Category: Technology

Categories
People Web Weblogging

It’s a mountain Mohammed thing

“So I have a blog” the words read, as I scrolled down the entries at Planet RDF. And then I noticed the author: Tim Berners-Lee.

In his first weblog entry, Sir Tim wrote:

…it is nice to have a machine to the administrative work of handling the navigation bars and comment buttons and so on, and it is nice to edit in a mode in which you can to limited damage to the site. So I am going to try this blog thing using blog tools. So this is for all the people who have been saying I ought to have a blog.

For all those who claim to be first, there is no doubt who was first, though late to this particularly party. Probably all that Web 2.0 stuff floating around.

I do believe that Sir Tim is also the first weblogger to hold Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire. Mind the language, children. Mind the language. No more of this informal lower-case ’s’, ‘w’ when talking about the Semantic Web now.

Categories
Web Weblogging

Online

Aside from adding some links and text, my first release of OutputThis! is online. Notice the exclamation point? Punctuation is the new black.

The rollout of the Structured Blogging work is tomorrow afternoon, but I’ve been playing with it today. When SB rolls out tomorrow I’ll list links to the test weblogs, but for now, you can check out OutputThis! Yes, I designed it. Yes, I know you hate it.

There’s been some odds and ends about the ‘forking’ nature of Structured Blogging today. It makes no sense, and the folks who are concerned haven’t posted anything online expressing their concerns, so end of story.

What is it, though, with webloggers who reach a point of success and then seem to stop weblogging? Is that the key to getting rid of webloggers–help them become successful at weblogging, and then they’ll stop weblogging? For all those people who don’t care for me and who would like to see me disappear, here’s your chance: help make me a Successful Weblogger, and I’ll go away.

In the meantime, I have a couple of long posts I’m working on and a links post to some very nice stuff you all are writing. I am surrounded by such talented people, which is good for folks like me; too bad for you, though, that you’re not successful enough at weblogging to give up weblogging.

Categories
Web

Quick note before bed

Phil Pearson is talking about the project I’ve been working on for Broadband Mechanics the last few weeks. I’m not working on the Structured Blogging component; I’m creating a middleware server called Outputthis.

A limited version of the service will be up for Tuesday for the Big Rollout, and then I need to add the rest: autodiscovery of web services through RSD; full update and delete for the Profile and Targets. But it should be enough for demonstration purposes and alpha testing/use on Tuesday.

Outputthis provides services that allow you to register weblogs or other resources that you might want to post to through the Structured Blogging “Blog This!” functionality. When you click the Blog This button, one of my services returns a list of weblogs, you check which ones you want, click the button and the next thing you know: the post has been posted to all the sites.

Right now, we’re upgrading the database and I’m fighting a really odd incompatibility between mcrypt and the xml_parser so it’s not running; something I’ll fix in the morning. Besides, it’s too early to turn it on–the rollout is Tuesday, and the focus at the party will be on the web 2.0 stuff like the Structured Blogging plugins (which are impressive); not the web 1.0 stuff, like Outputthis.

In the meantime, whatever Phil and Kimbro and the others have done with the SB plugin is not forking.

Categories
Technology

Breathe

I’m playing around with my new PowerBook. Well, new is a relative term –it’s a pre-owned TiBook that I bought from a friend; but I’m having as much fun with it as if it were new.

Instead of my 500 MHz processor, this one is an 800 MHz processor, with double the memory (1GB). And space! Over 60GB of space. Plenty of room for photos, and it’s loaded with Tiger–I finally understand widgets! In fact, I could easily become addicted to widgets.

PhotoShop likes the new machine. It works like a normal application now.

With the money I saved buying pre-owned, I can now buy an iPod. Well, more likely tires for my car, but I’m indulging in the fantasy of watching Battlestar Galactica on my sexy little iPod since episodes to the show are now for sale. However, no reason I can’t download the episodes to my new PowerBook. I have space now, you know. Lots of space.

I couldn’t get the migration utility to work between my two powerbooks, but I was able to network the two via ethernet connection. This is better, as I can just copy my songs to iTunes in the new machine, as well as my photos, email, documents, software, and x-rated movies.

Well, I should end this post. I don’t want to be accused of logorrhea. I picked that one up from my “Word of the Day” widget; it means excessive talkativeness or wordiness. A perfect title for a weblog.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Downtime

Last night my host installed the PHP 4.4.1 upgrade, which promptly broke my weblogging tool, Wordform. Broke it to the point where the admin pages don’t load in any form, and no error is given in my logfile or in the system error log, and without any form of feedback, debugging is rather complicated. My host backed out the 4.4.1 upgrade temporarily but I’m having them reload it. I can’t have the entire server be insecure because of my application.

There has been discussion on 4.4.1 and impact on other applications, though the environment is a big factor. I wondered if the underlying code from Wordform, which is a fork of WordPress, was impacted. However, others who have been upgraded on other servers and running WordPress are working, so it is something unique to my fork. Knowing this does give me somewhere to start and appreciations to those who sent me emails to that effect.

The security issue and the upgrade release happened the end of October and I haven’t kept up with new issues in PHP since I’ve been out of town so I wasn’t prepared. That happens sometimes.

I wouldn’t pursue a fix so strenuously if only my weblog was impacted but a couple of friends are also using my tool, so I’m researching the issue and trying to find a quick solution. If it was just myself I wouldn’t be that worried. I figure my forced downtime would probably delight many of you who have felt I’ve been too critical of your companies and your software and even yourselves, and there is a nice irony in the situation. I can even join you in this delight: the biter gets bitten; how wonderfully circular–so very ouroboros. So consider it an early holiday gift from me to you. Hopefully, for my friends using Wordform, it will be a short holiday.

Good news for my friends: their applications of Wordform are fine so it is my experimentation that is breaking, not the underlying application. At least they’re not impacted, which relieves me considerably.