Most blogs consist of one person commenting on the world, and a whole bunch of people passing by, spending five minutes to skim several posts, and perhaps making a comment or two. These people move on to never return, and they are replaced by more people who in turn do the same.

While blogs are typically considered more communal than typical websites, they may in fact be less so. Other websites have forums which receive hundreds of posts per day from established and respected members. That is a community. Blogs have comments. If you’re lucky (like with this blog), they are threaded with email notifications. This has the potential for community building, as people may make comments, reply to other comments, and return to reply again. However, it generally does not create community. Most people still visit once and only once.

Some bloggers try adding a forum. I did this, and the sad reality is that you will get no participation. For every 100 people that visit your website, one person will make a comment. And for every 100 people who comment on your blog, one person will sign up and post on your forum. Even if you put a widget in your sidebar with the latest forum topics, you’ll still get little to no participation. The forum is basically a separate website, one that will receive no benefit from the fame of your blog. Unless your blog is so popular that you’ve turned off comments, forums are a waste of time. You must chose: forums or comments. One or the other. Not both. On a popular blog, you may be better off disabling comments and creating a forum requiring registration. It cuts out the noise.

Bloggers used to require registration to comment, but fortunately no one does this anymore. It is …

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When you have a large amount of data to sift through, it is often good to create an ironclad framework to manage the data. This framework will include a method of inputting new data, modules for importing and cataloging old data, and an interface to wrap around the whole thing. Collectively, it is called a system.

The problem with systems it they are often created to manage a dataset that is expanding rapidly now, but will taper off quite soon. The designer of the system assumes that the expansion will continue at its present rate, so he creates the system to manage a large amount of data and he designs a thorough catalog to expedite searching. The problem is that with more items, more cataloging effort must be spent on each item so that searches can drill down the necessary data over an ever-expanding dataset. This means the cost of maintaining the system increases exponentially. If the expansion rate drops rapidly, this can be the nail in the system’s coffin, as fourteen layers of metadata provides diminishing returns when you are adding three records a day.

When you picture a “system,” think of a photography catalog. You add more photos as you take them with your camera, importing them using a memory card reader. You add tags and keywords. You sort the images into folders or (preferably) virtual folders. There is a search mechanism which lets you search by folder, date, and keyword. You can search thorough a mass of metadata that is generated by your camera automatically upon shooting each photo. If any one of these components is flawed, the whole system crumbles. Being able to find a photo in two seconds is worthless if you have to spend five minutes cataloging each one. Having a stable catalog of photos sorted …

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In the United Kingdom, some six million domain names are registered under the .co.uk suffix. While yourname.uk would be preferable to yourname.co.uk, such registrations are banned.

This adds up to thousands of lost hours among computer users and much more wasted space. UK residents have to type the extra “.co” for every domain they visit, communicate, or advertise. Clearly, the UK does not put its users first, or the lengthy subdomain would not exist.

One practice common among universities is to give students second-rate email and blog addresses. My email address at Daytona State College is the ridiculous richard_thripp@falconmail.daytonastate.edu. Blogs take on unwieldy addresses like agessaman.blogs.gfalls.wednet.edu. Giving students first-class registrations at the second level, like richard_thripp@daytonastate.edu or richardxthripp.wednet.edu, is out of the question. Usually, administrators will have their reasons such as firewalling users, keeping the namespace open, simplifying management, or departmentalization. None of these are valid and they all put the user last, when in fact the user should be the #1 priority.

On Thripp.com, it would be tempting for me to place users in some God-forsaken subdirectory like users.thripp.com/richardx, but instead I put them right up front like richardx.thripp.com. Sure, I might run into problems later. Sure, there might be unforseen consequences. Perhaps someone will register shout.thripp.com and then later I’ll decide I want it for a site feature? While the cautious person may say, “so that all my options are open, I should not allow direct registration of subdomains in case I want to use them later,” this is folly and treats the user as a second-rate citizen. Users make up the bulk of your community and are the only important part. This means you should give them important space. Damn the torpedoes. Whatever namespaces you are reserving are less important than you think. In fact, if …

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I’ve disappeared for the last few days because I’ve been working on The Thripp Public Library. While I can’t open it to the public yet (Dad won’t open our house to the world), I’m working on it now because I have time off and Dad’s generously donated lots of his books. Though I wanted to use Evergreen or Koha, I picked the simple and obscure OpenBiblio as my library system, because it’s the only thing I could find that would run on shared hosting. I was disappointed by the lack of features to start, but I’m starting to like the power and control with it, especially since the database makes sense, so adding new features is easy.

Before I even got started, the first step was to choose a barcoding format, classification system, and spine labeling format.

I don’t like Library of Congress (LC) classification because it’s arcane and confusing, so the Dewical Decimal system (DDC) was the default choice. But what to use it for? You can use it for everything, but I decided right away not to use it on fiction items, instead opting for “FICTION / *last name*” as the spine label and call number, which is the same as the Volusia County library system. It may not be ideal, but it’s much easier to use. Biographies are tougher. I chose DDC, but I put two lines above that say “BIO / *subject last name”. The DDC part is always “*numbers* *first three letters of the author’s last name*”. Large type items get “LT” at the top of the spine label. Spine labels == call numbers, always. I created a template file for spine labels in OpenOffice.org Writer, which I add to as I catalog books. Then when I get to twenty or thirty, …

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Sometimes I’ll write a post, and I’ll mention something twice. Often it’s my wonderful camera, a Canon Rebel XTi. And then I wonder: should I make the text a link twice? In the Rebel XTi case, it’s a link to Amazon.com (an evil affiliate link). Sometimes, the link will be with different text, or in an entirely different context than the first, though it goes to the same page. That could be linking to Glass Drops once while talking about night photography, and then again when discussing raindrops, in the same article.

I’ve noticed other people doing this, and I’m finding it ever more annoying. I’ve found there are two approaches to double-linking:

1. Link redundantly, because your readers will be annoyed and confused that your talking about a subject so much but not linking to it, if they missed the first link. Or do it to really get people to click your affiliate link. More commonly, readers scan your content rather than reading closely. Either they scan by default, or find your writing useless. To accommodate that group, you have to mention important stuff as many times as possible and hope it won’t be missed. Your writing for the unengaged rather than the engaged, and your putting the wrong ones first.

2. Don’t link redundantly, because you choose to cater to thorough rather than casual readers. Readers who take in every word and click every link in perfect succession. Readers who will be annoyed and confused if they find the same page twice in their tab bar after a work-out session with the scroll button. I click every link if I like what I’m reading, because I know the author will have good recommendations about the topic. And I’ve been finding it quite disconcerting when a good author is type …

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I created a URL trimming service at Th8.us. The URLs are shorter than Tinyurl: 19 characters instead of 25, in the format http://xxxxx.th8.us. I put it together using Hidayet Dogan’s Phurl for my Twitter account, but then thought it should be released to the world. I made modifications to the code so the random part is a virtual subdomain, is five characters instead of six (it’ll be a while before the 24 million combinations are used up), it respects trailing slashes, it links to the new address instead of just showing it in plain text, and it tells you the number of characters you’ve saved (it’ll even be negative if the original address was shorter). Also, hard-to-read characters are excluded (0, 1, j, l, u, and v). The service is simple, fast, and clean, unlike Thripp.com, which is heavy and feature-laden (flexible) and thus more prone to outages. th8.us shares no code and uses a separate database from Thripp.com, so you can count on the URLs working forever (barring problems with my host, SYN Hosting).

Here’s the first trimmed URL as an example: http://oorph.th8.us/.

Drag the one-click Twitter bookmarklet from the home page to your bookmarks toolbar. It’ll take you to Twitter and type in the shortened URL of the page you were visiting into the post box.

I’ve been away for two days working on technical issues instead of photography. The big one is that I’ve changed from richardxthripp.com to Thripp.com for myself and my users. A lot of work, but worth it because it’s so short. Read more about it here. I’d been posting to Twitter about it, right after I discovered that Thripp.com had become available, yesterday.

Expect some more photography tomorrow. The new address is richardxthripp.thripp.com, but richardxthripp.com/richardxthripp, richardxthripp.richardxthripp.com, and rxthripp.com, and subdirectories of them will continue to work forever. My email is now richardxthripp@thripp.com, but richardxthripp@gmail.com and richardxthripp@richardxthripp.com will also continue forwarding. Since the RSS feed address changed, Feedburner sent old posts to all my email subscribers. Sorry about that! It only happens once.

I updated the banner at the top so it says Thripp.com now. I’m here to stay!

The hard drive that never was. Waterlogged is two years old, coming on the heels of Raindrops, but a classic nonetheless. This was the hard drive from my first computer, a budget desktop I got in 2000 (I was 9 then). In February of 2005 it failed, and I’d just left it sitting around till June of 2006 when I cracked the case open (harder than you’d think) and took this shot. The drive is a Seagate ST34311A. I was walking around the yard positioning it as a mirror, creating interesting compositions (Blend In is another), when it started raining. The hard drive got wet, and that inspired this photo. The platters make quite a mirror, making the reflections in the drops quite sharp. After drying, the mirror was covered with spots and dust I never could get off, unfortunately.

Don’t ever open your computer’s hard drive, unless it’s broke and you’ve backed up your data, or you have no hope of recovering it. The read/write head you see in the picture hovers on a cushion of air one-tenth the thickness of a hair, produced by the velocity of the spinning disk(s) (7200RPM is common now). Even a speck of dust on the platter can mess up the drive and destroy your data. Hard drives are really fragile, and generally a bad way to save information, but they’re still the best thing we have to store a lot of changing data, cheaply and quickly. Back up your pictures to CDs or DVDs too, as they’re more stable.

Many hard drives have multiple platters (two to five), but this has just one. I found out the disks aren’t thick (slightly thinner than a CD, though very rigid), …

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I’ve broken my promise about focusing on adding photography, as I spent the last few days solving technical issues and making improvements around here.

Category URIs don’t have “category/” in them anymore, so you can get to the shop at richardxthripp.thripp.com/shop, which is what I’ve wanted for a while. I got this working with Top Level Cats.

The comment section for each entry has been totally redesigned. You can subscribe to comments (Subscribe to Comments plugin), preview comments without a page reload (AJAX Comment Preview plugin), and subscribe to an RSS feed for the comments on each entry. I moved stuff around and renamed stuff so it makes more sense; the “reply to” (for comment threading) is now at the top so that when you click a “Reply to this” link, you don’t have to scroll up to see the comment box. I use Yet Another Threaded Comments Plugin (YATCP) version 0.6.1, in which I accomplished this by moving <?php yatcp_show_comment_parents($post_ID); ?> up above the contact boxes in yatcp_comments.php, and delinking the reply box from the comment form (comment_form) by changing add_action('comment_form','yatcp_show_comment_parents'); to add_action('','yatcp_show_comment_parents'); in template_functions.php.

I added notifiers for disabled JavaScript, because the “Reply to this” links, comment previewing, and the shopping cart require it. Try disabling JavaScript in your browser to see what I mean.

When viewing individual entries, there is a link to the next and previous entries above the similar entries list (Related Posts 2.04 plugin, which has been taken offline by its creator). I added <?php previous_post_link(); ?><br /><?php next_post_link(); ?> in my theme’s index.php file for the previous and next entries feature.

If that isn’t enough, first-time commenters will get an automated thank-you email, with a plug for my RSS syndication feed. The Comment Relish plugin makes …

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