MovableBlog: Asides: January 2004

January 31, 2004

Hosting Matters suffers physical breakin Your data may be secure online, but also important is whether physical access to the machine is secure. [#]

FeedDemon 1.10 Beta for registered customers only [#]

Paid content gateway with PHP and Paypal [#]

How to hack an election [#]

January 30, 2004

Excellent MySQL primer MySQL foundations; More fun SQL; SELECT usage and joins [#]

Index of TypePad sites With development weblog. [#]

January 29, 2004

Why we don't want Internet security [#]

40 Yankee dollars to the first to write an Applescript posting photos to TypePad with iPhoto using the Atom API Time passes and we have a winner! [#]

MT/PHP portfolio [#]

Some really terrible weblog promotion advice Doesn't mention more effective techniques like having a unique but informative and not misleading weblog name; pinging blogrolling.com / weblogs.com / movabletype.org (by donation only) / technorati.com / blo.gs / etc.; writing informative title headings and using individual HTML files for weblog entries (Blogger does not support this); writing well and often (by far the most important technique); and including your weblog's URL in your email .sig. And why do 3 of Tristan's items include link exchanges. Does that even work anymore? [#]

Scoble: linker, or more features/performance/security? With a company of 55,000+, why not both? [#]

Phil Ringnalda pimps WordPress I've been meaning to take a look at it. Dynamically generated pages is pretty close to a deal-breaker for me though. Open source saves it from being totally written off by yours truly though. [#]

January 28, 2004

Definition lists - misused or misunderstood? Or both? [#]

Towards a safer MT weblog [#]

It's 1999 all over again! Dave Winer says it's the Technorati conference room. [#]

Min Jung wants Plaxo-like weblog links maintenance tool C'mon, nerds, make it so: who are you to resist her charm? [#]

January 27, 2004

Roland Tanglao aggregates the Conservative Party Leadership weblogs I know what you're thinking, this doesn't belong on a technology weblog. But what would really be interesting is a weblog that aggregates news about all of the parties for the upcomming Canadian (and hey, why not, American) election. [#]

TypePad user manual Dear, sweet technical writers: most users may not read the manual, but I do. [#]

Atom API support in TypePad I've been sitting on this since December waiting for it to go official. Be sure to check out the implementation. [#]

January 26, 2004

Judging the likely success of an ontology [#]

Ping Yahoo! with MT And no, you don't need radar or sonar to ping on the Internet. [#]

Tons of Photoshop tutorials It's effectively a weblog. Except no syndicated feed. This gets exiled to the bookmarks methinks. [#]

John Porcaro has some ideas on how weblogs can help your company. The idea that if gives you an opportunity to mention an little-discussed or -used feature of your product. [#]

Scoble's message for corporate bloggers Admitting mistakes and letting users (who have weblogs) review your product can be a good strategy. Then he pimps MSFT to prove a point. [#]

January 24, 2004

Kottke has pinging woes He's not pinigng Blogrolling I see. While the pinger isn't decentralized, the result (going to the top—or some other "updated" indicator—of the list of weblogs' blogrolls) is decentralized. [#]

Overview of the open source model as it applies to software and other areas Does not, however, address the Open Source Initiative's criticism of "shared source". [#]

We keep it tight, featured site up at Movable Type Meme of the day. [#]

Google cache blocking now on a provincial basis in China Thank goodness people are calling it something other than The Great Firewall now. Such a cliché. [#]

January 23, 2004

Jon Udell: "the complexity of open source licensing can make your eyes bleed" I should really stop linking to (and mentioning) his misuse of the blockquote cite attribute. [#]

Notes on Jay McCarthy's blogging style He mostly uses his aggregator to let him know when someone has updated. [#]

Ideas on getting a technical writing job, even if one is unencumbered by experience Darren adds finding an internship to Docsymmetry's list. [#]

January 22, 2004

If you love typography, then the web might not be your place Oh good, because I like the web. [#]

Mt-Blacklist upgrade available If you have a version of MT-Blacklist earlier than 1.62 installed, Jay advises using the full install. [#]

Goodbye Trackback And goodbye weblog comments. [#]

emacs for dummies Assuming they're distinct from dummies, then also for pico users like myself. [#]

The business case for website accessibility The soundbite: "making your website accessible to as many people as possible is just sound business sense." Be sure to check out Andy's slideshow on accessibility [PDF]. [#]

Roland Tanglao's excellent notes of Day 2 for RSS Winterfest [#]

10 reasons why RSS is not ready for prime time I've actually been bullish on syndication—if maybe not RSS in particular—especially after having rolled my own mini-aggregator. Besides, these are still early days for syndication. (As with Adam, I also found this link in an RSS feed.) [#]

January 21, 2004

Living the email lifestyle Text is still the Internet's killer app. [#]

Adam says using emacs is like breathing I still get mileage out of jokingly suggesting emacs first as a CMS solution. And this from a pico user. [#]

PHP 5 SimpleXML tutorial The parser is reminiscent of Magpie, which simplifies PHP 4's lots-to-be-desired XML parsing for those wanting to parse RSS. SimpleXML works for non-RSS XML as well. [#]

Some search engine optimization techniques Or, write well and write often. [#]

Mathemagic on the combination of corporate and employee (personal) weblogs Shows that a company can value what employees do on their personal time. [#]

January 20, 2004

Never let an ad agency near your website [#]

Inside XAML [#]

Windows Services for Unix cannot be installed on XP Home If you have XP Home, it would be a 217 MB download for nothin'. [#]

There was no need to show that Jon Udell incorrectly uses the cite attribute in the blockquote tag For he provides the evidence himself! [#]

January 19, 2004

CSS filters (hacks) chart My bookmarks listing of these types of charts overfloweth. [#]

Instead of defining a blogger in terms of their place on the power law, maybe we need to define them in terms of their level of involvement Introduces the concept of the Fractal Blogosphere. [#]

Deliver BitTorrent by RSS, not the other way around Later: Adam found a feed that does just that. [#]

Sometimes bugs fix themselves? It betrays a lack of digging deeper when it happens in my scripts, but sometime waiting makes things work. [#]

January 18, 2004

Subcategories in MT By plugin, alas, but still. So many plugins, so little time. (The link will be updated as David upgrades the plugin.) [#]

Excellent summary of some recent discussion about the power law If weblogs were like TV, I'd turn them off too. [#]

Have your OPML as RDF No more mention of the CC licence on the OPML sharing SDK site. (Hat tip Eric's comment in his own post.) [#]

January 17, 2004

Learning Movable Type A weblog to chronicle a user's learning the CMS. It's pretty much why I have this weblog. [#]

IRC as way to get in touch with developers #joiito features dev discussions sometimes, notably—since the developer hangs out there—about del.icio.us. [#]

Get web design clients on retainer From 2002. [#]

The importance of process in web design projects [#]

January 16, 2004

Towards the perfect 404 Still not as comprehensive as Dunstan's error-handling. [#]

RSS Winterfest will be part streaming media, part weblog (syndicated, of course), part wiki I'll at least be listening to portions of it (and if not, it will be transcribed). Six Apart VP Anil Dash will be speaking. Is there no RSS Winterfest IRC channel? [#]

Experiences with del.icio.us It's very useful as a s ide links weblogs (mine isn't the only way to integrate it in your weblog). [#]

PHP and MySQL approach to people and domains cited in a weblog This is very cool. I can see that having to markup old entries to make the script to include them would be a pain, but if that hurdle can be overcome (time would be the biggest cost) I can see how it can be used to give the reader (and for the writer!) easy access to previous quotes from and thoughts about people mentioned in the past. [#]

MT 2.661 released (see update at bottom of Ben's entry) Evidently there may be a problem with Comment-Preview and XHTML which may not have been fixed: there is a patch (not yet endorsed by Six Apart) which claims to fix it for good. Phil Ringnalda has a patch/hack for throttling too. [#]

If you output the data from Dave Winer's feed sharing in a format other than OPML, you gotta ask for permission Eric Sigler argues that the Creative Commons license used means derivative works (i.e. data in formats other than OPML) can be used without requiring explicit permission. [#]

January 15, 2004

Shelley: comments redirect in MT breaks the back button Not in all cases. In Mozilla, after clicking on a redirected link, the Back button takes you to the original post, not the redirect. But a test in IE, the most-used browsers, does confirm Shelley's observation. And she's right, having the option would have been nice. [#]

January 14, 2004

A list of my feeds for easy subscription You know you want to. Or here's the OPML, if you're into that kind of thing. [#]

Microsoft to take over Simon Fraser University? Well, no, not really. [#]

Beginner's guide to blogging with Movable Type Looks comprehensive. [#]

Harnessing web services with PHP [#]

Six Apart releases MT 2.66 More measures against comment spam. My measure—disabling comments—has so far been effective. [#]

January 12, 2004

Shelley: comment spam is partly the result of people talking about comment spam Can't say I blame the spammers on this one. Yet another case for not having comments on your weblog. [#]

Automatically close comments after one week Requires a MySQL installation of MT. [#]

Guide to really good answers on the MT forums [#]

Aaron Swartz: Jefferson was the first to say that "information wants to be free!" Here's the Weekend Update-style Joke-Off (ready? Go!): ...does that make Jefferson the first hacker? ...if Aaron really thinks information wanted to be free, why not link to those who objected to him in the first place? ...Jefferson would have been a blogger! [#]

January 11, 2004

Bill Kearney: Syndic8 had feed sharing almost 2 years ago [#]

Tim Bray says there are indeed exceptions to Postel's Law Mark Pilgrim seems to already have addressed some of Bray's objections here. (Also, a memo to technologists: why must you keep alluding to Mao Zedong in your rants?!) [#]

Researchers at my alma mater use Apple XGrid to find low autocorrelation binary sequences Some results here. [#]

David Janes thinks aloud about a Trackback aggregator using DMOZ categories, moderation and RSS [#]

Weblogs and email lists are the authoritative sources on Postel's Law [#]

January 10, 2004

What people miss by reading weblogs through aggregators There are a few weblogs I read in a browser (even though they have feeds) because I appreciate the effort the author put into the design. [#]

Light-weight MT client class [#]

Another quicklinks tutorial No word yet on whether this type of thing can be done across multiple installations of MT. [#]

January 9, 2004

Notes on tuning MT's performance [#]

Norton addresses reported computer slowdowns because of VeriSign [#]

Imaginary conversation about the Semantic Web Slowly introduces the concept. 'Why can't you people talk like normal people?' [#]

Why would you switch from MT to WP? I reply here. Also, sometimes the costs of making a move outweigh the net benefits of a new platform. [#]

Blogware's rich-text editor doesn't generate XHTML Upper-case tags, attributes without quotes surrounding the values, and the FONT tag (which is in the Transitional DTD but not the Strict). According to the screenshot, anyway. [#]

January 8, 2004

Software engineering is the fastest growing occupation for the decade of 2000-2010 Effectively calls bullshit on the idea that outsourcing is a problem. [#]

January 7, 2004

My Yahoo RSS available as early as Sept. 2003 Good to see the A-Listers finally catching on to this. [#]

Locke, Property and Software Piracy A response to the FeedDemon piracy discussion. [#]

January 6, 2004

Integrated Quicklinks Tutorial Requires you to hack a plugin. [#]

January 3, 2004

BlogMatrix scrapes powered-by-Blogger sites and creates RSS It doesn't say so on that page, but if you search for part of the URL of a weblog you know is being powered by Blogger, it'll return a URL that scrapes it into RSS 0.92. (When you come to a page that says "RSS feed information for [weblog]", the "blogrss" button links to auto-generated RSS.) [#]

The Battle Against Junk Mail and Spyware on the Web No mention of it being an economic rather than technical problem, or Lessig's bounty idea. [#]

The problems with XFN and FOAF are that they assume everybody has a website Also that mailto:email@example.com is a perfectly good URL that can be used in websites' stead. [#]

January 2, 2004

MovablePoster 2.0 released Post to your MT weblog via a Windows client. A lot like Zempt. [#]

January 1, 2004

Auto-close comments after a certain amount of time I considered closing the comments to old Vancouver Webloggers entries, but after installing MT-Blacklist, the spam stopped. (It's an effective, though certainly temporary, measure.) I've held off because the contributions from comments coming in from search engines aren't half-bad. [#]

Contribution to the power law Uh, I mean, top 100 feeds list. Yeah, that's it. I wouldn't mind the ability to see who's subscribing to my site(s) though. After all, that's all I care about. [#]