Urban Spelunking

I moved my blog to my own host recently, so reaim your sites to http://aaronharmon.com/blog/ to keep reading, if you so desire.

Today I decded to move my blog from ITP servers to my hosted server at aaronharmon.com. However, a new version of WordPress was released, and while the interface was the same, one of the new improvements was the ability to produce an XML file that you can import into a new blog to bring all of your comments, posts and categories in one go. Unfortuantely, the version of WordPress used at the begining of class was not able to export such an XML file.

After a bit of research, however, i found this plugin by Aaron Brazell which allows the export with no problem, meanining all of the posts are now viewable at aaronharmon.com/blog without a problem. You are unable to take your blogroll as far as I can tell, but thats not so bad anyhow.

Also, check out this wordpress template: http://blog.elinc.ca/rod/
That proves I am a total geek.

I finally got tagging to work for my thesis project. For a long time, a user could only add one new tag, but as many old tags as they wanted. I figured out that i needed to reset a variable to 0 at the begning of marching through my array.

This variable tracked the id of the tags, and if it was greater than 0 then it would just push the tag/story relationship into the database. Therefore, if an already existing tag was in the database as the first tag,it would set the variable to a digit greater than 0. The next new tag that the script came across would not be able to change the variable, because it would return an empty set. All is good now.

Also, a new weekly prompt if any of you want to write:

Write a short (400 words or less) story
that has the following things :

1. A vizier
2. A block of wood with a symbol burned into it
3. The downtown of a small town or villagr

go to wordshots.com to tell your version.

Marco Polo saw a unicorn. After this sight, he returned home and reported that the definition of unicorns would need to be changed. The were not beautiful and white as people had believed. They were fat, gray and shaggy. They did not charge violently at people, and where docile enough to be captured without the need of a virgin girl. The animal which he saw we call the rhinoceros. The mistaking of a rhinoceros for a unicorn in Marco Polo’s age would have been an easy one to make. The world he was from was unaware of the existence of the rhinoceros. There was the idea that a beast called the unicorn may exist, however.

Marco Polo’s unicorn is important for the information age. Polo recognized that unicorns were not as they where believed to be. Polo adjusted the definition of the unicorn to fall in line with the properties of what we call the rhinoceros. For Polo and the people of his age, the truth about unicorns was a matter open to consideration and debate. The information age offers the ability to redefine the world to anyone with access to the Internet. Tools such as blogs, wikis and social network websites, at first glance, seem to reopen perceived truth to debate. Ironically, however, the current socio-political context of the United States a puts an emphasis on perceived truth over sincere debate.
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The weekly wordshots prompt for this week is:

Write a story (500 words or less) using the following words:

• Pouch
• Purple
• Parson
• Partake
• Poorly

To submit your version of the story, visit WordShots.com, sighn up and submit your own version of the story!

I have been playing a bit more with wordshots. I decided to make a few changes, most notably, I removed the “Genre” constraint, to allow writers to tell whatever sort of story they want. Also my Update Cron went out, which pleased me. I also removed the “everyone’s stories” list from a user’s dashboard page. I met with Marianne yesterday, and she gave some really good input on the way the site works.
Some other things to try and add by the end of the weekend:

• Save as draft option (I have no idea how this will work, since you typically ahve one submit button per form. Maybe I should use a checkbox? or is this a JavaScript thing?)
• I also need to figure out how to make a story featured. Right now the Featured Stories on the front page are all recent stories. I am thinking of either doing a list of a user’s favorite stories, or making an alorhim which decides how good a story is based on a number of variables. The later feels most likely at the moment.
• Include the date on a stories display page - also change MySQL timestamps into PHP dates, which is a huge pain for some reason…
• The SQL by author query doesn’t work in my read.php script…so also must get that working.

I am pretty happy with how my thesis is coming along. I need to hunker down and get some reasearch done this weekend, however. The writing/storytelling part of the thesis…the hard part.

I finally have the alpha version of my thesis project finished. It is a social networking site for writers, called www.wordshots.com. It feels good to have the first part complete, though I still have a lot to do to finish by May. On the list of to dos:

1. Figure out why/what will get people to stick with it and keep writing every week
2. Figure out how to recruit users who want to be part of the niche community
3. Fix a few bugs in the PHP code – most notably getting correct dates to display
4. Add dates and copyright information to stores
5. Revise all the written thesis work into a finished package
6. Do some research/get stats on similar sites like Zoetrope, FanFic.net and Ficlets.

Heres to keeping busy.

I would like to collect images of cities from users. If you would like to post your cityscape, simply MMS a photograph with your cellphone to ppm@aaronharmon.com. Looking forward to seeing what you send!