I've completed the web version of the tutorial for my Tuesday appearance on the Screen Savers.
It's in very basic HTML because it's really a submission to the Screen Savers website and a companion to the material I'll cover on the air. When I have a chance I'll clean it up a little and put it into the design of my Savvy site (which needs a new design, but that's neither here nor there).
I also decided that the blogspot ad would be distracting so I moved the dummy blog to a new location.
categories: fireweaver metablog
10:23:17 PM 
say what []
Current Music: Hobo Chang Ba::Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band::Trout Mask Replica
categories: memewatch x-pollen
4:18:51 PM say what []
By all rights I should be barbecuing right now and by all means not laboring, but as a mostly self-employed guy who's job right now is mostly promoting his most recent book, not to mention a guy with not enough time to do all the things he wants to do once he finds them, I'm instead working on the tutorial for my demo on TV next week while B is down in Palo Alto visiting her family.
Here's my outline so far:
- What's a Blog?
- What's a Template?
- What's Dreamweaver?
- Blog Tools Discussed:
- Blogger & Blogger Pro
- Radio UserLand
- Movable Type
- LiveJournal (in passing, templates are fragmented)
- Tweaking Your Blog Templates in Dreamweaver
example: Still Blogging After All These Years - Making a Blog Template in Dreamweaver
no example - Integrating a Blog into an Existing Site
example: Agent7
discuss: Leo's site (home) vs. (blog) look-and-feel - Links:
- Dreamweaver Savvy
- Radio Free Blogistan
- Sample Templates
- Still Blogging After All These Years
- Agent7 blog
- Publisher (Sybex)
- My other blogs? Uncle John's Blog, Bite Media, MemeList
I realized I don't actually want to mess with the design of this site any more, especially not just to show something on TV, and Radio is tuned to just this site for me, so I'll probably use Blogger and Movable Type examples, depending on the time available.
Host Leo Laporte uses Movable Type for his blog and mentioned to me when I was on last time that he'd like to be able to integrate its design more closely with the look of his Leoville site. But really the thing has to boiled down to dense, flavorful nuggets. TV is like bouillon in your brain. A little goes a long way.
Several other cast members use LiveJournal, but LJ splits up your template into numerous text boxes, and while it would be possible to assemble them, view it Dreamweaver, edit, and then reslice it, it sounds like a royal pain to me and very television unfriendly.
I'll definitely mention Radio, since the templates are already files on your own hard drive, and can easily be opened in Dreamweaver. The trick is that DMX doesn't render .txt files as HTML, but I kill two birds with one stone by copying the contents of the file to a new dummy HTML file and editing there, keeping the .txt as a backup until I'm sure the new template is working.
With Blogger and Blogger Pro, it's just a matter of copying the single template file and pasting it into an empty Dreamweaver window. I've set up a demo blog at blogspot called Still Blogging After All These Years to use as a guinea pig on the air.
I may mention it was my friend syrup's website that first clued me in to the idea of letting the blog tool handle the entire front page of your site by putting other content into the template. She actually has a personal journal and now a sideblog that I suspect she's including with an SSI, but I'm not positive of that.
I may also show how I'm using Movable Type to integrate a blog about the books and awards of my writer clients into my agent page at the Waterside web site. This isn't live yet, but it's coming along, and it's a good demonstration of how to put a blog into an existing design. Movable Type has a feature for associating each template with a file you can open and edit directly.
Now that I'm tracking my Amazon rank with JungleScan (portfolio style) and the Books and Writers e-mail notification service, it will be interesting to see if there's a spike in sell-through during or after the appearance. It may sound crass but like I said, this is my job right now. You rarely get such immediate feedback on your performance in life.
categories: fireweaver metablog
2:56:48 PM say what []
He may be giving Radio's aggregator short shrift, but Jeremy has done a good job of breaking down several approaches to RSS aggregation and providing his own wishlist:
I'm on a quest to find the perfect RSS aggregator.... I'm thinking of a server-based process that can gather all the data and give it to me in one of several ways. Maybe I can just point my browser at it and catch up on the news—just like AmphetaDesk. That's great for when I'm on-line and in a surfing mood. I'd like it to do RSS auto-discovery. I'd like the option of having updates sent to me via e-mail and possibly instant-messenger. Heck, I'd like to be able to subscribe via e-mail or IM as well.... Anyone know of such a beast? Sounds like it'd be a fun project to build.
categories: knowhow metablog radioactive
1:43:23 PM say what []
decafbad follows up on Dylan Tweney's aside ("...LiveJournal.com (which most weblog news stories overlook for some reason) boasts more than 650,000 [users]..."), asking why is LiveJournal largely ignored in coverage of blogging?
But 650,000 users... that's a lot. More than Radio and rivalling Blogger.com. Is there a real qualitative difference in writing between the groups? I would still imagine there's a lot of crap to be found via Blogger.com. I'm not sure about Radio, though, since I get the impression that the 15 year olds have yet to flood into the userbase and its following seems more tilted toward professionals.The answers suggested in the follow-up discussion boil down to two things. (1) LJ is used more for diaries than for blogs (in the sense of personal inward-focused) daily posts vs. including links to the rest of the web in most posts, and (2) LJ users don't ping Weblogs.com. A corollary to (1) is that LJ sites are less likely to be interlinking to the rest of the blogosphere.
What's interesting is that feature-by-feature, LJ's functionality is comparable to or better than that of most other tools. The difference seems to come more from how the tool tends to be used than from its inherent capabilties. I wonder if having the word "journal" in the name (see also diaryland) tends to promote the more diaristic uses of application?
Then again, it's not like LJers don't link out. I know plenty of counterexamples to that. When I started my own LiveJournal in January of this year, my previous weblogs had been more in the world of online diaries and notebooks, visible to the public but not focused on gaining a large readership. I was happy being off in my own thread most of the time. But looking at my journal's archives, I see that I was using it as a general purpose blog, with a mixture of observations, introspection, and web sightings. I explicitly wrote about PEP early on, seeing the blog as a place to keep track of my thoughts about that project.
Since July RFB has sucked up more of my energy and bodega has become again more of a personal journal but also an entry portal for x-pollen entries, which tend to be memes I want to note and pass along.
The decafbad post, by the way, had some information about RSS feeds and LJ I didn't know (that you can add a feed as a friend, which is their version of an aggregator), and the follow-up comments included an interesting link to LiveJournal's Meme Tracker, a list of the top URLs linked to by LJ users (again giving the lie to the stereotype that LiveJournalers are all writing about being grounded, etc.).
categories: memewatch metablog
1:38:38 PM say what []
