Christian Crumlish (xian): 9base2

Weee're back

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 21:30:19 GMT

Well, that took longer than expected. I'm still getting things re-configured and re-set up at ol' Open Publishing / ezone / x-everything industries, but most of the sites are at least now visible, and I may hope that we've cured the hacked-so-easily problem we had going there. In the meantime, off the air, I found solace in posting via Radio and Blogger even when I knew the publishing action would fail, and hanging around the Well more. Forgive the extensive cross-posting. I'm just trying to push out all the categories with current posts.

Open question for Dave Winer

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 21:35:30 GMT

Dave, please explain to those of us who are not down with every nuance of RSS politics exactly how Six Apart is abusing the RSS spec. Thanks! Reference:

When users flame.
Movable Type users, predictably flame me for advocating a time-tested way of evolving software, explained by Don Park. In so many ways we're hitting the reset button on old practices that worked. Embrace & Extend is respectful. Eventually SixApart will want the respect, when an upstart (or an old fart) implements something called Trackback that doesn't work with theirs. Users, of course, don't have to understand this. But that doesn't mean it isn't relevant. And one day it would be great if vendors asked their users not to flame their critics or competitors. One can hope.

This subject came up yesterday at the Jupiter conference, about transparent companies, and how that relates to weblogs. Now understand that I do not today work at UserLand, but of course I am influential there. Weblogs, it seems, are somewhat about companies speaking their truth. Some bloggers, esp Kottke, don't get this. He often jumps on me for saying what I think. Jason, listen up. I'm supposed to say what I think. That's what weblogs are about.
[Scripting News]

Me on RSS? I'm still confused why the body of a blog post is called the description of a link. Note, this won't appear until my server is up again, even though it will be timestamped when I post it.

Server back up

Thu, 20 Mar 2003 06:14:46 GMT

Well, I don't know what was wrong with my DNS or Apache configuration, but whatever it was it seems to be working correctly now, thank Murphy. I've been getting some poignant messages from a friend in Iraqi Kurdistan. He and his family are headed from Erbil into the countryside to avoid, if possible, the ravages of this war. I believe they are more fearful of an attack from Saddam but of course nobody wants to be "collatoral damage," regardless of whether the fire is friendly, or as I heard a BBC announcer put it during the last Gulf War in their famously understated way, "rather less friendly fire." Anyway, I'll post some excerpts from Delshad's emails on my personal blog and reflect it here when I get a moment.

My server appears to be down

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 23:06:01 GMT

As of right now none of my web domains appear accessible, although I still seem to have FTP access to my Open Publishing server. I'm x-posting this to RFB's usernum address on the Salon community server (0001111). I'm depressed about the war. Working hard. Conference coming up. Lots to post about. Server down. Figures. Positive things:

She-Mob at the Starry Plough (pronounced "pluff") Friday night.
PornOrchestra premier in Oakland (21 Grand, which is the name of the club, not the address) on Saturday night.
PornOrchestra again, probably the one bandx will be at.
Leftover Salmon tomorrow night at the Great American Music Hall. Last minute but tempting.

Administrivia: Redirecting visitors from 000111

Fri, 14 Feb 2003 18:48:54 GMT

There are still so many blogs and sites pointing to this site's old address, that I thought I'd add an automatic refresh-to-the-new address (after 10 seconds to get oriented and then again quickly disoriented) to the template for the old-school page.

Redirecting my old RSS feed

Sat, 01 Feb 2003 17:01:20 GMT

There's no way to force people who have blogrolled my old address update their links. I can only assume that they haven't checked back much since their initial burst of inclusion, or if they have that they think I stopped blogging sometime last October. Then there are those who subscribed to my old RSS feed and never updated it. In my first hasty move I learned too late how to redirect an RSS feed. By then I had already locked myself out of the Salon-hosted server. However, since then I have reopened a back door to my old address and assigned it a category in my current blog. This means that I can (I think) now replace the old RSS file with an XML-level redirect. As far as I can tell, this requires manually supplying a new RSS file for my 0001111 category instead of permitting Radio to generate one automatically. I'll be trying that today. It's not clear yet that all RSS aggregators will understand the redirect. Radio does (naturally), and NetNewsWire does as well. Consider this an experiment.

A note for the occasional visitor

Tue, 21 Jan 2003 22:05:59 GMT

Several months ago we moved this site to a new address (http://radiofreeblogistan.com/). For better or for worse, quite a few of you have retained your links and bookmarks and so forth pointing to the old address. We became self-conscious about the look of the old site, frozen in mid-sentence, as it were, so we've come back to tidy up a bit. The main purpose of the new "look" (just testing now) at http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/ is to direct readers to the more recent content at the new address, enable the updating of blogrolling.com entries, and so on. To random wanderers and old friends, welcome and welcome back.

Fixing up the abandoned storefront

Mon, 20 Jan 2003 23:00:01 GMT

A large amount of my traffic still comes to my old address (http://blogs.salon.com/0001111/) due to bookmarks, blogrolls, and the like. I don't mind links directly to old posts, since they are maintained at both locations, but links to the old home page take someone to a page that hasn't been updated since October. Not cool! But since I moved to my own site (http://radiofreeblogistan.com/), I lost the ability to upstream (to use the Radio parlance) back to my old location. Now, as an experiment, I've set up a new category, for now called 0001111, and have tried to configure the #upstream.xml file so that its output will show up there. If that works, then I'll have opened a backdoor to my old abandoned storefront and can then fiddle with the templates to turn it into more of a catch-all signpost to recent entries and other items of note. I'm not sure if it will show up as a subcategory at the old address or at the root of the old address. We'll see. As a first step, I am crossposting this entry to the new category to see if I set up the upstreaming OK. UPDATE: I am re-posting this 12:24PM on Wednesday, January 22, to force a re-upstreaming to the RCS. The quintessence of administrivia. I kind of like the typo I just fixed ("I'm not sure if it wills how up..."). Freudian typos, you gotta love 'em.