Matt Croydon::Postneo

Category: Weblogs

  • dotnetweblogs.com/sgentile

    Sam Gentile has migrated from Radio to an ASP.NET weblog.  His RSS feed has also changed.  I’ve updated my links and feeds appropriately.  My old pointers to his weblog will still point to his old blog, and will eventually rot.

  • Using Informative Blog Entry Titles +1

    Jeremy Zawodny:

    If you’re using a cute title rather than one which summarizes your post, I’m unlikely to click and read it. You probably don’t care, but I wanted to mention it.

  • Limited Weblogging

    Rogers Cadenhead:

    Scott Johnson has hit the 20MB limit on Radio UserLand’s server, which can happen if you’re publishing a lot of images or multimedia files.

    I use Radio to upstream to an external server.  I just hit my 100MB limit on my web provider, so you can only imagine how long ago I would have reached my 40MB limit with Radio.  I actually only used Userland’s servers for a few days, because I already had web hosting.  Besides, I’d rather not be a number.

    I am a URI, damnit.

  • MovableType 2.6 Soon

    Michael Radwin notes that MovableType 2.6 is nearing completion.  It looks like MT users have a nice set of features to look forward to in 2.6.  I installed 2.51 in order to test TrackBack stuff, and it looked really nice.

  • News Briefs

    Here’s a quick lunchtime roundup from my RSS feeds:

    • Mark would like to have quickies like this or his ‘in brief’ posts autogenerated.  Me too.  It’d be nice to have a section of autogenerated links at the bottom of each day (or something like that)
    • Rael is posting to his Blosxom blog with NetNewsWire Pro
    • CK Sample has a mini-review of the 12 inch Powerbook
    • Ingo wants to write a .NET column, and get paid for it!
    • Diego notes that Microsoft forgot to patch some boxes.
    • PC Linux Online notes that there is a new Gnomemeeting release.

  • Commercial Weblogs

    Ed Cone:

    This [weblogs at Jupiter Research]  could be very useful to me. It’s a great commercial use of weblogs.

  • The effect of RSS On Design

    Dane Carlson redesigned his weblog.  (I like it btw)  This begs the question:

    If a redesign happens and everyone is reading via RSS, did a redesign happen?

  • Weblog Censorship

    Ed Cone:

    I know there is a lot about my life I don’t include in my weblog. Some of it is too boring to share, and some of it is too interesting.

  • DC-MD-VA Blogger Lunch/Dinner/Meetup

    James Robertson wants to get some DC-MD-VA bloggers together.  I’m in!

  • JSP Error Pages

    Ack!  I was without internet all workday yesterday at the store.  I was hoping to elaborate on my Java jab this morning, but was unable to do so.  First of all, I’d like to thank Dave Johnson for creating a kickass open-source Java-based weblogging package.  I have it running behind the firewall (along with a movable type installation) to play with and test.  It’s really cool.  And it’s free.

    I do find the stack trace when something goes wrong with Tomcat to be both a beeyotch and a blessing.  It’s great if you’re trying to debug stuff or figure out which class file you’re missing, but I’d like to hide all of that info from end users.  I think it would be ideal to have a simplified error page (like this example over at devshed) for end users, and enable a more detailed error page for debugging/development (DEBUG == 1).  Just a thought.

    Andy caught the error quicky (one of those errors that does not present itself until it is live) but not quite quickly enough.  It looks like Dave is thinking of simplifying things a bit to get rid of Velocity problems.  He might want to keep Velocity available as an option over a simplified macro system just in case people want to do cool Velocity stuff on a per-post basis.

  • Blosxom 1.0 and pyRuby?

    Here’s two birds with one stone.  So if you show up at PyCon, Sam, will you still be wearing your Perl shirt?

    Rael Dornfest: I’m thrilled to announce the 1.0 release of my Blosxom weblog app…. With the choice of dynamic or static rendering, Blosxom is at the point I’d hoped it’d be when it went 1.0.

    Now I have my first dillema. I want to do static rendering for scalability, but in accordance with the teachings of REST, I also want my URI to identify resources that can serve both GETs and POSTs.

    Meanwhile, the temptation to ditch Perl for Python is growing…

  • Parsing RSS At All Costs

    Mark’s second O’Reilly article is up:

    As I said in last month’s article, RSS is an XML-based format for syndicating news and news-like sites. XML was chosen, among other reasons, to make it easier to parse with off-the-shelf XML tools. Unfortunately in the past few years, as RSS has gained popularity, the quality of RSS feeds has dropped. There are now dozens of versions of hundreds of tools producing RSS feeds. Many have bugs. Few build RSS feeds using XML libraries; most treat it as text, by piecing the feed together with string concatenation, maybe (or maybe not) applying a few manually coded escaping rules, and hoping for the best.

  • RSS Feeds as Web Services

    Jeremy Allaire notes that there have been over 10,000 sightings of RSS “web services” spotted in the wild:

    As I’ve been reading and writing today I’ve come to a somewhat obvious conclusion:  there’s been an explosion of ‘web services’ in the past year, and it has nothing to do with SOAP, WSDL and such standards as described in the industry but with the ascending role of RSS and RDF as XML data and syndication formats.

    Jeremy has a point.  Another interesting tidbit from his post:

    Today’s count of RSS feeds from Syndic8.com:  10408 feeds
    Today’s count of SOAP APIs from xMethods.com:  275 APIs

    That’s a huge difference.

  • LinuxWorld Coverage

    Via Slashdot, BusinessWeek covers Linuxworld.

    I’ll be posting my blogger on the street coverage on Thursday.  I’ll be in New York City from earty to mid morning until I decide to drive home.  If anyone will be up there and would like to meet up, you know how to contact me.

  • Russ on Moblogging

    Russ has some moblogging thoughts:

    I think unless you’re a student who’s always out and about or a mover and shaker like Joi there’s not a whole hell of a lot to moblogging. It’s more of an instant online scrapbook than a real communications medium. With blogging there’s that level of interactivity which makes it very interesting. I read blogs, I copy permalinks, I write my posts and post to them, and I check my referrers for people who posted to me. With moblogging, I take a picture, send off an email and then I’m done. There’s nothing else to do – no interaction. Photos don’t link. And browsing the web from a 2″ x 3″ screen is difficult at best.

  • The Modern Homepage

    Zenmaster Mark commenting on Sam Ruby’s blog:

    In 1995, my dog had a home page and an email address. In 2003, it seems obvious to me that she needs an RSS feed and a FOAF profile.

  • Navel Gazing

    Wow, I’ve had 14,240 page hits to my weblog according to Userland.  Of course I’m still a long way from the top 100 list.

    In further navel-gazing, I’ve moved up and am now the 41st Matt on google, up from 45th.

  • Feed Express and Syndirella

    Feed Express looks tasty [via Erik].  Syndirella looks yummie too. [via that Dave fellow]

  • LinuxWorld Expo Blogger Dinner

    Yesterday I asked if any bloggers out there would be attending LinuxWorld Expo January 22-24.  I haven’t heard anything, but if you’d like more info or might attend, you can visit (and modify!) the wiki page I set up for it.

    I finally got around to installing MoinMoin on my web provider.  The installation was really easy.  If you’d like, you can poke around the wiki root at Matt Croydon::Postwiki.

    Update: Oops, the wiki page now actually points to the wiki page.

  • Linking to Your RSS Feed in Radio

    Sam Ruby encouraged me to link to my RSS feed, which Mark Pilgrim had suggested before I started blogging with Radio.  Mark pointed to instructions by Dave Winer on adding this, rsd, and blogroll support to your Radio template.  It’s as easy as adding a little macro to the head of your template, Radio takes care of the rest.