Friday, February 21, 2003

Blog Basics "What the heck is a weblog, anyway?" Let's step back and ask the question "What is a website?" This may seem like a rhetorical question, but can you answer it in one paragraph? Since you're reading this, you're probably very comfortable with the Internet and the concept of the web, but try to answer this question like your grandma just asked it. I don't think it's easy to describe simply! But I'll give it a shot anyway. Here's one answer. The Internet refers to all all the connectioned computers around the world. A website is a particular point within the Internet space, where knowledge can be found and commerce can occur. Like going to a library or a store, you must "go" to a website using a browse function on your computer. OK, given that answer, let's answer the original question. A weblog is a website that streams to your desktop. It can still contain knowledge and can still allow commerce to occur, but instead of you going to the website, the contents of the website come to you using an aggregate function on your computer. Why is the notion of a website that comes to you significant? TIME! Once I've identified the websites on the Internet that I want track, I want to tell my computer to do the grunt work of tracking the website and telling me when new information is available. Weblogs are easy to both content producers and content consumers! 5:12:51 PM

Blosxom 2.0 beta 1 I suspect there’s really no need for preamble. If you’ve been reading my blog over the past few weeks, you’ve more than seen it coming. Here’s Blosxom 2.0 beta 1, replete with sample plugins for: RSS 1.0, Weblogs.com Ping, Foreshortened, Tiki, Readme, Buy from Amazon, Lucene-Powered Search, and TrackBack count. :-p [raelity bytes] Indeed we have. It's amazing how much power Rael has squeezed out of a little bit o' code. I might need to reconsider bloxsom again. 5:10:34 PM

The Executive Suite The view from up here is really beautiful. I hope to visit here again soon. 3:36:13 PM

The 10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers For a long time I've known that some things have bugged me about certain blogs and/or bloggers. This is my attempt to collect them in a top-10 list. I was going to write a paragraph for each one, but I... [Jeremy Zawodny's blog] #11. RSS feeds that don't include the entire blog entry. Actually, I'm guilty on many count myself... Bloggers who rarely produce original content, instead simply aggregating links to other blogs that I already read. Guilty. I'm just trying to collect information about specific topics that interest me. Bloggers who spend more time blogging about blogging than anything else. Guilty. I think the blogosphere is only just beginning, although I am focusing more and more on desktop tools for weblog producers. Bloggers who are FontBitches and don't care. Innocent! Bloggers who don't provide any "about me" info on their blog, or pointers to it elsewhere on their site. I like to know more about the people I'm reading. Bloggers who don't provide a blogroll. Guilty on both counts. I am still building my website, and I need to figure out the best way to add these. Bloggers who post excuses for not posting. I don't care if you're busy today. If you're not posting, fine. I'll just assume you had other things to do. Innocent. Bloggers who react but rarely act. Commenting on what other people say or do is interesting, but I'm annoyed by folks who never seem to have original material. (Yes, this is like #2 but it's not quite the same.) Hmm, innocent. There's lots of activity going on, but it's more in the market analysis phase. Bloggers who don't provide obvious RSS links for their blog. Yes, I know that RSS auto-discovery is great, but not all tools do it. Each of my categories has an RSS link at the bottom of the page, but I'd like to put all my category links and RSS feeds at the top of each page. Bloggers who have TrackBack but don't use it. Innocent? 1:09:23 PM

CodeWarrior mucks with double-byte strings in debugger fyi, i just wasted several minutes trying to figure out why some double-byte strings were being truncated. Turns out the CW debugger truncates strings to 256 bytes, no matter how long the string is. 12:41:44 PM

myPhoto: iPhoto server Nice! myPhoto is a PHP app that serves the contents of your iPhoto albums. Downloading now. Perhaps I can finally give Paulette access to our photos without having to lose the use of my machine... 9:33:50 AM

Turn RSS into speech and synch to your iPod Listen to your blogroll as your commute into work... VoiceBox is a little OS X app that converts text files to AIFF files of computer-generated speech, and supports turning the output of your RSS aggregator into an audio file that is automatically synched to your iPod. LinkDiscuss (Thanks, James!) [Boing Boing] 9:19:23 AM

Blogspot shows ads via Google The first sign of a google/blogger integration seems to be textads on Blogspot that are keyed off words used in posts. Take a look at these random blogspot examples: one, two, three. Are these new targetted ads just the tip of the iceberg, or the real reason for the buyout of Blogger's content? [Blogroots] It certainly does look interesting... 9:19:19 AM