Per a reader request, the RSS feeds are no longer excerpts but rather now provide full entry content. I haven’t debugged them, so who knows what javascript hijinks or images or so forth will do. Not that I’ve been including any of that of late.

And a request: will the knowledgeable among you please direct me to RSS metrics and tracking resources? The downside to full RSS is that it’s no longer a carrot, directing readers to the site, and instead offers the traffic benefits (if I may characterize them as such) to the aggregator rather than the author or publisher. For content providers that use ads to offset hosting, that’s a reasonable argument against providing a full feed.

I don’t use ads, of course, but part of my theoretical justification for this site is to keep current on thinking about internet publishing. As such, I’d like to be prepared with the answer to the question, ‘how can we provide RSS in such a way that it provides a measurable benefit to our business goals’?

Won’t you help?

Linking to some server-side bookmarking tools made me curious, so I set one up on my local server, the PHP/MySQL based MySQLinks.

It’s described as beta, which appears a bit modest, but I understand the description. There’s no ‘make nice text’ function in the form submit, for example, which means it chokes on SQL operator characters such as quotes.

Although it works with blog pinger update files, it currently will only examine one changes.xml file at a time (so you can’t build a list of the updates with multiple sources, a necessity), and if that file is unavailable, it coughs up raw errors instead of your llist of links. So it’s got a ways to go yet.

On the plus side, setting it up was cake. I joined the mailing list and contributed rewritten bookmarklet code so that Safari would work with the tool, but have heard nothing from them and not recieved any list-mail, which makes me think they project might be dark for now.

It’s got me thinking about data management in general again. On my desktop, I tend to drag and drop crud all month long and then stick it in a folder every month. I have actually gone so far as to find scripts to do the cleanup for me on the first of the month but have yet to implement them because I want it to integrate with a by-filetype filer script I use. I also want all of the above to be available as folder actions in the OS.

Better is the enemy of good, after all. So instead I just do the cleanup by hand, or, better yet, write about it here instead of figring out how to hook it all up.

Hm.

I really should get it all working, and I really do have all the pieces in place. Once I get that settled I could presumably build a front end for the configuration components. I guess the last thing would be a concept that would allow users to grok it as an app instead of a collection of scripts.

Maybe if I call it the Red Swingline? Your Intern? Humina.

Impression, a backup utility for Mac OS X, by Stephen Elliott.

I’ll be giving this a whirl. Looks promising.

Here’s a roundup at MacFixit.

Postfix Enabler. Looks like it’s time to start thinking about migrating the server to Panther.

Adam Kalsey figured out the Remember Me, Movable Type comments problem sometime this summer, and provides a crystal-clear fix. I haven’t implemented this today (or even checked to see if MT integrated the fix into later releases) but for those of you who have wondered why MT sometimes knows ya and sometimes don’t, you may now sleep even more soundly than when you learned that the G5 to PC thing was a hoax.

But distracted by this project.

On my way to scrounge the MT fora, I saw a call for testers on MT3.0 dated January 30. I guess they might be full up, but I imagine I’ll drop a line.

This forum post appears to have detailed instructions on setting up a PDA-friendly submission form.

My socks are calling.

Well, this is being entered offline via AvantGo.

Aggravatingly, the form’s text-entry box is six characters wide by six lines high, rendering it rahtha poor from a usability perspective.

More research needed. But first, a vsnture into the exciting world of laundry.

UPDATE: hmmmm. Posting via that form appears to skip some of the formatting steps that happen when posting via the web-based forms. The original entry appeared sans line breaks. The form also included the extended field and did not offer the ‘preserve lline breaks option’ that I noticed.

More research indeed.

meryl.net articles: PDA Posting to MT (From Feb. 2002)

Once I got AvantGo set up to sync under OS X, the next step was finding the tools to post to the blog from the PDA.

I ended up using MAL Conduit which is both a true Palm conduit and has a decent readme in the distro, so no futzing around to set up the install, thankfully. I’m still poking around with the content settings.

I’m beginning this entry prior to completing the setup of the AvantGo bookmarklet, and I expect I’ll have to tweak things a bit.

The AG sync process takes a reallly long time.

Eric descibes how he’s been ripping John Peel to disc for later listening on iPod using the interesting multi-format capable MusicSafari.

In the past, I’ve used Ambrosia’s WireTap, which is free.

iChat Knows Where I Am, blogs EIC Jason Snell at Macworld. He’s whipped up a mildly kludgy AppleScript to set iChat’s broadcast indicator status to recognize his current location, either ‘at the office’ or ‘at home.’

Hm. This doesn’t directly apply to my needs right now, but it’s an interesting idea… I like the idea of status indicators available to good friends and family. In my case, something like ‘vacuuming,’ ‘washing dishes,’ ‘doing laundry,’ ‘jobhunting,’ and the like might be cool. Not that I have any idea how to automate that.

Tangentially: look! blogs at Macworld! Looks like Jason has been at it since January 20, and Mac 911 dude Chris Breen has been going since December.