Sansblogue

In a comment to my previous post Jim West asked:

Congratulations to my colleague Jonathan Robinson whose fine blog Xenos has just shot into the BiblioBlog Rankings making his first appearance an instant 33rd whiuch does not sound like much, till you realise that he narrowly follows Robert CargillOfficial Blog
and is actually ahead of Mark Goodacre’s classic and thoughtful NT Blog!

Incidentally my headline reflects the fact that as I write Xenos’ latest post is entitled: badgers, mushroom, and links which suggests the breadth of coverage of this blog :) and since “badger” is my default false answer for multichoice questions  he caught my attention ;)

TaDa a codex! (Photo by Friar's Balsam)

The Center for History and New Media, George Mason University the people who brought us Zotero, the neat simple free “just does what it should” bibliography manager have held a One Week | One Tool project funded by the (US) National Endowment for the Humanities. The tool they produced (only 0.3 alpha as yet to be fair) they call Anthologize.

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

I wonder if we could use it with some other WordPress plugins to make making FOSOTT easier? And what about collaborating on and publishing the output of a colloquium? Like the Isaiah and Empire one?

The only trouble is, to get full brownie points in the academic system we may need to use a conventional respected print publisher, and I doubt any of them will be happy with opting into such a system :( How come systems (like the NZ “Performance Based Research Funding” exercise or US tenure committees) end up stifling innovative ways of undertaking basic scholarly tasks like publishing the results of research? Still FOSOTT wouldn’t count for such purposes anyway – it is merely teaching!

HT: Digital Campus

Not quite the Oscar, more the Sumerian Worshipper (from the Pergamon Museum) the best I could find as a sort of Biblioblogger Oscar

The biblioblog top 50 is out for June. Of course, like everyone else, I never “usually” read them ;)

However this month is special for me, with I think two firsts for the list. Though probably someone with a good memory will demonstrate one or both false, until they do I claim:

1. To be the first person with two blogs in the top fifty at the same time. This blog has made it into the top ten, just! And after barely six and a half years of blogging :) While 5 Minute Bible is at number 35 (probably because regular followers of the E100 podcasts have inflated the figures).
2. I also believe that 5 Minute Bible is the first podcast to make the top 50. With only 125 posts this is pretty good going, and suggests that podcasting is a maturing medium, though I suspect its sheer numbers will always be lower, as the Great and Wise Google like all other search engines prefers text to speech.

Now, before the naysayers prove all this wrong, and mere bigheadedness, and absolute depravity, how can we hold a virtual party to celebrate? ;)

Yahoo have produced a Styleguide for the web. In the absence of any different requirements from your webmaster, and for most blogs we are our own webmasters, I do not know of another succinct styleguide that aims to cover issues of publishing on the web. There is even a page of very sensible advice about writing for search engines as well as humans.

Does anyone know of another, perhaps better Internet styleguide to recommend?

My daughter (in Glasgow as an exchange student) has been posting recently on Facebook about procrastination (it’s nearly the exam season there, and revision does not beckon like she thinks it should. Shopping, cooking, buying tickets… her list of procrastinatory activities are different from mine. But today I am procrastinating too!

I’m supposed to be polishing (off) a talk for tomorrow night on Song of Songs (I guess since I am the only person many people know who has preached on the Song I deserve the invitation ;) but that experience does not really make preparing to preach on the Song easy – so I procrastinate…

Actually this post is both related to the preparation (since the stimulus was seeing that Dale, who invited me to preach, uses a neat plugin to post from his blog to Facebook) and is actually useful – at least if this post appears in FB as well as on the blog.

Anyway enough procrastination, back to the Song of Songs.

PS (21 April 2010) If all you need to do is make your Hebrew and Greek Unicode look nice please see Phil’s excellent guide at How to Use Greek and Hebrew in Blog Posts (nb. as the post goes on it gets more and more geeky, but the beginning should not be beyond most bloggers).

I am writing this post to help others who have problems with using “International” (Unicode) characters on a WordPress blog installed using their host’s cPanel. Maybe I can save you the hours of searching on the Internetz for the answer :)

The problem I had was that though Unicode (Hebrew etc.) would display and edit fine when I slicked “Publish” it all turned to ??? ?????? ???? which was no use at all.

Some Googling and a few hints from kind friends finally suggested that the problem was the charactersets that the MySQL database (that runs WordPress behind the scenes) was set to use.

You can check if this is the issue by going to phpMyAdmin (in cPanel) click on the appropriate database. On the next screen is a table which includes to the right a collumn “Collation”. The likely problem will be some “tables” have “latin1_swedish_ci” which is (apparently) brilliant for English and other European languages, but no good for other parts of the world, instead of the nice  genuinely International “utf8_general_ci”.

The real bummer is that you cannot simply change this here, that would offend the database fairies, so you need to export your blog (in WordPress admin go to Tools and choose “export”).

Then:

1. Enter your cPanel and click on the phpMyAdmin icon in the Databases box.
2. Select the database you wish to manage from the drop-down menu on the left
3. Click on the Operations tab in the top menu of your phpMyAdmin
4. At the bottom of the page you will see the collation option. You can now select a collation from the drop down menu and click on the Go button.

Now using FTP backup your blog directory (you may want things like the pictures you uploaded, or your theme with any tweaks you made…) and then change its name on your server. Now you can install a new blog with the old name and in the old directory, it will work fine with Unicode characters :)

Just in WP-Admin “Import” the blog you exported, and then copy by FTP the wp-content/uploads directory into the new blog (that gives your pictures etc.) and also the theme you were using into the themes directory (to restore the look and feel. All that’s left is to delete the default “Hello World” post. If you are like me you already have one of those from the original install ;)

Then change the directory name.

For some reason despite having UTF8 set as the character set in WP-CONFIG.PHP thius installation is mangling Hebrew and presenting it as a series of ????

If there is anyone who can suggest a cause, or better still a fix, I’d be delighted, as I have a post that will be much better with Hebrew showing as Hebrew ;)

I’d thought for a while I’d do something special for my 1,000th post at Sansblogue. I know Jim W posts that many times a week, and others crack the kilo most months, but it has taken me since over six years to do it ;)

Maybe a book giveaway? But Joel at The Church of Jesus Christ is doing that…  (See Break My Blog Giveaway – No. 1 – The Lost World of Genesis One) Perhaps some deeply meaningful and profound thought, a post I could call one of my best :) then just days before the big 1,000 rolled around Blogger pulled the plug and I was frantic fixing what had not (till then) been broke… so my 1,000th post came and went and was marked by some damp squib :(