Jack Yan on Vox

Wordpress to be blocked in Brazil over sex video?

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:38:06 +1200

Just got this in from Mike Corso at Cool Site of the Day.

A recent Brazilian YouTube sex scandal threatened to close down every WordPress blog around the world.
   Did you hear about it? It's already called “YouTube Gate”—apparently a spicy sex scene was posted on YouTube and someone discussed it on a WordPress-hosted blog.
   The problem is the Brazillian courts placed a ban on viewing the IP address of the entire WordPress website …
   … And that means potentially thousands of bloggers can't have their content shown in their country.
   Even worse, this isn't the first time a violation like this closed down an entire network of blogs.
   But the bottom line is this should be a wakeup call for those who rely on hosted blogs (like WordPress) to tweak their strategy and avoid getting their own blogs banned.
   The good news is the fix is simple … just host WordPress on your own server (rather than hosting it on the WordPress site).
   Getting WordPress installed on your own site is now a snap … just take advantage of John Saya's FREE WordPress autoinstaller.

http://www.cnotes.com/r/wordpress.html

Any questions, shoot me an e-mail.

Mike Corso
Cool Site of the Day

   This is a bit disturbing. Global Voices has more info. One of the quotations indicates a million Brazilian bloggers will be affected.
   I am not sure if a Brazilian judgement should have an effect on blogs like this, penalizing those in Brazil who are using wordpress.com. Those who didn’t feature the home-made porn on their blogs—as in the overwhelming majority of Wordpress users—should not pay the price for the handful that did. (And surely non-Wordpress blogs are affected, too?)
   Surely a simple deletion of the offending URLs would suffice?
   And this desire to post someone’s home sex video on to their own blogs—well, it ain’t my scene. Stick it on to YouPorn and let the perverts all go to the same place, and keep it off the blogosphere!

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Lucire ‘Insider’ blog ready for prime-time

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 00:37:35 +1200

[Cross-posted] One glitch aside (in the notes below) I think we might be ready for prime-time—this is the public announcement (rather than the private one sent to Voxers earlier). Lucire has a blog—after I resisted it for years. The idea: to write about some behind-the-scenes stuff. I see no reason about having any “mystique” behind what we do. We work—hard.
Some of you in the marketing world will know that I did not think much of blogs originally. And that led to my refusal to go with a Lucire blog—after all, the forum was pretty successful from 2002 to 2005 before our hard drive conked out in 2006 and a lot of the data disappeared (they’re buried on the server somewhere, I am told by the team).
But the world has moved on, too, since 2005, and putting the occasional op-ed in blog form doesn’t seem too bad an idea. As long as it contributes to the community and allows us to talk to our readers, why not?
It’s been repeated in the ﬁrst post of the new blog, where Lucire ‘Insider’—the name comes from the print edition, though I did toy with ‘Oracle’—is stated to complement the Forum and Facebook group.
What I am wondering is how long my MySpace opposition will hold out, now that I am eating humble pie on this issue. As mentioned, the idea of a JY&A Media publication appearing on a Murdoch Press site feels funny.

Note to Maureen: we weren’t able to fix that earlier glitch you mentioned as nothing in the coding shows up (especially harder since it can’t be replicated on our computers), though there are some oddities (the Digg.com, Del.icio.us, etc. links only show on some posts, and there is no logical reason for them being “selective”). But who said computer programs were logical?! One entry aside, only a few dozen people are visiting the blog at the moment as we haven’t exactly made it obvious, so maybe with a bigger sample we might be able to track down the error. Please do bear with us!
If anyone else cannot see parts of the Lucire ‘Insider’ comment form, viz. if the name, email and blog fields disappear, please send me a comment here. Especially if you have theories on why this happens!—JY

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Wordpress v. Blogger: another thing

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:24:27 +1200

Now with two blogs under Wordpress, I have to say it’s OK, but it’s not that big a leap over Blogger. I still prefer Blogger for its HTML controls and there is another reason: Blogger blogs seem to get picked up in Google Blog Search more quickly. They may ping more accurately, or perhaps Google has a natural bias toward a company it owns. Now that the speed of Blogger has been sorted and there is an auto-save, my two main beefs with the service have been solved.
Still, I can’t say I miss the standard Blogger comment forms and the Wordpress interface is a Doozie. (Or is that Duesie or Düsie?) Being able to group posts by tags and having the whole Wordpress program on our server are boons.
Let’s say I have no one preference yet, but that Wordpress is not problem-free. But if Blogger ever upgrades again and goofs it as it did last time, I am now skilled enough on Wordpress to do the basics.

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Blogger is munted

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:12:55 +1200

I told you that I had worse luck on computers than most people. If you go to the Blogger Help Group, most people are reporting one or two errors with the service. Me, I have encountered at least eight.

Error bX-f65o2t when publishing posts
Error bX-u8psh2 when publishing post
Error bX-8cvpw4 when managing posts
Error bX-sw238 when publishing post
Error bX-uovded when editing posts
Error bX-5kiuq3 when editing posts
Error bX-4gu5tl when publishing posts
Error bX-hdc6sh when managing posts

I decided to stay with Blogger last week after working with Wordpress, but this is ridiculous. The service is falling over badly today and reminds me of the trouble I had when I was forced to move to ‘New Blogger’ earlier this year.

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WordPress at Medinge

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 00:28:30 +1200

I’ve had some success setting up a WordPress blog, but wanted to publicly thank those who volunteered to help me. It’ll be up at the Medinge Group site shortly and we’ll announce that through our corporate site in due course. It was easier than I thought, but not that much easier.

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Blogger-to-WordPress geeks: I want to hear from you

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 23:26:11 +1300

[Cross-posted] I’ve now read the WordPress site about what their service offers, and want to shift my Blogger blog over, after endless troubles with a new service that is inferior in most ways to its predecessor. My question now is: anyone want to tell me what their Blogger to WordPress transitions were like? Did all the posts go over smoothly? Can I make a WordPress blog look like this one and host it at the same place? Can I hack my posts’ HTML?
I’d rather hear from users, rather than brochureware pages. The computer industry has let me down too often for me to believe anyone.

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