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 Monday, August 11, 2003
EU regulations to control web cookies
European laws due to come into force by the end of October will shake up the way businesses are allowed to use cookies on their Web sites.
[The Register
10:47:43 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Warren Ellis writing a novel-on-a-blog
Inspired by Unwirer, the story that Charlie Stross and I co-wrote in public, on a blog, Warren Ellis has decided to write a novel on a blog he's created for the purpose (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 are already online). Link Discuss (via Charlie's Diary) [Boing Boing Blog
10:19:18 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Get Iconized!
picIconize Me!: It's easy, it's fun and it starts at only $15! All you need to do is... place your order, send your picture and within two weeks you'll have yourself a custom icon!
[Industrial Technology & Witchcraft
8:26:41 PM      comment []   trackback []  



ISSN for weblogs
The definitive reference, by Clark.
[Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
8:20:49 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Can RSS Save the Day?
Steve Outing tells us of This is True's recent leap: "For Cassingham, offering RSS gives him an additional way to reach readers without e-mail filters getting in the way or having them remember to visit a website. As spam filters do additional damage to ethical e-mail publishers, perhaps RSS will save the day - but first the web masses need to catch on to using RSS readers." Well, there's no time like the present to start! By chris@pirillo.com. [Lockergnome's RSS Resource
2:09:50 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Building Permanence into Nano Publishing
Building a Nano Publishing business using a weblog platform is a huge investment. There is the investment in time that the weblog writer puts into writing and publishing each article, the investment in time in reading other people's weblogs and responding to them, as well as the investment in money required to pay for hosting, development of artwork, and other content investments that may be required. Building up a large store of permalinks and their impermanence and also provide a guide to understanding what actually does happen should you need to move from your current hosting platform. I provide tips on what actually you need to invest in to make sure you develop a good permanent nano-publishing base.
[Microdoc News
1:51:56 PM      comment []   trackback []  



New Features for Blogdigger
Got some new Blogdigger features for ya.

The first is topics.  Blogdigger now returns results of topic (subject, category) matches for your search terms.  You will notice at the bottom of search results that have topic data, a link to the topic is displayed.  Also, popular topics are displayed at the top of the search results page.  You can search explicitly for posts from a specific topic by using the "subject:" prefix.  So a search for "subject:politics" would return all the posts that were classified into the politics category by their authors.

Right now, only the <dc:subject> field is being used for this data, so it is mostly RSS 1.0 feeds that are returned.  I am working on RSS 2.0 (categrory, ENT) solutions.  You might recall, way back when, that there was some discussion about incorporating data from the TopicExchange into Blogdigger.  That is still the plan, hopefully soon something will be in place.

The interesting thing about this, is that I didnt think it would work so well.  I figured most people use diverse names for their topics, and there wouldnt be a lot of commonality, just a lot of garbage.  Turns out their is a fair amount of garbage, but also a whole lot of commonality.  Topics like politics, music, news, technology and others all have posts from many different blogs.  And remember, you can subscribe to all of these topic searches in RSS!

The second new feature is the ad bar on the side of the results page.  This is powered by Amazon Web Services.  I wrote a small service that takes your search terms and sends them to Amazon and returns the top 10 book results.  I hope it isnt too obtrusive and all proceeds go to making Blogdigger better (i.e., buying more hard drive space).  Please let me know if the ads are taking to long to load; I am working on a caching mechanism, but I can take them down in the interim.  And if you want to get the ad bar for your site, email me, we can work it out.

Many thanks to Michael Fagan, Phil Pearson, Bill Kearney and Brother Mike for the input, feedback, swift kicks and help with this.

Enjoy
[Blogdigger Development Blog
1:49:17 PM      comment []   trackback []