I don’t want to wade into an RSS syntax debate, but I came across a practical
example of why to duplicate the Guid and Link elements in your RSS
2.0 file. Rogers
Cadenhead recommends that they be duplicated. It is one of two differences
between Rogers’ new proposed RSS feed for Movable Type users and Brad
Choate’s version (which I had used). The…
More tinkering. Last night I made the header and footer fixed width, evened up the right-hand column’s width in relation to the left column, added more white space to the main content area, and made various other changes to the CSS. I’m much happier with the layout now – it looks more balanced and not so cluttered. But I’d be interested in…
Yesterday I explained why I moved my blog from Radio Userland and
today I’m going to explain how I did it. I’ll also talk a bit about my
new CSS layout.
The Move
I have to give a big shout-out to Bill
Kearney, whose Radio
Exporter tool made it relatively easy to export all my content from Radio to
MT. There were a couple of gotchas for me though…
My transition to Movable Type is
mostly complete now, at least in terms of migrating content from Radio Userland
and getting my new CSS design to a position of relative stability. In this post
I’ll explain my motives for switching to Movable Type. In my next post I’ll
provide some details of the process I went through to switch and how I…
Pardon my dust, I’m in the process of moving my weblog from Radio Userland to Movable Type. Also, as you can see, I’ve done a re-design. There are still a few CSS issues to iron out, so things may be a bit funky for the next few days. But I decided to publish my new weblog now anyway, because…well, I’m an impatient character and I want to get…
I’ve just arrived back from a business trip in Melbourne, Australia. I’m creating a strategy for and managing the implementation of a new Intranet site. While I was over in Melbourne, I saw some examples of strategic thinking in action – by the local taxi drivers. Everybody is strategic in some form. But taxi drivers perhaps have more…
My article for Digital Web Magazine, The Evolution of Corporate Websites, has now been published. It’s a high-level look at web design trends over the past 10 years. Here’s the introductory paragraph: Hard to believe, but corporate Web sites have been around for over 10 years now. It’s fascinating to see how they have evolved over the…
In my previous post, I wrote about my early blogging efforts in March 2002 and the birth of Read/Write Web just over 1 year ago. In this post I review the past year and pick out some highlights. I’ll finish with some thoughts about what the next year may bring. Highlights of the past 12 months April 2003: My inaugural post was titled The…
I mentioned in my last post that one of my ongoing interests is topic mapping in weblogs. Topic Exchange and K-Collector are two initiatives that I’ve hyped a lot over the last year. However the blogosphere still doesn’t have a mainstream topic-mapping application – and I mean mainstream as in Technorati or Bloglines, apps that are used…
Here goes another self-referencing post about blogging. A couple of days ago I clocked up 1 year on this weblog, having started Read/Write Web on 20 April 2003, with an introductory essay called (of course) The Read/Write Web. Looking back on the past 12 months, I have to say that weblogging has done me a world of good. It’s been my creative…
Today I got my first article in print. My interview with Marc Canter made it into Computerworld New Zealand (pg 16, April 19 edition – right over the page from Jon Udell). It was one of my goals at the start of this year to get my writing published in the print world, so I’m chuffed to have achieved it! Here’s a screenshot PDF of the article…
I’m currently reading Lawrence Lessig’s new book, Free Culture, which is available as a free download under a Creative Commons license. I’m only up to pg 64, but already I’ve discovered some great new ideas. One of them is “media literacy”. This is the best definition I’ve found so far of media literacy: “The ability to read, analyze, evaluate and…
In my day job I’m currently working on a Web Strategy for my company. I’ve created web strategies in the past and I enjoy doing them. At the previous company I worked for, a telecommunications multinational, I wrote a Web Strategy to merge the websites of the New Zealand and Australian offices. Unfortunately for me this was in the middle of a major…
Jason Kottke has summarised Lawrence Lessig’s new book, Free Culture, in 100 words using Microsoft Word’s AutoSummarize feature. Jason’s reasoning was that “no one has the time to read books anymore”. Sounds about right. So, inspired by this, I decided to do the same with my 50,000-word Nanowrimo 2003 novel Dirtside to Spaceside. The…
Hands up who wants to get rid of the word “blog”? I’m beginning to wonder whether the word “weblog” has outlived its purpose. But before you call the white coats, let me try and explain. You see, blogging to me has always meant writing and linking. Seb Paquet has a much more comprehensive definition, but in a nutshell blogging is…
My first reaction when I looked at my referer logs and saw I’d been slashdotted was: Holy Shit! Actually it was Marc Canter’s PeopleAggregator that was the main link in the Slashdot article, but it was my interview with Marc that caused it. I’ve gotten 2000-odd visits from Slashdot so far (they’re still pouring in). This may not sound like much to…
Read/Write Web is pleased to bring you this special feature, an interview with software pioneer Marc Canter. Marc is one of the founding fathers of multimedia, having created tools and content in the medium since the late 70’s and early 80’s. He formed a company called MacroMind in 1984 and released products such as VideoWorks and Director. In 1991…
Oh man, has it been a whole week since I lasted posted something on my weblog? I’ve actually been busy working on an upcoming special feature for Read/Write Web. Top secret. I’ll publish it early next week. So, er, that’s it for now really.
Interesting comment from Lucas Gonze in the comments to my post regarding Lockergnome’s CSS-to-Tables re-design. Incidentally, Lockergnome is in the process of moving back to CSS – good on ya! But here’s what Lucas said about my pro-CSS rark-up, replicated in full: Lockergnome went back not because it preferred tables but because they’re…
I’ve been relatively quiet on the blogging front lately, for two reasons. Firstly I’ve been busily reading as much of Heath Row’s SXSW transcriptions as possible (thanks Heath!) – so I’ve been in Read mode rather than Write mode. But I’ve also been taking a good look at my goals for this weblog and deciding: where to next? Mostly for my own…
