Idle Words invites you to see that your blog site is included in a blog-data gathering project.
On the page where one submits or checks tht one’s blog is in place is a simple summary graph of poular blog-stylie publishing tools. As of this writing, 1, 2, 3, and 4 are blogspot, blog.pl (a data spike, the maintainer notes), movable type, and blogger.
What’s the difference between blogspot and blogger? No, really, I don’t know.
foreword.com | danelope has a few (very few) words on a subject that grows ever dearer to K-Donk, day by day.
The contradiction! Can diplomacy resolve things? Is regime change in the offing?
Where is Raed ?: UPDATED. Woo-hoo! I look forward to reading this, surely the most anticipated post by any blogger ever, anywhere.
Scheduled posting for Movable Type!
Trickle is a perlscript by blogneighbor Jim Flanagan of Everything Burns that enables publish-on-date style posting to the future under MT, my personal biggest missing feature. The script was developed in response to requests from another blogneighbor, Dan Sanderson of BrainLog.
Now I just have to go back and figure out why vanilla cron misbehaves on my OS X box. It’s surely aslo an excuse to finally install Cronnix.
Jim’s solution is elegant and simple, but like all users, my inelegant and complex needs stub a toe. In this case, it’s the use of a category as the publication key. Jim asks users to assign a new category, “Deferred,” to the draft entres you’re queueing up. However, even if I assign a dual category to my post-to-the future, I’ll still wind up with a new category and category achive page, “Deferred,” unless I rummage around to ensure that that specific category is treated in a special way.
It should be noted that Jim’s made the category assignable and configurable as an independent variable at the top of the script.
Perhaps that’s my key: can I assign the variable to ALL categories, such that any post in Draft mode with a future date will render under Trickle the next time after that date? I bet so. Can I do it via “*”? One way to find out.
Alternatively, I could just comment the category test, maybe.
UPDATE: rowsabowsa ragga fragga, I’ve burnt my twenty minutes with no love. I shall return. I believe I’m bumping against some of the same issues that frustrated me previously regarding cron and OS X, and not issues in Jim’s code.
On proofreading this piece, maybe I’ve brought a typo to the table. Fumblefingers!
UPDATE II: Point one: Jim actually notes in the code proppah that the script will strip the Deferred category from the entry.
Point two: the script needs to be in the same directory as your mt.cgi stuff (although I’m sure that’s hackable).
Point three: for the record, “*” is not a valid value for the Deferred category. It’s not necessary to worry about entries piling up in your Deferred archive, though, as MT won’t render empty categories. This does mean one should assign dual categories to your entries.
Point four: The execution problems I was having were a combination of pathing and permission problems. The successful use of the script I’m describing above was manually triggered from the command line. When I get it to run using Cronnix I’ll add an update here.
UPDATE III: manually via Cronnix, yes; scheduled via Cronnix, not yet.
UPDATE IV: scheduled via Cronnix, if Cronnix is currently loaded as an active application, yes; scheduled via Cronnix for cron to run solo, not yet.
UPDATE V: Success! Cronnix skedded-jobs ran independently via cron, just as one would want them to. I deleted several (but not all) test posts.
UPDATE VI: reset creation time to force to lead story slot.
Cory at Boing Boing links to Brad Templeton‘s reflections on and survey of spam and how we got here. Cory highlights a part of Templeton’s essay that echoes my own interest in the subject: spam has the power to contort consistent rhetorical and political positions into their logical opposites. Since Boing Boing uses an inline permalink system I’ll actually run Cory’s excerpt:
Spam fascinates me because it sits at the intersection of three important rights — free speech, private property and privacy. It’s also the first major internet governance issue (possibly in tandem with DNS) that the members of the internet community have been so deeply concerned with.
The reaction to it has been remarkable. By attacking something we hold dear, and goading us by using our own tools and resources to do it, spam generates emotion far beyond its actual harm, even though that actual harm is quite considerable.
Spam pushes people who would proudly (and correctly) trumpet how we shouldn’t blame ISPs for offensive web sites, copyright violations and/or MP3 trading done by downstream customers to suddenly call for blacklisting of all the innocent users at an ISP if a spammer is to be found among them. People who would defend the end-to-end principle of internet design eagerly hunt for mechanisms of centralized control to stop it. Those who would never agree with punishing the innocent to find the guilty in any other field happily advocate it to stop spam. Some conclude even entire nations must be blacklisted from sending E-mail. Onetime defenders of an open net with anonymous participation call for authentication certificates on every E-mail. Former champions of flat-fee unlimited net access who railed against proposals for per-packet internet pricing propose per-message usage fees on E-mail. On USENET, where the idea of canceling another’s article to retroactively moderate a group was highly reviled, people now find they couldn’t use the net without it. Those who reviled at any attempt to regulate internet traffic by the government loudly petition their legislators for some law, any law it almost seems, against spam. Software engineers who would be fired for building a system that drops traffic on the floor without reporting the error change their mail systems to silently discard mail after mail.
It’s amazing.
Oh good god, I gotta get to work.
pf.org: Nomen, Prenomen: the 2003 All-Name NFL Draft Team.
Geez, I’m linkin’ up a storm here today.
A few days ago (prior to Seven Truths and One Lie), I ran a piece noting a specific article in local alternative paper The Stranger, covering the crushing death of Olympia native Rachel Corrie. I used the article as a jumping off point to praise and criticize the paper, crediting editor Dan Savage with displaying renewed creativity in editorial choices at the paper at the same time as I noted and lamented some lapses and a general sort of malaise the publication has presented over the past few years.
What should land in my email last week but a detailed series of comments on my piece from none other than Mr. Savage himself. It was unexpected, to say the least.
I clearly need to adjust my expectations on these matters. When I commented on last year’s redesign of Wired, the designer responsible dropped by to correct a misstatement of mine (see the comments).
When I incidentally noted a local man’s interview and picture in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (stemming from a recently-settled terror case), he wrote in to express his displeasure at my characterization of the interview.
John Ashcroft, President Bush, Tom Ridge: I didn’t mean it! I take back all the nasty things I’m afraid to write! Please don’t strip me of my rights!
In all seriousness, what this means is pretty simple: I can’t practice casual, un-fact-checked writing here anymore, and it was a mistake to believe that this forum is a casual one, like a journal. It’s clearly not, and I promise to shape up and fly right from now on.
That said, I have asked Dan for permission to publish his letter, and haven’t heard back. So I’ll summarize his corrections and observations – not, it should be noted, with his customary wit.
First, he notes that he’s been the editor for two years there. Second, he notes that arch-rival Seattle Weekly only hired one writer away (George Howland) in contrast to my impression that the Weekly had “cherry-picked” the writers at The Stranger and furthermore, that The Stranger is now the home to Christopher Frizelle, who came from the Weekly.
Deservingly, he takes me to task for praising only the national-scope writers (except for Eli Sanders, who wrote the Corrie piece), and like a champ, lists his stable with pride: “. . . sandeep kaushik, amy jenniges, zac pennington, megan seling, jennifer maerz. . . actually, going around the edit office, we have more new people in editorial now than old timers.”
Additionally he notes that Sherman Alexie is now a regular contributor with a biweekly column, “Reservations,” to which I say hoo-HA, may have some more, please!
(Anybody else enjoy that Alexie piece in The New Yorker? Beautiful and sad, just like the town. While I can’t speak to the actual reality of Big Hearts, the Indian bar near Pioneer Square, the rest of the terrain of Seattle depicted – from the viaduct to Real Change – was authentically rendered. Hey look! An interview!)
He cops to the drinking issue (ha-ha! cops to the drinking issue! get.. oh, never mind) but insists it contained valuable social satire (mmm, you be the judge) and takes the time for a swipe at the Weekly that’s amusing enough to cite under fair use:
“as for the weekly condos-and-benz stuff, that didn’t stop in the early 90s… they just did a ‘home’ issue with lots of great news in it for ‘high-end’ condo buyers. did you catch that? howzabout their spring fashion issue? i don’t buy a t-shirt before April, you know, until after the spring fashion dictates come down from the weekly.”
So, to wrap up, Dr. Savage stood up for his team, and pointed out several incorrect statements and assumptions in my piece for which I can only say “thank you!” As a direct result, I now formally eschew off-the-cuff statements of fact in the context of this website, and will endeavor faithfully to note when I’m speaking from ignorance or without a specific source when I’m discussing matters of fact.
Tangentially, fezellow bloggaz, am I uniquely cazizursed with this? When you make off-the-cuff remarks about this and that in the larger media sphere, do your subjects write in to set you straight?
poupou: i, blogger: Poupou reflects on some of the things that, in their more abstracted ways, Eric and Chris have been thinking out loud about.
Eric and Chris are thinking about social software and collaboration behavior as developers and academic theoreticians, citing papers and so forth. Poupou’s posing the questions in a way which reflects a user orientation. Good for her!
She forecasts the imminent death of chat and notes the need for audience-sensitive content filters; a kill-file the blog author controls; then, huzzah, she points to a roll-your-own implementation for MT under PHP from the aptly self-proclaimed Scriptygodess, savior of all MT users and guiding hand behind the MT Plugins page.
Personally, I fall in to the ‘anonymity? why?’ camp; but in the entry and in some thoughtful comments by Coop my ‘why’ is answered.
It’s true I won’t be publishing material here I don’t want my parents to read; but it’s also true I have not published material here I don’t want the DOJ – or Rush Limbaugh – to read.
In the first case, it does mean I haven’t sat down and devoted an hour of serious writing to, for example, an intimate sexual encounter. Does it also mean I never will? That’s uncertain.
In the second case, I’ve already noted that I’m unhappy with this self-imposed restriction; however, it’s organic and not strictly a reflection of blog-ness and the age of zero anonymity.
There is a third case of content filter which determines what goes up here and what does not, and that’s the desire not to publish fairly finished source material – quotes, mostly; interviews, as being largely quotes, fit this rule – prior to professional publication of pieces drawn from the source matter.
That is to say, the blog supports professional activity, and is intended to act as a point of presence for both Mike Whybark, who woke up one day knowing he was a fool to not have thought seriously about writing; and Mike Whybark, underemployed webchicken.
In which case, um, maybe the sex writing shouldn’t appear there ayway, yes?
There’s more for me to say about this, but I’ve been told it’s time for bed.
Stuff: Alien Food Symbols: [via the estimable danelope] Look. Learn. Lick. Terrifying secrets of our alien overseers and their secret food-package symbology revealed.