Roland's blog

The server for this blog is moving to Colo. So, this blog will be down until DNS changes propagate.

C ya soon! Until then check out my del.icio.us blogette and RSS feed.

Great spoof post from Stuart. Truth is far stranger than fiction. I fully expect something like this to happen.

From Unbound Spiral: Skype Business Plans Revealed:

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Estonia March 23, 2004* WTF Spoof Newswire

Skype Business Plan details released today outline large scale enterprise ambitions. Throwing caution to the wind and responding to recent enquires from international press sources Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom released new products and service details in a closed session post CeBit conference for the Enterprise market. Earlier Skype announced partnerships with Plantronics and Siemans Mobile. The most important announcements disclosed details of the Skype "Supernode" Corporate Server, the Skype "Presence Manager and Skype for PDA's and Symbian Skype Messenger.

Skype testing began with a free to consumer "telephony" application released in August 2003. With over six months in testing billions in connected calls, and online callers exceeding 300000 concurrently Skype announced that HP would begin an immediate world wide corporate implementation. An unnamed HP spokes person said it was their "Windows" opportunity. It will be deployed in consulting services over the next three weeks. Concurrently HP will release new look PDA's and bluetooth headsets.

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Bold predictions which totally coincide with my thoughts. We won't call them blogs but you will be able to author and share anything, anytime with the world, your friends or any group you decide. Blogs, wikis etc. are just the first manifestation of this future world.

From Thijs van der Vossen · Predictions:

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"The future will be simple, open, informal, standard-compliant and in reverse-chronological order.

No matter how you call it, blogging, weblogging or personal publishing will become the most important way of sharing information and managing knowledge.

Wikis will become the most widely-used groupware and collaboration tools.

Web standards usage will grow as more and more people will be accessing the web using an ever increasing range of browsers and devices. It will not be long before mobile phones include talking browsers by default.

Everything will support and everybody will use content syndication and news aggregators."

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Sounds great. Sign me up for the Acceptance and Innovations Boards!

From Vets needed:

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"Thanks to Doc for helping Ethan Zuckerman and me advertise for Internet vets to vet the accumulating activism tools for our nascent Open Republic effort. Since all but my 15 readers have missed this groundswell, the back story is that a small bunch of us are looking for volunteers to serve on one of three blue ribbon advisory panels (your reward will be a blue ribbon and a certificate suitable for framing).

The Review Board will survey the available tools so the Open Republic Foundation can host its flagship effort–sort of an activist consumers' union–granting a Good Nationkeeping Seal of Approval for the tools providing the best user experience:

A comprehensive and comprehensible guide to the online organizing of campaigns

The Innovations Board will describe tools in the guides that need improvement and new tools to fill in the gaps among those tools:

Stimulate the creation of excellent campaign and governance software and Internet resources.

The Acceptance Board will exercise quality control over the work performed for the Innovations Board:

Review work commissioned for the Open Republic Foundation and accept or reject it as fast as humanly possible."

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Even though Safari is slower than Firefox, it remains my default browser because:

• I can post to my blog from any app from ecto using Command @. This doesn't work with Firefox.
• Tabs work properly i.e. multiple tabs get opened when I click on NetNewsWire rather than multiple windows. Again this doesn't work with Firefox.

OK, now I have to try this! Tonight maybe. Lock-in is over-rated since I have static HTML so I am not afraid of Markdown lockin!

From chaotic intransient prose bursts: ecto and Markdown:
"Version 1.0.5.5 has support for Markdown, the new text-to-HTML conversion tool by John Gruber"

OK, after this ringing endorsement from Cory Doctorow, I have to re-evaluate Shrook. I wasn't too impressed with 1.0 but 2.0 sounds cool.

From Boing Boing: Wicked RSS reader redesign:

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My RSS reader of choice, Shrook, went 2.0 this morning. After five or six hours of using it (couldn't sleep, friggin' jetlag), I am in love. This is the best UI overhaul I've ever seen (the old UI was pretty good too), a completely unexpected redesign that nevertheless managed to make this app that I use all day, every day, into something five times more useful and stable than it had been the day before. I like this punctuated equilibrium stuff.

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Sorry for implying that he isn't in my previous post as Tomas pointed out!

In fact, due to Mark's writing, I've learned tons of stuff about Python and accessibility.

Kudos to Six Apart for addressing the concerns of the community with an excellent FAQ. If only other companies would respond so well to feedback.

From the TypeKey FAQ:

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With Movable Type comment registration, we've provided a great deal of options for weblog owners. At release (remember, we're still in Alpha), we plan to provide a detailed user's guide to comment registration and comment management options. But, for now, we want to provide a glimpse of the commenting options.

With Movable Type 3.0 you have options. You can:

1. Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments where the commenter sends an email address
2. Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments
3. Accept TypeKey-authenticated and moderated comments
4. Accept TypeKey-authenticated and regular comments
5. Accept moderated comments
6. Accept unmoderated comments
7. Accept anonymous comments

Currently in Movable Type, 6 and 7 are the only two options. 1 through 5 have been added to create a varying degree of accountability.

While comment registration is not the right answer for every weblog, Movable Type 3.0 and TypeKey provide a flexible system that we feel will work for the majority of Movable Type users."

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I'd rather have a world where people who aren't great writers blog and write every day even if they don't improve. Better to live in a world where people express themselves than not!

And I think over the long haul (measured in years) that 99% of the people will become better writers. I certainly have improved!

From Most valuable asset [dive into mark]

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I grew up being taught, believing, and teaching others to believe that there were only two things you needed to do to become a good writer:

1. Read every day

2. Write every day

But now we have thousands of webloggers who read other webloggers every day, and who themselves write every day, and they’re not getting any better at writing. Some people become better writers through weblogging, but if you look around you’ll have to agree that many don’t. They may fancy themselves as writers, or even journalists, because after all they’ve been writing every day for years. But their latest stuff is just as immature and nonsensical as their old stuff. They can’t put words together. (What’s so good about putting words together? It’s traditionally considered advantageous for a writer.)

This bothers me enormously. First, the mind-boggling lack of self-knowledge required to write every day and not realize that you write badly. But more important, the fact that there is obviously a secret third ingredient required for becoming a good writer. You need to read every day... and write every day... and X. But I don’t know what X is, and obviously my teachers didn’t know either. They had it, but they didn’t know it. Daily writing is not our most valuable asset. So what is it?

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Markdown sounds like exactly what I am looking for. Very cool! Must check this out. Writing HTML without a WYSIWYG editor, using the broken code from Mozilla and IE's WYSIWG editors and using an HTML text area with a preview mode is for the birds. Hopefully this will alleviate the pain of doing this

From Daring Fireball: Markdown:

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Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. See the Syntax page for details pertaining to Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the online Dingus.

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

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Go Brent, go! I can't wait for 1.1. Looks like it will be smashing!

From Yahoo! Groups : NetNewsWire Messages : Message 1371 of 1374 :

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About the weblog editor, here's the deal:

It's being overhauled, top-to-bottom, for the next release of NetNewsWire. It
will be quite different from the current weblog editor.

The goals are:

1. To make it easier to use *and* more powerful. The user interface has been
completely re-designed.

2. To support more weblog features than are currently supported. (Things like
Movable Type keywords.)

3. To make it a better text/HTML editor.

4. To fix a bunch of bugs.

5. To make it scriptable.

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Awesome, thanks! Now if you could only do wild card URL searches like PubSub's referenced URI feature e.g. give me an RSS feed of all blogs that have links with rolandtanglao.com in them. That way I can see if anybody links anywhere on a site rather than to just a single URL i.e. anybody who links to a page anywhere on rolandtanglao.com

From Sifry's Alerts:

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I'm proud to announce the new Technorati redesign has launched, available at www.technorati.com. Some highlights of the new design:

Three free email or RSS watchlists for individuals - all you have to do is sign up as a member. Of course, people who have paid for watchlists are grandfathered in as well.

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Oldie but goodie that I must re-read now that I have a MovableType blog hence the re-post. The CSS and JavaScript and HTML stuff apply to Blogware blogs too. Only the template stuff differs. But once you have figured out one templating system, the second and third and fourth :-) (I think this is the about the 5th or 6th blog templating system that I have learned) comes easier.

From mediatinker.com:

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Tackling Movable Type templates and CSS for the first time can be daunting. The MT default templates contain four kinds of code: CSS, HTML, MT tags, and Javascript.

If you're new to all this, you're about to learn that it pays to make a careful study of the code. Once you understand the way it works together, it's pretty easy to modify your MT templates to display almost any design you want.

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Congratulations! MovableType and TypePad's world wide expansion continues.

From Loïc Le Meur Blog: Six Apart and Ublog SA sign an exclusive representation agreement in Europe:

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Mena, Ben, Barak and myself have been already working on this agreement for many weeks, I am very glad and honored to announce that Six Apart and my company Ublog SA have signed yesterday an exclusive representation agreement.

Ublog SA becomes the exclusive agent of Six Apart in Europe, Middle-East and Africa and has started distributing its leading weblogs publishing products, Typepad and Movable Type.

Typepad is already available in French and Spanish and will also be available in the next weeks in German and Dutch. Most European languages will follow shortly. Local Typepad and Movable Type websites will be launched very soon.

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The carpet is nice and clean and the room is now clean enough for the baby. Now need to move the server to Colocation and put all the baby stuff in the room!

Nice rant from Boris. Where is the Macintosh of Blog Systems? Drupal is more like the Linux of Blog Systems. More powerful but requires effort to learn because it is not user friendly. Perhaps Wordpress is the Mac of Blog Systems (or personal publishing systems as Boris likes to call Blog Systems) but I doubt it. Probably need somebody as fanatical as Steve Jobs to get that and as far as I can see, nobody in the Blog world (except maybe Brent Simmons) has his eye for visual aesthetics and usability.

Anyways, the prime reason I am now using MT is that it is the best blogging platform to build software on top of at the moment. As a result, all the coolest toys (like ecto which I am writing this post with) work best with MT. And part of the reason why might be because it is built using Perl and CGIs which evidently, Boris and I share the same love/hate relationship with.

From MovableType is the Windows of the Personal Publishing World | B. Mann Consulting:
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Everyone is all a-twitter that MT 3.0 is about to come out of hiding. Am I biased because I use a different publishing system? Probably.

But I maintain that MT has gotten to the top of the heap because of it's wide adoption. Much like Windows. Many people agree that OS X or even Linux is a technically superior operating system, but it's still Windows with the lion's share of the market. Much like MT.

So, herewith, a list of things that I don't like about MT.

These are in no particular order. I've used MT (kicking and screaming), but am by no means proficient. These are my opinions, so you can disagree with them. Feel free to comment or otherwise let me know if I get something factually wrong. And yes, I am talking about a default install.

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Why? It feels faster and the middle button of my Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer Optical mouse works for popping new windows or tabs. But I will probably switch to Firefox as my default browser when it goes 1.0 because it just keeps getting faster and I doubt Safari can catch up!

From InfoWorld: Firefox fills the IE void: March 19, 2004: By Jon Udell : APPLICATION_DEVELOPMENT : APPLICATIONS : PLATFORMS : WEB_SERVICES:

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Ironically, although Microsoft cited competition with Apple’s Safari as the reason for killing IE for the Mac, I’ve abandoned Safari on OS X for the same reason I’ve abandoned IE on Windows. Firefox does more, it’s moving faster, and — here’s the kicker — it runs identically on Windows, OS X, and Linux.

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We are cleaning the carpet in the room with this webserver so this blog will be down from about 9a.m. Pacific Saturday until about 5p.m. Pacific. Sorry for the inconvenience!

I want something like this. Imagine an RSS reader that when encountering an unknown RSS extension (say for customer support or personal ads :-) ), can download a spec and intelligently display the content! Now that would be cool. And Typekit is one possible way of enabling this.

From Typekit Framework Technical Specification:

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This document describes the Typekit Framework, TF. TF is a framework for specifying and deploying interfaces for XML namespaces. The goal of the TK framework is to provide a generalized solution for supporting extensible XML in webblogs and other contexts by allowing extension writers to author a cooresponding user interface called a typekit.

A typekit consists of a collection of resources for creating, editing and displaying elements in a single namespace. A typekit may include but is not limited to: XSL transformations, XForms, stylesheets and images. A valid typekit must contain a typekit discriptor in the root directory of the kit named typekit.xml. This document describes the contents and target context(s) of the kit. A typekit may support an element in one or more contexts, such as on a weblog or a WAP device. Typekits are served from any webhost and are completely distributed.

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