiquitous.

I get tasks in Mail.app whenever I run the app or bring it to the foreground. Because it’s IMAP whatever I change in the account is reflected everywhere else I have a connection to that account, like a window. So my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook, my home Mac Mini, or my work iMac always has the right list of emails in my Webmail Plus Inbox.

When I get a new task in Mail.app I use the key combination Command-Shift-E, which in Mail.app redirects the incoming email so I can send it somewhere else. It’s better than forward, it resends the message as if it was originally sent to where I want it to go. I redirect all my tasks to my Toodledo account’s email address. Right before I send the redirected message, I tack on to the subject of the task a little bit of text “@work #today” which informs Toodledo to make a new task for me, set it in my Work Context, set the due date for Today (or really whatever day I want) and then hit send. Doing this keeps my Webmail Plus Inbox blissfully empty. I get tasks and punt them forward to my Toodledo to track them and organize them.

Once the task is in my Toodledo list, I configure the list to show me Work tasks, organized by due-date and then by priority. I don’t really enrich the tasks with priority data so the principal sort is actually alphanumeric beyond the due-date sort. It’s in Toodledo that I spend a majority of my time. Toodledo captures everything, the text, any attachment files, you name it. This way I am sure I am not missing any tasks. I may be late with a task or two, but none should fall off the edge. As I work tasks I complete whatever it is the task requires and then I copy the body of the task, which is the body of the redirected email into a new email and then tack on some pleasantries like “Task complete” or some-such and on the CC line I include the email address for my department WordPress.com blog, and right above the signature line on my outgoing email to the task requestor I include a WordPress [tags] and [end] blocks to keep the usually messy signatures from clogging up my blog and setting all the tags so that when people ask me about a certain thing I can browse the tag-cloud on the WordPress blog and find the task, the time and the date it was completed. I don’t have to muck about with Sent Items or any of that malarkey. As an added extra, WordPress automatically creates pages for tags and sets up RSS feeds for tags so interested parties can just browse to the tags they are most interested in to see what is going on. Most people aren’t interested and the WordPress blog ends up mostly being for me. I quite enjoy it, I no longer have to spend time trying to remember when I did whatever I do and so I can sort of mindlessly chug through tasks without having to waste any precious brainpower on any of it. WordPress, Toodledo, and Mail.app do all the heavy lifting and storage for me, all delightfully complimentary.

In the morning I adjust a search on Toodledo to find all the tasks in Toodledo that I have completed the day before and then I use Toodledo and Byword to quickly markdown the tasks as a numbered list and then ship that off using MarsEdit off to the blog. The overall goal is to free myself as much as possible from the headache-inducing parts of my job as I can manage. Did I do something? When did I do it? Was there some kind of trick in fixing something or other? It’s all in the blog. In many ways I have replaced the need to form new memories about my work off to WordPress, so I really don’t know in a day-to-day way exactly what I have done here. I don’t want to know it. WordPress knows it for me. The only thing I bring to the table are my skills and abilities. Everything else has been farmed out elsewhere.

There is something very secure about such a way of managing my life. I can’t answer any questions posed to me about my job. I don’t form any long-term memories about this place. I’ve gotten used to the relaxed almost meditative way that I chew through my days. Technology keeps the things I find irritable or troubling. In many ways, doing it this way has vouchsafed the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. My spotless mind.

P2 or Not P2

Posted on March 10, 2011 by bluedepth

Today has been an odd silly day. It started out with an odd fanciful notion to investigate WordPress.org and possibly host it on a Mac Mini. My design was to create a workplace blog, theme it with P2 and whip it out on my coworkers and see how it worked for them. It’s not really a Wiki, we have that, and the Wiki software we use is Apple’s own that comes with their Server OSes, but the blogging component leaves something to be desired.

I saw WordPress.com pushing P2, a theme that fits into WordPress.com or WordPress.org and enables Automattic, the company behind WordPress to communicate more efficiently. My interest was piqued.

So I started with that original idea, then my assistant reminded me that I have a huge monster HP 1U server that I never use and it has Ubuntu on it. I had a little Eureka moment and decided I could work with that. I downloaded the WordPress.org software and went over the installation manual. I got everything edited and in-place and looking nice in the terminal window but couldn’t get the wp-admin/install.php screen to appear so I could finish the WordPress.org installation. I futzed and putzed and figured out I was missing some things, like a different kind of PHP, as well as PHPmyadmin. Once I added all of those various bits I tried it again. No dice. I finally figured out that when I created the “wordpress” MySQL database and user that I botched up the name and host information and didn’t see it until I blundered my way into PHPmyadmin. With that tool I fixed the problem and then everything was fine. I installed JetPack Plug-in, which promptly exploded in my face. JetPack needs to chat back and forth between WordPress.com and whatever machine you are installing WordPress.org on. This server here is firewalled on the wire and can’t be seen by any outside-to-WMU system, so that put the kibosh on JetPack. I still wanted to try P2, so I installed it and it worked like a charm. Then I ran into the same headache I always run into with these systems: SMTP. Here at WMU there is a huge barrier to access any network services, especially SMTP. So how could a WordPress.org P2 blog ever really work right if the server it’s running on can’t ever send out email properly? Oh, I tried to be clever and I failed. I tried to forge a CA, I tried lots of hints to try to masquerade into smtp.gmail.com using TLS, and I tried sendmail and postfix. Bloody hell. I would rather eat glass than have to see sendmail.cf again. I’d rather massage the tongue of a rabid wolverine than futz with postfixes main.cf file again! I mashed my head up against that brick wall until I took a step back and asked myself why the hell I was going to these lengths for something so tangential.

So then it struck me, if we’re using WordPress.com for the heavy lifting for most of our content management, why couldn’t I just create a new blog for our workgroup, slap P2 on it and carry on? That had its own problems. In the beginning I set everything up with Western Express and set my “Gravatar” to be associated with my work email address of andy.mchugh@wmich.edu. All fine and good until you try to use that address anywhere else! WordPress is picky. So I logged into WordPress.com thinking I could change my accounts email address in WordPress, as it turns out, you can’t. You have to go to Gravatar and change it there. It’s not so much change as put in a new address, switch it to primary, then rip out the old address. A lot of work for something that was supposed to be easy. Blargh!

So I got everything switched around and freed my work email address then re-approached WordPress as if I was a new user. I logged in using my work address (which is the most appropriate address for this pursuit) and created an account. I got the automated email verification message and clicked on it. WordPress refused with the error: “Could not create user” and so I emailed support at WordPress for help. Still waiting to get some TLC from the support people as of the writing of this blog-post.

Along with all of this I’m wondering if P2 will be well received? Will my coworkers see this as one more silly thing that I’m making them all use? I’ve pounded Wiki use into their heads, I’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes that none of them see now but will that will also radically change their working lives (for the better I assure you) and then I sit and wonder. I wonder if P2 is a solution that could work for us? If it works for Automattic, shouldn’t it work for us as well? I’m on the fence on this. I’ve whipped out so much new technology on these people, will they accept another massive change to how they communicate or will I be facing open revolt? I see this idea of mine shaped this way:

A private group blog that everyone can log into anywhere they are in the world, obviating the need to use any kind of VPN system as WordPress.com is available ubiquitously. It would enable people to hold online communications, post instantly like Twitter, post without limit to text (unlike Twitter), include rich content such as YouTube embeds and such all the while managing the conversations and using categories and tags to track different sections of our communication infrastructure. I imagine using P2 as I would have maybe used Google Wave if it was matured properly and supported by Google and not killed in its infancy. That we’d use several big tags such as “Donors” and “Help Desk” along with a constellation of other tags and not have to struggle with email distribution lists and missing information and delayed communications, all of that could be eliminated. On the flip side of that argument is “This is one more thing that you are forcing on us and making us learn.” I’m struggling with how P2 could fit in with our lives and whether this is a valid pursuit or just so much “chasing after the shiny”.

There are several of my coworkers that I’m nearly certain would go stark raving mad if I whipped just one more thing out on them. I just can’t deny the allure of all of these services, WordPress, DropBox, 1Password, Evernote… that their ubiquity online and their omnipresence in the mobile computing sphere is terribly attractive to me. That a workforce that I deeply suspect will be forced to become more mobile and nimble almost demands that I continue this breathless rush towards the bleeding edge.

So what I really would like is to find anyone other than Automattic who found P2 to be useful. It would gratify me immensely to know that P2 was a ‘game-changer’ and serve also as confirmation that I am on the right path and that this whole charge towards shiny actually serves a true and honest business purpose beyond my wanderlust for novelty.

As always, I would really love people to comment, I’m looking for evaluations, opinions, you name it, every bit helps. I thank you all in advance. 🙂

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