Complaint Hub

I did a test import of Complaint Hub into Drupal on my laptop.  It worked nearly flawlessly.  It’s going to be a little tough to keep up the permalinks so that any links to the current site redirect to the new site.  I want to move everything back to complainthub.com (You’ll notice the URL here is blog.complainthub.com), which makes it harder.  And then there are still the posts from my old From Harvard Street blog that are all forwarding from harvardstreet.complainthub.com to blog.complainthub.com.  I suppose I could probably just fix that to go directly to complainthub.com.

The import module for Drupal also does not import multiple Wordpress categories for a single post.  It only imports multiple tags.  Unfortunately for me, I use categories almost exclusively.  There is a way to convert categories to tags, but there’s a big disclaimer about backing up your database first.  I guess I could just do that.

Otherwise, it was pretty awesome.  I still need a nice new theme, but otherwise you may be seeing the changes sooner rather than later.

I’m thinking about migrating the site from WordPress to Drupal. For many of you, that sentence may make absolutely no sense. If you don’t keep reading, I won’t blame you. If you do stop reading, you should make it up to me by going and buying John Scalzi’s special edition book that he’s auctioning off for charity. Get him to inscribe it to me, with some really inscrutable saying. Bid quickly, as it’s already over $2000.

Anyway, if you’re still reading, I got a little infatuated with Drupal while doing some work for a project that never panned out. It doesn’t do blogging as well as WordPress (At least not right out of the box), but it does a lot of other stuff much better. And I think it would be perfect for a project I’ve been thinking about.

Some of you may know that I’m MUCH better at thinking about projects than actually doing them, and I have a bunch of stuff still in the thinking stage. I have a money-making venture with a friend. I have an online economics course to take with another friend. I have the science fiction novel I’ve been plotting out. I have an 8K in March and a 10K in April. I have my real job. I also have a wife, and a family, and some friends, all of whom require and deserve some of my time.

In any event, the project could be really cool, and a nice side effect is that I’d probably bring back the complaint submission page that people have been missing. And I’ll update the theme of the site - at least one friend insists that his eyes bleed when he reads it.

So that’s in the future.  I don’t know how long it will take to happen, but be prepared.  If you subscribe via RSS, the feed might change, although hopefully FeedBurner will take care of that transparently (To you, at least).  But I’ll keep you posted.

My Akismet spam filter on the comments here at Complaint Hub has been letting me down lately. In general, it has been fantastic. It’s caught about 8,000 spam comments since I started the site, and only caught maybe three or four real posts. But lately it has been holding more and more spam comments in moderation, emailing me and making me tell it that the comment is spam.

Some of what it’s been letting through are quite obviously spam. The latest was a brief message and then forty links to hardcore porn.

I hope this means that Akismet is just nearing the next step in their release cycle, and the spammers are getting better at fooling the filter, but all will be back to normal soon. I hate captchas, and don’t ever want to use one here, so a filter like Akismet is a necessity.

If Dante were writing The Inferno today, what circle of Hell do you think he’d put the spammers into? I’d throw them into the Eighth circle with the panderers (a person who serves or caters to the vulgar passions or plans of others (especially in order to make money [source]). There they would walk in a line, being whipped by demons. That seems appropriate.

Blog Action Day

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

I know, many people use their blog to further good causes every day while I complain about the awful horrors of living and parking in Washington, DC. But I think many people who do fight for these causes forget that most people not only aren’t fighting, they’re not even aware.

The wife has complained about Metro riders who don’t recycle the Express newspaper. This morning, there were two down escalators at Columbia Heights. I went down the one that the girl with the large suitcase didn’t choose. At the bottom of her escalator, I saw a copy of Express that someone had dropped. As I was heading to the bottom, planning to pick it up, a woman on that escalator picked it up. “Wow,” I thought. “I never see people pick up trash in the Metro station”.

And then she turned left to throw the paper in the trash, rather than right to recycle it. It got me thinking. I know that my first thought if I have paper trash is to recycle it. In fact, I’ve been reading Express this week because I haven’t been to the library. They’re doing elevator work at Pentagon City, and the recycle bins are blocked. So I’ve been putting the Express in my bag and recycling it at home, or at Columbia Heights in the evening.

But lots of people don’t even think to recycle. I’m sure this woman didn’t consciously choose not to recycle - the thought probably never crossed her mind.

That’s why it’s important to tell people about the little things you can do to help the environment. It’s no harder to recycle Express than it is to throw it away, so you can’t say it’s hard to recycle (At least in this instance). Compact fluorescent bulbs are cheaper in the long run. Cutting down on energy use at home will save you money. There are plenty of things that you can do that are easy, that don’t require huge lifestyle changes or lots of money, and that really do make a difference. But people have to know about these things.

Once you get people started thinking about how their actions can help the environment, the effect can snowball. If that woman thought about recycling Express, she might wonder why she doesn’t recycle more at home.

Anyway, join me and tons of others on October 15th for Blog Action Day.

It appears that, not only did someone find my site by searching for “where to place a complaint against a teen wilderness program”, but they did it twice, checking out three different pages on the second visit.

Perhaps I’ve gained a reader.

Techdirt: Why Full Text Feeds Actually Increase Page Views (The Freakonomics Explanation)

Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well.

I hate partial text feeds. It’s very true that I am much less likely to read an article if I have to click through. And with so much content on the internet, much of it pretty decent, there’s a good chance that I can find something else just as good as what you wrote.

I ‘m looking through my RSS reader, and there are hardly any feeds that I read regularly that don’t do full text.  Uniwatch doesn’t, and I frequently forget to read it.  The Hardball Times doesn’t, and I only read articles there where the subject line is intriguing.  Almost every site I read every day, including the above-linked Techdirt, has a full feed.

And look - here I am, blogging about something that they wrote at Techdirt, proving their point.

A friend recently gave me opportunity to discover that if you leave a comment under the name “Balls”, you are likely to be marked as spam by WordPress and Akismet.  Since I rarely ever see real comments marked as spam, I don’t usually watch them very carefully, and your comment is not likely to appear on the site.

I just installed a WordPress plugin that forwards the default WordPress RSS feeds to a brand new Feedburner RSS feed, which allows me to track not only hits to the site, but people who just read the RSS. Now, that may only be me, but now at least I’ll know.

Anyway, if you experience problems with the feed, let me know. It should be a transparent change for any of you subscribed to the feed.

In June, I have 30 hits from people who have Googled “hotmoms” and found this post. Okay, fine, I know people look on the internet for porn. NB: There is no porn here. There is plenty of porn on the internet, and I don’t feel the need to contribute any more.

Edit: I can’t believe no one caught that I wrote “don’t feel the need to contribute anymore” instead of “any more”. I certainly am not claiming to have previously contributed to the vast collection of porn on the internet. I guess my mom and my wife must not have read this post yet.  Both of them would have caught that.

Anyway, what I find strange is that Google Analytics tells me that, of those 30 visits, two are RETURN visits. Now, I suppose it’s possible that the two returning visits are people who have otherwise seen the site, happened to be searching for “hotmoms”, and decided to see what Complaint Hub had to offer on the subject.

But I prefer to speculate wildly and assume that two people have searched for “hotmoms”, found my site, and then searched for it again and returned. I’m sure they were disappointed both times.

The main site, complainthub.com, and the site to submit your complaints, submissions.complainthub.com, have been down since this weekend.  Sorry about that.  My hosting company upgraded from Rails 1.1.6 to 1.2.3 and forgot to tell me.  Thanks to Mo for pointing it out.  No thanks to Dreamhost for not telling me.  Actually, they’re a pretty decent hosting company.  If anyone is looking for hosting, let me know, if I refer you I get money.

And the submission site is still down.  I don’t know why.  I’ll try and get that fixed ASAP.  And by ASAP, I mean when I get around to it.