Christian Crumlish (xian): metablog

Aoling the blogosphere

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 18:08:20 GMT

Elizabeth Lane Lawley (question, is it overly familiar to refer to a weblogger by the name they sign their posts with - that is, would it be forward to have started my lead with "Liz Lawley writes..."?) writes in here mamamusings blog about the coming "aoling" of the blogosphere when weblogs hit critical mass an AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other big companies get into the game. There's good followup in the comments. I've just added mamamusings to my blogroll.

Blogging has grown up

Wed, 02 Jul 2003 17:18:43 GMT

Chuqui at Teal Sunglasses (whom I first read when he was active in several Usenet communities) writes a "Dear Dave" letter expressing his own view of the personality politics in the weblog leadership world lately:

Blogging has grown up. it doesn't need a parent any more, it needs a friend.

Migration project and priorities

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 18:28:26 GMT

As promised last week, I am going to start migrating some of my weblogs from tool to tool. I'm not doing this just to demonstrate the processes and the problems, but because I have had longstanding plans to do so as a matter of trying to rationalize (or refactor) my web presence a bit. My personal view of blog tool migration is that each vendor should make it exceedingly easy to import blog entries from any other tool, probably using some dialect of XML. I think it's probably too much to expect for the vendors to bend over backwards to make you leave, but since most tools produce XML-based feeds and some even store, archive, or backup their database contents in XML formats, just having good importing should do the trick most of the time. My most immediate plans are to move several of my Blogger blogs to Movable Type and to move Radio Free Blogistan from Radio to MT. Blogger to MT isn't so tricky, though I will document that process. I also plan to convert my old personal journal/diary/blog sites from their engines (hand-rolled, diaryland, Blogger, and LiveJournal) and import them into my X-POLLEN blog. The motivation of taking Bite Media and Uncle John's Blog off of Blogger is mainly to get basic features like comments and categories enabled. I like the new "Dano" Blogger interface and I'm a paid Blogger Pro user, plus I write and speak about weblogs in my work, so I will continue using Blogger for some purposes. One possible idea is to run a simple link list through Blogger and include it as a sidebar in my other blogs. The motivation for moving RFB from Radio to MT is more complex. The primary impetus is Trackback. I use the Blogistan site primarily to discuss the weblog phenomenon, and most of the thought leaders in that space use TB to coordinate their conversations. TB has already been demoed for Manila and is coming to Radio as soon as Userland's priorities allow, but I'm impatient, especially as the not-Echo discussion rages and I feel less than a full participant in the conversation. I will also continue to use Radio, mainly because I like the news aggregator and I use it to automatically assemble all my other blog posts into one place (currently the x-syndicate category here). The main thing I don't like (and don't understand) about the multiauthor weblog tool is the way it changes folds incoming post titles into the body of reposted entries. If I knew how to fix that, I would. I also like being part of this Salon blog community, such as it is, and using Radio is kind of a prerequisite, at least for the stats side of things. So, I'll be renaming my Salon Radio weblog with usernum 1111 to something besides RFB, once I've migrated the RFB contents to MT. I may use Salonika, or x-syndicate, or something else entirely, and I'll probably rarely or never post to it directly but continue using it as a compendium site. What's interesting is that people linking to the old address blogs.salon.com/0001111/ will end up at the new site and people linking to radiofreeblogistan.com will still end up going to RFB, despite its different backend. So, this is going to be complicated. Broadly, there are three major steps:

Set up a new RFB blog in Movable Type, pointed at a staging area.
Adapt the current RFB design to MT's templates.
Convert the 2000 or so posts here to MT import format.
Import the old entries into MT.
Publish the new MT RFB blog to the rfb.com domain.
Rename my Radio blog and redirect its output elsewhere.
Delete the old Radio entries once they are safely and properly working in the new blog.

I think that's about it. So far all I've done is (1). Converting the templates shouldn't be too hard, even though there are conceptual differences. Radio breaks out the day and item as separate templates but uses the same home template for the home page and for archive pages. MT nests the day and item sections in one main index template but uses different templates for various archive views. Once I've got the new templates set up (and I still would like to improve the design, but one thing at a time!), I'll post a dummy entry there just to test it and to demonstrate that that step is completed. I plan to document all my procedures and note the gotchas when possible. The big problem is converting the backed up entries to the MT format without breaking permalinks. Also, Radio stores each day as YYYY/MM/DD.html whereas MT by default puts each entry on its own archive page, with my preferred URL being YYYY/MM/DD/entry_title.html. In order not to break old links to the site, I'll probably end up keeping a duplicate set of all past entries. That may be confusing to some, but it should minimize breakage. Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Migrate from Radio Userland to Movable Type page offers a Python script for accomplishing the conversion from Radio's XML backup files. It looks very cool. I'm still figuring out how to run Python on my Mac (OS X 10.2.6), but if I can wrap my head around that, it may solve most of my problems when I get to step 3. As I said, though, I'm impatient, and there's a chance I may do a more crude migration in the short run, which would involve just starting to post using MT and stopping using Radio. The problem is that MT's search wouldn't know about the old Radio posts, but then I could continue using the Google search aimed at my radiofreeblogistan.com and that should work just fine. It's by far less elegant to leave the entires unconsolidated in two separate data piles, but in the end I'll do what works, even if that means taking a sloppy path of least resistance. The Blogger-related migrations are easier, as I said, so I may just slip them in along the way, when I get the time. I'm still interested in other tools, especially those used for multiple-user sites, such as pMachine and Drupal, so I doubt my consolidation will last. I'm also trying to get a wiki set up at thedeadbeat.com. I downloaded phpWiki, but I'm running into problems mainly related to my own stupidity and ignorance. Updates as they come.

His marbles

Mon, 30 Jun 2003 01:11:24 GMT

Dave's back, having made his point, rallying support for "mature leadership" against competing big companies and personal vendettas. That was fast.

Syndication list for developers

Sun, 29 Jun 2003 21:42:18 GMT

One tangible effect of the recent weblog format/syndication/api/archiving/interop debate recently is that Rogers Cadenhead has started a mailing list, the Site Syndication Format development list to discuss "ambiguities in the RSS 2.0 specification."

The goal is to develop a new specification from scratch ... that clarifies or corrects these issues.... The members of the list should be developers who have written software that produces or consumes RSS 2.0.

Note: I just added Rogers' Workbench weblog to my subscriptions.

Also: Dave Winer has taken Scripting News off the air to protest "lack of support, even namecalling" coming out of the current discussions.

Echo's out

Fri, 27 Jun 2003 19:34:27 GMT

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.

Jeremiah, 52:7

The Echo Project, née Sam Ruby's wiki pie, needs (again) a new name. I'm warming up to Shelley Powers' suggestion (Pubs) and Timothy Appnel's suggestion (ESP).

How to backup and restore the world

Fri, 27 Jun 2003 17:12:34 GMT

I just added David Pollard's How to Save the World weblog to my subscriptions. His blog is a nonstop source of fascinating thoughts about business, the web, society, and so on. He has also done some interesting analyses of Salon bloggers by traffic and interconnectedness. (Since Harry Potter will be knocking me out of Salon's top ten all time blogs within a day or so, I cherish my relative interleavedness with the rest of the blogosphere.) Anyway, I kept forgetting to check his site until I saw a link back in, and that was the clue that I needed to subscribe. It will also make it easier for me to quote him and x-post to the salonika category when he posts something about the Salon blogs community. I need to update the feed boxes on the salonika page, I know, especially since the untimely retirement of the Raven.

\"I am content\"

Fri, 27 Jun 2003 04:51:36 GMT

Dave Winer's commitment to RSS is beyond doubt. In fact, he says he himself is content in an RSS container. He has also issued a broadminded endorsement of the Echo project, saying he'll recommend Userland support it without, of course, backing off from RSS support.

Unsubscribing from Wi-fi News

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 23:09:24 GMT

Wi-Fi Networking News is a great example of a journalistic niche blog. Glenn Fleishman rules his beat and proves the concept. He's the go-to guy for all things wi-fi. If I were writing an article on wi-fi I'd start with his blog and then ask him questions before I went practically anywhere else. But the site just generates too much information about wi-fi for me. It outspecs my level of interest or ability to digest. I need other people to filter this stuff for me. I already read BoingBoing Blog, for example, and Cory is fairly wi-fi obsessed, so I get a good overview there. It's weird to unsubscribe from a newsfeed because the source is too good!

Note: I've been fiddling with the basic RFB design although the site really needs a total overhaul. Poking around the home template (and the CSS file in the gems folder, http://radiofreeblogistan.com/gems/tabloid.css), I've removed nearly all the blogrolling.com javascript-driven blogrolls. Some of them will be parked on the appropriate category pages or on other sites. I'll migrate any sites that seem missing over to my subscriptions (http://radiofreeblogistan.com/gems/mySubscriptions.opml), now listed on my home pages as my sources, since in this blog context that's what they are.

Also, from a much older to-do item, I added a little who am I info to the main page, because I know sometimes people like to know who's writing. I still hate the design, but that'll keep.

Anyway, honoring an old suggestion, I'll post something when I add to or subtract from my subscriptions, as an informal way of annotating the evolution of my weblog newsfeed subscriptions.

BloggerThis! on Google toolbar

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 21:41:02 GMT

The beta version of the Google toolbar (PC only) includes a new BlogThis! button for posting directly to Blogger weblogs. Observes Dave Winer at Scripting News, "They probably could have worked with other tool vendors to provide a tool-agnostic Blog This capability."

Sound an echo to sense

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 19:33:10 GMT

In the comment thread for Burningbird's entry called Echo Project for Poets , Joe Shelby points out that "Echo is already a name for a product ... that just released [a 1.0 version] under the LGPL license." If the goal is to surmount pass squabbles, the Pie/Echo project should steer very clear of anything that could be called highjacking. Looks like the name discussion may have to go back to the drawing board. Too bad. Echo (Matt Haughey's suggestion) kind of felt right.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

MT license flap

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 19:16:49 GMT

The advent of TypePad has prompted renewed scrutiny of the terms in Six Apart's license for Movable Type, specifically related to commercial uses of the product. A generally pro-MT take on the dispute can be found on MovableBlog, but it includes thorough links to the other sides of the argument.

Ecce Echo

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 17:14:02 GMT

The collaborative project to design a new vendor-neutral weblog format (edging toward the name Echo instead of the original placeholder, Pie) proceeds at a dizzy pace over at Sam Ruby's wiki. For those of us unable to keep up with the multiple, distributed debates taking place 'intertwingled' all over the wiki, Shelley Powers has posted a sort of status update that clarifies a lot of the burning issues.

Blogger transition

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 21:49:15 GMT

If you have a blog at Blogger, you may have noticed some instability lately. It appears that the Pyra team at Google is in the process of switching most blogs over to "Dano" the beta of the new version of Blogger. Your interface will change and you'll need to update your bookmarklets. There's lots more info available at new.blogger.com and in the help pane of the new interface. If your blog hasn't switched over yet, just sit tight. It will soon. You may notice its happened when your bookmarklet stops working. I paid for Blogger, so my blogs over there were in the Pro interface, so I guess I'm seeing the Pro side of the new interface mainly. (I keep a separate non-Pro account for research purposes.) So poke around yourself to see what's different. One thing I did notice is that if you had your RSS (shit! I said it again) syndication feed enabled in Pro, it's been turned off. You'll need to manually enable it again, which probably forces a rebuild of the new valid RSS template (still not customizable at first glance).

Googlesluts

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 16:00:33 GMT

Jan Haugland nominates David Harris for Googleslut of the century for temporarily renaming his blog Harry Potter 5 Summaries and News. Over 3000 hits this morning and counting....

A place to blow off steam

Tue, 24 Jun 2003 16:50:52 GMT

The Tude website is inviting bloggers to contribute articles (target length: 250 to 750 words) with attitude, about blogging or not. The idea is to provide a space for writing stuff that might not fit that well on your own blog.

Burning bridges

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 18:15:25 GMT

I'm done talking about RSS (originally RDF Site Summary, then Rich Site Summary, then Really Simple Syndication - gopod only knows what it stands for now). It's been made clear to me that my interlocution in the increasingly unhelpful RSS debates is unwelcome, and I've started tasting bile and feeling the urge to utter "a pox on (all) your houses." I generally don't cast aspersions on the integrity of virtual strangers, for who am I to get inside their heads and explain their motivations? I expect the same courtesy in response - the respect that comes from assuming that my own comments are true expressions of my own reactions, thoughts, feelings, and interpretations. I don't believe I have anything to contribute to the RSS debate, and I don't believe it will ever be resolved. I do think that the many flavors of RSS have a head start over any potential new vendor-neutral format (for all of the pertinent aspects of weblogging) that may arise, but I feel that the effort is worth the while, sysiphean as it may turn out to be, and I'd like to put my shoulder under that rock along with the others trying to work out a roadmap forward, built on learning the lessons of the past. This means I will try to contribute to the "what is a weblog?" discussion and to the Wiki Sam Ruby is hosting, as soon as I have anything of value to contribute. I'll also do what I can do to support and adopt the format the emerges, if at all possible. Of course I'll continue to have RSS feeds for my various sites, as long as necessary. The best outcome, as I see it, of this new effort, would be a single conceptual model that - by underlying a common syndication, archiving, and editing format - would deliver the holy grail of weblog interoperability: seamless migration from one vendor's tool to another. Since that has been one of my issues all along (I believe one of my first posts to RFB spoke about the importance of interop in this area), I think I'll start experimenting with a project I've put off for a long time, given the difficulties. I will attempt to migrate all of my blogs from their current applications to different ones, to document the difficulties in doing so and to clarify my ideas of how migrationg should work. Naturally, I'll report on my progress and setbacks in this space.

Security patch for pMachine

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 15:47:50 GMT

The makers of pMachine have announced a security issue affecting pMachine Free and pMachine Pro versions 2.2 or 2.2.1. To fix the problem, pMachine users should download one of the two following files:

You will find two files in the download (inc.cp.php and inc.lib.php). Replace the two files you currently have in your pMachine control panel folder with the new ones to plug the breach.

MacWorld blogware comparison

Sun, 22 Jun 2003 06:55:53 GMT

Scot Hacker's weblog comparison article for MacWorld is now available:

Putting Weblogs To Work (Blog Bonanza). The feature piece on comparative weblog systems I wrote for the July issue of MacWorld is now on newstands (page 76). A version of the article is online, but sans graphics and screenshots, sidebars, and feature comparison charts for blogging systems and for Mac-based posting tools. The article covers pMachine, Movable Type, Radio Userland, GeekLog, iBlog, LiveJournal, and Blogger Pro.... [birdhouse.org]

Radio silence at dreamweaversavvy.com

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 16:41:24 GMT

Continued technical difficulties at the Dreamweaver Savvy website (problems with Radio, the CMS I'm currently driving new home page updates) have caused me to temporarily roll back the home page to the old, ugly design, so at least there will be something there for visitors. Next I may have to manually ftp the new blog-based home page since the upstreaming is malfunctioning. Finally, I hope to get it back to automated again (or I'll switch to a different blogging tool).

Talk about your text ads

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 00:59:09 GMT

Susannah Breslin's efforts (on behalf of a loyal reader) to turn up a frontal shot of a female streaker has already yielded one slightly more revealing image. The cowgirl says "points of for pasties," but I say points off for implants. Also, outing myself as a dyed-in-the-wool word freak, I'd like to see a picture that shows what the streaker had written on her skin, front and back. One of the texts (on her back) looks like a domain name, something like goldenpalace.com (an online casino). Susannah says "Alright, who's got the streaming video, dammit," while I say who wants to bet she's a stripper or some other kind of sex business pro?

Give up the funk

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 22:47:47 GMT

There is an interesting discussion in the comment thread for Dave Winer's Why I said Movable Type's RSS support is 'funky' post. The title for that post is accurate insofar as Dave explains why he accused Six Apart of not respecting the RSS spec, but maddeningly evasive when it comes ot explaining precisely what he meant by the original statement. In other threads on other blogs people have speculated about exactly what Dave meant, but Dave has not come out and detailed the problems he sees. The effect is to spread a meme that there is a problem with MT's RSS without in any way helping to resolve that problem, whatever it is. In his post, Dave says he wants "all tools to produce the same RSS, modulo differences that are rooted in real differences between the products." (Again, without saying how MT fails to meet this goal.) He states that "not enabling interop is a chicken-shit way to compete. It's a sure sign of a large installed base but an inadequate development team or codebase." This smells like a further slam against Six Apart again without any specifics about whether or how this is going on. When pressed, he can easily say he was just stating principles or philosophy, but under the heading of explaining his assessment of MT's RSS support, the implication of the quoted clause above is clear. Skipping past the details again, Dave suggests that Six Apart has "responded with some respect, at least now their support for 0.91 has been upgraded to 2.0," (a situation that preceded this tempest-in-a-teapot and implies that Dave's agitation resulted in an RSS upgrade for Movable Type, when the trail through other blog comments suggests instead that Dave was basing some of his criticism on the RSS 0.9x feeds produced by default by Movable Type some versions ago - again without clarifying what may have been wrong with that RSS). Then we get to the meat of the complaint: "...but they still, by default produce RDF where RSS is called for." What does Dave mean by this? Does he know that MT by default produces both an RDF (RSS 1.0)-style feed and an RSS (2.0)-style feed? Is his complaint that MT offers RDF as the default syndication feed link in the default MT template? If so, is this some sort of unethical bait-and-switch (is that why MT's default template labels that link "Syndicate this site (XML)" and not "RSS" and doesn't use the orange RSS icon Bryan Bell designed for Dave? We can have a good discussion of this if Dave will come out and identify this as the problem (or discount it as a side issue and not the real problem, which is?). Does it have to do with the header information in default MT templates that directs aggregators to the RSS 1.0 feed? Again, without knowing it's hard to have a grounded discussion about what is kosher and what isn't. It is strange to me that Dave writes, "At some point the discussion has to stop, and for me, that was the day I said publicly what I had been saying privately - MT's support for RSS is funky...." That's when the conversation stops? Upon attacking an upstart competitor in your blog? Come on. He goes on "...and guys and gals, I was being kind. I could have said it's wrong." What is wrong?! So far I don't see it, and I pay more attention to most of this stuff than most people do. If you have to be an ultratechnical insider or privy to private email debates to follow this point (and some pretty smart well informed people all asked Dave the same thing - please be more specific), then what is the point of airing the argument in public without support. It feels like spin. Dave says that MT's approach to RSS is "as wrong as it would be for UserLand to implement Trackback that doesn't work with Movable Type" (so does this mean that the RSS put out by MT blogs doesn't work with Radio? I have not observed this.) He goes on: "...or implement the Blogger API and change the order of the parameters." That's ironic, given Evan Williams' unanswered narration of how the MetaWeblog API discarded parameters from the Blogger API crucial for hosted-server blog providers like Pyra. He end with more kerfluffle, lecturing the other principals as if from a position of greater maturity, saying, "UserLand clearly moved first in RSS in blogging tools, and it's up to the people who are following, to do so with respect." (Please, Dave, detail the lack of respect, either the original disrespect or the gap now between some respect and whatever a full measure of respect would mean.) The funny thing is that I believe a majority of the blog world would agree that the blog software products of today should ionterpoperate smoothly (in most ways, especially when it comes to migration, they most assuredly do not), and that the real threat will come from a Microsoft or other large vendor embracing and extending the emerging weblog standards. The effect of this hullabaloo, however, has been to sow dissension and distrust within the ranks of the still small close-knit blog development community, and somehow (as when he pops into the comments and responds selectively to the questions posted there) Dave seems to be contributing more confusion, vagueness, evasiveness, and big-picture changes of the subject than a simple explanation of what's wrong with Movable Type's RSS and what would be required to fix it.

Note: I've posted several comments to that comment thread. This blog entry is an attempt to capture some of the issues being discussed there. Here, for the record, are my posts to the thread (slightly edited for context):

Dave, I came to this page eager to understand the nature of the funkiness and came out just as confused.

Is the problem you cite the use of RDF elements in RSS 2.0 feeds? And if that is what you're talkign about, is it being done in some way that violates the extensibility (as I understand it) of RSS 2.0.

You also mention the metaweblog API. You generously pointed to Evhead's discussion of it in his blog a while back but you never responded (that I could see) to his contention that the metaweblog API discarded some elements of the spec that Pyra needed for its hosted blogs, and thus "broke" their spec and showed the kind of disrespect and failure to interoperate that you decry here in this post.

Also , it seems like the issue re MT is now not some misformulated RSS 0.91 but the defaulting to RDF (aka the branching from RSS unfortunately known as "RSS 1.0") vs. RSS 2.0.

Would this remaining "lack of respect" problem be solved by labeling the feed an RDF feed, or would it still gall you as a vote for a competing format? For that matter, is it disrespect for RSS 0.91 or RSS 2.0 to prefer RSS 1.0 (RDF)?

Thanks!
xian 6/14/03 1:35:28 AM

Dave, you're responding with philosophy and flummery when no one is disagreeing with you (in this thread) about the beautifies of not locking out competition by "embracing and extending" standards and popular formats maliciously. That's not in question here.

People are simply asking you to be clear about what is funky about MT's RSS support. Several candidates have emerged in this thread:
MT default templates offer a syndication link to an RDF-style (aka RSS 1.0) feed.
MT default templates include a header item that offers the RDF-style feed for autodiscovery.
MT RSS 0.9x templates used to include something that violated the RSS 0.9x spec?
MT RSS 2.0 templates still include something that violates the RSS 2.0 spec?
Please simplify clarify whether the problem with MT's RSS support is one or more of those four issues or indeed something else entirely. If 3 or 4, please indicate the nature of the spec breakage. By being vague, you give the appearance of constantly shifting the justification for the original criticism of Six Apart.

Legitimate specific criticism could do some god by setting a benchmark to help others (including nonexperts) judge if Six Apart is competing fairly in this heavily self-conscious marketplace. Popping the stack when people press you for details does little to reinforce the impact of the ideals you stated.

By comparison, Ev gave specific details when asserting that the metaweblog api "broke" the blogger api.

xian 6/15/03 3:12:24 PM

Weee're back

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 20:30:19 GMT

Well, that took longer than expected. I'm still getting things re-configured and re-set up at ol' Open Publishing / ezone / x-everything industries, but most of the sites are at least now visible, and I may hope that we've cured the hacked-so-easily problem we had going there. In the meantime, off the air, I found solace in posting via Radio and Blogger even when I knew the publishing action would fail, and hanging around the Well more. Forgive the extensive cross-posting. I'm just trying to push out all the categories with current posts.

Salam dunk

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 20:20:24 GMT

Journalist Peter Maass confirms the suspicions of the "Salam is real" camp: Salam Pax Is Real - How do I know Baghdad's famous blogger exists? He worked for me. Maybe this will help me convince my Kurdish friend Delshad that there's an audience for more than just one Iraqi blogger?

Blog comment moderation controversy

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 20:20:16 GMT

His playpen his rules, if you ask me (and you didn't, and it's too late now): Sam Ruby reserves the right...