Facebook CommentsTNG is a plugin for your WordPress blog that will spider your notes page and find imported WordPress blogs and bring the comments back into WordPress.

via The Kingdom of Philtopia » Plugins.

The Facebook comments show up with the comment writer’s name, a link to Facebook, and a Facebook logo as the avatar.

I suppose there are a couple small privacy concerns here.

First, you need to provide your Facebook credentials in order to crawl the notes and import the comments. I’m guessing Facebook Connect doesn’t provide an API for this. So it’s a question of whether you trust a guy named Phil to write a benevolent WP plugin. You might want to take a few seconds to view the plugin code.

Second, your “friends” who have commented on Facebook haven’t necessarily opted in to having their full name published on the Internet outside of a closed system like Facebook. But if this is something that actually concerns them, I’d advise that they not comment on anything on Facebook. Just visit the WordPress blog and make up an anonymous handle. Trusting a website to keep you safe/anonymous/private is stupid. You need to take responsibility for your own online presence.

What is WPtouch?

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into an iPhone application-like experience when viewed from an iPhone or iPod touch. It comes complete with ajax & effects, and all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also allows for near-complete customization through your WordPress admin.

Props to Rodrigo, whose obsessive link sharing led me to discover a WP blog that used the plug-in.

Unfortunately, all of this blogging history leaves a lot of loose ends. I have hundreds of posts that link to articles and sites that no longer exist. I also have links to blog posts of mine that refer to the old Blogger or Movable Type filename. And I’ve got tons of posts where I quoted some article or site using an em instead of a blockquote, simply because I was going for a particular presentation rather than trying to convey meaning. This last bit ought to get me at least a year in geek purgatory.

Now that I’ve switched my hosting provider to Dreamhost (they’re awesome), updated WordPress to the latest release, completed the NaBloPoMo thing, and gotten involved in this Blogging Challenge with CJ, I have a renewed interest in my blog. I’ve updated the robots.txt, published a new XML sitemap and told Google about it, installed All-In-One SEO, and have been going over some logs and other things to figure out what’s broken and how to fix it.

As you can imagine, it’s a big pain in the ass.

At what point do you just say “Fuck it” and leave the 404s, stop trying to figure out what to put in the .htaccess file to redirect MT URLs to their most likely WP counterpart, stop categorizing the uncategorized posts, stop fixing the errors in text encoding that happened from backing up and restoring MySQL files, leave the blockquotes as ems, and stop worrying about whether your reader will be able to follow a link to a news article in 2003 on the Boston Globe site that talks about a fireworks accident in Florida?

Now’s probably a good time.

NaBloPoMo 21

NaBloPoMo 7

At first I thought the whole thing might have been a joke, with imposters on both sides, but no, it’s the real deal. AP, BBC, CBC

Special thanks to Arif for sharing.

NaBloPoMo 2

Some of the key items:

• Revenues are not covering costs, and costs are growing faster than revenues
• Half of Facebook’s users are from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, places where you can’t make too much money
• Facebook’s CFO is reportedly in Dubai trying to get some oil money

Yahoo!’s $1b is probably looking pretty good right about now. Then again, Yahoo! probably would have fucked it up.

NaBloPoMo 1