Blogging on Godlike Nerd

Interview with the MetroWest Daily News

Sun, 23 Jul 2006 13:10:53 +0000

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.

FeedFlare Rocks

Sat, 31 Dec 2005 17:30:59 +0000

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.

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Do You Blog?

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 09:58:51 +0000

Make sure you take MIT’s survey for blog authors.

Planet d00dism

Thu, 02 Jun 2005 21:30:30 +0000

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.

Drop the Job to Blog

Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:02:52 +0000

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.

43 Things Supports WordPress

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 09:29:05 +0000

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).

WordPress 1.5 Released!

Tue, 15 Feb 2005 08:30:23 +0000

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 Belongs to Six Apart

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 23:14:26 +0000

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).

WordPress 1.3 is now WordPress 1.5

Mon, 03 Jan 2005 19:16:04 +0000

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).

First Post with the Brand New MarsEdit 1.0

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 23:16:29 +0000

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.

WordPress 1.3 Update

Wed, 08 Dec 2004 22:45:56 +0000

Much like most of the WordPress community, I’ve been waiting with baited breath for the release of 1.3. I’d all but forgotten about it until I recently discovered Blogsome in an attempt to get Dana into a quality blogging package.

Blogsome is a little known free blogging site. And it’s run with WordPress 1.3 software. They even give you your own subdomain name in the format: yourname.blogsome.com. How sweet is that?

At any rate, seeing the new features in 1.3 resparked my interest. I know it’s only a matter of time before it’s released (and hopefully soon). As such, I’ve put up a testing installation. It’s going to be in a state of flux as far as format and looks go, but the content will be static as I simply copied the data from this 1.2.1 installation into a new database for testing.

What is the Best Free Hosted Blogging Service?

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 14:39:48 +0000

Some of my friends (Katie and Dana) use free blogging services, namely, LiveJournal and Blogger/Blogspot respectively. I personally went straight to Movable Type and then WordPress hosted on my own domain.

Of those two choices I’d tend to go with Blogger. It’s owned by Google now, so there’s plenty of growth potential. Probably the main reason would be that I actually dislike LiveJournal because: it’s slow, its themes are applied only to the front page (comment pages are the horrendous style of the rest of the site), it’s slow, you are forced into a long address (even blogspot gives you a subdomain), it’s slow, everyone and their brother has an account there so you’re forced into an obscure AIM screename-ish username, and did I mention it’s slow? Yeah. I don’t like LiveJournal… at all… in any way… shape… or form.

Is It Time for a Blog System Standard?

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 18:06:20 +0000

Brent Simmon’s, developer the excellent MarsEdit, has asked a very important question. Isn’t it time that a common weblog system feature set was agreed upon?

This is related to my earlier entry about the fact that WordPress doesn’t entire support Movable Type’s API. For the record, it is very close. This isn’t horseshoes and computers are far less forgiving than any person I know. By leaving something as “minor” as post specific text formatting, it becomes impossible for external editing software to determine how to format posts, particularly for preview purposes.

WordPress and the Lack of mt.supportedTextFilters

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 21:08:49 +0000

I’ve adopted the excellent Markdown to format my blog entries. It’s makes it much easier to write and maintain entries. However, because WordPress has to filter each post every time, it slows down my homepage considerably.

That is something I’ve come to live with and accept.

What is not acceptable is that WordPress still doesn’t support mt.supportedTextFilters. This is what tells external editing apps like MarsEdit know what formatting is being used so it can properly preview entries for you. As a result, Brent had to put in a custom preference (that one must manually add in) to force preview of Markdown formatting for all posts. This is rather unacceptable, but not Brent’s fault.

Comment Spam Gone Bezerk

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 21:07:45 +0000

No sooner than Peter Cohen mentions getting more than 11,000 comment spams than I realize that I had been hit. I previously had less than five spam comments. I now had about 50. Ugh.

Luckily, setting WordPress to moderate comments with more than 3 links in it did the trick. Considering the success he had with MT-Blacklist and MovableType, I thought it was time I got WPBlacklist which is the equivalent for WordPress. Installation was quick and easy.

Migration complete!

Tue, 03 Aug 2004 09:22:59 +0000

The good new is that WordPress is a million times easier to install than MovableType. I also like its interface much better. The bad news is that its documentation, or at least the organization of the documentation is lacking.

At any rate, I also moved my weblog to the root of the domain, so I’ve made a pointer from the old directory. I just hope that users that were using an RSS client to read my site will notice that the feed has moved as well (it’s linked on this page).

Goodbye MovableType, Hello WordPress!

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 20:24:38 +0000

Following confirmation from Ranchero software that NetNewsWire does indeed work with WordPress, I’ve decided to move to it. Partly was to keep current and partly because of some of its features are compelling.

I won’t be making any more entries until the migration is complete. I’ll also be making my blog the front page for my domain. Stay tuned!

Blogging Software

Mon, 02 Aug 2004 10:19:29 +0000

I’ve been using MovableType to run my blog here and it’s been working great.

However, MovableType 3.0 and up are no longer free. For now, the current version of MovableType I’m using is sufficient, but I’m concerned about long term viability.

The guys over at Unsanity have moved to WordPress, which seems pretty nice as well.

Does anyone have any recommendations for Blogging choices? Keep in mind, I’d like to continue to have the option to publish using NetNewsWire, which does limit the options a bit (WordPress may be out of the running because of this). My host does supply Blogger software as part of their package as well.