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Archives for Blogging
Wordpress for the iPhone
Today Automattic and Effigent released an Open Source iPhone app that enables you to “write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch.”
Hooray. Now we can look forward to even more douchebags “liveblogging” public events.
The MT Comment Script Must Die!
After fighting off yet another comment-spam attack yesterday morning, I finally broke down and moved the personal blog to Wordpress. And yes, I tried the Movable Type 4.0 beta. It was just too little, too late.
Most of the old links should be resolving. If you have trouble finding anything, please let me know.
You would have to be insane to enable Trackback on a corporate blog. Look at the links at the bottom of Mena Trott’s post about the new licensing terms for [Movable Type 3.0][1]. The mob has spoken, and it’s publicly viewable on the company site. [1]: http://www.sixapart.com/corner/archives/2004/05/its_about_time.shtml
More Shameless Self-Promotion
I’m quoted in a story on blogging in the Business section of today’s Washington Post.
It’s definitely a community. You would tend to think that a technology like this would make it easier for people to avoid personal interaction, but it’s just actually the opposite.
The Ban the Ban blog (which I designed) is also mentioned in the article, in addition to my personal blog.
I thought the story was pretty good, but I would like to make two things very clear:
- I am a former non-policy Cato employee and nothing I have ever said or written should be associated with the Cato Institute.
- The “Cato Blog Mafia” is not an official organization–and, as such, has no “members.” And I certainly did not come up with the name.
I was quite amused to see a quote from Alexis Rice in the story. She was on the same floor in my freshman dorm (Thurston) at GWU. I remember setting up her first web page back in ‘97.
Now I’m Cooler Than You
I just received my International Standard Serial Number for this blog from the Library of Congress:
ISSN 1545-3480
You can get your own ISSN number here.
The Frosty Mug News Aggregator
I installed a couple of Movable Type plugins (mt-list and mt-rssfeed) to allow me to setup a blogroll page displaying the last five posts for each MT blog I’m hosting on this server.
The page is here if you’re interested. It updates itself four times a day. If it ends up being useful, I might decide to make it a bit more interactive.
I’m Three
Since just about everyone seems to be waxing poetic on their blogging birthdays as of late, I feel compelled to engage in a shameless act of one-upmanship.
My blog turned three a few weeks back.
Furthermore, this site has been online–in one form or another–for over six years. So there.
Why Use Radio?
With client applications like Kung-Log available for Movable Type, why do people still use Radio?
Implementing Textile on Old Posts
It was easy enough to implement Textile formatting on old Movable Type posts when using MySQL. All I had to do was run the following SQL command and then republish all posts:
UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_convert_breaks = "textile_1" WHERE entry_blog_id = "12";
You would obviously want to substitute the appropriate blog ID in the above statement.
I did notice one strange bug with the plugin. Text surrouned by a single dash is formatted as striked text. This creates a problem with SmartyPants, which converts two hyphens to an em dash. The result is that any block of text with two em dashes is rendered as striked text. They probably should have used a character other than the hyphen for implementing that particular inline formatting shortcut.
Movable Type 2.6
Movable Type 2.6 was released this morning. I already went ahead and ran the upgrade on my server and I’m quite pleased.
There are quite a few new features in this release. My personal favorite is support for multiple text-formatting options, based on plugins. Brad Choate has already written an excellent plugin that allows Movable Type to use Dean Allen’s Textile text formatting system.
As if all this wasn’t enough, Choate’s plugin also invokes SmartyPants (if it happens to be installed) which will automatically convert your quotes to “smart quotes.”
Very cool–and it also converts two consecutive hyphens to an em dash.
One Stop Blogging
I just downloaded NetNewsWire Pro 1.0b4 and it seems I can now post from inside my newsreader. It will be great to have a one-stop shopping application for all my weblog needs. Definitely a cool idea from Ranchero Software.
Newsfeed Newsflash
I will no longer be reading any blogs that don’t provide an RSS or RDF newsfeed. It has become just too much work to periodically check all the sites my news aggregator can’t get to. If you are using Movable Type or Blogger Pro, you probably don’t need to worry about this, otherwise, please get with the program.
On a side note… Does XML syndication remind anyone else of PointCast?
“Pony Up” or “To Be One, Ask One…”
Livejournal, an online open-source-based journal community, has an interesting membership model. There are basically two possible ways to acquire an account:
- An existing member may invite you to join.
- You can buy a subscription (2 months for $5.00, 6 months for $15.00, or 12 months for $25.00).
Apart from being a good model for preventing abuse, this seems like a good way to ensure that the community is built on a foundation of value. Members either value the community enough to pay for the benefits they receive, or they are valued by at least one member of the community who is willing to extend them a free membership.
Am I the only one who thinks the folks over at Slashdot and Metafilter should consider implementing something like this?
Blogger Birthday
It seems that Blogger is 2 years old today.
I honestly can’t believe I’m still using it. It’s cool and everything, but I could home roll something with PHP and MySQL that would better suit my needs. I guess I’m just too lazy to migrate the existing content. Sometimes I just suck.
Something cool that CJ pointed pointed out: The song “At My Most Beautiful” by REM sounds like something off Pet Sounds.
