Internet – Page 5 – Noise Between Stations

MT’s Innovator’s Dilemma

OK, just one more blogger-blogging-about-blogging-tools post and then I’m done. We might view the MT price increase through the lens of the innovator’s dilemma. They moved upmarket, and the open source, free, and otherwise interesting competitors suddenly looked like compelling options to those of us on the leading edge of the blog tool curve.

What if SixApart had released MT as open source at the same time they started charging for it? It would basically follow the Red Hat model: get the raw (e.g. Linux) functionality for free but pay for easier installation, more features, and support. For companies, it’s a no brainer expense, and the rest of us happily run our software for free. It’s quite hard to convince our brains to accept the risk of giving away the software, but we’re starting to see enough examples to learn from experience.

There’s gold in them thar blogs

WordPress and Textpattern, as previously mentioned, were fortunate to hit 1.x versions at approximately the same time as the MT price policy shift. If you were to try calculating the financial ramifications of this shift, you might fill one of your variables with the number 40,000.

This Old CSS

Roger Johansson uses a helpful “let me show you how I do it, step by step” way of explaining how to construct the XHTML and CSS for a simple but effective two column layout. It’s part of his excellent Developing with web standards mini-book.

New, Improved NBS

I’ve hired a crack team of stylists, programmers, and librarians to re-organize my five+ years worth of blog posts from four different blogging systems. Work is in progress, but you can start basking in the sheer joy of:

A proper RSS 2.0 feed that includes all posts
Permalinks and trackbacks
Categories now displayed in the navigation for easier exploring. The librarians are still cleaning those up and classifying older posts
Posts that post-date the hand-coding era (August ’99) are all in the template system, yielding proper archives.
Newer posts will actually validate.

Thanks for your patience while we strive to facilitate a pleasurable surfing experience.

CSS and CMS

Designing a site now that has to push the envelope of how CSS must be able to tweak the layout, much like CSS Zen Garden but for an ecommerce application. We’re also using a content management system, so the interplay of CSS and CMS becomes interesting. I think I can simplify the CMS templates so they only have to reflect business logic, and all the differences in presentation are done in the CSS. Still, it changes how I think about content types. Normally I’d only think about how granular the content types need to be to work in every template. Now I’m also thinking about what I want to appear in separate DIVs too. Not sure if that will end up being more granular or not. Dave Shea posts related thoughts about the relationship between markup and CSS flexibility.

Besides all the usual advantages of CSS, it should be an easier implementation as CSS development is easier than CMS template development. I think.

Audio Blogging

Audblog is an audio blogging service, allowing you to record an audio post from any phone which gets converted to an audio file on your server. I had the reverse idea a while ago, an RSS aggregator that would convert your favorite feeds into an MP3 file for listening away from the computer (oh LazyWeb…). Also, Audblog’s Audblog-to-email would be interesting to use with email enabled phones too, basically giving you inbox-style voice mail without all that crazy complicated VoiP software in between. Right now AT&T sends me an email when I get a voicemail message at home, but what I really want is the damn message!

Bill hates audio for thinking, which I agree with. But Bill and I are here in New York, car free. Much of the developed world spends an hour or more in a car or on public transportation each day listening to something, why not their favorite authors’ daily writing?

CSS for Emails

Anitra, via Owen, provides some links for coding happy emails, an area new to me: you can read a CSS thread, search for email clients, or read the guidelines.

Pushing Weblogs

Sometimes pushing, via email, still wins over pulling via websites. There’s a handful of sites I want to monitor but lack the time or attention to surf, even as an RSS feed. Lately I’ve been using iMorph’s Infominder service. They basically check a site for changes and send you an update. Nice touches are thrown in, like a digest mode and the ability to check RSS feeds. The first ten feeds are free.

Real-Time Design

While trying to surf the Staples website with Mozilla:

The web browser you are using is incompatible. We are sorry for the inconvenience. Our site currently supports only Internet Explorer version 4.0 and 5.0. This is due to the advanced features used in the real-time designer.

Well heck, if I had a real-time designer with advanced features I wouldn’t give a hoot about Mozilla either.

Spam Proofing

Dan Benjamin’s Win the SPAM Arms Race offers a clever way to create a clickable mailto: link on your web pages while greatly reducing the ability of spam harvesters to find it. Some people are so nice.

I’m combining that with some email filters, started with Heather’s list plus a few additions that are working well. So far I’m filtering on:
1618
opt out
ADV
[ a blank subject line ]
$$
!!
mortgage
loan
stock
click here
Section 301
FREE

I still find myself looking through the spam I’ve caught, like sorting through the odd creatures entrapped in the net before throwing them back.

Best Spam Subject Line So Far

‘I never said I want to be alone‘, on spam selling a stock. I still don’t understand why they think we’ll be in a buying mood after they trick us into looking at their unsolicited marketing message.

Looking for an IMAP Account

So I’m planning on moving away from Yahoo mail. It’s been wonderful to go many years without having to change my personal email address, but:

the reliability has been spotty lately
they started charging, which is fair, but it makes me wonder what other services are out there
the email hack, ugh
it’s time to ditch POP and move up to IMAP. I span multiple computers and multiple places, and can’t deal with having messages trapped on a particular hard drive anymore

So I registered a shiny new vanity domain name. I just want to point it at an IMAP account. So I’m looking for a service. I started trying mac.com, which is mostly good except for

webmail doesn’t seem to work on non-Macs
they started charging $8.33/month, again this is fair but makes me want to evaluate other services
i can have my mail forwarded to mac.com, and set my vanity domain as the return address, but mac.com still shows up in the “To:” field, not ideal.

If you know of an inexpensive, reliable, personal IMAP provider let me know. I’ll post the results right [here].

Here is here: Christina mentioned both dreamhost and oddpost. Dreamhost seems like a great option if you also need hosting, but I’m all set with pair.com. Oddpost only works on IE/Win. I’m willing to switch out of Mozilla now and then, but Win only is a deal killer.

I ended up with myrealbox, a site set up by Novell to display the capabilities of their NetMail product. While that makes me feel a bit like a guinea pig, it seems OK, and the user base is pretty big. It’s free, there’s no ads, it does IMAP, and the web interface is pretty good, though not entirely Mozilla/Mac happy, but then that’s not too rare these days. If it collapses completely I can always bail and go back to mac.com without having to change my email address. It’s mine, all mine, I’m a greedy miser.

Validation, The Movie

I’m gradually going around my site, cleaning each room, applying a template here, fixing a link there. In the process I’m finally getting around to reading Owen’s Validation, a persuasive argument for proper code, which could have been subtitled ‘Markup for the Long Now‘…

My view is validation is very important, and not because I’m a stickler for rules. I actually dislike rules…I don’t think it’s widely understood how unique the code is. This is an attempt to make a code that can go decades and centuries, getting broader in scope without ever shutting out it’s early versions. Because that’s what we need the code to do: this code is for recording what we think.

He also points to the handy Gazingus validation bookmarklets and, of course, the W3C validator.

Aside: A funny image in my head of people 50 years from now initializing their virtual museum to learn about early 21st Century Internet communication. The readable content consists almost entirely of CSS tutorials. The aural connection says, ‘Before the Great XML Convergence of 2023 humans actually used keyboards to type medium-specific display information, or used crude applications to generate non-standard display code…‘

Blood Book

Mark Bernstein has an interesting review of Rebecca Blood’s The Weblog Handbook.

For Blood, as for many diarists, the exercise of writing is its own reward. “If you allow yourself to begin posting entries based on what you think someone else wants you to write,” she warns, “you are missing the point of having a weblog.”

to which Mark points out a bit of contradition:

More seriously, Blood’s romantic conviction deters any extensive discussion of craft. If simple authenticity is the goal of weblog writing, and if you — the Audience Of One — are the only reader that really matters, then what craft is needed?

This is a balance I sometimes struggle with. Ideally I’m crafting words others will enjoy as well, words that still propel my own ideas. Isn’t that usually the case in publishing? Or journalism?

Rebecca nails it when she says, ‘The more your weblog reflects your interests and your world view, the stronger your voice will be.‘ I’ve always thought ‘voice’ is the most significant reason I like some blogs over others.

BlogSpam

Spotted! Well, not exactly the BlogSpam I referred to. But crazy random posts on the topic of air-conditioning and mold appeared on Molly’s blog here and here.

Is it someone’s idea of a joke? Do you wish you thought of it first?