Burningbird

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I’m keeping my neighborhood links but will be moving them to a separate page. However, the blogroll won’t just sit there, passively. A couple of tweaks:

First, I was thinking about accessing changes.xml from weblog.com and checking for recent updates; however, blogrolling.com does this for me and has a PHP service, so why am I giving myself grief? When I incorporate blogrolling.com, I’ll do like so many others and order the links by most recent updated. However, a little extra code will skim the top five most recent blogs and put them on the front page.

But wait! That’s not all.

Originally, I was going to look for favorite posts from the weblogger, list in a separate page, and then link to this page in addition to the person’s weblog link. I still may do this but it is labor intensive. To be honest, I’d rather to let you speak for yourselves. And so you are.

Next to the weblog link in the new neighborhood page will be a second link opening a page listing the complete text of all the comments you’ve ever made, in descending order, to my posts. Above the comment is the author’s name, and a link to the original comment in the posting page.

We’ll be able to see, at a glance, everything you’ve ever said here at the Burningbird since the day I started using MT comments. I call it this new sticky strand, “Talkback”.

Now when people read my comments and ask themselves “Who is this guy?”, Talkback will tell them. By your own words shall you be known.

The Talkback page is up and running at this time. You can try it yourself with any URL that’s associated with at least one comment. Type the following into the browser address/url field, changing the yoururl to the URL:

 

http://weblog.burningbird.net/speakback.php?url=http://yoururl

Provde the exact same URL you use in comments now, and all your comments should show.

To demonstrate more fully, comments from some weblogging neighbors who have ‘talked back’:

 

Dorothea Salo (BTW, Happy Birthday David!!)
Stavros the Wonder Chicken
Jonathon Delacour
Ruzz
Gary Turner
Mark Pilgrim
Dave Winer

Unfortunately, if you haven’t used your weblog url with your comments, Talkback doesn’t work. However, I’ll be quite happy to add your url to your comments in the database if you ask. Nothing more than a simple database update.

I have a few other things I want to do with the Neighborhood page, but they’ll keep for another day.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Being the shy, retiring person that I am, I rarely bring up my membership in Blog U. However, when the man who holds the purse strings at Blog U, The Happy Tutor issues a call to action, who am I not to respond?

Tutor writes, in alarm, about the possibility of censorship with the budding new Crimson Blog Brigade, otherwise known as the Weblogs of Harvard. In particular he’s concerned about the following paragraph:

 

We want to be sure that all activities on Harvard-hosted weblogs are respectful of Harvard, and don’t exist for the purpose of promoting a product, or political cause or candidate.

 

Not promote a product, political cause, or candidate. This would ban about half of weblogging material, leaving only cats and sex as safe topics.

In defense of product endorsement, Tutor addresses another Blog U member, Jonathon Delacour, and Jonathon’s promotion of that erstwhile cleaning utensil, Dishmatique. Tutor writes:

 

Is Harvard Weblogs saying that, in the unlikely event the half-witted A-list Blogging Aussie were to attend Harvard that his weblog would be in violation of the rules against promoting products on a Harvard Weblog?

Not having ever used a Dishmatique since this is tool wielded only by males at Blog U, I wasn’t as alarmed by the possibility of Dishmatique becoming a banned topic. However, since I’m in the midst of writing a flogging post about Jonathon’s most recent post, I felt it only prudent to join with AKMA in support of my sudsy comrade at this time, even to the point of saying that Jonathon is more than a half-wit. He’s at least a three-quarter wit, and a little change to spare.