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  Auto-pinging Topic Exchange

  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...

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  Topic Navigation Live

  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...

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  Topics: Automatic for the People

  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...

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  More on Topic-Sharing Community

  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...

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  Proposed Solution for ENT Topic-Sharing Community

  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...

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  RSS in New Zealand E-Government

  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...

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  Reaching for the Golden Ring (or Getting Paid)

  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....

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  Duplicating Link and Guid

  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...

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  Pop Quiz: Comments

  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...

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  MT Migration – The How and the CSS

  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 MoveI have to give a big shout-out to Bill Kearney, whose Radio Exporter tool made it relatively easy to...

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  Why I moved from Radio Userland to Movable Type

  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...

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  Running on MT

  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...

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  Taxi Driver Strategies

  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....

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  My Digital Web Magazine article

  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...

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  Combined project for topic mapping in blogging?

  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...

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  One Year On: Part 2

  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...

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  One Year On: Part 1

  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...

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  I guess this makes me a journalist

  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...

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  Entertainment

  Media Literacy and How Blogs Should Evolve

  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...

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  Napoleon’s Glance – the Art of Web Strategy

  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...