Facebook Connected

I've turned on Facebook Connect (yes it only took a week after Amber told me about it) with the Disqus commenting system we use here. Now you can post a comment on the blog using your Facebook account for credentials. Despite all the attention Twitter gets in our neck of the digital woods, it seems to me that Facebook is building overwhelming momentum in the social media space. With 150 million plus users the network effect is really starting to kick in. The success of Facebook also puts the lie to the widely accepted truism that Twitter competitor, FriendFeed, isn't growing because it's hard to use. I'd argue that Facebook is just as overwhelming to the new user but it rewards his or her initial struggle immediately and palpably due to the size of its network. Twitter succeeds for the same reason. It's not simplicity, it's simply the number of people who use the service.

Give our new Facebook Connect-powered commenting system a try and let me know what you think.

I'm Back Baby

Well I think I've got this place pretty much back to where it was. In fact, I took this opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of my theme, Revolution 3.0, and make some minor cosmetic improvements. I'm liking it even better now than before. I lost many of the images from past posts, but it turns out that both my graphics program, Skitch, and my blog editor, MarsEdit, preserve uploaded images in an archive, so I was able to get most of the pictures from 2008 back on the blog. Thanks Plasq and Daniel! Only one thing is stumping me. I can't remember the Wordpress command to insert the most recent post in a given category. I use that on the front page to put the most recent news and blog posts at the bottom on either side of the Stickam video. It's a little Wordpress PHP and it's quite handy, since I don't need to do anything to update it. Do you know what I'm talking about? Got any idea what the syntax is? UPDATE: Tollie gave me the command - I've got it working. Thanks Tollie! Now it's on to resuscitating the TWiT Army and TWiT Contributor Forums. I'm going to take this opportunity to fold the forums back into the TWiT.tv Drupal. Among other things this will automate logins from new contributors. The TWiT Army Canteen should be up pretty soon with a much improved design, thanks to The Frogman and Mongo. Sounds like a Morning Zoo team, doesn't it. And I've learned my lesson. Daily backups are in progress. Automatically. So, knock on wood, this will never happen again. Let me know if you spot any bugs. I think everything is back working again.

Ugly In So Many Ways

Yes Leoville is looking pretty awful. I'm reconstructing it from scratch. Fortunately, as you can see, all the posts survived the apocalyptic demise of my server's RAID 5 Array. Unfortunately, none of the Wordpress customizations did. So I'm downloading the plug-ins, restoring the template, hacking the CSS, and desperately trying to remember the changes I made. All the comments are safe with Disqus and will return when I turn on the Disqus plug-in. (Done. Thanks, Disqus!) Unfortunately, the image directory was not saved. That means all the attached images will be blank. I will be able to recreate some of them from my local archives, but most are lost forever. -sigh- All of this is because I was too cheap to buy the many gigabytes of storage required to backup that data. It was a false economy. I've purchased 200GB of storage from my host, Softlayer, at the extortionate rate of $180/month. (That's twice what a hard drive of that size would cost outright - 2400% more per year - and I thought the cell phone companies were bad.) And I'll be setting up rsync and S3 for a secondary backup, as well. Meanwhile it's back to the depressing and very time consuming work of fixing this place up again. Now I know, in a very small way, how it must feel to survive a hurricane.

Happy Birthday To Me

Today the Leoville.com blog turns seven. Over the years it's been running on Blogger, GreyMatter, Movable Type, Expression Engine, Vox, and now, I'm very happy to say, Wordpress. It's been so much fun, and when I look back at the old posts I realize what a long, strange decade it's been! There will be no cake. The cake is a lie.

Now With Video Comments

Thanks to Colin Devroe and Viddler now you can post your blog comments here as video. You'll need a free Viddler account, and you can either record right at the comment box, or pre-record something on Viddler and add it later. Either way, I hope you'll try this feature out. I think it's a great way for us to get to know you!