It’s a sad day for me right now – I’ve had to strip the coComment integration code out of the blog. After chasing down errors for the past couple of days, I finally came back around to my original suspect, and sure enough removing coComment from the equation seems to solve all problems. (I probably would have isolated the problem a bit sooner, but conflicts with extensions and browser-caching issues were muddying the waters. That and I was panicking – my pretty blog was broken and I didn’t know why!)

Hopefully this is just a temporary measure.

I love coComment and all it does, and am still an avid supporter of the system, but at the moment full integration is breaking things with a *bit* more frequency than I am really happy with. This is especially taking into consideration the non-coCo users of this blog who are still in the majority, despite my constant harping-on about coCo! Here at Bright Meadow more than half the fun often happens in the comments – if you can’t comment, well, it’s just not cricket.

coComment first came to my attention around the same time as another comment-tracking system. That other system, MyComment, relied on the blog-owner to have a plugin that enabled a commenter to track any comments he’d/she’d made on that blog. coCo, in a subtle but important distinction, relies on the commenter to have a bookmarklet/extension on their end. Comments are tied (primarily) to the commenter and only secondarily to a particular blog. A blog-owner needs to know nothing about coComment, and perhaps more importantly, to do nothing – if a commenter wants to track their own conversations it is, quite sensibly, up to them.

That being said, an extra level of functionality was introduced fairly recently, which enabled blog-owners to integrate coComment into their blogs. With the addition of a couple of lines of javascript, all comments made on a blog are automatically submitted to coComment. If they are made by a coCommenter, then the comments get added to the appropriate person’s conversations. If they are made by a non-coCo-peep, then they just get added to the appropriate blog/post page ^*1*

This functionality excited me and still does – though I publish an RSS feed for the comments on this blog (found here), and though I get email notifications of all comments made, tracking comments is hard when I am at work as I don’t have access to a feed reader, or to webmail. With the integration however, I just have to periodically check a single webpage to be notified of any new comments made across Bright Meadow.

This isn’t the only reason I use coComment, or decided to integrate it into the blog, but it is the bit that is going to be affected most by my current decision.

I don’t anticipate this decision being final – hopefully in a day or so I’ll be able to put the integration code back in and all will once again be well and shiny in my commenting world. This is the price you pay for playing with beta technologies. Sometimes things have to go on a little safari before they work properly. Sometimes new and fantastical beasts are found. Other times you get stuck in the swamps and need to be rescued. It’s this exploration that makes it exciting!

As I said, here’s hoping Bright Meadow can be fully integrated again soon 🙂

Endnotes:
^*1* Blogs have a page of their own that conversations get added to – Bright Meadow’s is here. Each individual post/conversation thread also gets a page, as does each commenter. A veritable smorgasbord of options on how you can track conversations!^Back

cocomment, conversation, comments

I just noticed that Bright Meadow has over 1,000 comments – 1,042 to be precise (as of 17:39 today).

This is a huge deal! And that count should even be a few more because the older posts I brought over from blogspot lost their comments in the move 🙁

I really couldn’t have done it without you all 😀

Um, help? I think I did something very, very silly on Monday afternoon.

I handed in my notice at work.

I will now be unemployed as of the 30^th of June.

And I have no savings thanks to the past four years of university.

Bugger.

Some back-story:
Back at the start of February I started what is my current (soon to be ex) job. It was a temp post and only meant to last a few months at most. Five months later I am still there and starting to climb the walls with frustration – I love the people I work with, but the job does not require someone with two degrees. We’ve finally got the project to where it should have been back in April, so it seems like as good a time as any to go.

My manager took the news wonderfully well, possibly something to do with giving her two weeks notice as opposed to the one we technically have to give – I’d feel bad just leaving them in the lurch – and I got hold of the temp agency to see what fun they had for me now.

Turns out, they don’t have much fun for me at all.
Zip.
Nada.

So here I am with no job to go to on the 3^rd of July. Not a good feeling, especially when the landlord has this annoying desire to get paid monthly. I’ve applied for a few things, looking into some others, but I have this sinking feeling that I’ll be going back to shop work just so I can pay the bills. Nothing wrong with shop work, just… Thought the whole point of going to University was that they would be throwing great jobs at you once you graduated.

Why does being a grown-up have to be so difficult? *sigh*

You will now all please brainstorm in the comments on how I can start to get the dream job as commissioning editor for a literary publisher with 1) no experience, 2) no qualifications, and 3) staying in Southampton for now. Good luck 😉

Endnotes:
I’ve discovered that whilst I can listen to music and be inspired, and I can be at the gym and be inspired, I can’t be at the gym, listening to music, and be inspired all at the same time. I was on the bike this evening and had a great idea for a post whilst listening to Pink, and just kind of ground to a halt because I didn’t want to loose the idea before I had worked through it in my head. I don’t want to have to start taking a notebook to the gym with me…

And no, this post wasn’t the great idea. The great idea has been added to the list with the ten other great ideas that I am working on at the moment 😉

Is anyone experiencing difficulties with commenting?

I have noticed over the last few days that sometimes the page hangs after submitting the comment, never refreshing and showing the new comment in place. Twice just now I also got directed to brightmeadow.co.uk/wp-comments-post.php instead of the proper page.

Clearly not appropriate behaviour, and I have a sneaking feeling something to do with the coComment integration. Now, is this behaviour just attacking me because my blog has taken an irrational dislike to me, or are other people experiencing it as well?

The observant of you (at least of those of you who actually visit the site and don’t just read it via RSS) might have noticed a few colourful leaf logos sprouting around the place. So far that is the only change that has been made to Bright Meadow to make my new lords and masters happy and I don’t anticipate any more changes either. I got the member agreement to sign last Saturday and access to the promised land (forums) on Monday and it has been a real eye-opener of a week as far as I am concerned.

Now it is one thing to be told “we have the best content on the web, we have the best people on the web”, and quite another to suddenly be surrounded by these people who are witty, smart, motivated, and in a league of their own. I’m not sure why I am surprised, especially when you consider that the people already in the network were the driving reason behind me wanting to join in the first place, but I’ve never been one to think through the consequences of my actions. Choosing where I did my undergrad by sticking a pin in a list sure gave a certain frison of excitement to the whole experience, but also led to three years of being mildly depressed by the pervasive greyness of the North. It also probably wasn’t the wisest thing I ever did, getting into a relationship with a guy bare months before he had to leave the country, but at the same time I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Not thinking things through has a history for me of either working out shockingly badly, or abso-fucking-lutley brilliantly.

I didn’t really think through this whole 9rules gig. Oh sure, I agonized endlessly over whether I wanted to get in, but I didn’t think further to what came after. Mainly this is because I honestly didn’t think I stood a fluffy-kitten-in-hell’s chance of getting selected, but also because of my afore mentioned inability to plan things through.

So here I am, suddenly a member of the network prided on having the best content and people around. This begs to make you infer that I am one of the best. Only, I compare what I’ve done here with what is essentially a personal blog, with what other people have done – redesigning Flock is only the latest in a long line of things that spring to mind – and I find myself lacking. I’m now gonna be standing alongside the movers and shakers of my digital world and find myself unable to give even a little wiggle.

As if I didn’t have a rather robust inferiority complex already.

I feel mildly guilty about the post I made last night about the Moving Pixies (reference being to the pixies that lived in our old office and came out at night to mess things up). It was pants and I knew even as I went to sleep that I shouldn’t have posted it. I threw it together in five minutes flat from a germ of an idea I had had at lunchtime and, well, you saw the resulting mess. Still, the post will stand as a testament to something Dewayne and Rob talked about in the comments of last Sunday’s Roast – the need to spend time over what you write.

Time, alas, is one thing that has been sadly lacking this past week. I have found myself engrossed, reading the words of fellow 9rulers (the day I don’t get a buzz out of saying that phrase is the day I leave), getting involved in conversations, and generally just marveling at the caliber of people 9rules has managed to gather under its banner. I’ve been inspired to write constantly this week but whenever I sit down at the keyboard I find myself lured away by the bookmark to the forums. Every day this week I’ve been merrily surfing away, chasing down links and thoughts, only to catch a glimpse at the clock and notice that it is near 1 am and that I have to be up at 6.30 for work. This leaves me with one option – scribble the idea down and pray that I will remember what I wanted to say when I finally get back to it. The orange post-it notes are rapidly covering my pin board.

Not that all these ideas buzzing around my skull is a bad thing, but is unusual for me to have so many ideas hanging around in the green room. And I love it.

illyna turned round to me today and said “so basically your complaining because it is too good?!”

Yes, yes I am. I am suffering from a chronic lack of sleep and it is all 9rules fault. The posts this past week on the blog have, frankly, sucked and (again) I know firmly who I am blaming. I look at what I’ve achieved so far and am proud at how far I’ve come, then I look at what’s around me and sigh because there is so much more I could be doing.

This isn’t a call for “oh, don’t be silly Cas, Bright Meadow is great” comments (though a few would be nice every now and then 😉 ). It’s an honest evaluation of the situation as I see it. I don’t blog for profit. I don’t blog for work. I got asked a time or two when I was thinking about submitting why I wanted to join a network and at that time it was a question I couldn’t really answer. I decided it was something I would have to try before I knew either way.

I remember the conversations we used to have in the courtyard last year. The sun was shining, we were armed with endless cups of tea, and we all had a seemingly never-ending capacity to find things to talk about so we didn’t have to go back to our respective research. So many ideas got kicked back and forth, many goof-ball, many more that made me question my world. I didn’t just get a tan whilst we were sitting out there avoiding work, I learnt new things, and more importantly had an absolute blast doing it. At the same time, in the midst of all this seemingly irrelevant chatter, I found ideas for my own research crystalizing and I saw new and exciting avenues of investigation opening up.

It’s early days yet, but already I get that same feeling around 9rules. Fun, because even the serious stuff should be fun, but in the background scarily intelligent and driven people kicking ideas around. Yes, they’re mainly making it up as they go along, but they make it look easy. I am in awe. These are people I admire and, perhaps more importantly, respect. I’m realizing I don’t need any other reason to be in a network. Blogging alone is great but every now and then it’s nice to know there’s someone out there who will get your back should you need it.

Call me silly, but I’m taking this as a call to step up my game.

The strangest things go missing when you move office. As a by-the-by, 24 hours from notification you have to move office to being fully installed in the new office has to be a record. And I mean 24 hours – confirmation of move 14:30 Tuesday. Confirmation of where moving to 08:30 Wednesday morning. Everything in truck by 10:30. Everything networked back together in new location by 14:00 Wednesday afternoon. Our in-house movers rule.

But anyway the oddest things are missing.

A blank piece of plastic that used to cover the space where a floppy disk drive could be on my computer.

Two of our eight rubbish bins.

Half a foot rest.

The washing-up liquid.

We also seemed to have gained a printer and computer base-unit – just waiting on the panicked emails from whoever they really belong to!

But yes, our in-house movers are really rather good at their job. Next time I move flat, I’m gonna see if they’ll move my stuff for me! I mean, we had a George Clooney and an Andrew Flintoff look-alike on the team, so it can’t be that bad 😉

The post-it notes have made a return to my life. I know there are better ways of organising things, but post-its are kind of my default. It is shocking how unorganized I’ve got again recently.