Latest Articles

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  Web

  Is this the beginning of the Age of Topic-focused Blogs?

  I read with interest Matt Haughey's essay Blogging for Dollars, where he relates his experiences running Google's Adsense adverts on his TiVo-focused weblog, PVRblog. Matt is making a pretty penny running the Google ads on his TiVo blog and one of the main reasons why is that it is focused...

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  Homage to Hyperlinks

  I've just finished transferring a bunch of links from Outlook to my linkblog. They are links I've been hoarding over the past few months, as ideas for future weblog articles or just for inspiration. I plan to use my linkblog to store all the ideas I harvest from the Web....

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  Linkblog begun

  I've been playing around with some linkblog solutions. Firstly, on Phil Pearson's advice I tried del.icio.us. Once I negotiated my way around the minimalist design and even more minimalist documentation, I liked del.icio.us. However the problem is that it's a 3rd party hosted service and I want to host my...

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  Using the Mark All Read button

  I've just returned from 4 days holiday. I was disconnected from the Web for the entire time. This was a good thing, as I spent lots of quality time with my family. Now I'm back sitting in front of my PC at home. I've spent the last hour reviewing stuff...

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  The Drowned World of Data

  Too. Much. Information. Data floods my mind and my actions become water-logged. What to do? There's too much to do. Information washes over me, my head is submerged. Metadata fills my nostrils. I'm drowning, help!I'm being melodramatic :-) But actually I do feel this way sometimes. Right now I am...

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  Web

  Linkblogs

  I've been thinking about starting a linkblog, like Phil Pearson has just done. Two of my favourite daily reads are Anil Dash's Daily Links and Erik Benson's Morale-o-Meter. Both those guys post a daily list of external links, with a 1-2 line comment on each link, which pretty much align...

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  The will to publish

  2003 has so far been a year of hype for weblogs and k-logs. Blogging is on the cusp of the mainstream. Or is it? A few posts recently have me wondering: why would normal people want to publish to the Web?Mark Pilgrim: "... itís possible that an unfiltered... unedited... personal...

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  Topic of the Pops

  CSS and XHTML are still dominating my mind's attention.xml file. As you can see in my menu, they're numbers 1 and 2 in my Weekly Topic Top 10. btw the Topic Top 10 is going to be a weekly record (pardon the pun) of the most popular topics on my...

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  Tableless CSS project winds up

  I've been totally absorbed in my CSS re-design this past week. I did some final tinkering tonight, trying to find a solution to the "bottom horizontal bar" issue (outlined in my previous post). But CSS positioning is an abstract thing to get ones head around. It's not like good old...

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  XHTML validation and more CSS notes

  I've been fixing up some teething problems with my new CSS design and I'm quite pleased to report that my homepage is now 100% valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I checked this at the W3C Validator. A couple of days ago I had about 360 errors on my test page, but...

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  Web

  CSS conversion of my Radio weblog

  I've done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it's now a tableless design. I'm doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven't yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis,...

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  Social

  Pirates of the Blogosphere – the curse of the protocols

  Andrew Chen wrote a response to my previous post about Syncato. He thinks I want to create something called a "distributed conversation protocol" and then take over the world. Actually creating a protocol would be the difficult part, given what is happening with Atom :-) So no, I'm not advocating...

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  Social

  Syncato and Microcontent Wiki

  Jon Udell is getting very excited about a new weblog product called Syncato, which is described here:"Syncato is a weblog system designed to extract the maximum potential from the content of your posts. All posts in Syncato are stored as XML within a native XML database and are searchable using...

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  11 Weblog Pieces

  Forgive me, it's the end of the day and I don't want to write my usual lengthy blog post. So I thought I'd do the blogging equivalent of "piano pieces", which in this case is a collection of various links and quotes that have caught my eye recently:Prelude No. 15...

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  Ted Nelson’s two-way links

  Matt Webb blogged the Hypertext03 conference and the resulting notes are a good scan. Thank goodness for people like Matt who blog conferences, because those of us who live on the other side of the world don't get to go to these flash harry conferences *sulk*. Matt's notes on Ted...

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  Rock n roll

  On a less serious note than my previous post, it also occured to me that bloggers are like rock n roll bands. The best bands explore a different theme each album, just like the best bloggers (imho) write on an ever-changing series of themes. My favourite band The Velvet Underground...

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  Entertainment

  Weblogs are the new Universal Art

  Blogging is a 21st century art form and right now it is the most vibrant creative outlet in society. Ideas flow like water in the blogosphere and Weblogs.com ticks over with updated posts every few seconds. Anyone can publish a weblog and that's partly what makes it so vibrant. But...

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  New School Blogroll example

  As per my previous post, I've updated my blogroll to include topics and conversations. I just manually updated my blogroll OPML file, but I envisage a web frontend for this in future - kinda like Phil Pearson's web form for his Feed Combiner.A bit more about the two new sections...

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  Extending blogrolls

  Don also mentioned auto-population of blogrolls, which is something that Phil Pearson has been experimenting with and I've been commenting on. My view is that the "blogroll" can be extended to incorporate not only links to weblogs (people), but links to topics and conversations (weblog comments). Later on you could...

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  Social

  Tracking conversations with Wikis

  Don Park has come up with some promising ideas on how to link weblogs with wikis. One of his ideas is for weblog comments to be cross-posted to Wiki pages, via some scripting that "can create or find" a matching Wiki page for each comment. For this to work, comments on a weblog post will need to be assigned...