Awhile back, I opined that a DC area blog meetup might be interesting. It turns out that there’s a blog meetup clearing house. The next DC area meeting is February 19.
I’ll do my best to make it (I’m a true slacker if I don’t, it’s just a few miles from my house), and if there’s too much talk about Iraq I can always play some video games…
Seriously though, it sounds like fun.
I’m still not as comfortable as most when it comes to expression but this blogging thing is helping me a lot. If only all the social phobes could have their own place — other than the spam-troll-infested Usenet. (I haven’t visited that group much but there’s lots of “snap out of it” and “F*%) this and that”, etc.)
He’s been a Salon blogger since the beginning of Salon blogs, but he is in the process of migrating over to Movable Type on tenorman.net. Good luck and keep up the blog!
Also, everyone please welcome rb.log 0.75:
rb.log is a full-featured weblogger written in Ruby. It features file uploads, comments, blog- rolling, side-bar editing, bookmarklets, the Blogger API, searching, RSS syndication, and archives. It also performs well on slower machines by regenerating static pages after posts are made.
The project website is also a good example of rb.log output. Also, everyone loves screenshots.
Mark Pilgrim introduces his 100 stories of unfamous people:
They are not syndicated. They are not categorized. They are not archived in reverse chronological order.
Mark is an amazing storyteller and I look forward to those little squares filling up.
There’s something I’d like to see more bloggers do: print stylesheets.
Read on for how to easily add this to your weblog with CSS. Thanks for pointing out the erroneous link, Wesley.
Thankfully Sam Ruby is filtering spam out of his comments. I subscribe to his comments feed but was getting ready to unsubscribe after having to scroll past several spam messages while skimming my news aggregator.
I get enough spam in my inbox.
Sam is also tackling trackback spam on his weblog by verifying that there is indeed a link to his site. He is also looking at upgrading the backend to intertwingly:
However, that part will have to wait as I’m in the midst of evaluating a wholesale upgrade of the software running my weblog, and in the process evaluating Blosxom 1.2, Blojsom, PyBlosxom, and Vellum.
Phillip Pearson seems to be begging for another project:
What features are people looking for in blogging packages? What’s left to do? Suggestions please 🙂
There’s a story in the .com section of The Washington Post today called New Kids On the Blog. It started out as a nonarticle, but picked up nicely on page E6. While reading the article, this popped out as quotable and thought provoking:
While blogs are a significant publishing phenomenon, I see them as entirely different from professional news organizations, which have paid staffs that ferret out and vet information according to established principles of fairness, accuracy and truth.
There is always tension between traditional reporters, BigPubs, and the weblog community. However, she did manage to quote both Evan and Dave, which tends to be par for the course in the “Yet Another Weblog Article” formula.
Pretty soon we’ll have a privacy policy and a mission statement, and it’s all downhill from there.
Apparently, my quick and dirty news aggregator is found useful by others too. So, we have setup a sourceforge project to host this. At the moment, it is still the same code base. We’ll add more features to this.
Rael:
Blosxom 1.2 is available for download. This release adds static rendering of individual entries (along with path- and date-based views), customizable daily date-stamp (via
date.flavourtemplate), configurable file extension and default flavour, and bits and bobs of cleanup (most notable being the end of the dreaded double-slash bug — if you don’t know what this means, don’t worry about it 😐 ).
As I see it, the most practical uses of public key encryption in blogging are going to be securing all those other things that we’re currently relying on a lack of idots to keep safe: Trackback, this FOAF thing, communication to community servers, and so on.
I’m hearing this more and more. Sam Ruby thinks that signing might be involved in his email comments experiment:
Signing is the next step, particularly given that e-mail clients already tend to have built in support for this. Ultimately, when the spam starts arriving, only signed e-mails will be accepted.
David Czarnecki has been hard at work on Blojsom. It is available on SourceForge, committed to CVS, and the javadocs and site docs are available.
Russ redesigned his site. I like it, even though I usually read it via RSS. Clean lines are good.
Wow, thanks for pointing out JSPWiki, Greg. I love the wiki idea, but it suffers from *nuke syndrome, every wiki (more or less) looks the same. I really like the sidebar design on the JSPWiki site and CocoonWiki. I think I’m stuck with MoinMoin (which I still thinks rocks, btw) or the equivalent on the server side, though I think I’ll set up a JSPWiki for behind the firewall.
How easy would it be to integrate something like JSPWiki with Roller? I really like the integration that Mr. Orchard has accomplished over at 0xDECAFBAD. I’m not personally a Roller user (tho I’ve played with it and love it), but given the JSP connection, I think it might not be too impossible
Mark Pilgrim is unplugging:
I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself.
Hopefully it will help. Good luck. I’ve been having some plugged-in issues lately, but they’re all self-imposed. No client to blame.
CNet:
Web logs (commonly known as “blogs”), message boards and other online forums are becoming increasingly important vehicles for developers to attract customers–and development talent–well before an application even enters the beta stage.
Looks like Jake has unleashed a Radio backup-restore command to the radio-dev list. I’ll let them work out the bugs, then I might try it so I can reformat and reinstall my ailing win2k server. I’ve been quite afraid to do so until now.
Tim has some good ideas. Having released tblib, I’ll do my best to keep an eye on the direction of trackback.