Speaking of We Blog, the website for the book features a community blog called BlogPopuli where anyone can contribute posts about weblogs either using Movable Type's trackback feature or by filling out a form.
The weblog to book to weblog dialectic bears watching.
categories: metablog
11:52:10 PM 
say what []
Since the early days of personal home pages, the readymade shorthand for characterizing a lame website is to refer to the owner's cat pictures. Yet the most popular personal-journal type blogs have always revealed the intimate and the mundane. It's the close observation that sucks people in.
categories: memewatch metablog x-pollen
11:37:58 PM say what []
Thanks to a head's up from Lawrence Lee at Userland, I'm testing out a list of titles of recent posts in the navigation column of this page.
OK, the first try was ugly. I've now put .recentPostTitle and .recentPostWhen into the style sheet in the template with the same characteristics as the .small style. Let's see if that helps....
categories: metablog radioactive
11:07:34 PM say what []
Also from bOing bOing, the blogosphere braces itself for the much heralded release of We Blog by megnut and matt-a-filter.
categories: memewatch metablog
9:30:58 PM say what []
There was a street in Berkeley called Grove. It's name was later changed to Martin Luther King Boulevard. Some time after that the city posted a sign labeling the street "Old Grove Street." Subsequently, people would refer to the street that way, which made B and I joke that it was eventually going to be known as Old Old Grove Street Street.
In a similar vein, this essay, called "(East (New (York))), (New (York))," points out the role of ambiguity and naming in the richness of semantic meaning, and identifies an impoverishment of meaning in machine-literal systems and protocols, such as the marriage of domain name service and IP addresses that brough us the ".com" obsession:
We deal with ambiguity by glomming onto the first sufficient interpretation as we listen (or read) and continue on. We usually don't even notice that there may be other interpretations. Given the number of possible interpretations of any given sequence of words it is surprising that we communicate as at all. We treat each failure to communicate or understand as a special case and thus avoid recognizing the larger issue. At best, issues of naming and ambiguity are treated as interesting philosophical concepts that have no direct relevance to the real world.
[thanks to bOing bOing for the link]
categories: memewatch
9:27:03 PM say what []
I've been working with Dreamweaver to adapt my blog templates, preparing for my next tutorial. So far I've fiddled with the color scheme at uncle john's blog. Both still need work. The colors are garish, some of the links are broken, and so on. But I'm getting more fluent in working with these templates and I'm pleased to be able to pull off the CSS layout. As promised, I will explain how I'm doing these things in this space, probably next week.
I'm also still working on the Radio vs. Movable Type comparison and will ideally have that posted here by tomorrow. We'll see.
I also prepped those two Blogger-based blogs for a Voidstar-converted RSS feed by adding <span class="rss:item"> ... </span> around the Blogger-item macro tags. Unfortunately, this generates a title based on the first x letters of the the entry, not picking up the actual title, so it's only a half measure, but at least now I can see both of them in my Radio RSS-feed aggregator.
categories: fireweaver metablog x-pollen
9:10:27 PM say what []
A website called knucklerap reported on a collaborative grammatical/editing discussion on Metafilter (although the knucklerap writer mistook one participant in the thread for the owner of the site). Part of the cited discussion:
"The problem is that the conjunction 'as well as' introduces a compound object phrase which is not parallel. Either both verbs [serve and witness] ought to be gerunds, or both ought to be infinitives."The phrase "in turn" attracted scrutiny, and for good reason. "Riviera" pointed out that it causes "temporal confusion, because you begin with the idea of the sequential ('in turn') and go to parallelism ('as well as')."
categories: metablog
8:30:41 PM say what []
Dreamweaver Team has posted some useful advice for optimizing the performance of Dreamweaver MX.
categories: fireweaver
12:27:03 PM say what []
This AlterNet article on "The Virtues of Promiscuity" discusses the evolutionary benefits of female promiscuity; that is the contributions "slutty" behavior makes toward the fitness of a species. Here's a choice quotation:
Even evolutionary psychologists, stout defenders of the meat-for-fidelity model, are beginning to acknowledge the benefits of women's "slutty" behavior. University of Texas psychologist David Buss gives the most credit to what he terms "mate insurance," a backup replacement in case the male partner doesn't survive.
categories: x-pollen
11:19:24 AM say what []
In yesterdays New York Times, an article on AOL's management shakeup reported that AOL discovered its membership was fleeing in the face of increased pop-up ads:
A study showed that when the number of pop-up ads was cut in half for a group of members, their satisfaction improved notably. That led not only to a cutback in the number of pop-ups across the service, but was, according to Mr. Leonsis, the catalyst for a revolution within AOL.
categories: memewatch
9:19:52 AM say what []
The news from the middle east over the weekend made me sad and frustrated and brought to a head some of my thoughts about the politics of the region, so I wrote a short essay at Junk Mail (The Case Against Peace in the Middle East).
Then I copied it into my new "outspoken" category but I felt like it didn't necessarily belong on the home page here.
Then I realized that I did want people to see it, so I added it to the home category.
Then I realized that my RSS feed is picking up entire stories (how do I get my RSS feed to pick up only a short abstract of each story?), so I unchecked the home category and decided to post this pointer here. Posting this to my home page so it will show up in my basic RSS feed
categories: memewatch radioactive x-pollen
8:59:05 AM say what []
The Business Section of the the Rocky Mountain News has an article on Starbuck's new experiment with online ordering in advance:
In this latest version of clicks-and-bricks retail, customers order through the Internet or a cell phone, and in five minutes, their coffee's ready at checkout. Charged to a pre-arranged credit card number, the drinks come with a 25-cent fee.
categories: memewatch
8:50:07 AM say what []
This flowchart should help you sort things out.
categories: memewatch x-pollen
12:52:24 AM say what []
