Despite my sporadic blogging here lately, I got chosen to be interviewed with a local newspaper, the MetroWest Daily News, for an article in their Sunday edition today. I haven’t seen the finished product, but we talked about blogging, professional blogging, journalistic integrity, and a blog’s effect upon your job and career in general. Hopefully I’ll come across as insightful. I’ll try to post the link once it appears on the website. ...
Heather noticed that I turned on several of the FeedFlare features for my RSS feed. I fall in love with FeedBurner more and more every day. Email this Send a link to your item to someone via email. Email author Allow subscribers to email you directly. (If there is no email address in your feed, this will be hidden.) Technorati Cosmos Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati. (If there are no links, this will be hidden.) ...
Make sure you take MIT’s survey for blog authors.
After thinking a lot about how to implement my own Erikkregator, Marshall recommended RSSMix. Now, that was an excellent suggestion. However, that only solves the problem of the RSS feed. I wanted to have a webpage to go along with it though. At that point, if I was going to be programming with an RSS parsing library, I might as well be mixing my own RSS feed. That sounded extremely painful though. That’s why I was glad to come across a slick piece of software called Planet. ...
Blogger icon Jason Kottke of Kottke.org has decided to make blogging a career. It’s a bold move to say the least. I must admit that I only recently (and by recently I mean in the last couple months) got turned on to his website in full. His remaindered links blog was the inspiration for my own supplement. Pen for Hire It’s been interesting to watch various weblogs have gotten acclaim for various reasons. The most notable and recognized by the public being the exposure of the CBS memos as fakes. However, in computer culture, other sites have earned more attention and respect from their respective audience. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has built a huge following using little more than a spartan web page and thought provoking commentary. I say thought provoking, but really what I mean is that his logic is so utterly relentless that any thought you might have had contrary to his generally gets a thorough beat down. He parlayed that following into a way to build revenue through ads and now subscription only content. ...
Robot Co-op announced today that they are supporting WordPress blogs (adding to Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, and Type Pad). As of this entry post time, it was still rough. The description texts are still not filled out right (making it apparent that they simply use the same method as for Movable Type, hardly a surprise), but I assume it works. This should be have been trivial for them to do (as all the major blogging packages use XML-RPC and Movable Type APIs). ...
I know all of you haven’t been waiting like I have been for this, but the fine folks over at WordPress have finished work on WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn.” This means that I’ll be taking the site down later. I’m not sure if it will be tonight, tomorrow, or sometime later this week. First, I need to finish at least one new theme. I’ve already started working on it on my test blog. It’s a modification of the fabulous Kubrick. When I’m done, I’ll be letting Michael know that I borrowed from him (though I tried to limit that as much as possible). ...
LiveJournal, or more aptly its parent company, Danga, was bought by Six Apart. For those not entrenched in the blogging community and its politics, Six Apart makes Movable Type, the most popular blogging software out there, and TypePad, one of the most popular paid blogging services. Six Apart essentially sets the standard for what a blog is, and what its features should be. In particular, Movable Type supports Trackbacks which allow blogs to reference entries in other blogs. Most major blogging systems support them (including my software, WordPress). ...
Following what could best be described as absolute confusion for its users, the WordPress developers have clarified that WordPress 1.3 will be known as WordPress 1.5 due to extensive changes. It’s completely a placebo effect, but I feel a little more comfortable waiting for WordPress 1.5 instead of 1.3. True, it’s the same thing ultimately, but I’m feeling better. In related news, they’ve also released a pre-release version of their upcoming bulletin board software, bbPress. I may just move over to it once a more formal version is released as PHPbb is overkill for what I need (due to extremely low volume). ...
The blog editing software I’ve been using for a while now, MarsEdit, has finally gone 1.0. I consider it the second most essential software I use on my site (right after WordPress). It works with a variety of blogging packages, so if you use a Mac and blog, you need to check it out. Congratulations Brent. I look forward to future development of this software.