It’s been over three years since I launched Daggle, and things have been overdue for an update. So, I’ve finally gotten to that. For those who care, a rundown on changes and some further thoughts on the latest version of the Thesis theme for WordPress.

WordPress? Yes, I’ve moved off of Movable Type. Since my blogging at Search Engine Land shifted to the WordPress platform last December, it made sense for me to use the same system here. Plus, I do love the Thesis theme that makes it very easy for me to add things to my sidebar units and elsewhere.

Shifting to WordPress was also an easy way for me to move off using TypeKey registration for commenting. I didn’t have to use TypeKey with Movable Type, of course. But I’d rigged things up that way from the beginning, and it was going to be a hassle figuring out how to disconnect all the custom stuff I had in place.

So, for all you who suffered with TypeKey, thanks — and those days are over. In fact, I’m dropping registration altogether. Anyone can comment without registration, and we’ll see how well the Akismet spam detection system works. As for having your own picture or “avatar,” well, if you have Gravitar, you’re good. Use the same email as your Gravitar-registered photo, and it will appear. I haven’t yet figured out a way to allow users to upload their own without using Gravitar, even if I enable registration (OK, this plug-in likely will do it, if I add the right code to my pages — but I don’t have time to poke around on the right way to do that within Thesis). Hang in there!

What you’re not seeing is a major redesign. I’d really like to get a new logo done — but what, I dunno! So I kept the old logo and personal pictures off my Flickr account (see Adding A Flickr Photo Stream To My Blog), but out-of-the-box, Thesis gives the entire thing a fresher, more legible look (or so I think).

I keep mentioning Thesis! See my past post, Launching My Wife’s Blog & Playing With The Thesis WordPress Theme, for much more about the reasons why I love this theme. I’ll also build on some things I’ve learned since that post, which I employed in the Daggle migration.

Most important tip – get Thesis Open Hook! In my earlier post, I talked about the saga of editing the custom.css file. OK, it wasn’t a saga, but with Thesis made so many other things easy, I didn’t want to have to open up that file in a text editor and FTP things across.

Thesis Open Hook makes those issues go away. Using it, I was able to add background colors to my custom.css file easily. Similarly, I didn’t have to edit that file in order to insert my custom logo, as was the case the last time I wrote about Thesis.

Thesis Open Hook also made it easy for me to insert ad units into my pages, though exactly where content appears before you insert it into one of the “hooks” isn’t always clear. After some experimentation, I figured out that code in the “Before HTML” box would come at the very top of the page (where the big AdSense unit now shows), while “After Content” made code show at the bottom of a post and before comments (where my smaller AdSense unit appears).

In the old blog, I had an annoying AdSense unit that would appear usually a few paragraphs into a post. It would show between wherever the “top” of a story ended and the “more” part began. Annoying, but effective — people did click. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your view), I couldn’t find a way to make that happen easily with Thesis or Thesis Open Hook.

Of course, I’m not trying to make a living off Daggle. Good thing, too — the blog’s traffic has stayed steady, but AdSense payoffs just keep dropping. AdSense here is more to play with how AdSense itself works.

Thesis Open Hook also made it quick and easy to customize my footer and customize the text on the 404 page.

I installed the latest version of Thesis (beta 1.5 r5), which fixed some of my earlier wishlist items. But I still have more!

• Give me a field to block a particular page from being spidered (or let me insert a custom meta tag of my own choosing, in addition to setting custom titles, descriptions and keywords — which, of course, are great to have). As a workaround, use the Meta Robots plug-in. That lets you set the meta robots tag for any page (options appear at the bottom of your edit window). As an added plus, you can install NOODP and NOYDIR tags. Need to know more about these things? See my Meta Robots Tag 101: Blocking Spiders, Cached Pages & More post. I was glad to see that Thesis seems to have dropped the unnecessary “robots=all” tag that it was inserting.
• Ability to save widgets and easily move them between sidebars 1 & 2. It’s a real pain if you make something for one sidebar and then decide to move it to the other. You have to copy, paste & delete.
• Ability to force a line break in the title text of a widget.
• Still hating the fact that I cannot change the text of the search box to something other than “To search, type and hit enter.”
• I have a new appreciation of how you can make any category into a navigational tab at the top of the page. However, now I want to control the order of those tabs. And I still want to have a “master” page that lists all categories. I had to hack one together that doesn’t automatically update if I add new ones. Down the line, I’d like to feature some categories and then have this master category page appear at the end with the heading “More Categories.” I also found that if you have lots of tabs, Thesis nicely wraps them into additional lines — but the “Subscribe Option at the end doesn’t play nice with this.
• I wish the Recent Comments widget had an option to show the actual comment, rather than the name of the person and entry.
• Give me an easy way to make the headline of a blog post also be a link.
• Give me an easy way to lose the “comments are closed” messages on pages.

I think Thesis is also preventing me from putting out a full-text feed here on Daggle. I’ve tried everything to restore that but have had no luck. I’ll keep looking at it.

Let me close with huge thanks to Michelle Robbins, who helped solve most of the line-break problems that resulted from the Movable Type to WordPress important. If you see any oddities, do let me know — there are a few still lurking around. Michelle also set-up the redirection so all my old former date/time-based URLs forward to the new keyword-based ones.

Another item off the todo list — I made a favicon for Daggle. Matt Cutts was demanding it. I’ll do the pictures of the dog you want later, Matt. I plan an entire montage of dog photos to prove I’m not entirely heartless about the dog. Her name is Daisy, by the way.

Want to make your own favicon but lack any art skills? Use this tool. It’s free, and you just upload any photo to have it turned into a favicon. I went with a California flag, becuase you know, I’m from California. Also, the palm tree and donut ones I tried didn’t look too good. Mmm, donuts. I might try that one again.

Fine, Barry. I’ll play the latest game. So why I blog?
1) Because I actually think about stuff other than search. Sometimes. Like when I can. And it’s nice to write about it. Because, you know, I’m a writer. Or I try.
2) Like Barry, it’s a handy way to keep track of stuff I want to remember later.
3) To help other people. If I’ve figured something out, say with with the computer and some odd problem, I like having content up that might be useful to others. When I finally get a Mac (I’m edging closer), I’ll no longer blog as I’ll no longer have computer problems. Or so I’m told.
4) An occasional rant is good for the soul.
5) You’ve heard me sing. It’s better that energy go into writing.
I tag no one. I’m too tired. If you haven’t been tagged, feel free to immediately declare that I secretly tagged you because you’re so awesome and wonderful.
Nice cat, Matt. If I had a cat, I’d blog more. Maybe someday I’ll post a picture of the dog. I mean our dog. I mean the dog I’m told I secretly love. Wearing a Google collar even. Seriously.

Good news, comments and trackbacks are now working on the blog! I tried to get comments going yesterday, but making them happen via TypeKey was more work than I thought. I’ll explain what happened below plus some changes I’d love to see, in case it helps others.

I know, I know — I should just use WordPress, as everyone tells me. I did like the program when I tried it in testing things for the SEW Blog last year, but as I explained over there. However, I liked the Movable Type category structure at that time better. And since I use MT over there, I wanted to stay with what I know for my personal blog.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to do comments at all initially, because I simply don’t have time to deal with spam. But I love comments on blogs! Movable Type has an option where you can let people comment through free TypeKey accounts and automatically let those flow through. So I thought that would be a good starting point. Maybe I’ll still get spam, but I’m hoping having to sign-in to a system will slow that down.

So I tick off the option under Feedback in the Settings area to make this happen. I get my authentication token for the site and figure it should work. But it doesn’t. The forms I’m using from the default template — the “comment ready” forms as Movable Type’s help files explain, aren’t working.

Hmm. Hmm. OK, so I do a little searching at Movable Type. I come across this help file: Enabling TypeKey on Your Weblog. Midway through that, I discover this:

3.x provides a new tag which will generate all of the required comment posting logic in your template. You can use this tag to replace your existing comments form code:

<MTCommentFields static=”1″>

Here’s a thought. A little question mark symbol appears in the Feedbacks setting area to give you advice about various comment authentication options. It brings up this help page. How about mentioning the fact there that for authentication to work, you’ve got to make this change.

Anyway, I wipe out all — and I mean all — my code about comments and insert this. Then I try testing. Slick. Now I see this showing up:

You are not signed in. You need to be registered to comment on this site. Sign in

When I sign-in and return, a form appears. Cool. But then when I try to sign-in, I’m told my site hasn’t enable TypeKey. Huh? But I got my token from TypeKey.

Two things turn out to be responsible. Yesterday, the site still responded to both http://daggle.com and http://www.daggle.com separately. I used the former, but the CGI calls still used the www prefix. My token was for the non-www version, and that made a difference. I’d gotten the token initially by entering the non-www address manually. This time, I tried using the automated handshake system. Now TypeKey listed both domains as working.

Back to testing, and still failure! After a little poking around, it turns out that I needed a trailing slash after the domain name. IE, http://www.daggle.com/, where you enter things in TypeKey. Despite the handshake, this wasn’t added.

Testing again, now it works! I’m rewarded with seeing a form on the page after I sign-in. I can finally post. And so I try, only to return to the page and see nothing.

Now I assumed that the issue was that thing were getting confused again because of the two domains. So I pack it up for the night, asking my friend Rob over at TigerTech, which hosts my blog, if he’d take a look at changing the CGI calls to use the non-www domain and also 301 redirect any www calls over to the non-www to help avoid any canonical problems with Google.

Rob quickly did that, so it was back to testing today. I tried again and still no comments appearing. What’s going on? What’s going on is that I’m an idiot. Well, confused, perhaps a little forgivably. Above, I said I removed ALL my comment code and used that special tag Movable Type uses. I should have only removed the comment FORM code. I obviously still needed all the other code controlling the display of comments.

A little work later, and I’m in business. Comments are showing up just fine. But I still have some annoyances with the system.

First, I can’t control the message TypeKey itself puts in. Remember what it says to people?

You are not signed in. You need to be registered to comment on this site. Sign in

How helpful and user friendly is that? I want TypePad to allow me to customize the message. Since I can’t, I’ve gone the route of saying right above what TypePad says what I wish it would actually say. Specifically, I do this:

Want to comment? If you are signed into TypeKey, you’ll see a form below. No form? Click on the sign-in link below, and you can sign-in or sign-up for a free account. Sorry you have to use TypeKey, but I use it to avoid comment spam. All comments currently appear automatically after posting.

Second issue, I can’t control the form and message TypeKey inserts if you are signed-in. Currently it says:

Thanks for signing in, [person's name]. Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven’t left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won’t appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Ugh. If they are signed-in and see a form, then don’t tell them they can comment. It’s obvious they can. You’ll only see a form here if you CAN comment because you are signed in, so lose that text. Plus, I have things set right now so comments from TypeKey people automatically appear. That means I don’t need that big hunk of text telling them that comments “may need” to be approved. Instead, once again, I want to control exactly what TypeKey is writing to my blog.

Another annoyance is that the form starts off with a URL field, then the comment field. I want the comment field first. Then I want to explain the URL field, because it’s not clear what that will do. I want to say, “Fill out this form if you want to turn your name into a link back to your blog or web site.”

Anyway, that’s the story of getting things going. In case you’re curious, here’s the code I’m using. I probably don’t need all the div classes that are in there, but I don’t have time to clean it all out, at the moment:

<b><font size=”2″>Comments</font></b>
<MTComments>
<a id=”c<$MTCommentID pad=”1″$>”></a>
<div class=”comment” id=”comment-<$MTCommentID$>”>
<div class=”comment-content”>
<font size=”2″><$MTCommentBody$></font>
</div>
<font size=”1″>
<p>Comment by <$MTCommentAuthorLink default_name=”Anonymous”$> <$MTCommentAuthorIdentity$> |
<a href=”#comment-<$MTCommentID$>”><$MTCommentDate$></a>
</font>
</p>
</div>
</MTComments>
<p>
<font size=”1″><b>Want to comment?</b> If you are signed into
<a href=”http://www.sixapart.com/typekey/”>TypeKey</a>, you’ll see a form below.
No form? Click on the sign-in link below, and you can sign-in or sign-up for a
free account. Sorry you have to use TypeKey, but I use it to avoid comment spam.
All comments currently appear automatically after posting.
</font>
</p>
<p>
<blockquote>
<b><font size=”1″>
<MTCommentFields static=”1″>
</font></b>
</blockquote>
</p>
<MTIfPingsActive>
<div class=”trackbacks-content”>

<MTPings>

<MTPingsHeader>
<font size=”2″>
<p>
<b>TrackBacks</b><br>
</font>
<font size=”1″>
Below are other blogs linking or writing about this post:
</font>
</p>
</MTPingsHeader>

<div class=”trackback” id=”ping-<$MTPingID$>”>
<div class=”trackback-content”>

<p>
<font size=”2″>
<a rel=”nofollow” href=”<$MTPingURL$>”>
<$MTPingTitle$></a>:
<$MTPingExcerpt$>
(from <$MTPingBlogName$>)
</font>
</p>

</div>

<div class=”trackbacks”>
<div id=”trackbacks-info”>

<MTIfPingsAccepted>
<blockquote>
<p><font size=”1″>TrackBacks appear after approval. Trackback URL for this post is <$MTEntryTrackbackLink$></font></p>
</blockquote>
</MTIfPingsAccepted>

Also, I should say that there might indeed be a workaround to some of the issues I have with not being able to control the text. If there are, they just aren’t things I’ve easily found yet.

I’ve been working on the blog offline for nearly a year now, and I’m finally pushing it live. By working, I don’t mean that I’ve been trying to develop something super wonderful. I just mean that I’d get some entries going, start on the templates and look, then get dragged back into to other things. Well, enough of that!

Shari Thurow kindly helped me get the look and feel together, though I’ve screwed up some of what she nicely started out for me here. I’ll probably tweak it further down the line.

Yep, there are some AdSense ads, plus you’ll find some Amazon links. Yeah, maybe I’ll try Yahoo ads down the line. Plus, maybe I’ll actually follow some of the good advice that Jen gives out over on her JenSense blog about getting more out of contextual placement. Hang in there, Jen, I’ll try not to be shameful.

Of course, I’m not really running the blog to be an earner. Instead, it’s more a place for me to keep some notes for myself while maybe sharing some interesting things with others.

I do plan to enable trackbacks and comments in the next few days. Moveable Type’s setup has been giving me some problems getting it going with TypeKey authentication, but I should have that solved in a bit. If I get any serious spam problem with either, they’ll probably go away — trackbacks first, then comments. I hope that won’t happen, but I don’t have time to spend trying to police either.

Overall, I’m still going to be fixing and tweaking things over the coming weeks, but I’ll get there in the end!

For more background on the blog and why it’s called Daggle, see Welcome To Daggle.

For more background on the blog and why it’s called Daggle, see
Welcome To Daggle.

What’s Daggle? It’s my personal blog, where
I’m writing about things other than search. If you’re after what I have to say
on the subject of search, then you want
Search Engine Land.
Daggle’s about other things in my life.

In particular, I’ll probably be writing about what it’s like to be an US
expat in Britain. I’ve lived over here for about eight years now, believing my
British wife that the weather would be much nicer than sunny Southern
California, where I’m from originally. OK, that’s not what I was expecting. Love
makes you do crazy things, so damn the weather, I said I’d move.

I’ll also probably write a bit about gadgets and stuff I play with. One
reason I wanted to keep the blog is so I have an easy way to remember some of
the things I discover when playing with a new toy, software, etc. I hope
blogging some of it will help others, as I’ve been helped by reading what others
have written myself.

Why Daggle? A long time ago, someone did a list of the remaining short domain
names that were left. I saw that daggle.com was on the list. Of course, this was
probably because of the
definition of
Daggle, which I didn’t stop to consider:

To trail, so as to wet or befoul; to make wet and limp; to moisten.

I don’t know how much I’ll be wetting or befouling things on the blog, but I
still like the sound of the word! So I went with it.