Monday, March 18, 2002

Where are the categories I found the categories page on my local version of this site, but I can't find it in the live weblog. Not sure why yet, but I'd like to create links to my categories as views of all the information on the site. Simply inserting "/categories" into the URL gives me a directory listing, which isn't what I want. However, each item in the directory listing is what I want, as it appears as a home page with the information filtered by category. Maybe the thing to do is to edit the item template to show the category. I'll try that. 9:02:53 PM

Rewriting history Now I'm faced with a dilemma; do I go back and edit my previous entries to reflect what I've learned about formatting and titling? That would make them easier to read. But it would also erase the "historical record"; some of the entries address the formatting problems I react to in later entries. I guess I'll leave them as-is. Mostly because I'm lazy. 5:30:34 PM

Titles considered helpful Yikes, I just scanned this page as it appears in the blog itself (as opposed to this slightly different desktop page). My interface shows much better discrimination between individual posts; the blog interface runs everything together into one long gray column. Titles are clearly called for, as well as (maybe) some changes to the template applied to each post. And my categories don't seem to have any effect on my blog itself; can they just be for outgoing syndication? I want to offer category views on the blog home page. There must be a way... I wonder if this is a problem with the template I chose? Boy, Blogger is sure easier to set up, and the templates are easier to manipulate. (I know, I know, Radio has ten times the features. But I find I prefer simple interfaces. Heck, I even prefer vi to emacs.) 5:27:13 PM

I've written some illustrated letters, although not in a long time. I started, I think, when I was in California and my daughters were in Connecticut. The exhibition below shows that (to nobody's surprise) some illustrated letters vastly exceed my abilities. But while they focus on the letters themselves, I'm remembering how engrossing and fun was the process of creating the letters. Perhaps I haven't written any like that in so long because of the time it took...but it was great. Probably better than getting one of my letters! Getting The Picture: The Art Of The Illustrated Letter. Often the expression of joy or affection, illustrated letters represent an irrepressible urge to picture language... [xBlog: Visual thinking linking | XPLANE] 5:19:05 PM

That wasn't too bad; I managed to post from a newsfeed, and enter my own reply. Apparently I'll need to apply some formatting manually, though; the default doesn't distinguish a quote from commentary. 5:09:32 PM

From WriteTheWeb comes this question: What is a k-log?. Some people are taking the concept of weblogs and applying it to the wider concept of knowledge management. The result is k-logging ("knowledge-logging"). But will it catch on - will your employer dump Lotus Notes databases in favour of browsers and blog-style brain-dumps? [WriteTheWeb] I think the answer is no -- Lotus Notes and its ilk are still going to be used, but they'll gather different kinds of information. K-logs will have to learn how to fit into the info-environment of large organizations. 5:08:04 PM

Aha -- I found the "top 100" list of channels to subscribe to. But still, where is the canonical list of available channels, if there is such a thing? 4:28:25 PM

Here's a puzzle. How do I "run" the news aggregator manually so it will scan when I want it to scan? And how do I find the URL of a new "channel"? How do I know what I want to subscribe to without being able to see what's available? Hmmm...there must be some way to do these things. 4:18:49 PM

I've set up six categories, but I'd like to use a richer ontology of metadata to talk about what I'm talking about. This will be quite the work in progress; developing an ontology is not necessarily trivial, and I'm interested enough in it that I know I'll be poking around in all the dark little corners I find. The more fun I'm having, the slower I go. As Dorothy Parker said, "Curiousity is the cure for boredom. There is no cure for curiousity." 4:15:46 PM

This is getting a bit more organized; I've been completely through the preferences and categories interfaces, and entered some tweaks. I'm not sure how far I would have been able to get without having experience with Frontier. I hope somebody is writing user documentation for Radio -- or maybe I should just go ahead and do it myself. 4:11:31 PM

I'm currently comparing Radio, Blogger, and some homemade things I put together with AppleScript and BBEdit. While this may say more about me than the software, I like my BBEdit solution the best so far. It has a major "hole" in that it doesn't currently store any given post as an independent object; it just uses ftp to upload one great honkin' page with all my posts glommed together. Radio keeps everything pretty modular, and Blogger is somewhere in between. I think. Blogger is the simplest and easiest, but I don't seem to have as much control over things as here in Radio. Next step: figure out how to start implementing RDF via Radio. Oh, and figure out what on earth the "Radio Community Server" is. Sometimes I wish software developers would all just take a year off so the rest of us could catch up a bit. 3:42:22 PM

© Copyright 2002 Peter Harbeson.