Sunday, December 14, 2003

Hussein captured?

CBS News clearly has some work to do. So does CNN but not as much maybe... I just heard via Jeff Cheney that CBS (TV) is reporting that Saddam Hussein has (possibly) been captured. Amusingly enough, neither CBS.com nor CBSNews.com has anything about this at this very moment, though no doubt they will soon. On the other hand, CNN.com already has the story, on its own page, where I can link to it, and where I'm pretty sure that the link will still work a year from now, and maybe even five years from now. Anyone for 10 years? (Long odds, but I give CNN about 50/50.) CNN is doing a very good job in my opinion. Permanent links are a very important part of Web infrastructure. Whether they link to a page, a paragraph in a page, a weblog post, or a whole site doesn't matter. Web content should be like books -- if I can link to it today, that link should work in the (forseeable) future. Would you buy a book that dissolved into thin air two years from now, and all citations of the book in other publications suddenly became illegible at the same time? I wouldn't. That's why I'm committed to keeping my content up basically forever, or at least for as much of forever as I can reasonably control. Maybe the web needs some longevity policy guidelines that we can all follow? 03:40'53    comment []  trackback []

Thursday, December 11, 2003

Again this week, I hooked up with the weblog-writers meeting via webcast and IRC. For your reading pleasure, I've got the IRC transcript: IRC Transcript in HTML (44KB) There was a rumor that the webcast would be archived for future listening, but in case that didn't work, I've got a recording here too. If anyone needs an MP3, just let me know. Update: Dave posted a link to the Real Audio archive of the meeting. It's 40MB -- which seems awfully big to me, since my MP3 recording is just under 18MB. I wonder if there's a difference in quality between the two. I recorded the MP3 in mono at 24kbps, which is more than good enough for speech, and is 50% higher bitrate than the stream I was listening to using Real Player. Scratches head... 18:43'34    comment []  trackback []

Thursday, December 4, 2003

I recorded the webcast of the weekly weblog-writers meeting at Berkman tonight. You can listen to it in MP3 in four parts here: Part 1 231KB (pre-meeting) Part 2 3.4MB Part 3 4.9MB Part 4 9.3MB Marc Nozell has the IRC transcript here. (updated URL -- thanks, Marc) 18:22'26    comment []  trackback []

Wednesday, October 29, 2003

Manila feature: Password-protected RSS feeds

A new feature for Manila which makes it possible to subscribe to RSS feeds in Editors-Only Manila sites using any RSS news reader which supports HTTP authentication: This is especially useful for people who run private sites for a workgroup or project, or for people who run Manila sites in educational environments where the sites are required to have restricted access. 01:10'43    comment []  trackback []

A feature of Manila that I forgot to mention earlier: When you're setting the path for a story or discussion group message, clicking the path field in the Admin box automatically chooses the "set a path" command. One less step needed for a commonly used feature... 00:06'15    comment []  trackback []

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Manila: News Item Department Enhancements
We've released some enhancements for Manila's news item departments feature: News item departments now each have their own RSS 2.0 feeds. In addition, each Manila site now has a page which lists all the departments in the site, along with links to each department, and its RSS feed. See this page on the Manila site for details. 02:03'42    comment []  trackback []