I Am Blogie

I use two computers (and one iPod touch) for work, for blogging and for other activities that involve connecting to the Internet. One is a rather heavy notebook which I keep at home, and the other is a lightweight netbook for when I’m out. I also have a 320-gigabyte Western Digital™ backup drive, and two 4-gig USB flash drives. The latter is used for shuttling files to and from my two computers.

It’s really cumbersome, the way I try to keep my files synchronized. There is a nifty little tool called SyncToy, which makes the task of copying files and folders between computers much easier. But it’s still not the best solution out there. And now I think I’ve found it!

One of my friends invited me to join Dropbox, and it came at just the right moment for me. I was working on a Japanese translation project, and it was such a hassle syncing the documents between my two computers. There was even a time when I forgot to copy the latest files from my home computer, and I had gone out of town!

The beauty of Dropbox is in its treatment of your synced files. You actually have local files on all your Dropbox-connected computers, and they’re all the same files. When you work on your files in one computer (files that you have dropped into your Dropbox folder), the system automatically synchronizes them to your online account. As soon as your other Dropbox-connected computers are online, they will automatically retrieve your changed files to update their local counterparts.

Neat huh? So here’s the setup. You install a desktop application that runs in the background, and Dropbox creates a folder that it will watch (normally it’s under My Documents). Whatever files and sub-folders you create in that folder will be synced to your online account.

It’s so easy for me now, switching from my laptop to my netbook, and back again. I can even view my Dropbox-synced files on my iPod touch! Here’s a screenshot of the app’s welcome screen. (There is also a version for the iPad, of course.) You can copy photos to your albums, and view files such as Microsoft® Word & Excel, as well as PDF files.

For those who use no more than one computer, Dropbox can still come in handy as an online backup facility. The only setback is, you only get 2 gigabytes worth of space. Nowadays, what’s 2GB, right? However, if you get your friends to sign up, you’ll get more space, up to a maximum of 8GB. Still not nearly enough for today’s netizen, but it’s a start.

This is not a paid post. But, if you click on the Dropbox link and sign up, you’ll help me get more storage space!

Ever since I became active in the blogosphere, especially in the advocacy efforts of the Mindanao Bloggers Community, I’ve been getting invited to conferences, seminars, workshops and similar events. Most of them relate to Internet and cyber-media / journalism issues. There were the speaking engagements in local conferences, then came opportunities to contribute to larger-scale [...]

A few days ago I changed the permalink structure on my Davao Delicious blog from /%category%/%postname%/ to /%year%/%category%/%postname%/. As of this writing, that blog has a PageRank of 4 and a lot of the posts and pages are indexed by Google. Some might say my move was risky because it would cause my blog to lose some Google love juice… But, there’s a documented case against having the %category% slug as the first part of your blog URL (after the domain name, that is).

You see, I wanted my food blog to have a logical URL system, wherein my readers would know right away what type of food establishment they were reading about just by looking at the URL. For example, when I’d write about a coffee establishment, the resulting URL would be http://www.davaodeli.com/coffee-shop/name-of-the-cafe/. But, the WordPress experts have said that using the category name as the first part of the permalink is a bad idea.

WordPress stores URL rewrite rules in the site’s database (is this a good idea?) — the instructions to form the pretty URLs your blog gets for your posts, pages and attachments (i.e., the dedicated page displaying an image attached to a post). In a nutshell, the problem is a performance issue: when %category% is used at the start of the permalink structure, the database table containing the above-mentioned rewrite rules get overloaded with hundreds of lines of instructions. The cause is the way WordPress interprets each post’s, page’s and attachment’s URL. Here’s something from the WP Codex:

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure it takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID. See wp-testers discussion of this topic.

So, in order to optimize my blog’s performance, what I did was to change DavaoDeli.com’s permalink structure to include %year% at the beginning, but still retaining the category name. For example:

http://www.davaodeli.com/2010/general/attention-davao-caterers/

When updating permalinks, WordPress automatically redirects old URLs to the new ones. If, for example, another site has a link to one of my blog posts using the old URL, click-throughs will correctly resolve to the new URL. The question is, how will Google treat my blog now?

Hopefully, having a well-maintained sitemap (c/o the Google XML Sitemap plugin) will ensure that my blog’s posts and pages will remain in Google’s index. I wonder, though, if I need to declare 301 redirects for all my blog’s posts and pages in the .htaccess file…?

[Media Release] The Senate and the House of Representatives have agreed to advance the resumption of its session to 24 May 2010, Monday, instead of its original schedule of 31 May. When the House of Representatives convenes on this day, we, representatives of over 100 organizations and coalitions comprising public-interest groups, environmental protection advocates, independent [...]

Finally — after 3 years!! — I got dabawenyo.com for myself. When I moved my I-love-Davao from Blogger to WordPress in February 2007, I wanted a good domain name for the new Web presence. Of course, all the names with just “davao” in it were already taken (including davao.net, which I used to own but [...]

WordPress 3.0 is set to be released this month, and I can’t tell you how very excited I am to get my hands on it. I do have the beta2 version, and I’ve been playing around with it. There are quite a few new stuff you can expect from WP3.0, but the most significant update (in my view) is its multi-site functionality. Read: WordPress and WordPress MU are now being merged.

For the benefit of those who are as yet unaware, WordPress μ (MU or “multi-user”) is a branch of WordPress that lets super administrators create a network of blogs in one installation. This is, in fact, what powers wordpress.com blogs.

I’ve finally gotten the multi-site (or multi-user) functionality of WordPress 3.0 beta2! And I’d like to share how I did it. You may choose not to use this functionality and use WordPress 3.0 as a single-site blog, but if you do want this awesome feature, do read on!

Here are the salient details of my WordPress environment:

CentOS server	Apache version 2.2+
PHP version 5.2+	MySQL version 5.0+
PHP safe mode off	Running suPHP

Before installing WordPress, you need to add this entry to your chosen domain name’s DNS table: *.domain.tld. 1400 in A {IP address}. Let’s assume your domain name is myblognet.ph, and the IP address that your web host has assigned you is 222.111.2.3. If you don’t have access to DNS, ask your host to do this part for you. The entry should look something like this:

[bash toolbar="false"]
*.myblognet.ph. 1400 in A 222.111.2.3
[/bash]

Then, you’ll need to change some stuff in your Apache configuration. Please be careful with this and triple-check your work at each step, to ensure you won’t accidentally mess things up. You’ll need to access the httpd.conf file (in my setup, this file is located in /usr/local/apache/conf/), and update the VirtualHost section containing the domain name you’re using for WP3.0. To wit (highlit lines):

[bash highlight_lines="3,4" toolbar="false"]

ServerName myblognet.ph
ServerAlias *.myblognet.ph
ServerAlias www.*.myblognet.ph
# more code here…
# no need to edit them!

[/bash]

You should then execute the following command (via SSH) so that the VirtualHost changes you made will take effect.

[shell toolbar="false"]
>> /usr/local/cpanel/bin/apache_conf_distiller –update
[/shell]

Your hosting environment may be different, so if you’re doing this on your own, please ask your host about the command above. Tip: use the locate command in SSH to find files and executables; e.g., locate httpd.conf.

Then, execute the following to restart your Web server.

[shell toolbar="false"]
>> /etc/init.d/httpd restart
[/shell]

Now, go ahead and install WordPress. Upon successful installation, add the following directive to your wp-config.php file. It would be a good idea to place this line (#83 below) just above the part that says /* That's all, ... */

[php num="83" highlight_lines="83" toolbar="false"]
define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
[/php]

Login to your dashboard and click on Tools » Network. The next screen will guide you through some more setup instructions, particularly for your wp-config.php and .htaccess files. Make sure to choose the sub-domain functionality, to be able to give your users a sub-domained site, such as http://pokerclub.myblognet.ph.

Once that’s done, you will notice a new menu item above the home icon: the Super Admin. And voilá, you now have a working multi-site WordPress installation! Go ahead and test it by creating new sites.

If you have questions, please feel free to drop a line below.

The first automated general elections in the Philippines are now winding down — not yet completely concluded, though, because there are still a number of areas that have not yet transmitted their electronic results. By the most significant indications, it was a success, in spite of the technical glitches in many of the PCOS machines [...] Election Day! ## Namfrel on the Maguindanao massacre ## Covering the elections: some reminders

I was one of the first 20 voters in my precinct in Matina, Davao City, having arrived there at half past 6am. The polls opened on time at 7am, and by all accounts, all of the PCOS machines in the school were operating nominally. The voting process, however, did not seem faster compared to previous [...] Covering the elections: some reminders ## The day after ## Pic Your President!