The occasional scrivener

Dave Winer has an elevator pitch for OPML blogging. What he means by “OPML blogging” is managing your weblog in an application, the OPML Editor, that enables you to choose whether to post an entry as a single sentence (or two) or in a more structured way with a title.

I can see the point. Sometimes you just want to post a link, or a quote, or an observation. That’s why I implemented my post-by-email feature to this blog. Any mail sent to an address with a certain subject line gets appended to that day’s observations post (if the file doesn’t exist, it is created.) The title of the post is always “Observations”. I got this idea from Fredrik Lundh, though I don’t think he posts via email.

I have a command-line version, but I usually just email from Gmail.

The cool thing about this approach, and the reason I call it a moblog application, is that I can post from my mobile phone via email. Granted, this doesn’t happen often, but it’s nice to be able to have the feature.

OK, so that’s my take: I agree with Dave that sometimes you just want to get the stuff out there, without writing an essay. I’m not sold on the application though. Granted, I haven’t used it yet, because as far as I know it doesn’t work with blosxom. But even if it did, where would I use it? I do some blogging at work (on breaks, naturally), some from a windows box at home, and some (like now) from a laptop running Linux. Each of these platforms supports emacs with remote editing via SSH, which is how I usually post. And when I don’t, I can use Gmail from any computer, or use my phone.

So, titleless blogging is cool, and liberating. Using the OPML Editor ties you to one application and one machine, that has to be running Windows or MacOS. That’s not so liberating.

Looks interesting. I’ll hear how it sounds tomorrow when I subscribe to the feed in iTunes.

That reminds me, I have to create a podroll.

This looks interesting, a watchmaker’s blog journal. Lots of info about watches and gears and stuff. Pretty interesting. But there’s no feed! How come? Just an excerpt is enough, if you want to drive traffic to your site.

Another site that should have RSS is The Luminous Landscape.

Jon Udell suggested in the latest Gillmor Gang podcast that blogs should be seen as the extension and evolution of resumes. If you’re a professional in the English and American sense of the word (i.e. an architect, lawyer, scientist, support engineer etc.) you should write about what you know, what you’ve learnt, and how you work in your blog. After all, any employer worth their salt will do a Google on a prospective hire before asking them to sign the dotted line. It can be embarrassing to know that you posted beginner’s SQL questions on a forum just weeks before applying for that DBA job.

(Jon’s argument is in text form in a blog entry.)

I’m not sure I buy into the argument, though. Most bloggers keep a pretty relaxed view about their professional life. After all, if you spend your work days thinking, which is basically what professionals do, you might want to kick back with a rant on politics in the evening. And even if your employer allows you to blog, would they be happy if you do it during working hours, especially if you’re building your online resume, so to speak?

I’m not sure what my current employer says about blogging. We have signed a Code of Conduct, which is basically a marketing device to enable the mothership to claim that their employees are ethical, or that they have at least signed a paper saying they know the difference between right and wrong. But from what I remember there was no mention of blogging.

We do have an internal blog, where I sometimes post stuff that’s relevant to the day to day work of my department. But that’s more something that fits between a “Staff.All” email and a casual water-cooler conversation with someone from another department. I doubt I could wax lyrical there about the latest trends in ticket tracking and support work. Is this the place for that? I highly doubt it. Like I said, I want to relax after work. Work sucks. I really don’t want to think about it too much outside 9—5.

That said, I do try to keep stuff from wandering way out of line here, because this is my digital identity, so to speak. (I also try to not mention where I work, even though my co-workers obviously know.) I personally find some weblogs fascinating in their mixture of professional writings and things of a more personal nature. And that’s OK, because I do think the line between work and personal life is blurring. Not only in work’s favour, I hope. What I mean is that if it’s OK for me to be online helping out the US team at 22:00, it’s also OK for me to take a morning off to take the kid to the dentist. It’s give and take.

Hmm, this post has the earmarks of late-night rambling. Better stop before my professional credibility is eroded.

Gotta love Russ. A few days after exposing his utter-non-hipness and confessing he doesn’t “get” MySpace he signs up for an account and starts trying to grok it.

I’m pretty glad my job doesn’t involve trying to fathom the fickle youth market. Like Russ, I don’t feel especially old, but the stuff that the kids are into (communities like Helgon and of course MSN chat) is out of my radar. I understand it in principle, but I don’t grasp the finer points. This blog is basically a personal broadsheet, the model is a hypothetical online journal from perhaps the nineteenth century — genteel, feelings under wraps, “stiff upper lip” etc. I can’t imagine letting it all hang out here. That’s not the kind of guy I am.

It should cheer him up that older people have consistently made money from younger ones throughout the ages (or at least since “teens” appeared as a consumer group) and if you just try your best you can probably manage.

At least with the older kids I have some kind of cred. My 5 minutes of manual reading have enabled me to use BitTorrent effectively, which is something my so-called internet literary youngsters have not figured out. But I shudder to think of what kind of fuddy-duddy I will appear in the four-year old’s eyes in about 7 years…

Yeah, I’m getting old, and it sucks.

Lately Engadget’s feed in Bloglines has had a lot of duplicates. I’m sure this is due to the feed ads they’re using, they seem to screw up the “modified” flag of the entry somehow.

I haven’t noticed anyone else complain, however. Is the problem with Bloglines or with Engadget?

Update 2005-12-30: The problem is that Engadget (or Weblogs, Inc) have started to publish the same entries under different URLs. The problem is not confined to Bloglines, either. Below is a screenshot from SharpReader:

I really hope that someone can fix this, the feed is almost unusable as it is.

Rui sees the same problem.

[This post has been edited. Reasons for this are given below.]

(Warning, most links in Swedish.)

Fredrik Lundh:

After spamming hundreds of Swedish blogs with misspelled marketing messages, anonymous representatives for the Swedish company “[H— & N—] Consulting” are now mailing misspelled legal threats to any Swedish blog that mentions their name. While we haven’t been threatened yet have only received a single incomprehensible threat this far, we just want to make it clear that we don’t have any plans, at this time, to publish their name, nor the names of “blogrankers”, “ppckungen”, “betalaperklick”, “carbzone” or any of the other sites run by this company, on any of our sites. — the administration

[Update 2005-11-04: the above has been edited in accordance to the wishes of H & N Consulting.]

[I’m as of this writing number three two in a google for the name of H&N’s CEO, hereafter referred to by the alias “XXX”].

This post by Stattin has been retroactively censored, which shows that the [redacted] XXX has some kind of pull in these matters. One wonders just what he’s trying to hide?

Update 2005-11-04: Someone calling themselves “Blogrankers” has a blog at blogrankers.blogspot.com. The one and only post made there has been removed. There is a cached copy on Bloglines (in Swedish).

There was a mildly interesting flamewar in the comments to the post, now no longer available. Someone calling him- or herself “stev” defended Blogrankers.com there, calling their detractors “Communists”. He used an English idiom in that he capitalized the initial letter of svenska (“Swedish”). Interestingly enough, this same quirk can be seen in the post referenced above.

Update 2005-10-28: Fredrik gets his letter.

Update 2005-11-01: I finally got my letter in the mail, threatening me with up to two years of prison for breaches of the Swedish data privacy law PUL, and my provider with legal proceedings if they did not remove the information. The letter was signed “H & N Consulting” but with no other contact information. The sender address was the same as the administrative contact for the domain “blogrankers.com”.

I agree with Bengt that these guys have no legal leg to stand on, but I am no lawyer. I don’t have time or energy to make an impassioned stance against the injustices of the situation. So I’m caving in to their demands. This also saves the legal community in Sweden a lot of bother they can do without.

I could say it’s scary that a company can use these kinds of scare tactics to silence valid criticism. The scariness is alleviated, however, by the sheer stupidity of their actions. They’ve managed to alienate a large number of influential voices in the Swedish blogging community, who, even if they will censor their posts, will never forget the name of the people who made them do it. I predict that the financial future of the company is bleak.

However, I did make an unwarranted assumption about XXX’s physical appearance. I wrote that he was covered in phlegm. As I have never met the person, this was uncalled for. I have no real way of knowing the what the physical aspect of the gentleman is. For any offense this comment may have caused, I apologize.

Update 2005-11-04: cleaned up and fixed links.

Update 2005-11-06: small edits and clarifications.

Russell knows about the evil stalker blog and outs Jacek Rutkowski as the author. Predictably, Jacek denies authorship:

Russell Beattie in his latest post wrongly identifies author of this blog and motivations that lie behind it […]

It would be interesting to run a author-comparison scan on sentences like that and the normal utterings of Mr Rutkowski:

I have seen lately very pathetic and lame movie “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (strangely it is number one in USA now but it is because Americans love everything British and this claymation movie is British) […]

I know Russell gets up people’s noses and is certainly no shrinking violet, but being the target of so much venom must be pretty unnerving. How someone can summon so much hate for another person whom they’ve never met is beyond me.

That said, I’m glad Russ is cool about it. I would have called the cops.

Apparently Google have released a web-based aggregator, google.com/reader. I like gmail, so I thought I’d try this out, even if it seems to lack a mobile interface.

So I uploaded my blogroll in OPML from Bloglines, and waited… and waited… and waited some more. After 15 minutes it still said “Your subscriptions are being imported…” so I decided to let Google Reader cool down a bit and try again later, perhaps in a year or two.

Reading lots of feeds via http://www.bloglines.com/mobile? Only showing updated items can help.

Go to Account > Feed Options and check the “Show only updated feeds” option.

(Thanks to Mark Fletcher for this tip :-))

My old university pal Fralle has a blog. We’ve sort of lost contact since he moved back to Örnsköldsvik. Hopefully I’ll get more info now, though the wonders of technology. Nice to see he’s been bitten by the O’Brian bug too.

Some random (l)user has proposed “RSS 3.0”. This is a bad idea.

Not only will Dave Winer hate his guts for diluting the sacred RSS 2.0 spec, but he has awakened the ire of merry pranksters Aaron Swartz and Sean B. Palmer. Swartz wrote the original RSS 3.0 three years ago. There’s even a Blosxom plugin for it.

Palmer wrote a cease and desist letter complaining about the misappropriation of the name “RSS 3.0”. As a compromise, he suggests the new version should be called “RSS DW”, for “Really Simple Syndication, Dick Waving”.

I installed WordPress on this site. You can peruse the result here.

Impressions: impressive! Slick install, helpful wiki, and nice default plugins (Markdown especially appreciated). A lot of thought has gone into the graphical presentation everywhere, not just the finished output. The admin pages were just as slick as the default Kubrick theme.

I’m thinking of using WP for blogging at work, and I think it’ll be just the ticket.

You can back up your Wordpress blog to gmail: here’s a post that explains how.

I’ve been doing this since October last year, here are some gotchas related to that.

This is my setup.

• Blosxom blog
• shell account on the blog server
• gmail address
• bash shell scripting nous

I run the following script from cron:

#!/bin/sh

HOME=/home/gustaf
DIR=$HOME/backup
DATE=`date +"%Y-%m-%d"`
# set filename extension to something other than ".tar.gz"
FILE=blog-$DATE.bak
MUTT=/usr/bin/mutt
# save crontab 
crontab -l > $HOME/save/crontab
# create backup file
tar czf $DIR/$FILE --exclude public_html/files/big  \
blosxom-data blosxom-plugins public_html bin save
# mail the file
echo ""| mutt -a $DIR/$FILE -s "backup $DATE" <my email>+backup@gmail.com

# prune old files
find $DIR -type f -name "blog-????-??-??.*" -atime +30 -exec rm {} \;

This zips up my blog and plugins, the bin directory, all CSS and .htaccess files, the crontab and my blogroll, and all smaller pics in a tar file. This is then sent to gmail. mutt makes it easy to send attachments from the command line.

The process leaves a bunch of files in the backup directory. All files older than 30 days are pruned.

As of today, the backup file is 1.3M 6.6M. According to the comments to the post referenced above, the gmail limit is 10M. You can add a check if your file gets bigger.

Make sure you can check the mail to the account you’re sending from, if the mail to gmail bounces you want to know about it.

Update 2007-09-11: I renamed the file extension as Gmail has started blocking files with the tar.gz extension. I also added a call to find to prune old files.

How weird is this: SixApart to offer Atom streams from TypePad and LiveJournal.

Streaming Atom. Who’d a thunk?

Basically, updates to huge blog sites like TypePad and LiveJournal are now so large that it makes sense to treat them like multimedia.

Another idea by Dan Sandler: combine river-of-news and item based feeds. Some feeds are important, some are just noise — if it’s important, it’ll come back. Slashdot definitely fits in the latter category.

(Via Matt.)

Using maths to stop comment spam.

Interesting. Would be nice to get a blosxom plugin.

Whisky leads to blogging.

I discovered by accident that this site looks shite in Internet Exploder. Rest assured that I will waste no precious brain cycles trying to fix this.

Found 2 mildly interesting sites today: Lloyd Cole’s weblog and DagensSkiva.com, a Swedish music review site. Neither of them have RSS.

What’s with that? If you’re worried about losing traffic, don’t post the whole text in the feed. Just let me know that something has changed on your site! You can’t expect people to return to your site just in case something has been added.

Get with the program, publish a fucking feed already.

Update: I found out today the DagensSkiva do have feeds, (with the option of choosing per reviewer, natch). So I’ll amend the above to say “make your fucking feeds autodiscovarable already”.

Lloyd Cole is still feedless, sadly.

Well, I seem to have fallen into a blogging hiatus. No one care, no one, I know, but I still feel a bit stressed that I’ve only posted 9 entries in May.

Things that I’d like to write about, simply to get them off my chest, are off-limits. They concern work, which I try to avoid kvetching about in public, and the concern the situation at home, which is more or less grim but also rather private. So I’m reduced to book “reviews”, and I can’t even find something good to write there either.

I’m really looking forward to vacation…

PS this blog needs a redesign… again.

Thanks to Erik I got an invitation to Yahoo’s social networking effort Yahoo 360°.

I’m a bit wary about this, I got burnt a bit on Orkut last year. And a one-size-fits-all blogging solution (which 360° is, underneath the dazzle of picture-sharing and “blasts”) is not really for me.

The lack of themes is a bit lame, I know some people who demand pink…

Not only Jim and I have started using del.icio.us as a quickie way of keeping up the blog count, exalted Swedish blogger Erik Stattin is doing it too.

Of course, this is just ersatz, compared to the master of linkblogging.

Dave Winer writes about the lack of categorization in blogs. I don’t find categorizing my posts that hard, because Blosxom mirrors the filesystem. If I write about computers, I add the file to the com directory. If I write about weblogging, I add it to the comm/weblog directory. If I don’t know where to put it, it goes in the alt directory.

(This mimicking of the Usenet hierarchy seemed a fine idea at the time, but now it’s a brilliant mistake.)

The above points to a drawback of the Blosxom scheme. It’s rather static. Moving posts between categories and renaming existing ones is bothersome (although there are plugins that help).

Anyway, you can categorize if you really want, and the fad for tags (in Flickr, Technorati et. al.) is an extension of this. Categories are fluid and instant. The category space is flat. Things coalesce out of it — some tags make sense, others don’t. I’d really love tags in Blosxom.

I’m officially hooked on Bloglines. Ghod help us all if they go down or go out of business.

I’m checking my feeds on the go with the mobile version: http://www.bloglines.com/mobile. Works like a charm on Charlie.

At work I’ve been using Sharpreader, an application I can heartily recommend. But the three-paned approach and the reliance on Internet Explorer as a rendering engine are personal turn-offs.

I’ve added the “subscribe to Bloglines” button to my blog too, just to mindlessly propagate the meme further. In fact, the more I use Bloglines, the more I feel an inexplicable appetite for human flesh and brains. Mmmmm… brains! BRAINS!!!

Ahem.

Check out my blogroll if you want.

A wiki as blog, very nicely done with updated internal links. Rui is a mobitopian of sorts (he hangs out in the channel sometimes). As a resident of Portugal and a telecoms insider, his views are often a contrast to wild-eyed American mobile utopians like Russ.

Of especial note right now is his list of Christmas phones.

I’ve been looking for a textmode syndication aggregator for a while. I tried Raggle but it just core dumped on my platform. Rawdog seems promising, but just didn’t seem to fit my needs.

I came upon Snownews via Rootprompt and so far it looks promising. No native support for atom feeds but that’s (supposedly) handled by extensions.

So now I can read my feeds from within screen, as Ghod intended.

Update: I’ve since installed rawdog and must say it’s a very good piece of software. Have a look at my feed here.

This is how I moved my blog from MT to Blosxom. The process is very specific for my case — you mileage will definitely vary.

Pre-requisites

I had the following pre-requisites:

• A good knowledge of Perl
• A shell account at the target machine
• A test machine running a free version of Un*x (OpenBSD).

I installed Blosxom on my test system and played around with CSS and flavours until I was happy with the look of the site.

Exporting from MT

Searching Google led me to this post. It concerned moving from MT to Drupal, but mentioned an important thing: the default MT export format is hard to parse. The method used instead was to export to XML, and parse that.

I downloaded the XML export template and the Perl file used to parse it, and modified them for my needs. They are available below:

• export-xml-template
• convert.pl

The changes to the XML template are fairly minor. I added a new Index Template in MT and called it “Export XML”. The output file was set to “export.xml”.

The convert.pl script was modified in the following ways:

• I changed the output from printing SQL insert statements to writing to files. The timestamps were modified to reflect the original posting date in MT.

• I constructed new Blosxom filenames from the entry titles.

• I mapped my MT categories to new ones via a hash.

After I had debugged these changes, I ran the script on an export downloaded from MT.

Importing to Blosxom

After I had this running, it was a simple matter of taring the files and moving them to the target server. After changing the relevant paths, I was up and running.

A friendly sysadmin installed a redirect at my old blog which pointed to the new one. The original MT archive posts were left alone to cater to old bookmarks, but I’m working on redirecting those too.

Update, 2004-11-02: The links to the files above were b0rked, but David McBride put me right about that. Thanks, David!

Update, 2004-11-26: Here is another article about moving from MT to Blosxom

For a guy who’s scratching his head at the whole ‘casting “phenomenon”, I sure can’t stop reading, thinking, and writing about them.

Go figure.

Anyway, Paolo Valdemarin shall have the last word:

Everything is packed, especially my hard disk. I have downloaded a whole bunch of podcasts I have not been able to listen to (this is a big issue with podcasts) and I’m kinda looking forward to be stuck at the airport or on the airplane in order to be finally able to listen to all this stuff.

Kudos to Frank for reminding me of this post, which I first saw at Dave’s.

I think this illustrates the basic uselessness of audio blogs. Not only are they huge compared to text, they contain relatively little information. The fact that you can ramble on in front of a microphone does not mean that you are being more coherent than if you sat down with pen, paper, or keyboard and wrote something down. There is very little gain, information-wise.

And lastly, where is the time needed to listen to this? I can scan blogs in the small pauses at work (these are frequent these days), get an idea, act on it, and go on with my work and life. If I listen to a ‘cast in the taco, I’m out and about, and whatever ideas I may get, whatever pointers to new information I may hear about, are gone, unless I sit down and commit them to hardcopy, or visit the home site of the cast to access the links.

What is gained?

Podcasting is a hobby for the idle rich. Only they can afford the time to compose the ‘casts, the money to pay for bandwidth and music licensing and the inevitable litigation, and again, the time to listen to this junk being uploaded, RSSed, downloaded in an unending spiral of digital aural effluvia.

The rest of us will have to content ourselves with text. And that’s an issue of the Digital Divide I can live with. Count me out of the “podcasting revolution”.

Update: Seth Ladd writes in a comment:

You obviously don’t spend 2 hours each day commuting on a bus or train. Time delaying audio broadcasts is perfect for those idle hours.

That’s a valid point. I’d like a way to time-shift regular radio broadcasts, a kind of audio TiVo. But I’m still unsure whether podcasting is the ideal application for this.

The old blog is being hit hard by comment spammers. Guess another Google dance is scheduled soon. Freaking lowlives.

As far as I can see, the only alternative is to go through each post by hand in Movable Type’s admin interface and manually disable comments. There must be a better way to do this…

Russ finally broke down and redesigned Mobitopia. It’s now a communal linkblog, where the denizens of the #mobitopia IRC channel post interesting URLs, with comments.

Additionally, it now has a fresh look, with the classic Nokia 7650 as visual signature.

Idle words is a very well written, funny blog.

I think I got this via Dave Winer back in the day.

Amusing

The new URL for a feed for this site is http://gustaf.symbiandiaries.com/weblog/index.vrss10. Thanks to Matthias for fixing the rss10 plugin!

Great blog, very interesting common-sense writings about the nitty-gritty of writing code. Nice design too.

Thanks Jim for the pointer to this one.

Interesting approach to text-based design, using blosxom. I’m definitevely going to look closer to this site as it evolves.

Podcasting is all the rage, but what the early adopters are finding out is that it sucks bandwidth. To save this, I propose the following components:

• a BitTorrent tracker site dedicated to Podcasts.

• RSS feeds for these ‘casts.

• A RSS reader client that takes the .torrent files as enclosures, and hands them over to a BT client for download.

Ta-da! At least some of the bandwidth is shared among the downloaders.

Podcasts may be the first mainstream legal application for BT.

In this post, I promised to hang in on Movable Type and not move to another tool.

Well, I’ve changed my mind.

Why? Simply because MT is too limiting for me. I edit my posts in Emacs, run them through SmartyPants and Markdown to get nice formatting, then paste the result into MT’s edit window on the site.

When using Windows, this works — kinda. But when I’m at home, I use an old laptop running OpenBSD. Running Firebird on that machine is slooow. So I’ve got this multi-step barrier in front of my text and my weblog.

I’ve been playing with Blosxom on a spare unix server. It’s everything MT isn’t: small, spare, configurable — if you know Perl. Also I like the semi-dynamic notion of timestamp-based sorting. Certain posts, such as my reading list are updated often. Under MT, you can’t see this. If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you can see that the post has been updated, but not otherwise.

Also, it’s insanely fun to be hacking with Blosxom. Turn-around time for site changes are instant, CSS changes are fast — all because I’m working directly in Emacs, not in bog-slow Firebird.

So as soon as I get stuff in order on Symbiandiaries I’m outta MT. They can take their bloated “CMS” and sell it to someone else. I’m sticking with the tools I know and trust.

Symbiandiaries.com is back online after a longer hiatus. The problem lay in the management interface, not the serving of pages. For once, Movable Type’s use of static pages paid off.

I’ve been chafing under the enforced silence, not realizing until now how much I appreciate the chance of self-expression. I really regret the chance to publish this post (now backdated). Oh well.

I’ve offered my services to Rafe of AAS fame as ronin sysadmin, so perhaps we can recover faster next time the site goes down.

As Matt said, what if audio blogs are the Next Great Thing, and we curmudgeons missed it? So as to be able to snidely comment on this phenomenon from a position of knowledge, I pulled down yesterdays Daily Source Code by Adam Curry, and put it on the taco, my trusty N-Gage.

OK, step one was accomplished, and I didn’t need those near-obligatory accessories, a $300 iPod and a $1,500 Mac. That’s nice, because I can’t afford either.

I started listening on my way home (5 minute walk, 35 minute subway ride, 7 minute walk). The taco is a nice enough mp3-player, but it lacks a fast-forward feature. I pressed pause to avoid looking like a zombie and read a book instead, but when I tried resuming, it started from the beginning. Obviously, an iPod would handle this better, as would any dedicated mp3 player.

Adam is involved in iPodder.org which he intends to turn into a centre for podcasting. Well, that’s all well and good, but if he wants creating and listening to podcasts to become mainstream, he’d better get a better, less iPod-specific name. Now you get the impression that it’s only for Mac + iPod users. Also, Apple’s lawyers may have some things to say to him.

The post itself was entertaining, I’ll say that. It sure beats trying to find new music to listen to, and fills a niche that FM radio perhaps can’t fill. But still, the Net is about TEXT, goddammit. Audio is all well and good for music and entertainment, but for information, the bandwidth is wasted. I may be able to read articles and blog posts “interstitially” at work, filling those blank pauses when I task-switch from one issue to another, but I can’t multitask enough to listen to speech.

Also, the barriers to entry are pretty high, both for producers and consumers. A blog poster needs to be able to handle a web form and a keyboard. An audioblogger needs mics, audio software, BANDWIDTH, and audio nous, not too widely available. Lots more talented writers than talented radio artists, but that may change as podcasting becomes more popular.

Consumers need: a fast net connection, an mp3-player, a modern computer, an intimate knowledge of RSS (version 2.0, no less), and weird and wonderful “iPodder” software, which, despite it’s name, is not tied to an iPod. Go figure.

Who’s the audience? The web is available to perhaps 20% percent of the planet’s population. Of this percentage, maybe 15% wander outside MSN et al. Of these, 10% read blogs. Perhaps 5% of these listen to podcasts. But I bet 99% of these are white, and male, and live in the US and Western Europe.

However, for all its flaws, audio blogging is much much better than that next scourge, videoblogging. That will be scary. Until then, I’ll stick to text, thank you very much.

Welcome to my new weblog!

I’ve given Movable Type a try, and as I’ve recounted here and here, it’s been a mixed experience.

MT is a very polished product. But I’m a command-line kind of guy, and web applications really don’t appeal to me. Give me an ssh connection and a remote server anyday. Blosxom is a better match for my style of work.

I have a TODO list up, and will be working on this when I have time from renovating my house. Watch this space.

Number 1 for “gustaf erikson”.

Number 6 for gustaf.

Blogs are like tamagotchis — a fitting metaphor. Incidentally, is our society in deep trouble when tamagotchis are the basis for new metaphors?

Unfortunately, we the Mobitopians have been neglecting our virtual pet. The traffic to the main page is down, and I myself find I’ve bookmarked the IRC links rather than the front page. Of course, I hang out in the channel all the time, having great fun, but we don’t communicate that fun and insight and commentary to visitors to the site.

A quick fix would be to move the IRC links to the front page, perhaps adding a moderation system so that not just anything gets posted. Also, being able to comment on the links would create a kind of Ur-blog (as in the original incarnation, posting interesting URLs), but with multiple commentators.

A way of submitting longer bits of IRC commentary would be nice too, so that visitors get a feel for the vibe of the channel.

Of course, the longer opinion pieces would remain, but they would be relegated from the front page.

The phenomenon of pointless audio blogs shows no sign of going away. The reaction has set in, however. Hear the manifesto here, or read it here.

I’d be tempted to call audio posts the ultimate ego-stroking, but that’s already been appropriated by weblogging itself…

(via Mark.)

Dave Winer is covering the Democratic National Convention in Boston, along with some other accredited bloggers. Good for him.

This post confuses me, however. I’m in Europe, and if I was covering this kind of stuff and could afford the GPRS charges, I’d get a laptop and a mobile to use as a mobile. Any half-competent phone manufactured in the last 5 years can do this. Of course, you have to dick around with cables, infrared, or Bluetooth, but it’s definitely doable.

Some bloggers say they’re the new journalists. I’d love to see a journalist say: “I can’t cover that, there’s no Wi-Fi there.”

Dave Winer has had blog posts in mp3 format for a while. All I can say is: why?

Listening to a person talk is much less efficient than reading something. You can’t skip back and forth, sometimes you miss a word or sentence due to differing accents, and if the speaker is talking in a language you don’t understand, you can’t babelfish it to get something vaguely understandable.

In Dave’s case, it’s not always easy to hear what he says. Part of the problem is his American accent. I speak and write English fluently, but I learnt it in British schools. I seldom hear “real” American accents, i.e. not those on TV or movies. This means that I find it hard to understand what Dave says sometimes, even though my English is very good. It must be even harder for someone who is more comfortable reading English than listening to it.

Audio posts are a step back. They don’t encourage information exchange, like text does. You can’t hyperlink to a specific audio segment. You can’t quote it without transcribing it first. The bandwidth requirements are absurdly high for the limited amount of information they contain.

Let’s hope the trend doesn’t spread.

Back to Basics

I’m hoping to go to basics soon. Right, Rafe?

Love and Hate: Internet Communities

This story is a good summary of the recent brouhaha over Dave Winer’s shutdown of weblogs.com.

From the Wired article:

“People have been really afraid to discuss this,” said a New York blogger who asked that his name be withheld. “There’s a lot of concern that any nasty comments will result in Dave not getting around to making a copy of your blog. I think a lot of the politeness and ‘We love you, Dave!’ sentiments that you’re seeing in some Web posts is just pure paranoia.”

That’s it. I now have a cron job running that’ll take an XML dump of this blog every night. Who knows, maybe Ewan will crack from England winning Euro2004 and delete everything around him…

I really enjoy weblogging. I didn’t think I would, but I do. It’s the return to the personal web circa 1994, when everybody with a web page put up their hobbies, reading lists, collectors items etc. for all the other people out there to discover.

Now, after nearly a decade, we’re back where we started, but with better tools. You don’t need a unix account anymore, and you don’t need to grok HTML. Anyone can update a web page, a.k.a. a weblog nowadays.

Every day makes me a day older, and even though I find it hard to believe, it’s now seven years since I first installed Linux on a 386 by floppy. Now I’m using a IBM Thinkpad running OpenBSD to access mail and IRC on a UltraSparc 5, also running OpenBSD. The company I work for uses Linux on Intel for nearly all its infrastructure. I spend nearly all my days in two or three terminal windows. I read mail with emacs.

So I’m a unix kind of guy. I’d rather write a 20-line perl program to do some data munging than fire up Excel. My windows are handled by screen. I browse the web with links and w3m (lynx is sooo 1998). I believe an app should do one thing, and do it well.

Yet I’m using Movable Type, the CGI version of Word, a bloated, opaque web application that definitely puts style over substance, a blogging tool for Mac users and other artistic types. It straddles uneasily across the Unix/Perl world, with its (nowadays) strong open-source bias, and the corporate make-a-buck world of proprietary source code and expensive licensing.

Well, I’ve grown to know a lot of people on the mobitopia channel, and one of them, Ewan Spence has a site called Symbian Diaries where just about anyone can get a blog. His installation has a lot of authors, a lot of blogs, and would probably cost $1,200 to license from Movable Type… but that’s another story.

Don’t get me wrong — MT is fine for anyone comfortable with web based tools like Yahoo Mail and Google. However, I don’t feel comfortable with it. I would rather have a system like blosxom or even my own crude perl hack.

But the central question is: would I post more entries? Would new software make me more productive?

I don’t think so. So even if I would have a lot of fun migrating to another system, and even if I can do that while keeping the symbiandiaries.com address, I think I’ll stick around MT for now. I’ll try to kvetch less, and write more.

And be more interesting.

Essentials [dive into mark]

Here’s another strange thing about David Winer’s trip to Europe — he’s started a temporary weblog for the trip.

Why can’t he update his regular blog, the one read by millions each day? He seems to have a laptop, and connects through internet cafés. So he should be able to update a server somewhere.

I don’t get it. I can update this blog from a web interface or from Emacs on a remote box. I’m nobody. Dave Winer is a respected internet personality. Go figure.

David Winer has some strange idea on how SMS works. So the gang at #mobitopia discusses a little, and David writes a post about it.

But how do we let Dave know about it. He’s travelling in Europe right now. With a mobile phone.

So now he has an SMS on it from yours truly. Hope he can read it.

Well, this should help my PageRank. Thanks, Jim!

Somehow it’s difficult for me to write on this blog sometimes. Part of the problem is lack of time. I have a family and a full time job. I usually compose rather nice entries when walking to the subway in the mornings, but they vanish when I arrive at work and a terminal.

Of course, I could become a T9 god and tap out screeds on my taco, but I prefer reading and listening to music when riding to work. If I’ve forgotten reading matter, I’m usually too pissed off about that to be able to write anything good anyway.

Work provides almost no convenient times for advanced composition. What free time I doi have is spent reading other peoples weblogs, which are much better than anything I could produce. So that too is a barrier.

So why have a blog then? Egoboost of course. And sometimes you write something or think about something that’s worth communicating.

Gmail is a meme spread by Google to help improve their search algorithms.

By tracking references to this enticing service, they can see which news sources and weblogs are influential. By launching on April 1, they can also track arguments against the belief that the service actually exists.

I’m pretty new to weblogging. I guess what I did in 1997 was weblogging, but that was what everything was doing then.

“Returning” to personal publishing, then, is entering a world where people feel strongly about things. Issues that outsiders such as I find arcane, like syndication formats, escalate quite quickly into religious wars.

In these wars, two protagonists stand out. They are Dave Winer, the grand old man of weblogging, and Mark Pilgrim. I haven’t really found out what they stand for, weblog-politically. But they are antagonists.

When I enter a community, I instinctively choose sides. I don’t know why I’ve chosen the side of Mark. Maybe he represents the young Turk side of the debate. Maybe Dave’s ego is just that much bigger. But there it is.

Thanks to Gadget17 I’ve got links to the category to which the entry belongs working. See below, to the right of the permalink.

The vodoo code needed is this: <a href="<MTEntryCategories glue=","><$MTCategoryArchiveLink$></MTEntryCategories>"><$MTEntryCategory$></a>

The first triplet of MT tags (within the HREF attribute) construct a hyperlink to the relevant category archive. The <$MTEntryCategory$> tag shows the name of the category to which the entry belongs.

So now I’m on a Moveable Type weblog, just like everybody else on the planet…

I’m running around looking at all the options, and I’m really happy I didn’t do that before I decided to write my own home-grown blog. I wouldn’t even have started.

When I first started writing my old blog, I rediscovered the feeling that I had when I first made a homepage back in 1997. The wonderful feeling of seeing your words out there for anyone to read. That feeling was behind many people’s websites. Then the web got really big, and the small people got lost.

Now we have Google and easy-to-use publishing software. So now there’s less of a barrier to just write something, and your words will perhaps be noticed.

We’ll see if mine are.