UPDATE: In a prior post I mentioned this blog uses Wordpress with the WPTouch plugin for great mobile device support (iPhone & Touch, Blackberry, Android, etc.) and the WP-Hashcash anti-spam plugin.

Things were not as "plug-and-play" as I would like. Well, with the 1.9.7.7 update to WPTouch, life is much happier.

Now, if you simply turn off AJAX comments in WPTouch, everything plays well together. No code changes required !

Thanks BraveNewCode ! … look for a little something in your beer fund

I’ve become one of those "smoker bigots" – you know the kind … they quit smoking and *THEN* start preaching all the bad things that smoking does. My conversion was not that I was a smoker; it was the "mobile browser".

I am blogger and user of the web but until about 6 months ago I was mostly on my computer. I now read blogs, feeds, news, and more using my iPod and/or my Blackberry. I use if for Facebook, the weather, Twitter (a little), and most of my personal email. I realized my blog was not as friendly to these mobile devices as it could / should / and eventually would be.

So, I set about to add support for mobile devices and mobile users. It was easy for my blog since it uses Wordpress and there is the WPTouch plug-in that makes it nearly automatic. It added support for the devcies I use most often and I even added support for the Androids of the world. (If you have a mobile device and it is not working with my blog, add a comment and I’ll do my best).

So, now I grumble whenever I hit a website that *does not* have special support for mobile devices. I realize I am being zealous but that has not stopped me from small internal unseen spurts of frustration. Oh well. I guess I could seek counseling.

Blogging, tweets, Facebook walls …. it can all be too much. For me it can all be too redundant. Like Ramírez said, "in the end, there can be only one".

I’ve been running a bit of a social experiment on myself over the past few weeks. anyone who reads this blog has noticed I have not been as prolific as I usually strive to be. It is partly because I’ve been in an experiment on Facebook. All that is wrapping up now. I have decided I can’t be master/mistress to two slaves …. wait, strike that and reverse it.

My preferred outlet is blogging. I like the longer for it promotes and I like the combining of words and pictures. However, blogging as more of a "broadcast" and Facebook allows me to listen to others. So, I have gathered so twine, bailing wire, and glue. I will blog for most of my content and "listen" and comment over on Facebook. I hope this keeps most of my efforts singular. time will tell.

… and for the record, I once again spent way too much time creating the artwork for this post.

As noted in a prior post, I recently stood up a new blog for my team at work. It quickly became a bit of a bother managing the various plug-ins and themes that I wanted. I thought there should be some way to instantiate multiple Workpress blogs with a single installation of the software.

For really large installations, the proper thing to do is install Wordpress MU. This is the codebase under Wordpress.com and supports hundreds and even thousands of simultaneous blogs. However, it is not for the faint of heart and I only expected to ever host a small number of blogs (three and counting). So I kept digging.

The This ‘N That blog got me started down a different path. Rubin wrote in his 2006 post about a trick to make the wp-config.php file dynamic. This file is what tells the Wordpress installation where it’s database is. The database tells Wordpress everything else. So, as the theory goes, you point multiple domain names to wp-config.php and inside, write a bit of PHP code to switch between databases. Now, in Rubin’s example, he was trying to overcome the problem of hosting packages that only allow one MySQL database. Bluehost does not have that limitation.  Also, a commenter noted a security whole in Rubin’s original post. So, I made a bunch of changes to my config file so it does not have the security risk and keeps the work blog off in its own database. I did test the notion of having two blogs under one database and using table name prefixes to differentiate. It all worked for a few minutes then I triggered the creation of a new test blog and KAPLUY ! It turns out I had to go into the admin settings for each blog and tell it to refresh its notion of permalinks. I don’t know why I had to do this. I just remember seeing it in the instructions for a plug-in install way back when and it seemed like the best hope for resurrection.

In the end, it all worked. I have the following:

• one Wordpress installation
• one set of plug-ins
• one set of themes
• each blog has its own domain name and appears as entirely separate entities
• the work blog has its own database
• my personal blog and my test blog have their own tables within a common database
• each blog gets its one directory for storing uploads, images, etc (this was missed in Rubin’s solution)

FYI – The fact that two blogs looks similar has nothing to do with my installation and has everything to do with my current esthetic eye.

In theory, this solution will work for a significant number of blogs. The limitations are your hosting provider’s package of bandwidth and storage. I don’t plan to test the limits of my provider, but I will say, their default package is pretty generous!

In an attempt to “move on” I’m moving some of the permanent pages from the top into posts so they will gradually become just part of the fabric of this blog. The clock project was completed in June of 2007 so I think it’s time to make room for other projects. Here is that page …