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Unfriendly Connect For Feedly

May 12, 2013 in Blog Software by Ezra S F | No comments

So Google announced Reader will shut down. So I migrated to Feedly. It is okay, but I will miss Reader just like I still miss Bloglines. (The current Bloglines is actually NetVibes which I hate.)

A few weeks ago, I noticed one my categories displays in the left menu there are unread posts, but the main window displays there are none. It took a week for me notice on the right side the list of feeds in the list also shows there are unread posts. Two views say there are unread but the one that shows the titles or previews of them says there is nothing. WTF?

Even stranger, the category does not appear in the Organize section, so I cannot just move the RSS feeds to another category.

Apparently Feedly users have complained for 4 years about the category. And even worse, many of the solutions appear only temporary. Whatever they change restores itself later.

Today, I put together another clue. The problem category is called “blogger-following.” Google Reader displays it as “Blogs I’m following”. Blogger actually owns/creates these in Google Reader when I subscribe to them using Friend Connect. This also adds them to the Blogger Reading List on my dashboard. Feedly picks up these subscriptions from Google Reader.

I think making changes to these in Feedly updates Google Reader. However, Blogger will change it back. I tried removing blogger-following from the feeds. However, a logout and login restored those changes. I think because Friend Connect is authoritative to Reader who is authoritative to Feedly, the fix has to be upstream of Feedly.

However, unsubscribing in Friend Connect did not really do it. (At least through a logout and login.)  When Feedly pulled the data from Reader again, the unsubscribed feed came back.

Apparently Feedly relies on Google for authentication. So, I cannot just Revoke Access for Feedly to my Google account to do #1 below now.

So there are a couple potential ways to approach fixing this.

    1. Do nothing. Google Reader dies on July 1. That should remove Reader, the man in the middle. Without Reader there, Feedly ought to no longer know about Friend Connect based feeds.
      Pro: Least amount of work. Con: Six weeks is a long time. Unknown whether that will actually work.
    2. Unsubscribe in Friend Connect. I subscribed to a blog through Blogger and confirmed new posts showed up in Reader and Feedly. I removed the subscription in Blogger by going to Settings to the right of Reading List. I clicked Settings to the right of the blog to remove. Finally, I clicked “Stop following this site.” When I refreshed Reader and Feedly, this blog disappeared. Of course, any I want to continue to read need a direct subscription in Feedly.
      Pro: Not sure. Con: I will longer publicly support friends. Very cludgy to stop following these.

 Probably wait and see.

WordPress Admins Under Attack

April 13, 2013 in Blog Software, Scams / Viruses by Ezra S F | No comments

Apparently someone out there is trying to brute force WordPress admin account passwords. Of course, older installers set the administrator username to the same account name: admin. Since this brute force is targeting that account name, WordPress blog owners are being advised to make sure to rename that account.

Disqus

March 20, 2013 in Blog Software by Ezra S F | No comments

I am trying out the Disqus comment system for this blog through the WordPress plug-in. I’ve had an account through them for years for my Tumblr. Not sure why I did not bite this bullet years ago. More and more sites I visit use it. It lets commenters authenticate through Disqus, Facebook, Twitter, or Google. The WordPress native comments are spam ridden even with Akismet. Plus the Disqus WordPress plugin is much more user and administrator friendly than Facebook Comments for WordPress.

To Blog or to Share?

January 4, 2012 in Blog Software by Ezra S F | 2 comments

This blog has suffered from my sharing on social media. Where I used to post every day, even just one liners to go check out a web site or a story, that activity is now all on Facebook, Twitter, Google+. HackEducation does a weekly post of news. I am thinking about doing something similar for the things I would normally just share.

First, other sites tend to die. Ping.fm screwed me by my not understanding their technology. By using it to cross-post, every link and every image used their shortened URLs. When they lost the database, every link and image was broken. I think ifttt.com works better, so I have it making a backup of this blog at ezrasf.wordpress.com and sneezypb.posterous.com. (Well, except the tags do not go over.)

Second, I can control the format and quotes better on this blog than social media. Sometimes I wish I had quoted more of an article when it disappears behind the paywall, is moved, or removed.

Finally, it would be good for me to spend more time thinking about things before I post. About a tenth the things I intend to post on this blog, I give up on posting and instead share on social media. I feel like there is more thought and intention that goes into a blog post.

P.S. Originally this post started before Christmas. I had it scheduled for today. Setting the goal for the year ought to help.

WordPress+Facebook

February 17, 2011 in Blog Software, Facebook by Ezra S F | No comments

Since I cannot use Facebook Apps over HTTPS, that put a wrinkle over using the NetworkedBlogs app. Because one had to go to their apps.facebook.com to do more than look at a post (goes to networkedblogs.com which shows my site in a frame) or view the app profile, I decided to ditch it. I decided to look for another way to facilitate the integration. I’m used to Twitter Tools which just posts to Twitter. I thought there should be an equivalent for my blog posts to end up as a Facebook link post (not as a Note).

So I started searching on WordPress for possible plugins. Many were out of date. Many were for functionality not useful to me. Eventually I started searching through Google which muddied the waters even more by giving me much older plugins.

  • Simple Facebook Connect required me to publish to WordPress then go back and hit a button to publish to Facebook. Lame.
  • Facebook Comments for WordPress pretty cool if all I wanted was comments. Really I wanted the posts to show up in my profile more.
  • WPBook sets the URL for each post to go through apps.facebook.com.

Wordbooker finally did what I want… It creates a post in my newsfeed for my blog which uses a link to my blog. I manage it through WordPress not Facebook apps.

I could be happy now. (Until I next get annoyed.)

Fix WP Numeric Broken Permalinks

January 23, 2011 in Blog Software by Ezra S F | No comments

In the early days of my using WordPress, I set the permalinks setting (the URL format style) to Numeric. They looked like http://ezrasf.com/wplog/archives/3. On 2008-SEP-27 I changed the permalinks setting to the Day and Name. According to my broken links post each time WP autosaved a draft it incremented the number so the names were no longer sequential. The gaps annoyed me. The new setting hid those gaps. (No, I do not have OCD.) However, it meant

  1. all those links in posts to old permalinks no longer worked and
  2. anyone incoming from search engines hit permalinks who no longer worked.

The search engine problem worked itself out without any effort on my part. They recognized the 404 HTTP error code, dropped the bad page from the index on the next crawl. They also picked up the new posts.

I occasionally spent some time working on fixing broken links. However, the process of determining where the link should go took so much effort I rarely fixed more than a few links at a time. So I did not make the progress I would have liked.

Then I discovered the Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress last weekend. It has been sending me notices about all my broken links. In desiring to shut it up, I had to spend time trying to fix those Numeric permalinks again. I noticed the format of a link in “Get Shortlink” buttons when I edit a post is the same as the Default permalink which look like http://ezrasf.com/wplog/?p=3. It seemed logical I could just replace “archives/” with “?p=” and fix the internal links. Sure enough, it worked. So I’ve cleared up the remaining internal broken links much more easily than I ever expected. It could only be easier if the broken link checker automatically did it.

The WordPress Codex says,

Find a post’s ID number and type the following (with your information) in your browser and you should be redirected to your post:

http://yourdomain.example.com/post/(the ID #)

Well, no matter what id number I use here, they go to the same post on 9/12. Weird. This would have been an even easier fix as I could double clicking on archives does not get the slash. Maybe it means I need something in the .htaccess to make it work correctly?

Meh. I am glad to have an easy solution. Annoyed it seems undocumented. Hope this helps someone else who has the same problem.

WordPress vs. Old Templates

December 9, 2010 in Blog Software by Ezra S F | No comments

WordPress has neat new functionality to notify about and easily update templates. Apparently some of mine are so old they can no longer be updated? The result of trying was not removing the “.maintenance” file resulting an inaccessible blog. Easy enough to remove it once I looked up the problem. However, annoying that I was not given an error notice or anything useful.

Upgraded to WP3.0

June 20, 2010 in Blog Software by Ezra S F | 1 comment

The upgrade to WordPress 3.0 doesn’t appear to have broken anything? Good.

It pointed out my Tarski theme was a point revision behind. That has also been upgraded. No apparent problems.

No need to go mess with code. That makes me verrrry happy.

Sorry for the Outage

May 10, 2010 in Blog Software by Ezra S F | No comments

My hosting service, Dreamhost, announced they would be upgrading every one off PHP4. Only people using old software would get bitten. I’ve kept my software current, so I wasn’t worried.

Only this of all eight domains started showing an HTTP 500 error (Internal Server Error). I dreaded having to go through and determine why. Turns out it was easier than I thought…. In Dreamhost’s panel, the domain was still configured to use PHP4. When I changed it to use PHP5, the WordPress started working again.

I would have thought part of an upgrade would be to change this configuration. At least it was just a simple change and not digging through code and logs.

Comment Phishing

March 31, 2010 in Blog Software, Scams / Viruses by Ezra S F | No comments

I noticed today comment spammers are getting craftier. Some of the comments I approved I now believe to be comment spam. Perhaps they are probing to later deliver the real deal?

They use the name of people who legitimately commented. Because the scammer cannot see the real email commenter’s address, they use a different one but nothing drastically obvious as spam.

The IPs are 74.63.104.125 and 74.63.104.121. The legitimate comments have different IPs. These IPs belong to FDCServers, who provide colocation and dedicated servers. I’m tempted to send a message to the abuse email address for the company.

For now I’ve renamed the spam comments as ” (Fake)” and removed the web site. I’ll have to be more vigilant.

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