Category: Weblogs

This just in: Photo Matt has gone HTTP 447.

Via freshmeat, Rawdog 1.12 is out and about.  1.12 is a bugfix and minor feature release.  Rawdog is currently my aggregator of choice.  It’s simple, gets out of my way, and lets me view my news just about anywhere that I have access to a web browser.

Newsforge notes that b2evolution snuck a release out the door at a very opportune time.  The release announcement notes a plugin architecture, which may sway switchers.  The new release also includes a bevy of text formatters:

By request from our users, several popular text formatting plug-ins have been included such as Textile, Auto-P, Greymatter, BB code, Texturize, and graphic smilies.

That’s nice.  The smileys in the post editing interface of the previous version turned me off.  I haven’t had a chance to take a look at it closely enough to see if I can turn that off.

I would expect that the WordPress crew is slaving away at getting the newest version out the door.  I still use Radio to power this blog, though I have some MovableType blogs scattered about along with a few Wikis.  I also try to test out blog/CMS software as often as possible, so I’ve seen recent versions of most of the popular blog engines.

Mena has clarified and modified the licensing of MT3.0.  Yeah, it still costs money.  Freak out if you will.  MT saves Jeremey time, and that si worth money to him.  Mark has switched to WordPress and now has freedon.  I’m still using Radio on this blog, mostly because the thought of cleaning up and converting 3000 some entries scares me.

I was impressed by WordPress before it was cool.

Over at the Early Adopter weblog, they’re taking a look at new bits included in the latest preview release of Longhorn.  There are some really amazing bits in there.  Things like your machine name, connection status, your IP addresses and your domain information.  It also allows you to easily ping another IP or download/upload files.

Bits like this make coding a breeze, but it also facilitates things like disabling the firewall with 3 lines of VBScript.

Double edged sword, that.

EasyMoblog is a moblogging and weblogging platform built on PHP.  It allows users to post to their weblog/moblog via Email (the classic solution).  It supports RSS and looks to have a simple and easy admin interface.  Check out the demo blog/moblog.  EasyMoblog is released under the GPL.

Thanks to James Robertson for the pointer: The Baltimore Sun is offering a ton of new feeds.  He has added several to his aggregator, and I’ve added several to my rawdog instance.  I did the same when Yahoo and the AP started producing feeds, and unsubscribed from many of them after suffering from information overload.  When the BBC unleashed a bunch of feeds, I only subscribed to a few: mostly business, tech, and a little local UK news.  They’ve proven quite useful.

I think that I’ll audition these feeds from the Baltimore Sun and probably end up voting some off the island.

This is excellent.  Rael has put together an atom feed for mobilewhack.

In the RSS feed item associated with this post, Mark Pilgrim declares the following:

Note: The “dive into mark” feed you are currently subscribed to is deprecated. If your aggregator supports it, you should upgrade to my Atom feed, which includes both summaries and full content.

I should note that Mark’s Syndicated Feeds page makes no mention of the Atom feed and makes no note of deprecation of the current feeds.  I’ll file that under sorta deprecated for now.  At the same time, I feel like I should get off my butt and subscribe to his Atom feed since I really miss full content posts from Mark showing up in my aggregator.

Steve Mallett:

I’m playing with scoop.
It is kicking much ass-age.
Moderate my soul.

I’m too tired to contribute my own, but one could have some fun with this.

Hey cool!  That’s my picture on the bottom right.  It’s not one of my best, but there it is on the front page of textamerica (for a few minutes anyway).

The really cool part is that they sent me an email telling me about it.  I know that the process is automated, but it is a warm fuzzy email buried in a mound of spam.

Speaking of textamerica, I got an email from Shawn Honnick last night, and yes, and I’ll totally be sticking with them while they figure things out.

Wow. I installed WordPress a few minutes ago, and the whole process was one of the easiest and quickest blog installs that I’ve ever done. I can probably set up a MT blog in my sleep. Blosxom just takes a few minutes but lacks Whizzy menus and user-friendly stuff. It was as simple as uncompressing WordPress, creating a MySQL database, editing about 4 fields in a php file and a few configuration clicks.

It was really quick. It’s really slick.

It’s set up for mutli-author blogging out of the box. It does trackback, pings weblogs.com, and does all of the basic things that I can think of out of the box. The RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds that it generates all validate. The templates do included a good bit of embedded PHP, so they are going to be harder to edit than your standard Movable Type template. The default template is okay but not particularly beautiful. It could always be worse.

It looks like they allow per-blog and per-post geolocation data in the form of lat/long. I haven’t seen much done with this in the blog that is produced, but I’m not looking very hard. Of course many evil and interesting things can be done with such data.

I would peg WordPress (which is derived from the b2 codebase) at a little more advanced than your Livejournal/blogger/hosted blog and around the same level of complexity/flexibility of Movable Type. It does require PHP and MySQL, though both of those can be found in less expensive shared hosting. I’m not going to move my daily blogging to it, but I am definitely going to poke around.

Inklog is cool and all, but geek handwriting is rarely all that legible. I hope that MS is using geeks to test their handwriting recognition, because if you can decipher geekwriting, you can probably comprehend anyone, save perhaps doctors.

It looks like logging in to textamerica last night to edit an entry updated my template to include google ads.  It also changed the template to one of the new default ones.  I guess I’m complaining about a free service which rocks, but I am a little annoyed at the sudden appearance of google ads on my moblog.  I’ve always had the few required linkbacks in my template, and recently each entry in my RSS feed adds some links to textamerica.

I went poking around the footer template, and the div containing the Google ads is required.  I can’t remove them or alter them or else I am A Bad Man (and probably violating ToS).

It is understandable that textamerica needs some way to fund their site whcih has gone from a few hundred users to probably thousands and thousands in the past few months.  It has always been a free service, and I’ve never quite been sure how they’ve been paying for it.  They sell ringtones, but it obviously is not making them enough money.

My suggestion to textamerica: offer a for-pay ad-free account option.  Maybe a couple of bucks a month ($2.95-$4.95) would cover it.  I would definitely consider the option.  Right now I’ve got a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, so I’m thinking about moving on to self-hosted moblogging.  Textamerica has definitely got a lot going for it: When I first signed up with them, I went from zero to moblog in just a few minutes.

Via Ken MacLeod, Wallop is a place “where you can share photos, blog, and interact with your friends.”

It’s by invite only right now.  If anyone has the hookup, I’d love to hear from you (<%radio.macros.mailTo ()%>).  The idea is scary but exciting at the same time. 

Diego has posted a monster blog entry about blogging.  If you want to learn about blogging and/or start a blog, go read it.

Jonathan Knudsen at Sun has a write up about mobile blogging.  It is a good roundup of mobile blogging in general, and also accessing/updating blogs from the J2ME environment.

Russell Beattie’s weblog and Mobitopia were down this morning.  The guys on #mobitopia were trying to get in touch with him to let him know, but we should not have been worried:

<RussellB> My *Mom* called me at 7:00 a.m. this morning to tell me

I posted my first entry on Mobitopia this morning: Nokia’s Mobile Media 7700.  I think it’s a good start, and if it’s the tip of the iceberg as El Reg suggests, I’m so there.

C.K. Sample has set up shop at BlogSpot.  His new project is called 3650 and a 12 inch.  I’ve sent him an email asking how much he needs to bankroll an RSS feed.  I’m going to loose track of him without it.