Year: 2004

Categories
Burningbird Weblogging

Smart URLs, converting from MT to WP, and die, URL, die

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I am in the midst of trying to salvage weblog entries that have gone through many variations of URL identification, as I’ve passed from tool to tool, and through many variations of what is subjective goodness in URL naming strategies. At the same time, I am also dealing with years old links to material so far out of date it’s laughable to even think about having ‘this is dead’ notices for it.

The problem with old URLs started becoming extreme enough at my site for me to write an application, PostCon, which I’ve talked about previously. PostCon provides the ability to selectively annotate the information that is returned for old URLs that have been pulled, or to manage URL movement. All well and good – but ultimately in the end, I knew I would reach a point of having to just letting the URL die a natural death.

Tim Berners-Lee has stated that Cool URIs don’t change, but he said this back in 1998, when the Web was only a few years old and we thought that the inherent goodness of the Web was based on accumulated knowledge. Now, over a decade after the Web’s birth, we’re finding that the Internet is an ocean and URLs are rocks around our neck, and with each passing year, the water is getting higher.

I had a domain, yasd.com, which I’d had for years and accumulated a vast number of URLs to funky (in the bad sense) material within that domain. The content the URLs reference is badly outdated, much of it to long dead technology. There were page examples for dealing with the beta version of Navigator and IE and how to deal with cross-browser differences and so on. None of the examples have worked for years, and for the few that I managed to pull from version to version, I finally gave up when Mozilla seemed to splinter into many sparkly pieces, and there are now so many different variations of browser/operating system pairs that the only way you can hope to survive is making sure that you work to the most common standards (not necessarily the newest or even the best).

The yasd.com domain was also tainted, long time ago, because there are so many variations of what ‘YASD’ means. For instance, a popular meaning for YASD is “Yet Another Sudden Dead”, a gaming term, and it is through this that I started getting so much of my email spam: kids were using the domain, yasd.com, as a phony sign up email address whenever they wanted a throwaway address.

Rather than continuing to renew yasd.com, and dynamicearth.com, and p2psmoke.org year after year, just to maintain that URL ‘coolness’, this year I’m letting them go.

(The moment I released yasd.com, the email spam coming into my email system fell by 80%.)

Now, before releasing these old domains, I could have setup permanent redirects for the old domain URLs to URLs on my new domain, and I suppose this would be the proper thing to do – but why? There is no value in this old material, and neither is there any additional value with posting a note saying, “This material is out of date and no longer supported.” Though the message might be more meaningful than getting a generic 404 error message, the benefit of providing it is offset by the cost of continually maintaining these old, old, old URLs. Doing so might be ‘cool’–but there is no value either to myself, to the search engines, or, ultimately, to the person arriving at my site from an old, old, old link.

(Unfortunately, the registrar I have, rather than letting the URLs relapse gracefully into a 404 status (and hence letting Google clean out its database), insists on persisting the domain for a time to try and get me to renew it. So if you search on “C# book” and go to what was the Google link to this (third down from the top), you’ll get a foolish registrar generated page instead. )

That takes care of the old and useless, but what about the relatively new and possibly useful?

For the good URLs, ones to pages that still exist, I use rewrite rules in .htaccess wherever possible, and then use PostCon for the rest.

(The .htaccess file is a file consumed by the Web server with directives telling it how to manage specific page requests, including redirects from old page URLs to new. One directive provides a pointer to an error handler file or application that handles all ‘bad’ page accesses, and I use this to point to my PostCon application.)

For the many weblog URL lives: I used .htaccess when I went from individual entry pages ending in .php to ones ending in .htm, and I used PostCon to manage the redirects when I went from numbered pages to ‘cruft-free’ URLs–URLs that are based on a archival data and post title. But now, I’m faced with an interested challenge.

When moving from Movable Type to WordPress, I went from a category-based archive to one based on the date. I could generate .htaccess entries for each file using Movable Type, and since I’m moving the archive location, the only .htaccess file that would be impacted by such a large number of redirects in the one in my old archive location.

However, a second problem arises with the conversion from MT to WordPress and that is both products default to a different separator character when generating ‘dirified’ URLs. Movable Type uses ‘underscores’ (’_’) for all of the replaced characters in a title, such as the spaces; WordPress uses the dash (’-‘).

(Though I appreciate the efforts undertaken, in my opinion the Atom effort would have paid for itself ten times over by now if instead of focusing on the syndication track first in its efforts (which I hasten to point out is now my new default syndication feed, so don’t get pissy with me), it focused on porting behavior instead–including an overall agreed on definition between the tools as to what is a ‘cruft free URL’.)

There are page specific and programming specific ways of working this issue, none of which I’m entirely satisfied with because I don’t want to maintain all of the old files at the old location over time. What I can do is write code to create .htaccess entries (or PostCon entries) that map between the different filenames, including managing the underscore to dash conversion.

In addition, I may be able to create a rewrite rule that handles the conversion for me, including the conversion based on category (by discounting the categories and handling individual title overlaps) to date, not to mention the underscore to dash.

But then I’m faced with the decision: do I want to use underscores, or do I want to use dashes?

Further research shows that supposedly to search engines, the underscore is seen as a part of the search phrase, while the dash is seen as nothing more than white space. On the other hand, others swear by the use of underscore, and feel that it makes for a more ‘attractive’ URL. In addition, they state that smart search engine bots know how to handle both dashes and underscores.

(Oddly enough, much of this discussion is encapsulated in a forum thread having to do with pMachine’s new ExpressionEngine application. )

I can always alter the code for WordPress to work with underscores instead of dashes, but do I want to?

Before I finish this last URL cleanup task, managing the weblog archive URLs, I seek further opinion from others:

In intelligent URLs, is it better to go underscore or dash?

Categories
Places Weblogging

The Greening

The Greening happened overnight. When I woke up this morning, even the tallest and largest trees were sporting leaves, and every car was coated in green dust. No matter how carefully I look for it in the Spring, the Greening happens suddenly, without warning.

In the front yard, I noticed that the seed I scattered carefully on top of the mulch, and missed by both squirrel and bird, has sprouted. Good. This will be food for the bunny that makes its home in the bush on the side of our townhouse.

Frank from Sandhill and Jim from Noded had lunch at the BloggerCon conference and talked about the possibility of Jim hosting a BloggerCon in Chicago, or me hosting something like this in St. Louis. Though I agree that we need to focus more conferences in this lovely city, I can’t see myself doing something like a BloggerCon. A blogging conference has little appeal to me nowadays.

Meeting people I’ve come to know online has more appeal. I could see myself inviting any and all to St. Louis just to show off the city and all of the many, many places I’ve discovered. We wouldn’t need a hall because we could take our conference to the parks or along any of the water fronts, and get together at any number of good places to eat, or to listen to St. Louis’ own unique form of Blues. Rather than backchannels and facing each other other silver titanium barriers, we’d sit next to each other, and just talk. That, now, that does have appeal.

Fall. I would invite people to come here in October, because the heat of the summer has finally died down, and the Autumn colors are in full swing. People talk about fall colors in New England, but the Northeast has nothing on this state. Nothing. And neither San Francisco or Boston, or even New York, can match our unique blend of Northern/Southern history, nor our less expensive but just as quaint Bed & Breakfasts. Not to mention genuine riverboat gambling.

I wouldn’t invite people for September, because it can still be too warm in September. Besides, I’m planning a long drive in September, visiting friends and family here and there. Weblogging friends, too, if they’ll be glad of a visit.

Of course, meeting outdoors or at restaurants wouldn’t provide wireless access, but there are Starbucks all around for those who just have to blog any event immediately or they’ll implode into green pixy dust. And the libraries in town here all have Internet connectivity in all of the meeting rooms if we must shut ourselves away, though why I couldn’t understand.

There would be no fees and no sponsors and no formal invites, and all of you would be welcome–but there’s a potential glich in these plans: I have no idea of where I will be in October, or what I’ll be doing. By choice and by fate, my circumstances are uncertain day by day and I may not even be in St. Louis in October.

To be even more contrary, I’m also not sure if I’ll be a weblogger at that time, and no, this is not another “Why do we do this?” writing. But to assume that I’ll be a weblogger in six weeks, much less six months, implies that I’ve set my course and fixed my interests and nothing can possibly happen to change this. Life is far too quixotic and filled with fascinating possibilities for any of us to say with any certainty that next week we’ll not only have something to say, we’ll want to say it online.

There are a few, a very few, that we can comfortably say of, “they will be weblogging in six months”, but not necessarily among the people I read with the greatest delight. No, not even among you who are sure, without a doubt that you’ll be blogging in six months. Though we may say that the Internet is forever, there’s more than a hint of the ephemeral in this art form, and that makes it unique, and interesting. We are not sculptors, making statues of marble for all time; we are the street artists with our bits of colored chalk.

This impermanence and the subtle underlying promise of empty spaces makes this experience that much more alive and vital and beautiful because, just like the Greening, we never know when a new voice will suddenly emerge, or a beloved voice go, just as suddenly, quiet.

We are mono no aware, and that is our essence and our uniqueness:

By lonely roads
this lonely poet marches
into autumn dusk.

Basho

So by all means, please come to St. Louis the first week of October if you will, and you’ll see such beauty as will leave you forever changed; and you’ll listen to great music and eat wonderful food and enjoy interesting conversation and have a marvelous time. But I may not be here. I hope you don’t mind.

Categories
Plants Weather

Summer in April

We’ve had an unusually warm Spring this year. The temperatures yesterday and today are close to breaking record highs, and I think today we’ll actually make it. That means over 90 F (that’s ‘hot’ in Celsius). This combined with the rain we’ve had has led to an explosion in growth, and even people who have lived here for years say they don’t remember when we’ve had a finer Spring.

Too hot to focus on a couple of projects I’m working on, and that includes writing: professional, weblogging, and some new tutorials for WordPress. I think tomorrow I’ll get up at dawn and find some place by one of the rivers to spend the day. This is one of those times when I wished I had a kayak or canoe to actually take out on the water.

I was driving in the hills last week when something hit my windshield, sounding like a chalk bag hitting the floor. It was a pollen or small seed bag of some kind that had fallen from the trees, and there was this circle of light green dust on my windshield. It reminded me of Tinkerbelle in Peter Pan, and her bag of magic pixy dust. I continued to get hit while making my way through the trees, and by the time I got home, my car looked like it had been attacked by an army of mad Tinkerbelles.

I just now looked to my left at my dark gray slide scanner and noticed it was dusty again, but when I run my fingers across its surface, they come away coated with that same light green fine dust. I’ve been leaving the windows open, and the place is covered with pollen. I have no idea what it will do to electronics. I know that I’ve been taken over by a strong desire to just find a cool green field somewhere and lay down in it.

It’s just now gone on midnight, and from the street below, I can hear laughter from a balcony, mixed with the sound of our wind chimes. “Let’s go to the park, throw around the football,” I hear one voice ask, to a chorus of laughing assent, and then gradual fade to silence as they start to walk away. The voices aren’t all that young, either.

Categories
Connecting Social Media Standards

How far is too far

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Making the rounds in the advertising world is an interesting technique, termed viral marketing: making use of social software techniques learned from spammers, virus makers, and other experts of this nature. With viral marketing, rather than a formal ad campaign, with purchased space in newspapers and time on TV, you create ads or content that is notorious enough to generate a lot of Internet activity, seed them via email or through online groups, and just allow what comes naturally. The recent subservient chicken is based on viral marketing…and so is a new ‘ad campaign’ if you want to call it this, for Ford.

A few weeks ago, links to an online ad for a new car were sent out via email. The ad is part of an ‘evil twin’ concept: Ford is trying to market the car, the SportsKa, as the supposed evil twin of its popular Ka model.

The ad opens showing the car in a driveway, when a ginger cat starts walking past it. The sun roof pops open, and the cat, curious, jumps up on the car and sticks its head through the opening. At this point, the sun roof starts to close on the cat’s head. The cat struggles madly before its head is decapitated. Through the window you can see the head fall into the car, and the lifeless body falls down the windshield and off the car to the back.

I’ve been told that this is computer enhanced, and supposedly no cat was harmed in the making of this ad. I hope so. I sincerely hope so. Unfortunately, it was real enough when I first saw it to have upset me quite deeply. Warning people “not to click this if you like cats” cannot prepare you for this. Especially when you assume that a major car manufacturer like Ford has limits.

Evidentally, there are no limits.

After watching the ad, I started looking around for reactions. If the purpose of this viral marketing campaign was to generate notice in the car, one can say the ad has been successful. But whether it will earn the company customers is hard to say because reaction has been strongly divided.

A considerable number of people believe this ad to be humorous, and that those who are disturbed by it lack a sense of humor, and are taking it too literally. There’s this from a weblogger:

I haven’t had a free moment to blog lately, but this is just too good. You’ve gotta see this. This is MY kind of car commercial.

Surprise. UK’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty doesn’t like it.

By the way, have I ever told you? I love animals; they’re delicious.

However, appreciation is not universal, and Ford has said that the release of this ad was a ‘mistake’ – the one targeted for their viral marketing campaign featured a pigeon being killed, instead:

It was, they say, intended as a “viral marketing” tactic – designed to be sent via the internet from one individual to another – although this idea was subsequently rejected by Ford on taste grounds. A clip costing several thousand pounds and showing a pigeon being catapulted to its death by a bonnet springing open was approved and released last September. However, the rejected advertisement began circulating on the internet last week, at first because of an apparent mistake, and then spurred by black-humoured web users who passed it around.

…black-humoured web users who passed it around. I hesitated to participate in this little viral marketing exercise, except that this ad goes back to a conversation we had about censorship and Howard Stern. At that time, we asked: how far is too far?

According to an Australian ad agent:

“I reckon the line of acceptability has probably been pushed quite considerably by viral advertising because the whole point is to be notorious,” he says.

How far is too far. A month ago, I would have thought decapitating a cat to sell a car would have been too far.

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.