Matthew Smith

YouTube Support on UQ Library Blogs

uqmsmi14 — Tue, 29 May 2007 06:23:22 +0000

I’ve added a very simple little plugin that allows UQLBloggers to embed a YouTube video in their blog posts.

To enable it, log into your blog, go to the ‘plugins’ menu and click ‘activate’ next to the ‘YouTube’ plugin. From then on, any time you type something like this:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne_WXP7lUWM]

it will result in something like this:

(This is a humorous video which I have never watched – apparently it is about libraries)

Note that the actual video remains at YouTube, it is not hosted on any library servers so it will count as internet traffic on quotas.

Thanks to Jennifer Creese for the idea and Robert Buzink for writing this plugin.

UQ Blogs Stats

uqmsmi14 — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:45:01 +0000

This post is probably only interesting to UQ Library blog owners but may also be of interest to other organisations that are thinking of using blogging in a similar scenario.

I’ve just been checking out the stats for UQ Library blogs . It’s a bit hard to tell how much is traffic generated by blog owners and how much is students but in many cases the IP addresses give it away. A lot of traffic is from blog owners but this show up because they consistently come from the same IP address where as students are on fairly random addresses depending on which ISP they use and whether they connect from the eZones.

We are also getting many hits from RSS readers which becomes apparent when you look at the most viewed pages . From this page, I can see that BSL leads the pack in terms of views but I’m not sure if the staff have been reading it more than the students – though judging by the popularity of the RSS feed for BSL, I’d guess a lot of students are also watching it. Law, External Students and HSL are also getting some traffic. In this list you can also see posts that have attracted attention. Usually people link to the actual story if they’ve come through an RSS reader – which supports my theory that the BSL RSS feed is being well used.

I had an email this week from a person who didn’t realise that their blog was behind a firewall. Please note that all blogs are behind the firewall (like the intranet) unless you let me know that you want the students (and the rest of the world) to be able to view it. To check, go to an eZone and see if you can load the blog.

The stats for the Search terms is helpful and a bit of a laugh too. Someone out there agrees with Jo on the tartan mini-skirts thing.

I almost forgot – you can get an idea of where people are getting to your blog from by looking at the referring pages . The other menus on the main stats for UQ Library blogs page have lots of other stuff including the Referrers section showing how many people are coming from bookmarks and google too.

If I ever get some time (like between Fez releases), I’ll put some more plugins into Lyceum so we can get more blog specific stats (and those photo avatars that I’ve been asked for might make it in too)

Happy blogging all.

Comments Behaving Strangely?

uqmsmi14 — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 01:22:45 +0000

UQL Blogs Users: If any library blogs are having trouble with comments going to a blank page or redirecting to the portal page then it’s probably to do with a setting in Spam Karma 2 called ‘Captcha Check’ and you should disable it for your blog.

25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines

uqmsmi14 — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 01:47:12 +0000

I found this post pretty helpful for those of you starting blogs and for some of us seasoned bloggers too.

25 Tips To Optimize Your Blog For Readers & Search Engines

Everyone and their dog (yes, there are a few dogs out there with their own blogs) have started up a blog these days, but many people just aren’t taking the steps needed to optimize their blogs for both readers and search engines.

Mixing Auth on Apache

uqmsmi14 — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 05:25:01 +0000

Here at UQ Library we have a blog server which has a mix of blogs both public and staff only. To restrict access I had a problem because if you can get to index.php on the server then you can see all the blogs. We use IP restriction here so that computers on our internal network don’t have to go through the pain of logging into the website to see the blogs. There are plenty of plugins for wordpress that work with lyceum to restrict access based on passwords.


	Looking at the problem today, I realised I could use SetEnvIf to solve this issue.  The basic example is:
SetEnvIf ^/ms public_blog=1

order deny,allow
deny from all
allow from internal.subnet
allow from env=public_blog
satisfy any

	But this didn’t work for some reason.  I eventually worked out it’s to do with the Rewrite rules.  When the rule is re-written, the SetEnvIf doesn’t pass the test, so I put an extra rewrite rule in before the usual rewrite stuff:
# Detect the public_blog env setting and pass it on when redirecting
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{ENV:public_blog} 1
RewriteRule ^([^/]+)/? /index.php?b=$1 [L,QSA,E=public_blog:1] 
	Then I had to add
allow from env=REDIRECT_public_blog
	To the auth stuff above and now it works!  The downside is that it requires a sysadmin to make a blog public rather than it being a config option.
	UPDATE: I also had to look through the logs for 401 errors on publicly viewable blogs.  I did this by grepping for the URL, then choosing an external ip and grepping that IP (since most of the 401s happened on files that weren’t blog related such as the plugins and templates.)  I then used allow from all or allow from all sections in my config to let them through.  If you are seeing a password box popup when viewing this blog, then let me know!



Playing with RSS
uqmsmi14 — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 00:44:18 +0000
	As a demo of some of the things you can do with RSS aggregation, here is an online RSS reader which combines the library blogs in different ways. (click the categories link on the left to see what I mean)
	http://dev-repo.library.uq.edu.au/uqmsmi14/gregarius/
	You can use your RSS readers to aggregate content into your own structures.
	You may also notice I’ve enabled RSS feeds on all sorts of things – when you browse a category, there is the option to subscribe just to posts in that category. There is also the ability to subscribe to a search so that if new posts turn up with your keywords, they will update in the RSS reader (google news has this feature which is handy for following certain topics in the news).
	I’ve also moved the default feeds for posts and comments to a more obvious place in the side menu.  Subscribing to the posts feed just gives you a feed of each post as it appears.  Subscribing to the comments feed lets you keep an eye on comments on the blogs.

 


Annoying Spam Karma Blog Footer
uqmsmi14 — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 05:11:39 +0000
	If you don’t like it, you can turn it off:
	Options -> Spam Karma 2
	Under ‘general Settings’
	Untick the box: Automatically insert SK2’s ‘X spam eaten’ message 


 


Using UQ Logins
uqmsmi14 — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 05:06:29 +0000
	I have made a change to the blogs server (which i will call UQLBlogs from now on) which shouldn’t effect anyone except that when logging in, the UQLBlogs checks your password from the UQ username / password server instead of storing them.  This means if you change your UQ password, UQLBlogs will recognise the change.
	If you are not using a UQ username, the UQLBlogs will use whatever you registered with.   UQLBlogs still tries to email you a password when you register but you should ignore it for UQ usernames and use your UQ password.
	For the nerds out there: To accomplish this task, I downloaded an LDAP plugin from Pat Cavit / Zilla Smash and basically had to rewrite it to work with lyceum and UQ’s LDAP setup.  The result is highly specific to UQ but I can share the results if anyone really feels the need.  It involves a small hack here and there to the lyceum code too.

 


Blogging Help for UQ Librarians
uqmsmi14 — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 03:58:39 +0000
	This is of interest to UQ Library readers only.  I’ve put some help for setting up your blog on Sirius.  This steps you through registering, setting the proper name and tagline and controlling who can access and comment on your blog.

 


Ajax Spell Checker
uqmsmi14 — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 03:52:04 +0000
	I’m just checking if the live spell checker works with lyceum.  I downloaded it, unzipped it in the plugins dir and it is working quite well without modification.  Which is what we’d expect as it doesn’t need to do much with the database.