The results are here is anybody is interested.  I can particularly recommend the page telling you how to donate to my campaign

Very impressed by the ability to choose layout options and resize columns.  It is a lot easier to resize columns than in WordPress, and there is a preview of what you are doing visible all the time.  It takes a bit of the challenge out of it all, but it puts all sorts of things within the reach of people who don’t do HTML and CSS.

It concerns one of our local councillors and his belief that he is being targetted by the Chinese government. The story starts by saying:

Eager blogger Duncan Crow was shocked when an article posted on his website appeared to infect his whole system.  And he even hinted that it could have been the work of the Chinese government.

Sounds like somebody has been a big fish in a small pond for a bit too long and has started to forget how small that pond is in the grand scheme of things.

On reading this I reached into Skuds’ toolbox and pulled out Occam’s Razor which suggested that the chances of the Chinese government finding one critical article about their relationship with Tibet out of the thousands that must exist, and then acting against it instead of the many that will be more influential, are a lot slimmer than the chances of one person, who would never claim to be any sort of expert, making a bit of a cock-up and screwing up his own site.

It is even less likely when you consider that, despite the story talking about “his system” and the Chinese “hacking into his computer”, Duncan’s blog is hosted by Blogspot and so is entirely based on Google’s servers.  To hack it you would need to hack Google and not a PC in Crawley.  Having said that, I suppose you could avoid hacking Google by getting into the PC to look for a stored password.

More hilarity ensues when Crow is quoted as saying ” this was too sophisticated to be the work of local political extremists who would be my usual suspects.”

But the punchline is at the end:

Fellow blogger Richard Symonds, who stood in the county council elections this year for Gossops Green and Ifield East, called Cllr Crow ‘paranoid’.

I think that when Richard Symonds starts calling you paranoid you should start worrying.

There are other possibilities.  I know a bit about Blogger, having been working on a Blogger-based site for a few months on behalf of Horsham Labour and I have seen posts on there that have screwed up the whole site until I fixed them.

The most common cause is pasting something from Word or some other source.  It may look like you are just pasting text but in fact you can pick up all sorts of junk from Word, including all sorts of spurious <div> and <span> tags.  In fact a well-placed, accidental </div> could make it look like the rest of the site has gone.

One way to fix this is to go into HTML mode and remove all the junk.  The sledgehammer approach is to delete the whole post.  To avoid this sort of thing,  if you paste anything do it in HTML mode.

I’m not saying that is what happened, but I’m guessing it was something like that.  If I’m going to rubbish one hypothesis it is only fiar to offer an alternative one that is more plausible.  The irony is that in all probability it was a local political extremist that caused all the problems after all – he just didn’t realise it.

The Observer, wisely, made no comment of their own about whether they believed any of this, but just stuck to reporting what was claimed.  The Crawley News, even more wisely, chose to refrain from printing anything at all.

The Observer, 3rd May 2009

Just recently I have been busy setting up a new web site for Horsham Labour Party, with a final push to make it go live on May 1st. As anybody can see it is a blogspot site.  It is not really a blog though – it just uses that framework: comments are disabled for a start.  The advantage of using Blogger is that you can have people post articles without having to teach them HTML or anything.  Having got very used to WordPress now I found it very strange going back to Blogger.

We thought about registering a domain like Crawley Labour Party have for their new site, but I think the Horsham membership wanted to wait and see how it went before actually spending any money.  In fact you can do an awful lot online for free these days.  I am still tempted to just go and register a domain, fork out for a cheap hosting package and install WordPress – or even experiment with Drupal or Joomla.  Maybe even a wiki or bulletin board to go with it…

The real difficulty now is letting go.  The idea was that I would re-learn how to play with Blogger templates, create a template, tweak all the layout, tweak the style sheet etc. and then hand it over for the members to create articles.  Now its done I feel all parental towards it.

I’m sure that when more people start posting I will keep going in to sub-edit their posts for style and layout.  It will be a real effort to resist fiddling with it.

The launch date was very fortuitous though.  Apart from being a notable day in the socialist calendar, it was just in time for us to publish our list of county council candidates (and Horsham are very proud of puttnig a candidate in every division and getting all the nomination papers in early!), and the day it went live the local paper had 5 letters published that were hostile to the Horsham MP, Francis Maude and his parliamentary expenses habit.

Two days later and Maude was all over the Observer with a story about his business interests, so there has been plenty to write about!

I find myself wishing that Maude would just stop being greedy and hypocritical for a week or two, or at least stop getting caught out, so I didn’t feel obligated to keep responding.

In the meantime if anybody fancies putting gratuitous links to http://horsham-labour.blogspot.com on their own blogs or websites so that it appears on Google search instead of the old, moribund site do feel free.

It has been a mixed year really.

Music

As far as music is concerned, I have been quite disappointed. Last year and the year before I found a lot of new music to excite me, but this year there has been a relative shortage of new exciting acts, or new exciting material from established acts. Its very much a cliche now, but I do like the Arctic Monkeys, and a few other bands who caught my attention this year are the Gossip, the Holloways, Wolfmother and Black Angels.

I probably bought fewer new albums this year than I have for a long time, but the ones which stood out for me where The Captain & The Kid by Elton John, Rodrigo y Gabriela, and Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Actually that last one had a lot of filler. If they had taken the best tracks from the double CD it would have made a normal album to rival Blood Sugar Sex Magik. I also have to admit that Robbie Williams’ Rudebox has been growing on me, and that the tracks I have heard from the new Muse album convince me that if I get given it for Christmas I will be very happy indeed.

Some of the new music I discovered (Black Angels and the Gossip) was via Internet downloads – legal of course – but looking through the eMusic archives I found all sorts of goodies which were new to me even if they are actually not very new – like Badger, Peaches, Eagles of Death Metal, Chicks on Speed, Easy Star All-Stars, and Gotan Project. It really was a case of grabbing hold of the long tail.

I don’t think I have been to any concerts this year, apart from the Croydon World Party. Must make an effort to get out more next year.

Books

This year I read very few new books, and most of them were new books by writers I always read, like Robert Rankin and Christopher Brookmyre (excellent new books from both of them). I did finally finish Will Self’s Book of Dave which I was really into by the end of it.

The only novel I read by an author new to me was The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox. It won an award for best first novel, but given the circumstances of its creation I think it may be an only novel. The author was knocking the idea around for 30 years and only found the impetus to complete it after a cancer attack.

Mostly I was re-reading some old favourites and catching up on older books I should have read ages ago (like Flann O’Brienn’s Hard Life) and a lot of what I read was non-fiction. I had a bit of a binge on off-kilter statistical/social theory books like Blink, The Tipping Point, The Wisdom of Crowds and Freakonomics, any of which I would recommend, and Faster, which I wouldn’t.

Film

I don’t think I visited a cinema all year, but with the ever-shortening interval between theatrical release and DVD release I saw quite a few of the year’s films at home.

The ones I enjoyed most were V for Vendetta and Hostel. The most ridiculous film of the year was the obvious one – The Da Vinci Code. Even though I was expecting it, the line about “Quick! We must get to a library!” cracked me up. Snakes on a Plane seemed to disappear without a trace ater all the hype, but I have not seen it yet so I can’t really say if that was justified or not.

TV

After being underwhelmed or left behind by music, cinema, and literature, I was more excited than usual about the television this year. I still tended to leave it on a music or comedy re-run channel as background except for specific programmes but there were rather more of them for me this year.

There was the continuing story of Lost first of all. I still don’t understand it but it is compelling as it always threatens to all become clear and then just gets weirder. The revitalised Doctor Who survived the introduction of a new actor as the Doctor and just got better and better, and the Torchwood spin-off is also extremely watchable.

Other highlights for me were the Planet Earth and Coast documentaries, Tim Marlow’s arts show on Five and the bizarre but gripping Life on Mars.

Sport

By which I really mean football, I find it hard to get into other sports. The biggest event, biggest disappointment and smallest surprise had to be the World Cup in Germany. But despite England’s extremely poor performance it was a brilliant tournament with a sad and dramatic ending as Zidane left the pitch a few minutes before the end.

Other highlights were Arsenal’s progress in the Champions League, West Ham’s Cup run and that amazing FA Cup final. Even though we were robbed it was one of the best ever cup final matches. Unfortunately this season’s performances mean that West Ham is also a low point of the year – but with new owners it might all turn out OK in the end.

Deaths

It was sad to see the backs of Tony Banks, Linda Smith, Syd Barrett, Vince Welnick, Robert Altman and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman. The biggest shock death of the year had to be Steve Irwin, providing Australia with its own ‘Lady Di moment’. The demise of Slobodan Milosevic and Pinochet is scant compensation for all that lot.

Events

For me there was only one contender for best experience of the year, and that is the Sultan’s Elephant. I did not follow it around the streets of London for days and only saw it once in Trafalgar Square, but just that one sighting was enough to leave me totally awestruck. It was just one of those things you don’t know you need to see until you have seen it. I’m sure the US mid-terms will have more impact in the greater scheme of things, but there will always be more elections – ow many times am I going to see a 40-foot mechanical time-travelling elephant?

More locally the fall of Crawley Council to Tory control on the drawing of lots was the most momentous event, although when they lost their majority as a result of a defection to the Lib Dems it was almost as big a deal.

Two events which everyone agrees were highlights of the year, I have not yet experienced in the flesh despite seeing a lot about them in magazines, newspapers and TV programmes – the Holbein and Velazquez exhibitions in London. If I don’t get round to seeing them before they end in January I will be kicking myself.

Personal

A few nerdy things stand out for me – moving from Blogger to WordPress and getting my own domain, for example, or finally discovering podcasts for myself.

Employment has been full of ups and downs. Jayne’s employers closed down so she is now temping while looking for a new job. I got a great job offer, but red tape has postponed the start date so I am currently in a sort of limbo while I wait to transfer.

On the family front, Frankie left home which seems to have done him a lot of good and has done wonders for relations between him and Jayne. The biggest news of the year is still about Jayne’s older daughter who found herself pregnant this year so next year I will find myself a sort of grandfather with some sort of qualification (step- or -in-law, or something like that). How did that happen?

Jayne finally persuaded me to go on a camping holiday. In fact we went to Dorset twice. It was not as bad as I feared – but don’t tell her that!

Oh yes – and my cat died..

2007

The new year should bring new jobs for both of us, a grandchild (shudder), exams for Charlie, a new PM for the country and another set of hard-fought nail-biting elections for Crawley. It will also bring a lot of stuff which can’t be predicted and thats what I’m really looking forward to: the surprises.

It is traditional, possibly even mandatory, for WordPress users to look down their noses a bit at a set-up which is free, very easy to use and under the ownership of a newspaper company, but it does have a lot going for it.

For a start, it is extremely easy to get registered. Even easier than getting set up on Blogger. Just give a user name and away you go. The posting method is with a very user-friendly WYSIWYG window, although the purists can change to a plain text version and put their own HTML tags.

There is plenty to not like about it – the lack of control over all the links to other Blogs Today blogs in the sidebar and lack of customisation generally. Maybe these are not such an issue to newcomers on the principle of not missing what you have never had.

The way it is set up on a geographical basis, to correspond with the areas of Johnston Press papers presumably, could help to get local bloggers in touch with each other. The ownership of the whole thing by Johnston Press is a lot more visible than, say, Murdoch’s ownership of MySpace which would put off a lot of established bloggers.

I don’t think it is going to tempt users of WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace or whatever to move, but I do think it will encourage more people to get involved. It is extremely easy to get started with it.

I have set up an account myself, but really just to provide a link here, and for established bloggers that is where its use may be felt the most, especially those with a strong local presence like the many councillor blogs on B4L: if your local JP newspaper pushes it you could end up with a group of local bloggers all interacting with each other, but unaware of your own work.

Anyway, I have been wondering about this for a while, because I really am not very expert in the inner workings of MySQL/php. I know the reason why a spammer would want to have a useless comment attached to a blog post – because it would contain a link to his piece of crap website selling timeshares or porn or pharmaceuticals or online gambling or whatever, and the more links the better page ranking he would get on Google whenever someone searched for timeshares or porn or pharmaceuticals or online gambling or whatever.

What I don’t understand is how they actually do it. Its not an automated script which calls up a page and then adds a comment because surely that would show up as a hit – and some days my filters catch more spam comments than the total hits for the day. The way WordPress works is that each post, page and comment is an entry in a database (I think) so what the spammers are doing in creating records in my database, bypassing the normal entry method (the comment form).

Even when they are trapped by a filter, as most are, they are still occupying space in my database until I moderate or clear out the Akismet stuff. It just seems so much more intrusive than the spam I used to get on Blogger. In theory, if enough spam arrived quickly enough it could use up all my diskspace, although its unlikely.

I would be reallt interested to know how the bastards do it. To my simple mind it seems that blocking that method of inserting comments would be more effective than the current one which analyse the content.

Also I would interested to know why they still persist. Are there enough blogs out there with no sort of moderation or filter that the spammers still manage to achieve their objectives?

Yesterday I found that to activate the Akismet spam-blocker you need something called a WordPress API key, which you get by opening a free account a WordPress.com. I did that, and while I was doing it I had a look around WordPress.com.

The last time I looked was shortly after the service started, when Jo referred me to it, and it seems to have moved on a bit since then. Or maybe I didn’t know what to look for before. The customisation options seem to be greater than they were before, and there is an import function which will import old posts and comments from Blogger.

Anyone thinking about moving to WordPress, should have a look at this. It saves you the trouble of finding (and paying for) your own host, has the same look and feel as WordPress and most of the same facilities.

You can’t install plugins or any template you want, but there is now a range of different templates – 32 of them – to choose from, and you can edit the sidebar in a fairly simplified way by dragging widgets to it. So it is limited, but still pretty bloody good.

The biggest problem I can see is that if you move to WordPress.com and import all your posts, and then later decide to get the extra 20% of functions by running on your own host there is not an obvious way to export from it. (Just as well really, because if there was I would be kicking myself having moved about 600 posts by hand, discarding all the comments in the process)

Running a version yourself does involve a small cost, in return you can get a more personalised domain name, the ability to add extra features via plugins and more scope for customising, but if you can live without that it is worth considering. I might have gone for it myself if someone had not snapped up the “skuds” name back in October – even though they have not used it since.

Inbetween that, I found out about the error log on the server and through that I noticed that I have cocked-up the links to the 2004 archives. I’ve fixed that now.

I would have thought I was the only person interested, but I was getting a load of errors as a result of other people trying the bad links, so obviously not.

Even more confusing when you consider that there was always a fair amount of random visits from people hitting the ‘next blog’ button on Blogger.

(And yes – I am excluding my own IP address)

Unless… sometimes when I load a page in IE it comes up without all the formatting and I have to reload to get the boxes and claret & blue colour scheme. Maybe thats happening to other visitors and they are re-loading and therefore doubling up their visits. Anyone else getting that? And if so, any ideas why its happening?

Its on my list of things to look into.

As an interim measure, I changed my Blogger settings to archive monthly and not provide individual post pages, while publishing via ftp. This created a single HTML page for each month of stuff.

Then I changed back to publishing on Blogspot, and changed settings back to allow individual post pages. This meant that I still had everything available to me on Blogspot, including comments.

Meanwhile the ‘orphaned’ HTML pages were put as individual hyperlinks in the Archives section on the WordPress template. I also hacked them about a bit to remove all the links and other stuff in the sidebar. I could have done that by just simplifying the template I know.

Thats where I was a couple of days ago, then I decided I would start actually importing the posts into WordPress. As Supanames do not enable the CURL extensions which WordPress’s import facility relies on this is a manual task…

I have been going into the old Blogger account, opening each post and copying it then pasting it into a new WordPress post – changing the timestamp and making it private. I have been tagging posts up as I go along. When I had a complete month, I published all those posts and removed the link to that month’s archive page.

It works OK, but there are some drawbacks, like losing all the comments I used to have.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that if any Blogger bloggers are thinking of migrating, one of the questions they should ask a host is whether they have CURL enabled!

I might see if I can get that added to the list of requirements on the WordPress Codex.

It took two or three days’ worth of spare time to do February, and I found myself wishing I had not been so prolific in February – 60 posts in 28 days… I also resisted the temptation to change anything and just copied everything even if it is now embarrassing or proved to be wrong.

Thats 60 posts down and only 627 to go. It could be a month or two before I am completely finished – with the WordPress import tool it would have been minutes.