FYI: Blog Related Links:
- Merged Blog (many Blogs each with its own template on one page)
- AutoBlog (Manufactured Blogs)
- Anatomy of a Blogging Engine
Thanks!
categories: metablog
11:15:09 PM 
say what []
Pyra deserves (and gets) a huge amount of credit for lighting the spark that led to this blog explosion. The Blogger product represented a discontinuous leap in ease-of-use for website updating when it first appeared, and they continue to push the envelope with constant innovation. I'm also hoping to review the Blogroots book here when it's available.
categories: metablog
5:15:29 PM say what []
Thanks to a pointer from John Robb at UserLand, I can link to Paolo Valdemarin's explanation of how to direct different categories to different website destinations. I haven't worked through this myself, but it will enable me, for instance, to send my MemeWatch category to my as-yet-unignited memewatch.com website.
In a sense there is a Darwinian competition going on in my mindspace for which solution I will rely on for my blogging needs. If Radio solves all my problems, I'll probably just keep running with it. Meanwhile, I'm still experimenting with MovableType. May the best blog tool win!
categories: metablog
5:10:41 PM say what []
According to Dave Winer, William Safire will be blessing the usage of the word blog in his Sunday column:
Safire is the authority on American English. So blog is now a very real word. It will be in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Safire has written it up. We all did something real. Jorn Barger, Blogger, the Frontier community. Congrats to one and all!(Also, wow! One brief link back from Dave about the comparison conversation I've been posting has driven my traffic through the roof. Thanks, Dave.)
categories: memewatch metablog
12:23:24 PM say what []
There is a range of weblog types, from the personal journal at one end of the spectrum to the annotated set of links at the other. Somewhere in the middle is the new pundit/commentator type blog that is merging with the professional-journalist-moonlighting and edited-blog-at-an-online-'zine models. It is a spectrum, though, not a polarity, and every version of the mix seems to be out there. My first regularly-updated personal site was a pure personal blog designed as a place for me to quiet down and write my thoughts every day, a way to keep my writing chops fresh. It was called breathing room and it rarely contained any links at all. What linking I did was based on the usual web hypertext possibilities and it was never intended as an annotated bookmark site. But this was back in 1998 and the idea has since evolved rapidly, helped along by the various tools that help automate the updating of a log site. Ramble on.
categories: metablog
11:03:03 AM say what []
New linked articles posted at Junk Mail about:
- The Daily Howler taking the piss out of Ann Coulter
- The Economist worrying about W.
- The Washington Post: Ex-Dictator Broke, Living with Mom
- Semi Truth's timeline running down W.'s exciting business career
categories:
9:53:53 AM say what []
Your questions echo a lot of mine when I started. I was a Blogger user originally and decided to give Radio a try when it was released last December.1. A lot of people use the typical design for their blogs. If you look at mine, I don't. (I also enhance my stuff with a lot of my own code written in PHP. Mostly because it lets me keep what I had when I was using Blogger.
How do the RU scripts integrate with your server-side PHP?
2. Stories are for longer permanent posts. A lot of people will use them for longer articles. I haven't really found a ton of use for them. Though people like Adam Curry use them periodically to write about things they'd like to highlight.
I'm thinking that these comparisons and their follow-ups may get archived as "stories." Should I do RU versus MT next (this is the decision I'm most interested in), or RU vs. Blogger (probably what most people care about)?
3. The part of Radio that is not obvious is how it works. If you haven't browsed the Radio documentation I recommend it. It answers a lot of the initial questions I had.
Here's one example of the kind of thing you can do with Radio: If you look in the Radio Userland directory there is a directory called www. Anything you drop into this directory gets upstreamed to your site. If you have a template designed you can even write up a page of content and have it upstream it while wrapping it in the template for your site.
...and where does it end up in the site's hierarchy?
4. I host my blog on my own site via the ftp stuff. It was actually quite easy to do. AND I still remain part of the community. When my site updates it pings weblogs.com. My site shows up in the pageview stats for Userland. It tracks pageviews via a an image load from userland at the bottom of my page. So even though I host my own site I'm still part of the community.
OK, that's good to know. I don't mind my site living at Salon, for now, but I have plenty of my own hosting space, domain names, etc.
5. The macro language. People have done some neat things with this. For instance, on the righthand side of my page I have a recent posts area. This is all done through Radio with some code I wrote. Anytime I do a post it gets updated.
This stuff interests me, but it makes me think that there are two blogging user types: D.I.Y. types who like fiddling with scripts and code, and people who want an out-of-the-box solution. Radio actually seems to satisfy both.
So far I've used Blogger, Radio, MT, and LJ. I liked Blogger at first, but it suffered from lots of load issues. LJ tends to feel like the AOL of blogs to me. While there are some people with really nice content it's hidden among lots of noise.
Yeah, I haven't visited much of the LJ universe but there is a lot of "I'm mad at my dad" type of stuff there. Some interesting subcommunities though. I think I'll probably migrate my personal LJ blog, as an experiment, either to MT or Radio.
MT and Radio are my two favorites. MT lets me have a group blog at work. Everyone in my team posts stuff to it and it is so useful and easy to work with. I think if I'd found MT before Radio I might be using it. But at this point I've gotten used to Radio.
Now, I'm torn.
Radio is also a bit more then just a blogging client. There is the instant outlining stuff that is pretty neat. And the outliner is actually pretty handy for writing html.
I think the outliner is Dave Winer's original baby.
In the end, it really all comes down to personal preference I think. I do think that currently MT and Radio are kind of at the top of the heap though.
Hope I didn't end up rambling too much
Not at all. Thanks!
(There are also a few more comments at the original RU vs. LJ article.)
categories: metablog
9:24:41 AM say what []
I'm still having trouble wrapping my tiny, non-script-writing, head around the theory and practice of MovableType's TrackBack feature, but Dave Watson says it can be used from Radio, so I'm going to follow his advice and paste in some sample code here:
I don't feel any different.
categories: metablog
12:20:12 AM say what []
