In my previous post, Stasis
and Synchronicity, I scratched the surface of something that’s been
bothering me recently. I’ve been sensing a degree of stasis in the blogging world,
not to mention in my own life (and given what I wrote 12 days ago about weblogs
being avatars, perhaps the two are intermingled). I finished my previous
post with a…
Jeffrey Zeldman wrote today about Glassdog’s transformation from an “experimental narrative
powerhouse” to a mere blog. Under the provocative title The saddest music in
the world, Zeldman’s piece was a reflection on how The Web has not lived up
to its original promise:
“Oh, little child. Long ago, before you were born, some of us dreamed…
That’s the title of my second NZ Computerworld article, which is in this week’s edition (pg 16). Here’s a PDF copy of it. It’s also available in HTML format on Read/Write Web.
Since it is an article that attempts to bring RSS into a mainstream light, some people who arrive here may not know how to “subscribe” to an RSS feed. My advice is to…
I recently downloaded the mIRC client and have been checking out the Freenode IRC network. The few times I’ve logged in there haven’t been many people about – mainly because I live in New Zealand and so my time zone is out of whack with the northern hemisphere. But tonight (Saturday night my time) I had a nice chat with Seb Paquet and Suw Charman…
This is a boring post about fixing a couple of tedious Internet Explorer CSS
bugs. But I want to record it for my own records and for future Google
searchers.
1) The IE Italics bug – in the past I used italics whenever I quoted somebody. However on certain CSS designs, italics breaks the width settings of my page
for IE users (90-95% of the…
I’m in a stage right now where there are lots of details that I’m juggling in
my life, both in the real world and my weblog world. My job is busy, with quite a few
relatively exciting projects on the go at the same time. My home life is busy,
looking after a highly energetic toddler in the evenings. And I’ve been busy transitioning my weblog from…
Now you tell me! There is in fact a way to automatically ping Topic Exchange from within Movable Type. Thanks to an old Ben Hammersley post, I found out that the category attributes page has a box to enter TrackBack URIs to automatically ping.
So after all my work over the last week, I’ve managed to set up MT so it:
1) adds ENT data automatically…
Topic navigation is up and running on Read/Write Web, including cross-posting
to both K-Collector and Topic
Exchange. You’ll notice on the main menu, it now lists internal topics (or
categories if you prefer – you say tom-ah-to, I say tom-ay-to). And in my RSS
file, I’ve added references to both KC and TE. Here’s basically what I added in
the MT…
Matt Mower’s written a great explanation of
how the K-Collector aggregation process
works.
KC
is
a very clever system and I’m pleased to hear it doesn’t actually require the
KC
client
app
on Radio
or
MT
in order
for
people to participate in the KC community.
What I will do is continue with my own experiments with Movable Type. I already
have…
There’s already been a great response to my post last night (see the comments to previous entry). Greg suggested his aggregator Blogdigger could be included in this – I agree! Matt and Andrew also posted very thoughtful responses.
Here’s some of my feedback (copied from the comments – I must get these enabled inline…):
Overnight while pondering…
A few weeks ago I
suggested merging Topic Exchange and K-Collector together, or at least bring
the two sets of functionality closer together. I figure I’ll take a leaf
out of Marc Canter’s book and try and rally the community together on this
project. I’m hoping the respective developers of Topic Exchange and K-Collector
can get together and figure…
This is an article I’ve submitted to Computerworld NZ. I interviewed Ferry Hendrikx of the NZ E-Government Unit for this. Note that the target audience is mainstream IT people, so as well as writing about Ferry’s experiences in E-Government I decided to also explain what RSS is and put it in the context of everyday IT. So here it is:
All this hullaballoo about Movable
Type’s new licensing structure is just another example of one of the Web’s
enduring issues: how to make money on the Web when users are accustomed to free
lunches. It’s not just an issue for developers either, it’s as bad (if
not worse) for writers.
But before I address that wider issue, if you were to ask me…
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…
