Day: April 16, 2004

Categories
Weblogging

The surreal to the sublime

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Oh good lord. I have no idea whether to laugh or snort in disgust. I guess it depends on whether this is a made up story or a real one.

While I was having way too much fun with the St. Louis weblogging group working on comment fiction, a story, if you want to call it that, broke at Blog Herald.

“Exclusive!”, screams the headlines, in dusty blue rather than lurid and cheap yellow, as one would expect:

Defining the A-List at BloggerCon according to Halley Suitt: “elitist bad-ass-A-list-bloggers exclusive event” revealed.

Again, it’s difficult to tell whether this was a gag, or for real. Regardless, so the story goes (and it seems more improbable than our little Comment Fiction story), Halley Suitt sent out an invite for drinks before this evening’s dinner. Dave Winer, who insists it was not he who leaked the story, suggested that she put the invite on the BloggerCon site for all conference attendees. Halley responded back, jovially (I mean, come on. I haven’t met Halley, but even I can tell it’s a joke), with:

Dave = The Drinks @ the Millennium event is NOT open
to all. This is a purely snobby elitist bad-ass-A-list-bloggers
exclusive event BEFORE the dinner which is open to all.

Dave wasn’t comfortable with this, and I can somewhat understand it, though I think his response was, well, a bit pompous. If he were to attend a get together with some of the more, what would we call them? Illustrous? Prominant? Famous? Heavier pinged? Regardless, if he were to start getting together with a bunch of the elite, you know someone would leak it and he’d be made the goat.

Someone did leak it, if the story I’m reading is true, and not yet another case of Comment Fiction. And a bad case at that.

If it is true, then this is about the silliest thing I have seen in years. If Halley wants to have a get together with a group of people she knows, great! She should! I hope now that all of them don’t show up at the prearranged place, and quietly go somewhere else and have a great time. I personally recommend drinks at the Four Seasons or Harborview, myself.

But regardless of whether this is true or now, it seems like we’re now using meeting each other like kids use trading cards.

“I’ll trade you a Dave Winer for a Halley Suitt and two Dan Gillmor’s.”

Piffle. Pure piffle.

If this was all a put on, and a publicity stunt, or a made up story – pretty good. But I like what I and the other St. Louis bloggers are doing, better.

Categories
Stuff

A9, A why?

I tried out the latest new Internet toy, the new search environment, A9 from Amazon. I searched on both my name and my weblog and thought that the results were rather cleanly presented. There were some surprises, too. For instance, someone had fun signing my name to comments on other weblogs in regards to the TypeKey topic. Always good to know when I’ve given another a bit of fun, or a giggle.

The Site Info feature attached to each link is rather interesting. Accessing my site I saw that, first of all, it displays a snapshot of my page from over a year ago. I have no idea why they have such an old snapshot; nor am I particularly overjoyed at seeing my page listed in the context of Amazon’s already overburdened and cluttered selling environment–as if this site were a ‘product’ rather than what it is: a personal writing environment.

Still, no biggie. It wasn’t until I was looking at other sites that I noticed that you can actually review the site, just as you can review any Amazon product. Others may dislike A9 for potential privacy issues, but I thought this was nothing but trouble waiting to happen.

For instance, look at the entry for Scripting News. Already the game is being played out with people either loving Dave Winer or hating him, and do we need to have this permanently recorded within the Amazon marketing venue?

Book authors and editors have long been wary of Amazon’s little star and rating system. The problem with it is that anyone can make a review, without attaching their name, and the quality of the reviews can vary widely–but the stars all add up the same. If you look at the reviews for Practical RDF–not an activity that gives me that much joy, unfortunately–you’ll see some thoughtful, though negative reviews, side by side with a throwaway one from a person who said the entire book is outdated because it covers an older version of one specific tool. (And totally discounting the fact that I published tutorials and new sample code for just that tool at the Practical RDF.)

The process is too easy, too anonymous, and too permanent.

As difficult as it is for an author to go through these types of reviews, we have to expect it as part of doing business, and to be expected when writing professionally. However, I can see great potential for abuse of this rating system when it comes to personal weblogs and other web sites.

You only have to read the reviews attached to Scripting News to realize that people can be personal, hurtful, and petty. In our weblogs or comments, these types of writings pass into archives and fade over time. Not with good old Amazon’s permastar ranking and review system, though. Now, pettiness can live on through the ages.

Categories
Burningbird

Home sweet home

Other than the fact that my recent comments listing doesn’t show using Navigator on Mac OS X, I’ve found my new home to be quite nice. I am still impressed with the speed of publishing. I took some time off to work on other things, but now I’ll start looking at finetuning my own hacks and seeing what other hacks to add in.

I know that my review and conversion weren’t totally complimentary about WordPress, and that this just isn’t done in weblogging circles; but I thought that the last thing the WordPress people need is a bunch of Movable Type people converting over without forewarning, and then flooding the WP support forum with requests for, well, the things with which I’ve been flooding the forum.

However, from the forum I did find a workaround to the missing post preview. WordPress allows you to attach a password to a post, and when the post is published, all that shows is the title until you enter the password. A member of the support forum suggested that we could use this to preview our posts–in context–and then remove the password when we’re happy with the post. So, I’m using a password of ‘beingpreviewed’ with each of my posts that I’m in the process of previewing, and if you want to see it in the more raw state, just enter this password.

Categories
Burningbird Weblogging

Slammed by a trackback

A trackback got through on MT, and ended up causing a rebuild that overwrote the stylesheet, index.php (which is the WP template), and various other files. Luckily, this time I had backups.

Trackbacks should have been turned off, but with all the hacks to overcome spamming, turning TB off in the database isn’t reliable.

If you do move from MT to WP, you’ll have to move the MT installation. Completely. You can’t trust that something won’t sneak through and cause a rebuild.