Christian Crumlish (xian): radioactive

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/.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Advanced Radio chapter from 'Essential Blogging' posted

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 15:58:54 GMT

A sample chapter from the new O'Reilly book on blogging. [Scripting News]

Yes, I am still planning to review this book!

Sat, 05 Oct 2002 22:07:26 GMT

John Robb mentioned ThinkBlank today. I followed the instructions and added the MetaLinker code to my home template when I linked to the site a few days ago, but I'm not seeing any metalinks. What am I doing wrong?

Meta linking to your RSS feed

Wed, 02 Oct 2002 18:38:09 GMT

Per dive into mark, I just added a link tag indicating this blog's rss feed. The code I added should work for any Radio blog whose RSS feed is named rss.xml:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss xml" title="RSS" href="<%radio.macros.weblogUrl ()%>rss.xml">

Sample code for focused custom Google search

Mon, 30 Sep 2002 17:45:07 GMT

The site search feature of Google's free custom search offering works by default only for sites whose addresses are root-level URLs (so, for example, you can use it out-of-the-box to search jrobb.userland.com or blogs.salon.com but not blogs.salon.com/0001111/). With the help of Ian Landsman and a few other readers over the weekend, I've come up with code that produces a custom Google search of just this blog. I've in fact replaced my calendar with it (well, I've moved the calendar to the bottom of my masthead column anyway, on the theory that robots may still find it useful). I want to offer the code to anyone to copy and tweak, but I've learned that posting code (even escaped-out code) to a blog entry tends to upset news aggregators, so instead I've written up the learning process with a few code samples as a story.

One solution to Google site search

Sun, 29 Sep 2002 22:49:14 GMT

Have I mentioned lately that I love the Internet? Cast a question on the waters and the answer (or an answer) generally comes back within 24 hours. Ian Landsman sent me a solution in the comments to my previous post. I'd paste the code in here but even when escaped out it will cause problems for at least some aggregators, so look at the comment if you're interested. Basically, Ian's solution passes the inurl:0001111 specification that limits the search to just my site on this server, including it in the query as a hidden text value by including a name="q" attribute. The only drawback I can see to this solution is that, by avoiding the custom Google search, it doesn't permit cobranding (not that big a deal to me as a private individual but perhaps an issue for more commercial enterprises) and it doesn't offer site-specific search option on the results page. I'm playing around with a hybrid solution on an experimental page (experimental meaning undesigned, no navigation, etc.). Basically, it involves using as much of the custom code as possible but still trying to pass the hidden text values per Ian's solution. It seems to work just fine, but I'll keep banging away at it for a while to see if I've screwed it up. If it does work, I'm going to replace my calendar with a search box and then probably write up a story with the code so it won't break aggregators but so I can distribute it to anyone who isn't blogging from the root of their domain. (This entry x-posted to knowhow category because making blogs—or k-logs alike—searchable addresses a key question regarding the usefulness of logging as a KM or knowledge sharing instrument.)

News aggregator problems with forms

Sat, 28 Sep 2002 19:00:36 GMT

Since Jrobb and dws and others have posted their form code, the strange decoding, unencoding, recoding behaviors of the Radio RSS Aggregator appear to have rendered my Delete button inoperable. Or is this just me?

Salon rankings

Sat, 28 Sep 2002 00:26:01 GMT

Well, the race is on. Will I catch up to the (on vacation) Plan B blognovel to become the number two all-time Salon blog after Scott? Or will the Cowgirl lap me before I make it? For all I know I may have plateaued (that can't be the right spelling) already. It's embarassing to be beaten by both halves of filchyboy (I still don't get what's up with his site being registered at two usernums—it really cuts into his rank!). At our current differential, RevCow will outstrip me in twelve days or fewer. I just have to hope Plan B's vacation lasts that long! Nevertheless, I'm afraid I'll be back in third place again before long even if I do make it to the coveted (if meaningless) number two spot. I shouldn't count out Michel Vuijlsteke either, especially not if he spots another topless model sometime soon. At least I'm keeping ahead of the anonymous Pornographer.

Radio driving me nuts today

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 21:30:17 GMT

I can't figure out what's wrong, but when I look at the home page all I see is the first-draft-with-typo version of my first entry of the day and nothing since. They Events Log appears to show regular uploads and my local versions of the pages are up-to-date, so I don't know what the problem is and I don't know why I'm posting about it because if it's a real problem you can't see this post and if it's an illusion that's only preventing me from seeing the updates then this post is less than useless. Call it blowing off steam. Time to reboot. But why is this happening? ... Well, that didn't do the trick. I looked at the files on the local Radio server and they look as they should. You can even go to today's archive page and see at least some of the missing posts, but I still don't see them on the home page no matter how often Radio claims to have upstreamed the local version. This is maddening. It's antiblogging.

Comment monitor updates via RSS

Wed, 25 Sep 2002 17:56:54 GMT

Also on the Driver 8 tip, another entry notes that Phil Pearson has "a new version of his comment monitor ... that will update me on new comments on my blog... through the RSS aggregator."

We are experiencing technical difficulties

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 20:40:46 GMT

Apologies for the bad links to the not-upstreamed-yet stories representing the two parts of the weblog panel (subjective) transcript. Once again I am told that Radio "Can't write stream because the TCP connection was closed unexpectedly."

Posting bottleneck

Tue, 24 Sep 2002 18:40:10 GMT

According to my Events log, "What happened" (a number of times now) is

Can't upstream because "Can't write stream because the TCP connection was closed unexpectedly."

So new posts are not appearing (yet). Ironically, by the time you read this they will of course have started appearing again. Probably nothing a little power-cycling won't fix.

Weblogs: form or medium?

Fri, 20 Sep 2002 23:18:21 GMT

In tweneyblog, Dylan Tweney runs with Peterme's distinction between media and forms:

Just to clarify the terms: A practice is something you do, probably requiring some training, a standard of professionalism, and code of ethics (journalism, medicine, or construction). A medium is a vehicle through which information is transmitted and displayed (broadcast television, HTTP/HTML, newspapers). And a form is a stylistic genre, a way of organizing and presenting information or stories (haiku, sonnets, novels, magazine stories, weblogs).

So far, there's not really a "practice" of blogging in any coherent sense, though I suppose one could emerge eventually. Peterme is right on that blogging is primarily a form.

But there is a sense in which the weblog is also a medium, and that's syndication. ... When people start using aggregators ... with integrated aggregator/weblog tools, such as Radio, they can post their own responses much more quickly. That creates a kind of "virtuous circle" of conversation, as Udell has noted.

Tweney thinks that we'll see syndication behaving more like a medium as we move further along the adoption curve.

RSS 2.0 to reduce lumps in oatmeal

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 22:25:56 GMT

Looks like we won't see so many repeated items in our news aggregators if RSS 2.0 catches on:

Now, for 2.0 feeds, we check if the item has a guid, and use that as the identifier, assuming it won't change even if some of the properties of the item change. This is true of the 2.0 feeds that Radio produces, and of Scripting News in RSS. We welcome other aggregator developers to use this new feature in RSS 2.0 feeds.

[Scripting News] To quote Sgt. Schulz, "I know nothing" about RDF, 0.9x vs. 1.0 vs. 2.0, namespaces, and modules. I'm a writer, damnit.

Dreamweaver Extension for Editing Radio Themes

Fri, 06 Sep 2002 22:22:13 GMT

Dave points out that Macromedia is supporting Radio Themes in Dreamweaver MX:

Many thanks to Macromedia for supporting Radio in the latest release of Dreamweaver. "For Dreamweaver MX developers, the kit contains extensions for website building and application development. The extensions help display data in PHP applications, add functions to the file menu in Dreamweaver, and edit themes for sites developed using Radio Userland for editing weblogs." [via Scripting News]

Scripting News

Fri, 06 Sep 2002 22:16:37 GMT

Dave points out that Macromedia is supporting Radio Themes in Dreamweaver MX:

Many thanks to Macromedia for supporting Radio in the latest release of Dreamweaver. "For Dreamweaver MX developers, the kit contains extensions for website building and application development. The extensions help display data in PHP applications, add functions to the file menu in Dreamweaver, and edit themes for sites developed using Radio Userland for editing weblogs." [via Scripting News]

Myelin Blog Comment Monitor

Fri, 06 Sep 2002 15:44:25 GMT

Cool, whatever Phil did to fix the comment monitor for non-IE browsers also fixed it for my IE/Mac browser.

Jeremy Zawodny Dreams of the Perfect RSS Aggregator

Sun, 01 Sep 2002 20:43:23 GMT

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.

Please Don't Feed the RSS Aggravator

Fri, 30 Aug 2002 18:18:40 GMT

Well, coincidentally, I was just dipping into my RSS aggregator news feed when I got a note from Charly Z encouraging me to check out a discussion about RSS syndication going on among some other Salon Blogs. Scott Rosenberg's Links and Comment picks up on a complaint from the author of FarrFeed on discovering his entire blog being reproduced (in an inferior form) with someone else's copyright attached:

I've been working my freaking butt off pitching my writing anywhere I can, so when I saw my words and images gracelessly splashed across another site's pages, I declared war. The site which had subscribed to FarrFeed had also mangled the layout and tossed out my text formatting so that the page looked like garbage. But what really made me angry was seeing the other site's copyright declaration centered underneath my work. Oh, my copyright notice (linked to this page) was also there, but off to the left and not nearly as prominent as the subscriber's. BAD BOOJUM!

Here's part of Scott's take:

I also think that, legally and morally, it falls in the category of "fair use" — which means that it becomes increasingly more problematic when others take and reuse more and more material. In the case of Farr and other blogs that are reposted on this other site, the postings are resupplied by a third party without any value added — there are no new comments from the site's proprietor — and in fact with value subtracted, since many of the features of the original blogger's site (layout, comments, whatever else the blogger has done to personalize the page) are gone.

Here's my value add. It relates to the discussion about Daily Pundit Premium from yesterday. One the one hand, I want to benefit from the freeness of the web. I want my blog to be read far and wide. I'd like to be able to track who's reading, and naturally I love to receive filthy lucre whenever possible for my efforts, but I'm probably doing this more to build reputation than for any other single reason. For the moment, I expect to extract my vig from the rest of the life, which should benefit indirectly from my contributions here. (This reminds me of the whole "give something back to the Web" idea that was big in the mid '90s. It was understood that we each reap huge benefits from the freely shared common spaces of the Web, so there is something of a moral imperative, or at least exhortative, to contribute something back to the common weal.) So, in the interests of info lubrication, I have all my RSS feeds turned on and I am happy to have them promiscuously seed my posts far and wide at this time. Nonetheless, I wouldn't mind being a columnist somewhere, and if I start writing column-length work on, say, a weekly basis, I can imagine wanting to be paid for syndication the way some print journalists are (such as, for a random example, Mark Shields). Thus I can imagine not always freely syndicating all of the writing I put online, maybe even incorporating some kind of password or scramble/descramble security for information that's being sold instead of given away. This bears more thought. I can also imagine saying: feel free to use my syndicated content but please link back to me in thus and such a way. I still remember from the late '60s or early '70s when "the syndicate" was a typical kind of euphemism either for "the establishment" or "the mob" (depending on context), something like Chief Broom's "the combine" in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Hey, when I mention a book, should I always slap my Amazon store tag on it? What's the theory on that? Am I lazy or principled for not always shilling every book I mention?

Getting Ready for a Partial Move

Wed, 28 Aug 2002 22:45:57 GMT

Andrew Bayer was hassling me about not having set up radiofreeblogistan.com yet, but hey, my sysadmin is a friend, we barter services, he's been busy. So I spent a little time reading up on httpd.conf and I set up the VirtualHost entries for that domain and a few other pending domains. I still need to set up mail forwarding and a few other settings, but soon I expect to start publishing at least some of my categories over on the new server. Since I'm paying (partly) for hosting, I don't like the idea of abandoning the blogs.salon.com domain entirely, impersonal as a (binary-looking, in my case; 0001111) usernum might be. I'm thinking maybe once I get started moving categories over (some to other URLs) I will at least keep salonika, my Salon Blogs channel, and radioactive, my Radio Questions and other Radio-specific entries channel here on this community server. My question is, though, can I move the home page and thus the root address over to http://radiofreeblogistan.com and still keep some of my categories streaming here to the rcs.salon.com community server?