Thursday, June 26, 2003

Thinning the blogroll I tried to thin my blogroll today. Somehow I had accumulated over 230 feeds, and I was only able to pare that down to 211. I did re-organize my folder sets, broke out my Coders into Coders-Java and Coders-MacOSX. I also made a folder specifically for blog-related tools and services. Some of my feeds really should belong in two or more folder. That's a big problem waiting for a good solution. While a weblog may be a person, i want to mostly want to read about topics. Where one person writes about more than one topic of interest to me, I want those entries to propagate to the appropriate folders. Perhaps what I want is a list of feeds separate from a list of topics, and the aggregator would route and filter incoming entries. Currently, there are only a few people who's blog I want to read in its entirety (shout outs to steve, tony, greg, eric, and jud. now if tony would add an RSS feed and jud would start blogging again... :-). 10:47:20 AM

iPhoto plugin for photo-blogging Eric Sigler is today's hero - he's made an iPhoto2 plugin that can post photos to weblogs using the metaweblog API. It works rather well too. Yay Eric! [Ben Hammersley.com] Sweet! Downloading now... UPDATE: nice idea, but I don't want full size images in my weblog. To be really compelling, I'd want options for thumbnails and/or reduced sizes, options for where to put the binary file, as well as being able to annotate. Ah well, it sounds like a job for a real weblog authoring tool. 10:25:22 AM

The Holy Duh of Weblogging When I asked Brent Simmons whether he thought there was any way for people to making money via weblogs other than providing software or services, he actually answered a much bigger question when he responded: "... I probably wouldn't hire anybody for anything unless they had a weblog." He continued: ... The main thing is: if you don't have a weblog, I probably don't know you, and I don't have an easy way to get to know you. If you have a weblog, I'm either reading it already or I can read it and look in the archives a bit to get a sense of who you are. " After sitting staring at the ceiling thinking about this comment, I realize it crystallized, for me, a very basic question about how to think about weblogs. The painfully simple question is, "What is a weblog?" The painfully simple answer is, "A weblog is the representation of a person on the Internet." [Rands in Repose] This is a good definition of a weblog (that's my emphasis, not Rand's). Just don't forget that an RSS feed is not weblogs, but a weblog is an RSS feed. RSS feeds can also be news feeds, server status feeds, CMS change feeds, etc... 10:06:29 AM