Different ways to organize RSS feeds
...At evectors we are working on a reputation-based filtering system, where users of k-collector will be able to have their news filtered according to who is writing about some specific topic. It's still at a very early stage, but it sounds promising.

Whew... it looks like there's still a lot of stuff to invent and code to write, uh?
[w4feed:RSS 2.0] 
6:43:04 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Bush Campaign Reaching Out to Bloggers

Perish the thought...

Washington Post: President Bush's campaign will unveil a Web site today that allows proprietors of online journals -- Blogs or Web logs -- to "get the latest campaign headlines and inside scoop posted instantly to your site through a live...
[The Blog Herald] 
6:37:16 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Tripod Blogs better than Blogger?
PC Mag has rated Tripod Blogs higher than Blogger, Live Journal and Weblogger in a review published today that is bound to attract criticism. Lycos is trumpeting its win with a release to Yahoo! Finance, although the Blog Census figures...
[The Blog Herald] 
6:33:57 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Integrating Trackbacks into the whole blog but not just in post comments... Everywhere!

MT did a poor job of integrating trackbacks. I've made some changes that push them up the focus a little. They will now appear in the main and archive templates and in the comments sections. I hope everyone finds this useful in one way or another :) Adam Kalsey has done a lot to help out with this with hist fantastice MT Plugin, SimpleComments, which is required for these changes. (It's a simple install of copying 2 files to your...
(via Reflective Reality) [Channel 'social_software'] 
5:38:46 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Update: My.Yahoo RSS Aggregator is live
Just tried it myself - works like a charm.

You have to add the Blogs section, available here:
http://e.my.yahoo.com/config/add_module?.module=xcontent
The interface is nice. Summaries of the latest entries, headlines for older entries. [Blogdigger Development Blog] 
5:15:10 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Enriching Blog Calendar
Someone has to thinks of it first - here's another natural blog feature development in the making:

"Most blogs have a calendar for navigation but not for much else.  I was thinking how nice it would be to enrich it automatically with other information like birthdays of people on blogroll, anniversaries, schedule of conferences I am planning to attend, etc.

Size of the calendar will have to get a little bigger, but mouse-over sensitive date specific details can be displayed in an area immediately below the calendar.  FOAF and iCal/vCal formats can be useful here.  Calendars are also amazing yet under-utilized advertising medium IMHO."

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
5:09:39 PM      comment []   trackback []  



My.Yahoo is now an RSS Aggregator!
"Sneak peek: Yahoo RSS module

"The My Yahoo RSS module appeared briefly yesterday on the Choose Content page under Personal Information Management with the name "Blogs", but it seems to have disappeared now. Here is a screenshot of the config page for the module:"

(via Blogdigger, BloggingRoller, Arjun) [Blogdigger Development Blog] 
5:03:27 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogware developed in Ruby!?!
"Congrats on the first publicly deployed blog hosting system in Ruby! Cool! Could we have some more technical details please, Joey? Like why Ruby and why not Perl, PHP, ASP, etc? The things you mention are nice computer science arguments, but some juicy ammunition for PHB's :-) would be awesome!"

"Boss Ross has declared that we are far enough out of stealth mode for me to use my powers as Tucows' TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator) and actually say what language the developers are using to write this pretty cool blogging tool called Blogware...

Ruby!

Some of you might right now be cocking your head to one side. Ru-what? If you're one of these people, Ruby is:

* A complete, full, pure object oriented language. Even the number 1 is an instance of class Fixnum.
* Flexible and dynamic. It's both dynamic (no need to declare variables) and strongly typed (types are checked at runtime). What to add methods to a class at runtime? No prob. Want to add methods to an instance at runtime? Once again, No prob.
* A language with a nice clean, consistent syntax
* Open source

(via The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century) [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 
4:56:26 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Blogging Explained to Old UNIX Hacks
"The other day I was talking to an old friend of mine that used to be really into UNIX but that ended up choosing a different path. He wanted to know what the heck a weblog was. I had to evoke old UNIX images: back when we were in school, people used to cook up elaborate .plan files and change them occasionally to reflect news in their lives. The .plan files were displayed whenever that user was fingered (always elicited a giggle or two from UNIX newbies), and that was the state of the art in displaying up-to-date personal information. (Of course static web pages quickly made .plan files extinct, but we're talking prehistoric times here). During that time, there was also the Usenet phenomenon - news protocols such as NNTP, and newsreaders like rn and variants. Usenet was a huge time sink for us back then - I remember a year or two where I was religiously following newsgroups such as comp.unix.wizards or comp.os.research, and I knew others that spent multiple hours a day keeping up with dozens of newsgroups. Well, combine those two things and you arrive at my explanation of blogging in terms of old UNIX analogies: you're basically pivoting the table - you're publishing a "newsgroup" about yourself (alt.omrig.die.die.die :-)) on a set of topics (a.k.a. categories) where all the threads are started by you, and others can subscribe to it using an RSS aggregator, and post responses. Most people are probably thoroughly confused by this definition, but to my friend this seemed to make perfect sense..."
(via Omri Gazitt's Weblog [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 
4:49:30 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Macworld's Weblog Roundup Falls Short
MacWorld magazine's July issue contains an article by Scot Hacker (great name for a computer magazine writer, no?) entitled 'Put Weblogs To Work' (sorry, not yet available on their site). In it, he compares seven weblog packages (Blogger Pro, Geeklog, iBlog, LiveJournal, Movable Type, pMachine Pro, and Radio). It's too bad he didn't think to include Free-Conversant (which this blog is built on). It competes extremely well in all categories he looked at, and then some. What's more, it adds depth to many.

Take 'Search', for example. Everything in Free-Conversant sits in a hierarchical database and one can performed very detailed searches (by date, author, subject, message body, etc.) and includes the ability to search for user-defined metadata. Take a look at Free-Conversant's Support site search page. Any weblog hosted there can have a similarly robust search interface.

Rich Site Summary. Every package he looked at can generate RSS. Conversant can generate numerous rss feeds via channels. What does that mean? Let's say you only wanted to see posts I make on a certain topic. With Conversant, I can give you access to rss feeds that are topic specific (see the right side of this page. See all those rss feeds? Lots of work, right? Wrong. All done automagically, leveraging Conversant's search capabilities. Pretty clever, huh?

If you wanna blog, take a look at Conversant. For me, it's not just a blog platform, however. Macrobyte (Conversan't creators) hosts my e-mail accounts, ftp accounts, and static web hosting. Macrobyte does custom developing, too. From really big stuff (like writing a Conversant plug-in to import xml data from the National Library of Medicine), to smaller stuff (like writing an Applescript that automates image uploading to the static server) and, soon, adding a WYSIWYG editor to my weblog posting interface...
[romanvenable Weblog] 
2:26:46 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Closing the loop on XHTML blog content
James Farmer asks about the difference between WYSIWYG XML and HTML editing:
[Jon's Radio] 
1:08:45 AM      comment []   trackback []