Christian Crumlish (xian): metablog

Last post at blogs.salon.com

Sat, 26 Oct 2002 06:12:21 GMT

OK, let's try this again: Radio Free Blogistan has moved. The last entries posted to the old address are the ones you see here dated October 25, 2002. For current entries, please go to the new address: http://radiofreeblogistan.com/.

A fix attempt

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 22:09:42 GMT

Since fireweaver is squatting on the home page, I got through to radio.userland.com and set up ftp upstreaming to send that category to http://fireweaver.com/blog/. Posting this entry to the home page and fireweaver should get fireweaver pointed where it's supposed to be and will also I hope restore the integrity of the home page entries.

Still moving...

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 21:49:45 GMT

Well, the first attempt screwed up the upstreaming and one side effect is that "fireweaver" is rendering on the home page instead of in its category folder, which hides most recent posts. (Follow the metablog link at right to see recent blog-related posts.) Meanwhile, this is more or less a dummy post to see if the rendering will fix itself. For some reason I am suddenly also unable to reach http://radio.userland.com/ where the information about #upstream.xml syntax and the script that fixes URL errors after upstreaming changes can ordinarily both by located. Update: Ugh, it gets worse and worse. When using that abovementioned script, Salon blog users, be sure to replace the string "radio.weblogs.com" with "blogs.salon.com." I now have nested redirection problems! Publishing this to several categories to see if it will stop salonika from squatting on the home page (now that fireweaver is pointing offsite.

Moving Day

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 20:59:17 GMT

If my upstreaming changes today work correctly, then this may be the final post to Radio Free Blogistan at the http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/ address, in which case, I want to make it very easy for any future readers directed here by old links (sorry, everybody!) to get to the new home page at radiofreeblogistan.com. If I were really cool, I'd redesign this page so that it contained the moving message and then loaded the new page at http://radiofreeblogistan.com/ automatically, or immediately redirected to that page, or something cool like that. Instead people ending up here will have to follow a link like this one or the one in the title of this entry. If the move fails, then this message will seem kind of lame and embarassing in retrospect. For the technically minded, I will continue to use the Salon hosting and address for my salonika category, and possibly for hosting images and other large files within my storage quota. The blog-related categories (knowhow, metablog, radioactive, syllabus), along with a few knew ones (uh, i don't know... bloggerz, stereomovabletype?) will also be upstreamed to sections of radiofreeblogistan.com. The others will be squirted off to more appropriate hosts (for completists: fireweaver will show up at Dreamweaver Savvy once I get the templating integrated, memewatch will migrate to memewatch.com, outspoken will fold back into Bite Media, and x-pollen will go to x-pollen.com). I'm starting another new category today, unrelated to blogs. It's called "Agent7," it's about my clients and colleagues in the worlds of technology and publishing, and especially their instersection, and it will end up at waterside.com once we get the server-side includes inserted into the appropriate page. Update: The first try failed. I tried to copy the old #upstream.xml file into the subcategories that I didn't want coming over to radiofreeblogistan.com but that somehow resulted in a strange out-of-date rendering of the home page. To fix that I'm editing this file and reposting after throwing away the bad upstream files and restoring Radio to community upstreaming. If things get back to normal, I'll try the FTP approach, possibly by publishing yet another change to this cross-category entry.

Blogger back up

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 19:56:38 GMT

Ev says that any compromised data has been restored and that if you kept your FTP information at Blogger you may want to change your password now, although it is not clear whether that information was accessed. Anil Dash recommends changing your username as well.

Remote (FTP) publishing with MT?

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 17:58:45 GMT

Are there plans in the works to ever give MT the ability to publish content via FTP (that is, not on the local site where MT is installed)? Or is it already possible, by defining the local site in the blog configuration using an ftp:// URL? Inquiring minds want to know without doing their own homework. I ask because I want to publish news of technology and publishing to my literary agency's website, which is hosted elsewhere from my own personal sites, naturally. I'll use Radio most likely, since it's so easy to spawn a new category and have it upstream by FTP, but I had mocked up the blog in MT until I realized that I might not be able to publish to this nonlocal host.

Blogger hacked!

Fri, 25 Oct 2002 17:09:29 GMT

The BloggerDev mailing list is abuzz this morning with people complaining that their settings have been switched around by someone using the monicker hax0redbyme. The first symptoms showed up when users tried to manipulate their blogs and found their view site link within the Blogger application redirected to http://blogger.com/hax0redbyme/. A list member checked the team listings for one his blogs and found that most of the team member entries had been changed. Requests for passwords generated the message ""Password request sent to hax0redbyme! You should receive the email momentarily." Some are concerned that the Blog This! bookmarklet has been insecure (though I can't see how it's any different from any other process that may or may not cache your login information wth a cookie). And others are thinking beyond the potential loss of data into the question of whether the hacker has now gathered FTP login information or other info on the many thousands of active Blogger accounts. News when it happens.

What's Sullivan for Instalanche?

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 19:17:30 GMT

ShortStrings (no permalinks, but it was posted Tuesday, October 08, 2002), says Andrew Sullivan reports that Christopher Hitchens's new book on Orwell went from 1,074 to 4 on Amazon's best seller list after he chose it for his next book club discussion. (More...)

Blogging the conference, part two

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 18:17:31 GMT

I decided to try to plumb the native talent of clients and other people subscribed to the Waterside "virtual conference" mailing list:

I'm trying to arrange wireless access at the 2003 Waterside Conference (in Berkeley), and I wanted to ask the members of this list whether anyone has experience setting up this kind of impromptu wireless shared access in the past, especially in other conference settings. I plan to blog the conference and hope other participants will do so as well, providing live real-time coverage of keynote speakers, panels, workshops, and hallway encounters.

Here are some of things I'm trying to sort out:
Will this work with one DSL or T1 ethernet access points, a hub to do DHCP, and one or more Airport or Linksys type wireless base stations? If we want to offer wireless access in the main auditorium as well as, say, in the demo room, would I need a second access point, or can a second base station pick up the network by being wthin range of the first base station?

In a nutshell, are there hardware elements I am overlooking or networking concepts I have egregiously wrong? I have a spare hub, yards of ethernet, and one base station, so I think I can provide almost everything just by stripping my office...

The hotel wants to know "how many computers" will be using the access, saying they need to set aside separate IP for each one. I think they don't understand DHCP or that they need to be told that one computer (my hub) will be needing just one IP address, thanks. It's all subnet masking behind the DHCP/NAT server, right?

I'm obviously semiclueless about this stuff, so I'd like to take out to dinner anyone planning to come to the conference who knows more about such matters and who would be willing to help me in a pinch in configuring and setting up the access on site.

I'll keep you posted.

Call for Contributors

Thu, 24 Oct 2002 16:06:10 GMT

As my (still secret) project continues to take up most of my working time, I'd like to accelerate a plan I had on the backburner for the future of the blog, which is to throw it open to outside contributors. I think coverage of this beat would benefit from the input of collaborators. I see blog-related topics and stories flowing through my aggregator without my having adequate cycles to address them, and I know that some of my readers and some of the people who link to me could do as good a job as or a better job than I could of covering some of these topics. I'm going to follow dws's model of how to do this (from his RadioFAQs channel). If you'd like to contribute occasional content to RFB, here's what you should do:

Tell me you're interested (email is fine).
Set up a "Blogistan" category in your blog.
Send me the URL for the RSS feed for you new category.
Post any content you want to contribute to RFB to that category, including a credit link to yourself (so that if we use the automatic aggregtion of the muliauthor tool, the posts will not appear to have been written by me).
I'll do the rest.

I will continue to post original content as well, of course, but I will start to take on more of an editorial role as a guarantor of the quality and pertinence of the material here. To do so, I am planning a three-tiered approach to content submitted by outside contributors. The first tier will be discretionary, in that I will subscribe to a potential contributor's RSS feed and manually post entries I feel are appropriate. For anyone who consistently contributes content that makes it into RFB, I will proceed to the second tier, adding their feed to my multiauthor tool's list of incoming feeds and thereby automating the inclusion of their posts (removing my discretion from that step). I will continue to make the decisions about what categories posts belong in and, most importantly, whether they are to appear on the home page. A contributor on this level will appear on a new masthead page as a staff writer. The third tier will only come into play if a staff writer becomes so involved as to be willing and able to take on a share of the responsibility of deciding which categories posts should go to, whether to include suggested entries from outside contributors, and which content belongs on the home page. If this tier comes into play, RFB will have fully transitioned to a publication model. I don't know whether any of this will work. Maybe no one will want their content showing up here, but it will be an interesting experiment, and I hope it will continue to increase the value of this blog to those learning about weblogs. If the content increases too quickly, most of the new contributions may appear in a special RSS-only feed. We'll see. Other future plans I have for RFB include reforming the categories. I'll probably stop rendering non-blog-related categories here (such as fireweaver, memewatch, outspoken, and x-pollen), and add a few new blog-related categories, such as one for each of the major products. Instead of using RFB as a central clearinghouse for my other blog posts (via x-pollen and the multiauthor tool), I'll treat it more as a blog-about-blogging channel that can, when necessary, be fed from other blogs. Meanwhile, I plan to move my personal blogging from Bodega (at Livejournal) to a new x-pollen site. This blog will probably become my home base, feeding other topic-specific sites as needed. On the one hand, I like the differentiation of separate brands for separate types of content. On the other hand, simplicity is a virtue (and a pragmatic benefit) and that other way (toward infinite taxonomical subdivision) lies madness. On the third hand, inertia is powerful. Meanwhile, if you are interested in contributing links and thoughts about blogging trends and phenomena to Radio Free Blogistan, if you have an idea for a subbeat you'd like to cover (such as a product-specific column), or just want to discuss these and related ideas, please drop a line to submit@radiofreeblogistan.com.

Making a metablog with TrackBack pings

Wed, 23 Oct 2002 17:35:17 GMT

In my continuing effort to use my own blogorrhea as a guinea pig, I have some plans in the works for my x-pollen.com domain. For example, I'm planning to move my personal blog from LiveJournal to Movable Type. I'll document the process as I do it. I'm also trying to set up a TrackBack ping-based metablog to aggregate all (or as many as possible) of my other log entries into one rolling meta index. For the MT blogs, it's easy to make them ping a specific category in another blog (which I'm calling metaxian), but I haven't figured out yet how to capture and display those pings on the MT index page. I've followed the instructions (I think I have) but so far nothing is showing up at http://x-pollen.com/metaxian/ . My next step will be to look at the discussion forums at movabletype.org to see if these questions have been asked and answered. Since http://blogroots.com/blogpopuli.blog and the KMpings site are both working examples of the kind of metablog I'm trying to create, none of this should be rocket science. I was hoping that each ping could trigger a blog entry, which could then roll off the home page and be archived as usual, but it appears that the pings must be listed as their own entities, so I don't know what that says about archiving older pings. I have much still to learn about all of this. Suggestions are welcome.

Making a conference bloggable

Tue, 22 Oct 2002 20:00:17 GMT

So, what does it take to make a conference bloggable? That is, what are the usual arrangements required? Is it a matter of one IP address, a DHCP hub, one or more airport or linksys type wireless base stations, and that's it? Or am I overlooking a layer of complexity? This is the kind of thing I imagine Doc Searls or Chris Pirillo to know, but I'm asking my readers because you guys seem to know everything. Here's what prompted this. I suggested to Waterside (my literary agency) that we make their annual conference bloggable this year. Here's what the hotel said: "We have done wireless Internet before in our meeting room, but the clients have always brought their own equipment for the connection. We just turned on the lines for them to access." And here's what they asked: "Also, we will need to know how many computers will be using the lines so we know how many IP addresses to set up. Will you be bringing in your own wireless equipment? If not I can find out the cost to rent for you." I can bring my airport but that will probably cover only one room (probably wherever the panels and speakers will be). We may want another base station in the demo room, I would imagine. I've got an extra hub, so that's not a problem, and lot's of ethernet cable. Am I missing something I'm going to want ot rent? But here's my real question? Why do they care "how many computers" will be there? We don't need a unique IP address for each computer, right? Shouldn't we be able to use DHCP? I would think several hundred participants would use the wireless at least to get on the web and check mail if not for blogging.

The semitruth hurts

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 20:41:48 GMT

Favorite new Salon blog: SEMI TRUTHS: The Radio Active Salon. Best feature: True news stories followed by semitrue embellishments. Bonus: Mentions Michael Jackson and pr0n.

What's next? The homeless rockstar?

Thu, 17 Oct 2002 17:31:41 GMT

I remember in that strange Terry Gilliam film The Fisher King that the two homeless guys eventually get pitched to participate in an upbeat sitcom (or was it reality show? that's what it would be today) about homelessness to be called "Home Free!" Homeless people have had homepages for a long time now, especially since municipalities such as Santa Monica (which Harry Shearer refers to at the end of each Le Show as "the home of the homeless) started making sure homeless people could get Internet access through public libraries or kiosks. They learned what that consituency wanted most (lockers and showers, if I recall) because they suddenly had a voice apart from their for the most part anxiety-provoking physical shambles. I first heard about The Homeless Guy's blog on Metafilter, with a Kaycee-scarred angle of worrying whether the guy was for real or a clever hoax. Since then the story of Kevin Barbieux and his blog has been percolating up toward the mainstream. Blogger features his blog in its blogs of note module on the its home page (looks like Die Puny Humans is off the list). There's something to be said for Blogger's utterly free option (using the ad-sponsored blog*spot service) in that it opens the door wider to online publishing than any other service I can think of. Blogger's always had trouble doing the Eudora thing — turning that onramp into a toll road — but the service being provided in the search for a viable business model is undeniable. Before anyone starts talking about blogging being the next street-newspaper bootstrap solution for the marginalized, consider that Kevin Barbieux's blog is well written and organized. He provides frequently asked questions and answers right up front, and mixes the blog content with other links and information about himself. This draws me in as much as the provocative title and premise.

Come on in, the water's fine.

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 21:23:49 GMT

added a new link to my masthead/sidebar area today. It's called Today's Referrers and its an ordinary link to the page showing RFB's referrer stats for the day. A few referrers show up almost every day, sometimes with just one link. I often assume that that one link is the writer of the other blog. I love this intimacy about the web. My computer books have sold to tens and hundreds of thousands of readers all over the world, but the ones who write back make the whole thing worthwhile. I liked that about Enterzone, the cozy community of readers available, willing to be organized on the web. Readers are great but readers who write are the best. Come into the game if you're not playing now. Make it harder for me to make a living as a writer by competing with me for attention. This will only toughen me up. I'm prone to slack off without that nervous mammal prey feeling. Find out what you have to say, when given the microphone. Learn how you would write if you took the time to practice writing simple declarative sentences (file under do as I say and not do as I do). You have a voice. Use it.

Where's Waldo?

Wed, 16 Oct 2002 18:51:00 GMT

A combination of burnout and offline deadlines has severely hampered my ability to post interesting links here, let alone cogent ideas or analysis. I don't think this situation will last too long (although I am heading to southern California for a wedding on Friday and won't be back in action till Tuesday, so this site will go dark during that period, for the first time since we launched). But there is a natural ebb and flow to blogging, so acknowledging burnout and overload is probably a good thing. Yesterday my body went on strike and demanded that I sleep most of the afternoon just to get caught up on the fatigue cycle. I took this as a sign to stay away from the computer except when absolutely unavoidable. Ironically, I just started a new, private intranet-ish k-log project blog sorta blog for tracking the still secret project. So the blogging goes on as a knowledge capture and project management tool even when I'm not reporting on the metablog scene here in RFB. In the meantime, I direct you to the fine links in my various blogrolls hither. Most of the time I find out about intereresting developments from them. Blogging News has been doing an especially good job lately of covering the biggest stories and most quotable quotations in the blogosphere.

To don't

Tue, 15 Oct 2002 18:17:36 GMT

Things that won't get done today:
review tapers addendum for dead letters magazine
finish installing pmachine
install and test rss monkey
set up godetia and wildflowertrips domains for b
set up virtuser mail forwarding for antiweb.net
send book promised to friend
make household budget
plan/prepare for moving site root to radiofreeblogistan.com
*set up rss monkey*
learn opml
final notes on j-school panel
jump menu for sidelists
http://www.onfocus.com/snap/cats/
http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/index-media.asp
http://www.onfocus.com/bookwatch/
rush to judgement mediajunkie.com/rush
don't know if suexec or cgiwrap available <==figure out!
Please Notify in my event log. Does that mean rss feed received? How notify?
possible to do e-mail list, just send summaries?
Also, how about "Mail this entry..."
w.bloggar
kung-log for MT
make blog books page, link from masthead
make colophon
. typography
. software, radio, dreamweaver, fireworks, textedit, palm desktop, eudora, ie, mozilla, opera, omniweb, netscape
. hardware: mac, speakers, camera, handspring visor, pen and paper
xmltree
PEP is my codename for my dream application, the Personal Expression Platform
start blog directory process
include blog reviews
blog books
required reading
by tool
blogger
radio
movabletype
livejournal
other
respond to blog-related e-mail
try out manila
consider bbCMS for ezone/thedeadbeat/mediajunkie/memewatch
Type design, bold vs italics vs quot marks, not having a style sheet or set design, semantic <strong>? it's more like <span class="thoughts"> and defining that to look italic? accessibility and standards sometimes feel like an infinite regress
traction
people have died of exposure
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/nation/crawford/index.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=28609
http://mcns10.med.nyu.edu/intro/brain.tumor.primer.html
turing test for spam arrest
q: how to use short listings in rss feed instead of entire post?
abude brazil ins story meme

Get a real blogroll

Mon, 14 Oct 2002 18:20:05 GMT

Though I feel I have no time to learn anything new at the moment, I've build up a strong desire to learn more about OPML and start really organizing my links in a more iterative, interactive way. Blogrolling.com is like crack. It's so easy to get started and it takes so much of the pain out of adding a link, but it's a dead end. Seems like step one would be to import my bookmarks (and all my older bookmark sets), currently in the form of IE Mac "favorites." Is there some easy way to do that?

Got my Google API key

Sun, 13 Oct 2002 19:07:43 GMT

I should now theoretically be able to build a list of related links by Googling a keyword from each post, no? Is there prior art for this?

Bias in the blogosphere?

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 17:43:23 GMT

In this essay on the political leanings of bloggers, Robert Corr says "I've attempted to apply the Herman/Chomsky propaganda model to the blogosphere, and submitted the essay for my Politics and the Media class." I'm still reading it, but he makes some good points about the economics of cyberspace and the climate of the blogosphere. It seems to me, though, that many tech bloggers lean left (or libertarian) just as many post 9/11 instabloggers lean right (or libertarian). It's just that the tech bloggers are less engaged politically, at least in the sense that they have other things to blog about than Robert Fisk's latest anti-Bush screed. He makes the point (among others) that bloggers are mainly commenting on pre-filtered news (and talking points):

As Andrew Orlanski pointed out, "If I was in a position of power, I'd be delighted to see news reporters supplanted by blogs, because blogs — for all their empowerment rhetoric — are far easier to divert and confuse than a few persistent and skilful reporters."

He also makes an interesting analysis of the link "economy" among bloggers as a form of advertising. Then again, he quotes the New Statesmen on the relative influence of Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan in the blogosphere in which InstaPundit is said to have "only 40,000 readers a day." I suppose a newspaper would see that figure as paltry and unsustainable from the advertising-pages perspective, but since when is 40,000 people a small number? If you sell that many books you can make half a year's pay. Newspapers may serve 10 or 100 times as many people but they are not written by just one person alone! (End of digression.) At Corr's own blog, MentalSpace, he hosts a Political Blog Map plotting bloggers on the 2-D cartesian grid, based on the Political Compass quiz. The sample of bloggers shown is small, but it begins to bear out my sense that the slant online is toward libertarianism and away from authoritarianism, more than a left/right divide. Then again, we need other dimensions, because where does communitarianism come in? Full disclosure: RFB (or, in my political guise, Bite Media) scored -2.62 on the economic left/right axis (minus is left, plus is right) and -6.26 on the authoritarian/libertarian axis (minus is liberty, plus is authority).

RadioExpress in a new window?

Fri, 11 Oct 2002 16:52:40 GMT

Speaking of bookmarklets, does anyone know how to modify the RadioExpress code so that the resulting post page shows up in another window? I sometimes like to refer to the page I'm linking to while constructing my post. I wonder if the RSS aggregator's Post button could be modified similarly?

He must type pretty fast!

Thu, 10 Oct 2002 21:48:38 GMT

Else how could Nat Torkington have transcribed that Digital ID World DRM panel live? [via Doc]

Kung-log: OS X client for MT

Thu, 10 Oct 2002 21:29:23 GMT

Tom at Backup Brain posts:

Kung-Log is a Mac OS X application that lets you post and manage Movable Type entries. Written with AppleScript Studio, I believe.

I downloaded this a while back but haven't had a chance to test it out yet. I recall that Scot Hacker also told me a while back that iJournal, an OS X app for posting to LiveJournal can in theory be extended to post to any blog (I'm not sure how all these things work!). Then there's w.bloggar, an app for Windows that posts to a number of different blogging systems.

Powerpoint slideshow from Chicago weblogs panel

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 17:25:51 GMT

All About Weblogs has posted the PPT presentation from last weekend's panel. We want to hear more about the proceedings!

Brad Choate's 'Sanitize' plugin for MT

Wed, 09 Oct 2002 17:11:23 GMT

Apparently if an MT blog allows HTML in comments and uses an executable file extension (such as .php or .shtml) this opens up a security risk from code that could be inserted into a comment. Brad Choate has released a plugin called Sanitize that enables MT users to exclude all but a specified list of HTML tags in comments:

[T]he quick fix to this problem is to disallow HTML comments. But if you want to keep your HTML comments and strip them of unsafe tags, you can use the Sanitize plugin to clean them up. Here's how you might use it:

<MTCommentBody sanitize_html="a href,b,br,p,strong,em,ul,li,blockquote">

The tags listed in the 'sanitize_html' attribute are the tags that are allowed. Any tags not listed will be removed. In addition, the JSP, ASP, PHP and SSI markups are automatically stripped out to prevent abuse. Attributes must also be specified (as of the 1.1 update).