05 vs 04

Now that the first term is over and done, it's interesting (well, to me, anyway) to compare what happened in Warwick Blogs in autumn term 05 versus 04. If there were many fewer entries or comments this year as opposed to last year, that would suggest that there was something of a novelty effect which was wearing off. If there was growth, that might suggest that there is a something of more lasting interest and use going on here.

So what do the numbers look like? Courtesy of Kieran's magic SQL fingers, like this:-

	Autumn 04	Autumn 05
New blogs	2,315	1,026
Posts	11,444	12,704
Authors	1,640	1,275
Comments	21,893	24,365
Commenters	2,819	3,080
Images	17,407	20,070
Page impressions	1.2 million	2.9 million

So what to make of it? Well, the number of new blogs being less is not surprising; last year nobody had a blog, so there was a bigger population to draw from. What interests me the most is that although posts and comments and the number of people posting and commenting have remained broadly constant, increasing only slightly, the number of people reading Warwick Blogs - the page impressions - has more than doubled. Who are all these silent readers? Where do they come from? In part, of course, they come from Google; as the corpus of WB has grown, so there is more chance that some arbitrary Google search will return a result within WB, luring the unwary googler into our evil lair. But it also looks as if more people find it a worthwhile destination for its own sake this year than last year, which is nice.

One other interesting quirk which isn't in the table; the page impressions don't count requests for images from galleries. Those requests run at about 2.5 times the page impressions rate; so we serve about a million pages a month, but we serve 2.5 million images from galleries in the same period. That was mildly startling to me, although it turns out that Google is once again partly to blame; Google Images just loves the 70,000-odd images that Warwick people have uploaded into their galleries. That's quite pleasing in a way, though I was less sure whether I should be pleased when it was pointed out to me that the top request from Google Images comes from a search for girls kissing, where WB scores an impressive fourth place result. Hmm.

John Dale : 04 Jan 2006 17:56 |  Tags: BlogBuilder |  Comments (11) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Handling abuse

Further to my last entry about abusive comments, we've seen some blog entries and received some email from people who are, understandably, upset to have received such unpleasant comments. Here's a summary of the suggestions and advice we've been sending out:-

1. Do you really want comments from strangers? When you write an entry which is world viewable then by default anyone in the world can also comment on the entry. But if you're fairly sure that people who might want to comment on your blog are also students or staff at Warwick, then you can change the "Who can comment on this entry?" dropdown list to be "Staff/students" and then anonymous comments won't be possible on that entry.


2. But I have friends and family outside Warwick who I want to be able to comment; what about them? A useful way to allow this is to change your anti-spam question from something which anyone can guess ("What colour is an orange?" by default) to something which people will only know the answer to if you tell them. For example, change the question to "What is my commenting password?" and change the answer to "elephant", and tell your friends and family what the password is. Then they'll be able to comment, but nobody else will.


3. I want comments from strangers, but what do I do if I receive abuse? This is tricky. The university can't do anything to help you in this situation because we can't reliably prove the identity of the commenter, and in many cases we would have no jurisdiction over them anyway. In the new year, we'll add a feature allowing blog owners to ban an IP address (the address of a specific computer) from commenting on their blog, and this may help in some cases. But the bottom line is, if you allow strangers to comment on your blog, there's a risk that some of them will be obnoxious. You should think carefully about whether you're comfortable with that.

One other thing: if you can, please restrain yourself from replying to abusive comments. People who post abusive comments more than anything want a reply; it doesn't matter to them what kind of reply it is. And while you may be relaxed about or even enjoy trading insults with commenters, the message you're sending to them is Warwick Blogs is a place where I can get a reply. And what happens then is that they keep coming back, not just to your blog, but to other peoples' blogs, and those other people may not be as relaxed about it as you were. As soon as we deleted all the recent abusive comments, and removed new ones as soon as they appeared, the commenting stopped; there was no longer any reason for the abuser to continue. So the most community-minded thing you can do with abuse is to delete it quickly, and not respond to it.

Thanks, and happy new year to all.

John Dale : 31 Dec 2005 12:28 |  Tags: Comments |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Abusive comments

Over the last few days there's been an outbreak of trolling – unpleasant and abusive comments scattered throughout Warwick Blogs, traceable to a single IP address.

We've now deleted all the comments from this IP address and the various names used, and we'll continue to do so if more comments from the same person appear in future. It's possible that deleting these comments has left some blogs in a state where there are replies from logged-in users to comments which are no longer there; apologies if you've been affected by this.

It's also possible that in doing a bulk removal of offensive comments, we may have accidentally deleted a legitimate comment or two; again, apologies if you've been affected by this.

John Dale : 29 Dec 2005 11:29 |  Tags: Comments |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

New home page

Writing about web page http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/

The most obvious change today is the new homepage, I hope you agree that it looks great. It'll be changing again soon with some new graphics with a bit of luck too. Thanks go to Andy, John, Karen and Hannah.

As you can see, there is lots of great new content on the homepage, no longer are you restricted to just clicking to the most recent entries.

• Hot topics is back! This is a much better system than before (thanks to The King of Wales) which ranks entries according to a top secret algorithm that will hopefully show interesting entries on the homepage all the time without the spam
• Top tags are now shown on the homepage, allowing you to quickly see what people are writing about at the moment
• Most recent photos are also on the homepage now as long as you upload your images with "Show in collections" turned on.
• To let new bloggers be found more easily, there is a "New bloggers" link as well which shows entries from blogs created in the last 6 weeks

Let us know what you think, we welcome both praise and feedback on any problems :)

: 21 Dec 2005 11:27 |  Comments (11) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BlogBuilder update

Update of BlogBuilder today with a few big changes.

• New feature: You can now go into your admin screen and the "Edit tags" section and add definitions to your tags. These will then show up on hovers and at the top of aggregate pages for those tags
• New feature: You can mark your images now as "Show in collections" and they will appear on the new homepage but also on the new images page
• New feature: There is now a view on all entries from new blogs. This view makes it easier for new bloggers to be heard and found.
• Improvement: Hopefully improved performance of a lot of pages because of some back-end work

: 21 Dec 2005 11:20 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BlogBuilder update

Follow-up to Modifying image tags from Blogbuilder news

A new version of BlogBuilder was released and deployed this morning, with the following changes and improvements:

• You can now access your blog in any case – so, for example, you've been forced to give out your blog name in lowercase in the past (blogs.warwick.ac.uk/mmannion) but now you can give it out in any arrangement (blogs.warwick.ac.uk/MMannion, blogs.warwick.ac.uk/mMannion) and it should work
• When you click on the "Create entry" hyperlink directly it should take you to a screen that allows you to select from the full range of options for creating an entry. This is mainly for users who don't have JavaScript browsers and so cannot see the dropdown
• There has been a minor tweak where you can still access the dropdown box even when you increase the text size
• You can now tab out of the "Tags" field on the edit entry page, and you should also now see multi-word (with underscore) tags in the suggestions
• The "Edit tags" screen (see previous entry) now includes tags from images.
• You can now select as many tags to see on the sidebar as you want (from Admin -> Appearance)
• Users who aren't logged in have to answer the anti-spam question to send emails to you through your blog

And an update on the problems we've been having with Favourites – we still haven't worked out what the problem is, but we're working on it. It seems to have occurred since we upgraded BlogBuilder to use Java 5 and the latest version of JBoss, which doesn't explain why this is happening, sorry.

Mathew Mannion : 08 Dec 2005 10:20 |  Tags: Administration BlogBuilder Tags Update |  Comments (9) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Modifying image tags

A lot of bloggers who use BlogBuilder regularly may have come across the feature to "Edit your tags" (by clicking Admin from your blog and then Edit your tags from the menu). This allows you to change the name of any of your tags, or to add synonyms where you can add an extra tag to one or more tag (for example, you may want to add the synonym "humour" to all entries you have tagged "funny", "limerick" or "joke").

Currently, this only works for entries, but we're working on making it so that you can do it for images as well – how this can be done is something that we'd like the community to comment on.

Would you:

• Put image tags on the same page, so that images and entries with the same tags are grouped together; or
• Put image tags seperately underneath your entry tags

This implicitly has a second question, if you have, say, 100 entries tagged "Humour" and 50 images tagged "Humour", would you always want a change to one to affect the other? Would you expect that if you changed your entry tag to "Funny" that your images would automatically change to "Funny" too? The tags system at the moment implicitly links from entries tagged something to images tagged the same thing, but it would be interesting to see opinions on this.

Mathew Mannion : 06 Dec 2005 16:57 |  Tags: Administration BlogBuilder Tags |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Tagging fiction

We've had a few enquiries recently from people wanting to know if there is any way to find all the fictional writing on WB, and all the poetry. The answer is that it ought to be possible via tagging, and indeed this seems to work pretty well for poetry; if I view all entries tagged poetry then there are 292 of them which seems like a pretty good result.

Strangely, though, the same approach doesn't work for fiction; there are only five entries tagged as fiction, and 19 tagged story, though the actual number of such entries is much larger. It seems like something of a missed opportunity for fiction authors if people who want to browse this type of content can't easily do so. Could people writing (or who have written) fiction of various sorts consider tagging such entries "fiction"? It seems as if it would be a win for both authors and readers.

John Dale : 29 Nov 2005 17:38 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Tags |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BlogBuilder update

We've done a few minor changes to BlogBuilder in the last week or so. Primarily we've been upgrading some of the stuff on the server side that you wouldn't notice. We've upgraded to Java 5 and JBoss 3.2.7 which makes things easier for us and improves performance. You may have noticed a few small moments of downtime but hopefully nothing too annoying.

A few small changes that you might or might not notice or care about:

• My comments now correctly shows entries that have recently had non logged in comments. Before it was only pushing entries to the top that had recent logged in comments
• Improved accessibility of the comments popup windows as per Alan's suggestion
• RSS feeds now have comment counts in them for readers that support this

: 23 Nov 2005 11:46 |  Tags: BlogBuilder |  Comments (29) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Equations in blogs

We've just added support for LateX markup in blogs. This means that if you write this:-

[latex]
\Large\varepsilon=\sum_{i=1}^{n-1}    \frac1{\Delta x}\int_{x_i}^{x_{i+1}}\left\{\frac1{\Delta x}\big[    (x_{i+1}-x)y_i^\ast+(x-x_i)y_{i+1}^\ast\big]-f(x)\right\}^2dx
[/latex]

then it will appear like this:-

Hope this is useful for some people. Comments as always very welcome. In fact in this particular case, we have to hold our hands up and say that we're not mathematicians; our solutions to Fermat's theorem don't fit in the margin, we don't know whether all perfect numbers are even, we don't have the faintest idea what the above equation means, if it means anything. All of which is to say that we'd welcome more expert opinion than ours on whether this service does what a mathematician might reasonably expect and/or find useful.

Update 14/11/05: Note that we've now changed from angle brackets to square brackets

John Dale : 09 Nov 2005 10:00 |  Tags: BlogBuilder |  Comments (27) |  Close comments |  Report a problem