MovableBlog: Asides: April 2004

April 30, 2004

Why Ecademy will succeed Because Ecademy is social software that encourages people to get away from the computer and meet in the flesh in an ad hoc but regular basis (unlike Meetup.org which is planned and regular and Upcoming.org which is planned and one-time). [#]

Timothy Appnel: MT 3.0 isn't a "dot 0" release, but there's no "exodus" He worries about the level of communication with developers. Olivier thinks he knows how the communication troubles at 6A happened. [#]

WordPress 1.2 Beta adds custom fields to weblog entries, better options interface If it weren't for the fact that you can't have multiple weblogs in WP (yet), it would be ahead of MT by a lap. [#]

April 28, 2004

What does "Syndicate this site" mean? I note simply for the record the continued absence of the excellent Learning Movable Type from Six Apart's external MT resources page. [#]

If Six Apart won't fix the bug in the MTEntryModifiedDate tag, somebody will And somebody did. [#]

Considerations when upgrading to MT 3.0 I wouldn't say there's an exodus from but rather a small trickle away from it. PHP-based weblog publishing systems seem to be the popular alternative to MT for those that have switched, since those are the ones that have equalled MT in terms of features or surpassed (like Drupal, which is, admittedly, more CMS than personal publishing software). [#]

Derek Powazek is a randomizer I'm a sorter-by-path-and-filename. [#]

April 24, 2004

Shelley moves to Wordpress Another high-profile move away from MT. [#]

Showing uncategorized entries using Brad Choate's SQL plugin [#]

Inserting MT 3.0 comment template code in your existing weblog After you've upgraded to MT 3.0, of course. [#]

MT-Blacklist not compatible with MT 3.0 beta [#]

MT is a competent but bland content management system Jonas says that MT is missing the boat, hence his change to Drupal before MT 3.0 was officially released. [#]

April 23, 2004

Adam's proposed changes to MT 3.0's comment editing interface [#]

Funneling traffic from Boing Boing Or you could do this automatically using, oh, I dunno, Magpie. [#]

dirifyplus plugin for MT [#]

Boris has some ideas for IT Garage [#]

Les Jenkins has some thoughts on the MT 3.0 architecture and suggests a revenue stream based on MT plugins [#]

TypePad protocol reverse engineered Leave it up to geeks to beat the software producer in documenting its product. [#]

Min Jung can't help but seeing something rather unrelated to blogging in the new TypePad logo [#]

Technorati Cosmos links for Radio [#]

April 22, 2004

MT 3.0 won't be a feature release Well, there goes that criticism I had of it. [#]

GoogleGuy says that underscores are not word separators That means using the dirify attribute to create meaningful URLs in MT doesn't help increase your PageRank. [#]

TypeKey error message less than helpful Even less helpful than the one at cleveland.com. [#]

Small MT 3.0 stylesheet enhancements If you told me a week ago Adam would be my go-to guy for MT 3.0 info (despite my being a beta tester), I would have called you a liar. [#]

Unregistered comment moderation in MT 3.0 means unregistered comments will be silently rejected I wish Adam luck in (and hopefully have contributed to) his quest to be #1 for the phrase "silently rejected". [#]

Boris is keeping track of people who are converting to Drupal I will be using Drupal for at least one (new) personal site of mine in the very near future, but as of now the costs of switching from some of my existing powered-by-MT sites does not justify the benefits Drupal offers. [#]

Eric Meyer on the problem with Technorati links at the bottom of each post Says everything I wanted to say about them and more. [#]

April 21, 2004

Use PubSub to track your URL, name and topics I still like the Feedster interface better (and why is there email confirmation at PubSub? Feedster gives you the URL right away) and Feedster gives you instant results whereas you have to wait in PubSub. The "okay, now what?" factor will probably confuse new users. [#]

Tim Bray adds Technorati links to each post On the front page, which visitors reading through RSS will have to take an extra step to access. [#]

Movable Type 3.0 Beta first thoughts [#]

Search engine optimization and accessibility See also: mentions of "Google" at Dive Into Accessibility. [#]

New features for NetNewsWire Not owning a Mac just got harder. [#]

The economics of Skype Looks like AT&T thinks this VoIP thing might just catch on. [#]

Non-bloggers come out looking good Always good to know where the money really is. [#]

Kinja news weblog So let me get this straight: it doesn't have a syndicated feed? [#]

Patch Drupal to ping Technorati [#]

Joey tells the story of his first IT job If the story appeared in his regular weblog, he wouldn't have called Queens University by its official name, I guarantee you that. [#]

Consulting around Drupal and free software in general Closing the source of a client's project means closing rooms, NDAs and other costs that may be passed on to the client. In other words, it's a business case for open source projects and returning the fruits of paid labour to the commons. [#]

April 20, 2004

Everything is "broken" Or: using the word "broken" to say that you don't like how something works is broken. [#]

AccordionGuy endorses Ross Rader for member of the CIRA board of directors The CIRA AGM is in Vancouver this year, although voting for board of directors happens a month and a half later. Those that have .ca domains (including myself) have voting rights at both the AGM and the board of directors vote. [#]

April 19, 2004

Roland: PubSub makes Trackback obsolete [#]

Ping-o-Matic multi-ping service for weblogs But how do I ping it from within my weblog CMS of choice? (Search engine spammers: your job has just been made almost a dozen times easier.) [#]

GoogleGuy asks "GoogleGuy Says" website to stop publishing his forum posts It wasn't fair use anyway, so GoogleGuy had every right to ask. Also, since when does silence automatically mean consent? [#]

Chinese "entrepreneurs" using form-scraping software to submit spam [#]

dotCanada sucks It gets better: I dotCanada's site (at 6:10 PM) and all I get is an error stating that PHP can't connect to MySQL. [#]

April 18, 2004

del.icio.us documentation revamped I'm linked with two ways of integrating del.icio.us with your website, one using the Movable Type plugin MT-RSSfeed, and the other using PHP and Magpie RSS PHP library. [#]

For Boris, short comments go on someone else's site, longer comments on his own I've all but stopped short-commenting too: they now usually appear on my "Asides" weblogs. [#]

MT 3.0 beta testing Yeehaw! [#]

April 17, 2004

TypeKey is only a first step [#]

Weblog about examples of business blogs So there is money in blogging. [#]

April 16, 2004

Firefox find in page now searches textboxes and textareas My short entry on Blogzilla which links to the Burning Edge's report. [#]

MT, respect weblogs.com's policy It's not just MT. [#]

Perl inside PHP Don't cross the streams! [#]

Phil Ringnalda has been using the description element RSS as originally intended Ballsy. [#]

April 15, 2004

Google Gmail privacy fears overblown People are still unwilling to trade their privacy as a commodity. And yet another service where the opinion of its critics are divided between those who have tried it and those who have not. (But a robots.txt for email?) [#]

Government of Canada sends BlogsCanada cease and desist order James Bow and Darren Barefoot comment. [#]

Weblogs.com thinks Adam should enjoy life more And I blog more than he does. [#]

April 14, 2004

Ecto for Windows Can you guess what I'm posting this with? [#]

PHP comes of age I look forward to articles entitled "Python comes of age". [#]

Boing Boing adds Technorati links to its entries Which I've been doing for months, and which Don Park did before me. [#]

April 13, 2004

Make money blogging The important questions are "what else?" [#]

April 12, 2004

MT from the command line My favourite clients have been the ones who gave me ssh access. [#]

When scam artists abuse privacy rules to defaud deaf people [#]

eBay RSS feeds Get it while it hasn't yet been served with a cease and desist order. [#]

Using phpBB as your commenting system for Movable Type Sure, you could do that. Or you could install Drupal. [#]

Matt Haughey says that with Gmail, you'll never have to delete anything If we never had to delete anything, then why do disk drives keep increasing in size? [#]

Matt Haughey says that "everyone and their mother has a Gmail account" Replace "everyone and their mother" with "every A-Lister", then maybe we can talk. [#]

April 11, 2004

Return of the homebrew coder Joey has links to those mentioned in the article points to his story of being a Lone Coder. [#]

Andrew Coyne: MT is the Mercedes of blogging engines [#]

Computer matchmaking circa 1957 [#]

The EFF and others need actual cases and consequences, not what might happen, with regards to privacy advocacy [#]

April 10, 2004

Look, Tim Bray blogged the search terms for those reaching his weblog! Which only increases the odds people will come across his weblog with those search terms. [#]

Unofficial errata to "Normalized Syndicated Feed Content" [#]

Opinion about TypeKey split down the line of those who have used it and those who haven't Jay is responding to Sarah's thoughts on TypeKey, and he's right. (I thought we weren't discussing TypeKey anymore, but I guess that means the thread is back open.) [#]

April 9, 2004

Photodude switches to Textpattern That's the highest profile switch away from Movable Type I've seen so far. [#]

Redirect your old non-future-proof MT entries to future-proof equivalents I thought about doing that, but instead of having a long .htaccess file to be run through every time a client loaded something with /archives/ in the URL, decided with making my old individual archives a script that redirected to the new individual archives, so that only the entry accessed did the redirection. [#]

April 8, 2004

"Meme" is not allowed Linking to Maciej is my way of protesting the linking of a site just because someone asked everybody to link it. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, then good, the "meme" is failing.) [#]

Making a living as a search marketing professional Evidently it's possible. [#]

They have BloggerCon in China now Cash bar, evidently. [#]

Cross-site scripting security advisory So don't use somebody else's Javascript. Or your Javascript. Or for that matter, don't have a website. Or even better, don't use the Internet at all. [#]

April 7, 2004

Atom template for TypePad In case you signed up before TypePad got Atom feeds. [#]

Normalizing syndicated feed content [#]

Email management Unless there is information that I need in it, I close my email app when working. [#]

Channel Definition Format is back in the news The channel definition for this weblog (not Asides) has existed since May 2003 when Mark published his CDF template for MT. See also discussion at intertwingly.net of May 2003 and Don Box from today. [#]

April 6, 2004

Powerpoint uninteroperable with Microsoft, OpenOffice.org is evil But what Mark really meant to say is that OpenOffice is a platform. No wait, an operating system. No wait... [#]

Ping all the weblog update pingers at once Why they didn't call it "MetaPinger" I'll never know. [#]

Kaye hopes the BloggerCon she has planned in NOLA will be the 50th So if there's one in Vancouver, it would to be somewhere between the 3rd and 49th, inclusive. [#]

7 facts about Atom Most look more like interpretations than facts (which is not to say that the interpretations are incorrect, mind you). [#]

Website design matters But don't tell Scoble that. I'm also interested in this "casual adherance to the standards" approach. Would that have worked for railway manufacturers? [#]

HTML is code I've was once mistaken for a developer because of my HTML and CSS knowledge. [#]

An OPML of the RSS feeds from my sites Not an exhaustive list, but in my zealous attempt to monopolize the top 10 of Google results for my name (I have 8 at this writing: websites with .nu or .se in the domain are not me), this list seems to have snuck in. [#]

The Register goes XHTML and CSS The CSS is surprisingly well-documented. [#]

Google may crawl links on pages with noindex in the meta tag If you don't have access to robots.txt you're either not paying enough or you're getting ripped off. [#]

April 5, 2004

The way forward with web standards Preaches to me, who is part of the choir, but it makes a good business case for developing websites with web standards. [#]

Six Apart hires three of its support system volunteers I've long said that the support forum is the best resource for Movable Type, and bmk, girlie and kadyellebee were by far the best supporters, so hiring them makes all kinds of sense to me. [#]

April 4, 2004

Slightly more secure RSS-to-local-HTML Microsoft at least gets some things right, eventually. [#]

Auto-link URLs in comments while still allowing HTML Requires hacking the code, which I'm no longer against. [#]

Hyperlinks add to the texture and usefulness of non-fiction It bugs me, though, when excellent sites like North Korea Zone use "here" as the text for external links. [#]

Solving your morning fire hydrant problem I've already solved this by going through the list of weblogs I subscribe to and ask the question "but what have they done for me lately?" and worsened the problem by subscribing to Feedster searches for my favourite authors, their books, and musicians, their records, and other assorted interesting people or ideas I want to keep track of. [#]

Convert graphics in PNG format to .ico Courtesy Matt's instructions on how to create a favicon.ico for your website. [#]

April 3, 2004

Derek Miller links to recent weblog posts that say graphical user interfaces get no respect I tell ya, no respect. [#]

Weblogs are just websites The first comment is funny. [#]

Extract EXIF data from a picture with the MTImageInfo plugin [#]

April 2, 2004

Textpattern also has a Presentation Management System If it called it that, though, the acronym would be unfortunate. [#]

Paypal IPN agent in PHP If a person is impatient enough and an interface doesn't exist in their scripting language of choice, they will build it themselves. [#]

Gmail screenshot See also: Google's Gmail. [#]

The importance of !important Add this to the overwhelming pile of evidence that IE sucks. [#]

The market creates usability Open-source programmers marvel at their code, not their interfaces. [#]

A truly virtual office Putting a divider between my computer and my bed has increased productivity (and, thankfully, sleep). [#]

IRC to IM gateway As IRC and IM fiend and serial early adopter, I must have this. [#]

Thank You, Movable Type So people other than me are setting up MT for clients. [#]

WS-* I remember when WS stood for WordStar. [#]