April 21, 2006

Splog software

I found one of my recent posts appropriated (plagiarized) at a clickfraud spam blog called Christian-radio, hosted or created by a tool called BlogSolution that appears to be designed to create splogs. Welcome back my friends, to the tragedy of the commons that never ends....
November 16, 2005

All Your Base

Google has launched Base. It seems pretty worthless to me, at first glance, unless they produce a method for importing large numbers of files in a standardized format....
August 21, 2005

Google Blog: This was posted from Microsoft Word

Quoting from Google Blog: This was posted from Microsoft Word: Last July, a few of us visited the Democratic National Convention to see political bloggers in action. Many were using Microsoft Word to post their reports. It was a multi-step process that didn't look like fun, but for citizen journalists, punctuation,...
August 2, 2005

Ann Althouse fisks Pajamas Media

I really should get off my ass and get a blogads account. All my blogs together might cover my bandwidth costs, anyway. I don't think I'm PM material (Charles Johnson creeps me out, for one thing), but even if I were it sounds like a dubious plan. In Althouse: Pajamas Media...
July 26, 2005

Yahoo 360 adds feeds

Frances Pabon over at Good Bloggin' alerts me that Yahoo 360 has added (finally) the capability to pipe in feeds to your personal page there. This is a much better alternative to expecting overblogged folks like myself to both posting in yet another location. Also, I noticed that Frances' most recent...
July 14, 2005

Six Apart release MT 3.2 beta

I'm looking forward to testing out the new version of Movable Type (Movable Type 3.2 Beta) - if only for the new administrative features....
June 9, 2005

Origins of blog software applications

an interesting discussion in the Textpattern support forum pulls together statements from the creators of Greymatter, Movable Type, and Radio Userland describing the genesis of each application. What's fascinating is how different they are. Someone should gather analogous statements about Blogger, Textpattern, WordPress, and so on....
May 11, 2005

Typo - minimalist blogging engine

Typo "provides a fast and easy way to start a weblog and manage it with a rich desktop client application like MarsEdit or ecto."...
April 29, 2005

Mac OS X "Tiger" to ship with built-in blog system?

Quoting from Blogging and Ping-O-Matic built into Mac OS X "Tiger" In Ping-O-Matic in Blojsom we learn that Tiger will ship with Blojsom, a Java based mutli-user blogging system. And Blojsom has built in support for Ping-O-Matic. Nice. I wonder how Apple will package it up. Will blogging be one of...
March 29, 2005

Yahoo 247

The other day I was talking to someone about Steve Rubel's great Micro Persuasion weblog and the energy and enthusiasm he demonstrates as he avidly filters key blog news and posts about whatever he cares about (note to self: add his headlines to the list of feeds down the right side...)....
March 13, 2005

Rex Hammock is not blogging SXSW

But he is pointing to people sitting near him who are. I'm in the Blogging Showdown session that hasn't commenced yet, where we'll get to hear some of the leading lights of nanopublishing comparing their products and maybe even confessing to some of the warts therein. If not, I'm sure the...
March 8, 2005

Spammers exploiting Blogspot

In A Whole Lotta Nothing: Blogspot is hurting America, Matt Haughey points out that Google's blog hosting service is becoming part of the typical spammer's infrastructure. Given that the quest for page rank also underlies most of the problems with comment and trackback spam, isn't it about time Google started closing...
March 6, 2005

MT 3 stalling on rebuild

I upgraded most of the sites I publish or host to Movable Type 3.15 a few weeks ago and for the most part the transition was fairly painless, but for some reason the Edgewise blog gives me trouble when I try to rebuild older pages. That is, new posts go up...
January 27, 2005

Technorati tags plug-in for MarsEdit

The divine Laura Lemay has given us MarsEdit users a great shortcut for adding technorati tags as keywords. I'm going to add some as I post this (from a bookmarklet) and then reopen the post in MarsEdit to activate the key words. If and when it works, they will apear at...
January 18, 2005

Comment-Spam-Filters

Google has implemented a new method for depriving comment spammers of their Google-Juice. Damn fine idea me thinks!...
January 12, 2005

Speaking of NetNewsWire

Good interview with Brent Simmons of Ranchero at The Shape of Days....
January 6, 2005

More details on 6A's acquisition of LJ

Livejournal confirms the rumored sale to Six Apart (via Waxy.org Links): Mena discusses the purchase, and Six Apart's Livejournal FAQ and press release...
January 4, 2005

Six Apart to buy Livejournal!?

Six Apart to buy Livejournal!? "holy crap!," says Andy Baio [via] Holy consolidation, batman, says I....
December 9, 2004

Looking for more info about Blog:CMS

BLOG:CMS appears to be a fairly full featured open-source blog / content management system. I believe Martini Republic uses this application. I'd like to hear from people who have compared it to some of the other popular blog and open source CMSes....
December 2, 2004

"MSN Spaces is people!"

Obligatory MSN hosted blogging service post, autoquoting from MSN Spaces = soylent green Xeni Jardin: Updated. Today, Microsoft launches their free hosted blogging platform, spaces.msn.com. What effect the service will have on Blogger, TypePad, Userland, and the like is, predictably, a subject of great debate. The service is free, and seems...
December 1, 2004

Microsoft blogging service about to launch

Quoting from Scripting News: Mary Jo: "Microsoft's MSN division is expected to take the wraps off its MSN Spaces blogging service this week, according to sources close to the company."...
November 23, 2004

The case of the missing comments

So this weird thing happened over the weekend. Somehow, Monday morning, none of my bloggers were able to post to any of the blogs I host with Movable Type. And MT was acting strange in other ways. It listed each of my hosted blogs as having no comments at all. Actually,...
October 7, 2004

MarsEdit UI notes

At inessential.com Brent Simmons explains some of the user-interface design decisions that went into his new MarsEdit weblog-posting product for Mac OS X. (It is in beta currently and is free for paid-up users of NetNewsWire.) It's a pretty good tool although being in beta it still has a few flakey...

MarsEdit UI notes

At inessential.com Brent Simmons explains some of the user-interface design decisions that went into his new MarsEdit weblog-posting product for Mac OS X. (It is in beta currently and is free for paid-up users of NetNewsWire.) It's a pretty good tool although being in beta it still has a few flakey...
October 5, 2004

Ev resigns from Google's Blogger team

In evhead: Next?, Evan Williams explains that he's been on the startup dotcom treadmill for six years now and needs to work on some other aspects of his life. Sounds like a healthy move. He answers all of the inevitable questions in his post, debunking in advance any potential rumor of...
September 24, 2004

NetNewsWire 2.0 public beta

Happy, happy. Joy, joy. (Gotta love Ranchero.)...
August 19, 2004

You, yes, you

Go join multiply....
July 29, 2004

Movable Type 3.1 will offer more to non-developers than 3.0 did

The release of Movable Type 3.1 is currently scheduled for August 31: Dynamic PHP publishing, controllable on a per-template basis: You can control whether you publish a dynamic or static page on a per-template basis, letting you balance the publishing and traffic for your weblog. For example, high-demand documents like XML...
July 22, 2004

Threaded blog comments via AIM

Zacker has married AOL instant messenger to his blog's comments AIM Comments (using, I assume CivicSpace or perhaps the main Drupal trunk?). I need a category like "interop" or "convergence" or maybe just "features"...
July 20, 2004

New Feedster interface coming

While I've had my eye on Technorati and Kinja and Bloglines, Feedster has been hatching big plans: Micro Persuasion: Feedster to Launch New Way to View Blogs...
July 2, 2004

Analysis of the blog software trends

Ben Franske is surveying the blog-software landscape. (Note: I've been on a bit of a web hiatus for the last week or so, since my book just shipped to the printer and I've needed to catch up on rest, exercise, bills, mail, email, and so on. I should be back in...
May 23, 2004

WordPress 1.2 available

WordPress 1.2 is out. What I wouldn't give for comment moderation! (via Scripting News)...
May 22, 2004

Blogs gone wild

Chris Pirillo has launched a bogging network at Lockergnome.net. Looks like a private-label instance of Tucows' Blogware oroduct. Looks like Chris has moved his personal blog from MT over to Blogware as well (though there's no credit back-link, so you have to divine that fact by actually reading his entries)....
May 21, 2004

Comparison of server-side blog tools

If you are deciding whether to upgrade to MT 3.0 or switch to another self-hosted service, the Blog Software Breakdown chart might help you sort out your decision....
May 20, 2004

Technorati developers brainstorm

link relationships <link rel=""> XFN votelinks creative commons (rel="license") filtering sorting expressions in the queries if then and or not recentness, authority Tantek: sort by criteria Use link relationships strength of relationship friends acquaintances people i've met show me links from people that consider themselves colleagues wikis and email lists profiles...
May 19, 2004

Blogger vs. LiveJournal

Blogger vs LiveJournal: markpasc.org Looks like Blogger has matched LJ feature-for-feature, crabwalking into social networking at the same time (around the shared interests - I'd love to see Google's internal maps drawn from that data)....
May 18, 2004

Resist monoculture

Weblogs Compendium - Blog Tools (via evanwolf group). I've got my test deployment of Scoop running. As soon as my book is put to bed I will start messing with it, but I'm really holding out for a groovy MT-to-RDF-to-Ftrain SiteKit migration tool. Ping lazyweb, somebody....
May 14, 2004

SixApart Redux 3.0

The license terms for the new 3.0 release of Movable Type are being changed. Discounts are being made to existing users. Stay tuned. [Editor's update: Mena has posted some clarifications to the original terms.]...
April 30, 2004

Google IPO

John Battelle has written a fascinating piece on the upcoming IPO of Google and the documents related to it which were released yesterday. Highly recommended!...
April 25, 2004

RSS Readers for Mac

Brent Simmons at Ranchero is getting ready to make a major upgrade to NetNewsWire while Erik Barzeski will be soon launching his new news reader called PulpFiction. It's very nice to see such a race to develop better tools for reading syndication files. Notice how these tools are now rendering web...
April 19, 2004

MT 3.0 beta about to start

Do MT alpha testers automatically become beta tester's in Six Apart's upcoming beta test of Movable Type 3.0? Shouldn't that link really have been to movable type dot org? Aren't I supposed to be handing in Chapters 3, 5, and 6 in various states of undress tonight? Thank goodness my editor,...
April 17, 2004

Jabberwocky

Jabberwocky is an application for cell phones which maps your familiarity (or at least the familiarity of the phone) with your environment by mappinh how often other GPS enabled phones are encountered as you go about your day. It's an interesting idea. I seem to recall a vaporware of yesteryear which...
April 6, 2004

Slouching toward Google

Jason Kottke is reading Rich Skrenta and both of them are making pretty grand predictions about the growth of Google. I must admit I have been entertaining similar ideas. The advent of the Google calculator started me on this train of thought. I use this function of Google on practically a...
April 1, 2004

Launching services

Kinja has launched and turns out to be a very sweet tool for aggregating content. At this point it seems as though it would make a good addition to an existing toolset like Technorati. I'm not sure I understand how Kinja will ultimately distinguish itself from other such services. This will...
March 26, 2004

Paging Dean Allen

If you integrate Textpattern* with VoodooPad, I will babysit your soufflés. *which is already secretly a brilliant flexible database interface that uses the “list” metaphor that anyone with fingers can get…...
March 19, 2004

Manic jag

This week has been a trip. For example, last night the Dean rally at the hotel was so packed (it was like a Dead show in about six different ways - someone please remind me to explain this at another time) that I ended up retreating to the hallway and playing...
March 16, 2004

Need help installing Scoop

So close, and yet so far. The install.pl script for Scoop is pretty dang amazing. Here's what apachectl says when I ask it to do configtest: PerlSetVar takes two arguments, Perl config var and value Whuzza? UPDATE: OK, that was dumb. If I'd followed the instructions I could have avoided the...
February 24, 2004

Three reasons to use WordPress

Matthey "Doubting" Thomas offers three reasons why he uses WordPress 1.0 to drive his website: I can't, and shouldn't, control the sites that link to mine. So when they do link, I should make sure their links don't break. The URIs (addresses) WordPress provides for each article I write are almost...

Next-gen blogging tools

Dave Winer is planning BloggerCon II and is soliciting ideas from blog users (as opposed to developers) about what features the next generation of blogging tools should offer....
February 19, 2004

TidyText plugin makes MT posts valid XHTML

90% Crud: TidyText: TidyText is my new plugin for Moveable Type.... It adds two new text formatting options for entries that will run them through HTML Tidy to make the XHTML valid before building the entry. Most of us want to support web standards, for me it's a pain to remember...
February 17, 2004

Globo blocking blogs?

An orkut message I received from a "friend" of jibot (a bot that heralds visitors to the #joiito irc channel) accuses Brazilian company Globo of blocking access to the Blogger-driven blogs it hosts to anyone from outside Brazil and of preventing users from accessing their (free) blogs until they pay for...
January 15, 2004

Dude! I just upgraded to MT 2.65, now this?

Movabletype.org News : Version 2.66 Released As a stopgap before we release comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, we've released version 2.66 of Movable Type, which includes some protection against comment flooding. We've included a throttling measure so that comments from the same IP address can only be posted every N...
January 4, 2004

Optimizing Movable Type

Christoph Cemper has written up the results of his recent efforts at performance-tuning Movable Type. The upshot? rebuilding category archives works from the browser again - no premature end of script (internal server error 500) problems anymore (was a timeout before actually)saving disk space for having only 1 large category-common file...
December 10, 2003

Drupal getting major overhaul

Looks like the upcoming version of Drupal with have some significant improvements: The Drupal developers have been little busy bees ever since the new development branch has been created about 1.5 months ago. Those that do not track the CVS commit messages or read the mailing lists might wonder what we...
December 8, 2003

Floating markets

Blogshares is coming back!...
December 6, 2003

New TypePad features

Everything TypePad announcesthree new features for TypePad, namely additional sorting options for TypeLists (blogroll-like lists), the ability to upload a zipped folder of photos (a vast improvement over the tedious, one-at-a-time 15-at-most original method), and the ability to password-protect your entire TypePad site. (via Buzzmachine)...
November 29, 2003

Spammers find MT's open relay

Been busy holidayin' and doing other stuff lately, so a lot of the basic substrate of blog news and blog gossip is passing unremarked. By now, most MT users probably know that Movable Type is vulnerable as an open spam relay. If you are not using the "mail this entry" feature,...
November 24, 2003

Google Is Out To Get Dave Winer

...or at least that's the impression you'd get from Hiawatha Bray's article in today's Boston Globe: It's not the casual Web surfers who are complaining. But as Google expands beyond mere search services, it sometimes alienates tech-smart users who were once devotees of the company. Consider Google's acquisition of Blogger, one...
November 22, 2003

So, how do you write "typepadista" in Japanese?

Six Log: What's New: Six Apart Announces First License of its TypePad Personal Weblogging Service to NIFTY, one of Japan's Leading ISP's What's interesting about this piece of news is that: (1) Mena is officially the CEO of Six Apart (I did not know that) and (2) the absence of Joi...
November 15, 2003

Extreme customization

Anyone who's worked with UserTalk, Frontier, Manila, or Radio knows that there's a lot of impressive power packed into these tools and also a lot of idiosyncrasies. The software is ideological in the sense that it reflects the choices and preferences and decisions of mainly one programmer and software architect, Dave...
November 12, 2003

Comment spam on TypePad

Here's a splendid idea from Jon Gales to deal with comment spam among TypePad users....
November 8, 2003

Adding BlogThis! to the Google Deskbar

Jason Shellen's got a hack that will add a Blogger bookmarklet-type button to the new Google Deskbar. Now, who will do the same for MovableType, Radio, pMachine, LiveJournal, AOL Journals, Lycos blogs, etc.? (phew!) [via BuzzMachine]...
November 5, 2003

Posting to Movable Type from Radio's outliner

Andrew Grumet explains how to get started with multi-post publishing from Radio to Movable Type. I presume this would work with TypePad as well?...
November 4, 2003

Movable Type growing pains

Scot Hacker reports some scaling problems with Movable Type. He's noticed that his server is taking longer and longer to rebuild after each new post or comment. The comment problem leads to people double- or triple-posting in frustration. Thus far he's found an unorthodox solution, but he's mainly hoping that the...
October 20, 2003

Google 'disappearing' UserLand?

A while back I took Dave Winer to task when he complained that Ev Williams was "disappearing" UserLand by not citing Radio as a major competitor to Blogger. In that context, I didn't feel that Evan was obliged to rattle off an exhaustive list. However, today Dave is pointing to some...
October 18, 2003

Combatting linkrot in MT

Brad DeLong quotes Kevin Drum ("What a mess. A combination of host problems and Movable Type fragility wiped out my site for the entire day. I'd bore you with all the details, but I'm too pissed off right now to write about it. ... Also, all my permalinks changed during the...
October 16, 2003

Inline trackbacks better than pop-ups

Responding to Andrew "I hate blogs and obsess about little else" Orlowski's latest screed at the Register, which blamed Six Apart for ruining Google by inventing Trackback, Mena writes in Six Log that it's a better practice to include trackbacks (and comments) on the same page as the weblog entry they...
October 13, 2003

Radio Kick Start coming soonly

Rogers Cadenhead writes: I've received a few e-mails from readers wondering when they'll be getting Radio UserLand Kick Start, which comes out this month. I checked with my publisher, and it appears they'll be shipped from the Sams Publishing warehouse to Amazon.Com this week. [Workbench] I'm looking forward to it! Radio...
October 10, 2003

Best way to delete old Radio posts wholesale?

I've been using Radio to run my Mediajunkie page after migrating this weblog to Movable Type, and I recently added Adsense ads from Google to the pages. I'd like to republish the whole site to get the ads on to the archive pages, but the problems is that the first 1000...
October 9, 2003

Hooking up AmphetaDesk to Movable Type

Salon blogger Andrew Bayer has recently migrated his weblog from Radio to Movable Type, which lacks a built-in posting aggregrator. To remedy this, he has figured out a way to hook up Amphetadesk to MT. Very nice. Andrew, did you have to hack AmphetaDesk or MT or both? Either way, please...
October 6, 2003

Help with Radio's .root files

I was doing a period check of very large files on my computer, planning to backup or remove the largest ones to make some room, and I noticed that among the top five files, four of them were .root files used by Radio: aggregatorData.root (149 megs) weblogData.root (128 megs) manilaBloggerBridgeData.root (79...
October 4, 2003

Radio UserLand woes

The Salon blog community servers (hosted by UserLand) have been down since sometime Friday, which is frustrating for the Salon bloggers who rely on the community server to host their blogs (and their comments) and to track updates and traffic figures. As far as we can tell, UserLand is down to...
September 28, 2003

Microsoft, Apple blog plans?

The Blog Herald reads about a panel at the upcoming Microsoft PDC conference and predicts that MS will roll out a blogging tool as part of MSN or SharePoint. SharePoint 2003 includes a "Web Log" web package for including a blog-like element in a SharePoint collaborative website, but it's only semibakes...
September 19, 2003

Clarifying the freeing of Blogger Pro

I was a little confused by the news announcements about the end of a fee-based Pro version of Blogger and folding in of most of the Blogger Pro feature set into free Blogger. I emailed Steve Jenson a few questions and, though he was on vacation at the time, he graciously...
September 14, 2003

Does Xanga offer RSS?

A reader just sent me a comment looking for a tutorial on how to add RSS to a weblog. I saw from his URL that he is a Xanga user (The Populist), so I went to the Xanga site looking for info about RSS or syndication support and didn't find any....
September 10, 2003

Google to make Blogger Pro free

According to Ev, Blogger Pro's features will be folded into the free version of Blogger. Ev: "Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the web." Susan Mernit asks these questions about the announcement: Is this the rich company Microsoft-like tactic of offering...
September 6, 2003

Someone's attacking Blogger

According to a message from Evan Williamson the BloggerDev mailing list, Blogger is being subjected to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack right now....
September 5, 2003

Upstreaming theory

OK, I think the reason why my Mediajunkie page hasn't been upstreaming is that my year-long Radio license must have expired. What I'd like to know is why I wasn't automatically invited to renew it when the time was up? Doesn't UserLand want my money? Anyway, I did just re-up for...

AOL Journals found wanting

Salon blogger Rayne Today has been trying out the AOL Journals feature and has some criticisms to share. UPDATE: Rayne Today has also posted further comments about problems with AOL's approach to blogs (The Clone War Quagmire and earlier entries)....
September 3, 2003

Follow up on Dean and software

Dana Blankenhorn has written a long reply to Dave's criticism of the Dean campaign, and I'm still a little confused. Is it that the Dean team should not feel free to develop and promulgate technical solutions to their own specific problems? How is that different from any sovereign entity doing so?...

What software is Dean selling?

Where did Dave get the cockamamie idea that Howard Dean is in the software business? Is it based on the modified version of the open-source Drupal CMS called DeanSpace that some Dean supporters are distributing for free to encourage people to build sites for Dean that will generate and aggregate RSS...
September 2, 2003

Radio not upstreaming for me

Since I moved Radio Free Blogistan to Movable Type I've used my Radio software mainly as a public news aggregrator, building the Mediajunkie page from most of my RSS subscriptions. For some reason, though, the page stopped updating on August 30. I'm definitely still picking up new posts. I can see...
August 26, 2003

Yahoo blog rumor

Noticed in my sidebar, The Blog Herald (which needs an editor as bad as I do), reports that undisclosed sources inside Yahoo! say "that the company is already in talks with a number of blogging firms, looking for the right acquisition vehicle to integrate into the Yahoo! stable of sites." It...
August 23, 2003

Yahoo blogs! (in Korea)

John Robb notes the orange XML (RSS) icon on this Korean Yahoo blog page called IDE Designer. What's interesting is that they are experimenting with blogs at kr.blog.yahoo.com, but if you hack the URL down to just blog.yahoo.com you are redirected to groups.yahoo.com. I assume this is just temporary. I continue...
August 21, 2003

Due diligence

Did the Six Apart people think about the fact that TypePad will inevitably be abbreviated as TP, and that TP already has a vernacular association in English? Though I guess no one yet has said, "MT means empty" or "RU completely satisfied?" so it's probably no big worry....
August 12, 2003

Radio has blog-to-email

John Robb reminds me that Radio and Manila both have blog-to-email bridges (and both have post-by-email as well), in response to my Weblog-to-email plug-in? query. Radio users can go to http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/prefs?page=5.12 to turn on a service that sends weblog headlines by email to an address you specify. When I tried using...
August 11, 2003

Weblog-to-email plug-in?

A friend asked me to recommend a good third-party plug-in for automatically turning weblog posts into mailing-list messages. I've got the Bloglet service plugged into this site but I subscribed myself when I signed up and haven't gotten a post in months, so I don't know if that's just me or...
August 10, 2003

TypePad vs. Blogger

Richard Silverstein has written a comparison between Typepad and Blogger. Neither product has mature enough photoblogging capabilities for Richard's liking, but he sides with TypePad overall, despite a steeper price....
August 6, 2003

MovableBlog reviews TypePad

TypePad launched as a preview release yesterday (Tuesday, August 5 - or, technically, 11:59 pm Pacific time, Monday, August 4). MovableBLOG offers a brief review of TypePad, pros and cons. I've been writing about the beta since I got in on it a few weeks ago. The most interesting issues, I...
August 4, 2003

Radio does trackback

I just got pinged by Don Park. It kind of tickles. Jake Savin has completed work on Trackback for Radio. It looks very cool. It seems to do the autodiscovery and outgoing pinging automatically based on your entry links (so you can't selectively ping or not, unless you don't link). Actually...
July 28, 2003

TypePad's template builder rocketh

Six Apart is gradually lifting the NDA for beta testers of TypePad, unveiling a specific interface detail each day this week. Today we're allowed to talk about the template builder, which I do over on my TypePad blog (Linotype), in an entry called Best CSS-design interface yet....
July 24, 2003

Diaryland vs. Movable Type

Not Just A Pretty Girl compares the business models of Diaryland and Six Apart: Diaryland versus Movable Type: An interesting corollary to the Dairyland situation is the relationship between Movable Type, Movable Type Pro and TypePad. I'm an extremely happy MT user. I love MT. I think it's the best thing...

World's first MT book

Following Rogers Cadenhead's forthcoming Radio Kickstart, Anil Dash links to this book about Movable Type. Note to self: see if Anil's daily links has its own RSS feed. D'oh! Of course it does....
July 23, 2003

Pinging a Radio weblog again

Not sure if Zempt did the ping, so I’m posting with the bookmarklet now, second try at pinging Jake’s Radio ‘Blog: Wed, Jul 23, 2003....

Pinging a Radio weblog

Jake Savin, a very cool guy who works at UserLand, is demoing a Radio weblog with incoming Trackback pings turned on in this entry: Jake's Radio 'Blog: Wed, Jul 23, 2003. This post should work. The other half would be enabling Radio users to send Trackback pings when posting links to...
July 19, 2003

TypePad image

Another parody from Denounce tacitly compares AOL Journals webloggers to spam, and over in the TypePad beta testing world a nascent community is born, unsure of its place in the pecking order, but pretty sure it's above AOL and, from the sounds of it, Blogger as well. Verdict's out from LiveJournal...
July 17, 2003

Weblogging for poets

Shelley Powers is launching her *.forpoets.org domain and plans to employ four different weblog tools to build the four initial branches of the site (weblogging.forpoets.org, internet.forpoets.org, linux.forpoets.org, rdf.forpoets.org), and to launch each subdomain with an essay on the weblog tool being used. Even better, she is inviting her readers to recommend...
July 13, 2003

Tackling the MT permalink problem

Már Örlygsson explains How to future-proof URLs in Movable Type....
July 9, 2003

LiveJournal pinging weblogs.com?

Found a link from Technorati: Top 50 Interesting Recent Blogs with Context in my referrers, went to check out the page, and saw a lot of unfamiliar listings with similarly formed titles. On a hunch, I started mousing over and sure enough most of them were LiveJournal blogs. Is Technorati manually...
July 8, 2003

I [heart] Zempt

I installed Zempt , a free blog-posting client for Movable Type (and TypePad) and it's pretty slick. It uses Really Simple Discoverability to set up the connection to your blog-server host. In fact, the Choose Blog pull-down list gives me access to both my MT installation and to my TypePad beta...
July 7, 2003

What I can say

Wasted literally over a hour this morning re-reading irritating threads that led in many ways to the nEcho project. When my blood pressure returns to normal, I may point to some of them just to remind people of how we got where we are now. Meanwhile, I was delighted to learn...

My first look at TypePad

As a way of hammering away at TypePad's feature set, I'll try to build a nice list of FOAF links for the sidebar. BTW, so far I have only the slightest quibbles about user-feedback in a few contexts. The design seems really well thought through and reflects obviously many best practices...
July 4, 2003

MT bookmarklets for Safari

Dori Smith has posted some Movable Type bookmarklets that work with Safari to Backup Brain, the excellent weblog she publishes with Tom Negrino. Thanks, Dori!...

AOL gets blogging

Jeff Jarvis reports on a sneak preview of AOL's upcoming weblogging entrant, saying "They've done a good job." Jeff was invited along with Meg Hourihan, Nick Denton, Anil Dash, and Clay Shirky to preview the service, called AOL Journals. Discussing the meeting from the AOL perspective, an AOL employee named Kevin...

Did Evan 'disappear' UserLand?

Dave Winer claims that Evan Williams left UserLand off a list of Blogger's competitors, calling this chilling. In the post Dave refers to, Blogger API Update, the closest thing I can find to any "list of competitors" is in list item 5: Interoperability. This is a biggie. At least two other...
June 26, 2003

BloggerThis! on Google toolbar

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."...
June 25, 2003

Blogger transition

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...
May 21, 2003

TypePad design comps

TypePad's newsletter has sent out its first message including answers to some frequently asked questions, such as, "Is TypePad just hosted Movable Type?" (it's not), and so on. The contents of the newsletter are also posted at the TypePad site along with some tantalizing screen shots that give a fairly good...
May 10, 2003

Radio wish: comment-to-email

Here's a feature request for Radio. I'd like to have an option to turn on email notification triggered by comments. Any time someone posts a comment to RFB, for example, I'd like to get an email message containing the comment or at least containing a link back to it. I've got...
April 15, 2003

Frequency, a Mac OS X desktop Blogger client

Brad Rhine has released Frequency, a neat little desktop Blogger client for Mac users. I had the opportunity to beta test this software and it works like a charm....
April 7, 2003

Enhancement to Radio's 'recently updated' page

You know, the ol' Recently Updated page here at Salon Blogs might be even cooler if it included a title or brief excerpt from the most recent post. It would make the page something of a composite blog ezine. How hard would that be? I realize this takes a back seat...
February 27, 2003

Ev confirms Google Blogspot AdWords

Just noticed today that Ev's hiatus was remarkably short. A new design for his blog includes a disclaimer that he is not speaking for his employer. Anyway, as we speculated here a few days ago, Google is indeed targeting ads on Blogspot pages. Makes sense....
February 17, 2003

Denton on Blogoogle

Nick Denton is all over the Bloogle story. I especially like his suggestion that Google should support and open standard for weblog updates and indexing....
February 11, 2003

Which Dem is about to drop out?

TPM hints that a prospective Democratic presidential candidate is about to drop out of the race for health reasons....
December 10, 2002

Blogger API 2.0 developer preview

As promised, Steve Jenson of Pyra has uploaded developer-preview documentation of the Blogger API 2.0 to a temporary location at the Yahoo group bloggerDev. He says I'm waiting for a DNS change to propagate before I give it a permanent home. Once that update is finished, I'll open up access to...
November 16, 2002

Radio frequently not updating my blog

I find it very frustrating when I discover, as I do more and more frequently these days, that Radio has either ceased upstreaming my changes or is continually upstreaming an out-of-date version of my weblog home page. Today, for example, I fixed a typo in the Iraq/Iran salonika post and posted...
November 11, 2002

Blogger API 2.0 developer preview 'in a few weeks'

Steve Jenson from Blogger is the new moderator of the BloggerDev mailing list. He says he is implementing Blogger API 2.0 and expects to have a developer preview "in a few weeks." He told me, "I don't think I'll be answering any questions about it until I'm ready to release the...
November 6, 2002

Why fool MT?

I meant to link to Scot's recent O'Reilly blog article about tweaking MT to make it power a news site for the students in the Berkeley J-School IP Weblog class, but like so many interesting articles lately, I let that one escape me as I juggle multiple responsibilities. Today, Dave Winer...
August 20, 2002

Open Source Radio Handbook

Scott of the Fuzzy Group is releasing his Radio documentation as an open source book, since O'Reilly used only a fraction of it in the Radio chapter of the upcoming Essential Blogging: As the author of the O'Reilly Essential Blogging chapters on Radio, I clearly have a commercial interest in Radio....
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