Category: Weblogs

Ovidiu Predescu:

Tomorrow will be my last day working at HP, I’ve accepted an offer to join Google. While I’m sure I’ll miss a lot of colleagues at HP I’ve worked with, I’m really excited about the new job. I’ll get a chance to work in the most successful start-up in the Valley at the moment, and get to do some really exciting things.

Rogers Cadenhead:

Useful utility for webloggers: A Source Code Formatter and DeFormatter for publishing source code in a weblog or other site. The formatter converts “<“, “>”, and other characters into HTML character entities that can be safely published (via FuzzyBlog).

Mark Pilgrim is fed up with W3C standards:

I migrated to semantic markup that has been around for 10 fucking years and they go and drop it. Not deprecate it slowly over time, mind you, but just fucking drop it. Which means that, after keeping up with all the latest standards, painstakingly marking up all my content, and validating every last page on my site, I’m still stuck in a dead end.

Wait for it…

Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.

I’m migrating to HTML 4.

Dave posted further clarification on what to do with things like the source element in the metaWeblog API.  Here’s a word of advice to all: even if you’ve read a spec a million times, re-read it before you claim to not understand it.  It will save you from looking like a complete moron.

Trust me.

Sam Ruby will be in Seattle in two weeks.  On an unrelated note I was in West Virginia last night.

David Johnson in response to Sam Ruby’s post about weblog APIs:

It hurts my head too. I’d rather see a SOAP interface where everything is specified by WSDL, or a RESTLog-like interface where everything is drop-dead simple.

I’d love to see a SOAP interface.  I love parsing some WSDL and ending up with everything I need to use it generated for me.  I’ve done it in both Java and .NET, and it’s wonderful.

Simultaneously, I would love to see a minimalistic RESTful interface.

I just hope that the major weblog software vendors go for it.

While I was crossing the street (Connecticut Avenue in Kensington, Maryland: 6 lane divided highway) this evening, I thought to myself: why isn’t my weblog moderated? [context is important here]

I link to a lot of stuff. I write some personal stuff, and then every once in awhile I write something quite worth reading.  Why can’t someone view my weblog at a Slashdot threshold of 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, or -1 depending on what they’re looking for.  If they viewed my weblog at 3, they’d catch some of my better work, probably the stuff that gets me flow from various sources.  I would probably set the default for my weblog to 1, that way the stuff that doesn’t matter would get modded down, but everything else would be 1 or above.

The stuff deemed useless by my readers would be modded -1 Redunant, Unfunny, Dross or something of the sort.  Users who found a particular post helpful would rank it +1 Insightful, Interesting, Amusing, Funny, Productive, Useful, etc.  It could be done on a per-post basis or someone could moderate several posts at once on the main page.

Now here’s the kicker for everyone who complains about weblogs always being in reverse-chronological order: There’s a little menu on the sidebar that allows you to view posts by date (chronological or reverse chronological) OR by rank (highest moderated weblog posts first).  This way someone can come to my weblog and view my stuff staring at the most intelligent things I’ve said.

I can see this easier to implement (in theory) with a dynamic weblog (like Roller) but I’m sure Sam could hack this up in about 6 lines of Perl (I’m being generous) and the obligatory new template.

Moderators: Please mod this post up.

Doc Searls stopped in SLO (San Luis Obispo for those who have never been there) while on a road trip back to Santa Barbara.  The funny thing is that I stopped in Santa Barbara for lunch while driving between LA and SLO.  I don’t think that I knew that Doc lived in Santa Barbara at the time.  I also didn’t try to search out net access in coffee shops at the time.

Here’s an entry from right before the trip.  I had been blogging with Radio for a little more than a month at that point, though I started Livejournaling in September 2001.

Heads up: Bill Kearney has set up a new weblog.  His new blog also has an RSS feed.  RSS subscribed-a-go-go.

Go read Sam Ruby’s post about weblog APIs:

Why do I say it is dramatically simpler?  Let’s propose a challenge.  In the spirit of the BDG to SOAP 1.1 which exposed all of the machinery of SOAP, I’d like to request that proponents of either the Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API produce a similar BDG for their protocols, and would like to request that it include the first item from the Radio Weblog Post Module example.  I’ll start by providing a sample for RESTLogPost.

Any takers?

Has anybody implemented any clients or servers with the Blogger2 API?  I read the specs and the arguments back and forth after the specs were released, but I’m not quite sure if things were resolved.

I personally like (and have more experience with) the metaWeblogAPI since it has support for stuff like titles and anything else you want to drag out from the RSS2.0 spec.

So what else do you have up your sleeve, Sam?  Your RestLogPost sample leaves me wanting more.  🙂

Dave Hyatt on Safari:

Blogger, if you’re listening, you can treat us just like Mozilla. We will work. What do you think I used to post blogs on the Mac before you started blocking it? 🙂

Dave Winer:

It’s true, it’s true. I’ve been offered a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and have, of course, accepted.

Hmm, I see a special weblog edition of Celebrity Deathmatch coming on: Winer vs. Lessig (or Harvard vs. Stanford).

You might notice a difference in tone between posts done at work and those done at home or on the road.  Most of my posts right now between 10am and 7pm are done at work from a computer on the sales counter of a mom and pop camera store.  It pays the bills and I enjoy most of it (except passport and immigration pictures).

I have recently noticed that posts done at work have a rather urgent (curt?) tone to them.  I type them quite quickly between customers or during slow periods.  I try to find and correct typos, but this weblog is 100% spellcheck free.  I’m not exactly happy about it, but my blogging on the go doesn’t afford me a spell checker.  (Mental note: find a light weight BloggerAPI/MetaweblogAPI client with a spell checker)

My posts from home or out and about after work tend to be composed with a little more care.  Project updates and random hackery tend to happen at home.  I tend to roll out of bend and fire up my aggregator in the morning.  My first volley of posts tends to be pre-caffeine.  I usually fix typos that I catch (my built-in spell checker sucks though) and occasionally enrich a previous post with an update or correction.  I try my best to make an update or change obvious, but every once in awhile they might not be.  Every once in awhile I will tweak a post a few times just after publishing, but that probably won’t impact any readers.

As a pseudo-resolution, I’ve been trying to write more original content for the blog this year.  I recognize that I’m a better linker than writer, but I have definately enjoyed writing a few longer mini-pieces so far this year.  They’re still flying low under the radar, but as I write more, the quality of my work will improve. Perhaps I’ll jog another weblogger’s brain and they’ll take it to the next level.  That would be awesome.

I’m a big picture guy and I take pride in broadening the big picture of others.

Ernie the Attorney:

My News Aggregator is like CNN, except I have my own selection of reporters out there in the field.  Adam Curry reports from the Netherlands, Chris Cloud is my travel advisor, and Jenny is my librarian.  I have lot’s of other sources.  The subscriptions are cheap.  Why not get yourself a news aggregator?  You deserve it.  It’s changed my life even more than TiVo.

For what it’s wroth, Ernie, Greplaw, and Lessig are my dream team of lawyers.  I scan 245 news sources [OPML] entirely too often.

Rick (codemonkey that he is) sent me an email in response to my post titled “Open Source OPML Directories?”  He has a working OPML directory renderer on his site that is powered by PHP, Javascript, JSRS and is backed by a database.

It also renders with some pretty wicked DHTML.  Maybe if we poke him enough he might release his code under a CYA open source license of some sort.

Dan Gillmor:

The Internet is Read-Write, not Read-Only.

John Robb:

OK.  That’s it.  My next computer is going to be an Apple.  After 18 years on a PC, I am ready to call it quits.  Windows is waaaay too much of a hassle for me to maintain.