Steve Gets A Life

when to blog

so i recently discovered that 6apart, makers of this blogging software (movabletype) acquired LiveJournal (another blogging system) sometime a while back (who knows when).

while reading about this, i was directed to this article essentially about why people shouldn't blog

this reminded me to post to my blog, but that i shouldn't apologize for not posting in so long, cause "Who cares?"

the comparison between blogging and macramé is pretty good, but the one thing that macramé blogging is ok for is communicating between family and friends on a one-to-many level.

for example, i read trissy's blog and she reads mine. the same with jim and yes, even sometimes andria (when she posts, that is). this way each of us can write what we want to share with each other, when we want. the others can read at their leisure as well. its a very comfortable method for dissemniating personal updates.

im not meaning to replace the phone call to a family member, but for little stuff that happens every day, things that would come up in conversation if you saw the person everyday, thats the kind of stuff blogs are good for.

so, you have two choices as a blogger: 1) global audience, and 2) personal audience.

the former requires thought and insight, and should follow the ideals mentioned in the link above. quality, not quantity. see alacrity for a good example.

the latter is more about quantity and i believe is what most blogs really are. they are meant for people who know the author personally and read all the posts in context. they are a continuous storyline that started long before the blog itself started.

i believe there should be a distinction between the two of these. people visit boingboing and relative blogs for very different reasons. why are they considered the same thing? because they use the same technology? does that make personal letters and magazines the same? imagine if cory doctorow wrote about how he loves washing his new car between boingboing posts? it doesnt work, there is a distinction. you send links to your mom from one category, to your coworkers from the other.

my problem is i merged the two. my blog is a great example of what not to do.

wiki v3.0

so stealing once again from alacrity, i send you off to discover JotSpot, a new type of wiki that is much more than a wiki.

first off, it has improved the wiki interface tremendously, basically it looks a lot better than your basic WikiWikiWeb. it also provides some neat new features, like being able to email to any page for an addition (eg if i cc: a page on the wiki, that email will be appended to the page, a great way to track discussions related to projects). also your standard WYSIWYG tools are available (bold, italic, align, colors, links) so if you know how to use a word processor, you're set. no Wiki formatting required to learn.

just adding those would be nice, would make this a cool new wiki. but what they do next brings this tool into a new realm. as mentioned in alacrity, this becomes sort of the 3rd generation of wikis after (1) basic wikis and (2) Database backed wikis (wikipedia, etc).

What is so great is essentially the introduction of structured data. instead of just being plain text, some bits can be considered "dates" or "values" and can be tweaked, sorted, etc. this allows a wiki to transform from a place to stick a bunch of linked thoughts into a Web Application Development Platform. their example of making a new-hire application is so simple, and so elegant, i just wonder what else can be done that easily. more interestingly, i wonder what tough problems will be find solutions here, ones not immediately obvious.

these guys are a company and they're going to sell this stuff. they just got $5.2M from a VC and it looks pretty neat. im gonna try to hop on early and see just what can be done with this new technology. because, really, thats what this is.

watch the demo (SWF)

MarsEdit beta preview

trying out MarsEdit, by the guys who brought you NetNewsWire (new NNW 2.0 out now too)

pretty good. easy to use. doesn't seem to do categories yet, though.yes it does, initially it doesn't quite know your settings (eg categories), you have to give it a username/password before it can "know" your blog. try choosing your blog and hitting "refresh" .. should do this automatically, methinks.

also would be nice if it automatically found your stylesheet for the preview. a la kung-log

these guys are good. they give out code, too. helping me help you.

Currently playing in iTunes: Worried Eyes by Eagle-Eye Cherry

what a loser

i haven't been blogging too much since i got back from vacation it seems. i wonder why. i think i've just been so busy getting the new place together and moving into a new office and all that, that i just don't have any pearls of wisdom (or pointless entries) that i think are worth sharing with everyone.

i also have been lagging in terms of researching all this stuff. i've seen a few more things about the new technologies out there, there's just so many acronyms i can handle at a time. OPML, FOAF, whatever. i think it would be pretty neat to work with that stuff, but i don't think there are a lot of people hiring new grads to think about social computing at the moment. who knows. all i know is that google sure isn't hiring me. jerks.

phantom trackbacking

so i was looking at my webserver logs today (in a fit of boredom) and discovered that someone (from cable.mindspring.com) had visited my site, coming from Christopher Allen's blog. more specifically, from his entry on privacy. i checked it out, and there i was, listed as a trackbacker.

so i've never read up too much on trackbacks, but here are a few links i just found about the subject.
now from what i understand, what should have happened is this:

1. i read Allen's entry and enjoy it
2. i decide to write about it
3. just before i hit "publish," i include Allen's trackback link into my list of URLs to 'ping'

but i didn't. instead, i skipped the last step entirely. but it seemed to not matter.

is there something doing the pinging for me? is just mentioning the URL of the blog entry in the few first lines enough? whaddahey?

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so maybe im an idiot. i found the answer:

Auto-Discovery
A final option for using TrackBack in Movable Type is to enable TrackBack auto-discovery in your weblog configuration preferences:
When you do this, Movable Type will look for any links in your weblog post, and use auto-discovery to determine if those links are TrackBack-enabled. If they are, Movable Type will automatically send TrackBack pings to those sites. You don't need to use the URLs to Ping field, nor do you need to use the bookmarklet to select TrackBack-enabled posts.

but then i checked. and that checkbox wasn't checked <gasp!>

blogroll, opml, etc

made a blogroll out of my subscriptions using NetNewsWire. exported the list into an OPML file and then found, modified, and used a simple perl script to generate the final product. this link will on the right side of the page from now on.
now just to automate this process ;)

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on iTunes: A Farewell to Kings from the album "Chronicles Disc 1" by Rush

what is a blog

i found a very good article that essentially sums up what this whole "blogging" thing is all about, and why its taking off like it is. one of my favorite insights:

So why all the excitement? Everybody seems to have one and yet a weblog feels more like a pet rock than a revolution. We are particularly reminded of the excitement that accompanied the explosion of home pages in the early days of the Web. We suspect that, like home pages, the appearance of so many weblogs isn't the interesting part. The interesting part is, rather, the pervasive use of a set of technologies.

ive had an idea in my head for about a year now for a piece of software involving blogging. i think i really should move on it, as it seems the time is ripe.
that explains my interest in Objective-C these days.