Dave Winer's weblog. One of the original (and best) weblogs out there. Or maybe it's this instead. Not really sure about that.

¶ 120 Posted at 11.16 AM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | web )

So here we have, in partes dos, a look at the Weblog "phenomenon" by journalist JD Lasica : parte uno parte dos

A quote from the article, courtesy of Doc Searls (he of the Cluetrain Manifesto):

Searls believes that blogs offer the news media a means of "re-personalizing journalism," through their subject matter and by connecting journalists to other journalists' journals and to expert sources. ... Searls says the media remain blind to the cultural and technological changes that are overtaking traditional modes of communication.

Be that as it may, I don't foresee any earthshaking changes in the structure of journalism. The strength of the weblog, as articulated above, focuses on the individualism of the weblog. Individualism, however, doesn't scale. A news site like CNN will never be supplanted by any weblog. Weblogs work on a small scale. They work from a single perspective. They're opinionated, argumentative, discursive. You will not find out about a train wreck from a weblog. You will not discover the results of an election in Scripting News. The Morning News will tell you about all sorts of wonderful information about graphic design principles, but for updates on the war(s) in Central Africa, well, you're out of luck. Weblogs cannot do this. Even if Dave Winer (of the aforementioned Scripting News) achieves his dream of bringing publishing to the masses, nobody wants to visit a dozen weblogs every day to get a coherent picture of the world. And I'm being optimistic to think it will only be a dozen. Traditional news sites will continue to exist to gather information from far-reaching sources and agglomerate it into a coherent, comprehensive source. Information. How fun. Now, obviously, that's not the only reason people read the news. Opinion sections would do much better as weblogs. They'd be more interesting, more varied, and much less sanitized. But that's not what people want out of The News. Searls acknowledges this, but Lasica does not emphasize it. Weblogs will remain niches. There must be a lowest common denominator for the news, because some things demand the resources of a news agency.

So then. Weblogs remain niches. Very good niches, though. Inter-personal communication is terrible. Most people don't know very much about each other, even the people they consider best friends. People just don't talk about very interesting, personal things. Weblogs are easier that way. Your audience is far away. Out of sight, out of mind. The message is easier to send, and easier to receive.

The kicker, though, is the obvious one. You remove the middleman. Information transfer is no longer mediated by the, well, media ("Allow myself to introduce... myself." **). All of a sudden, you can know directly what people elsewhere are thinking. The media never really tells you that. And even when they do, they never get enough people's perspectives. Everybody knows about tornadoes. When a twister comes through, the news goes and finds the most ignorant, dirtiest, inbred hillbilly they can. "It was pandelerium, Ma!" Or, on spring break, they always find the people whose vocabulary consists exclusively of "Whoo!" and "Dude." With a weblog, you can avoid that. Ideally. We'll see if that works for real.

** Pet peeve #392: I hate the (mis)use of myself. It is not a subject; that is I. It is not the standard object; that is me. It is the reflexive object. You only use it when the subject and object of the verb are the same. Everyday I hear someone use it as the subject of a sentence. "Mike and myself were at the bar..." Or an object. "They came to see Gopal and myself." Most of the sentences are like that. People can get a handle on difficult, hard-to-use words like I and me when they are the only subject or object. As soon as someone else is thrown in there, it becomes myself. This is not hard, people.

Pet peeve #25: While we're on the subject of grammatical unorthodoxy (to put it kindly), there's the other one. Improper use of the conditional. As in, "If I would have known they were going to be late, I would have driven more slowly." Uh uh. Didn't you people take French? Don't you know the SIMPCON? Si - Imperfect - Conditional. The condition clause is in the imperfect. As in, "If I had known..." The hypothetical clause is the part that takes the conditional. This is also not hard. Personally, I lay the blame for this on John Madden. I heard him misuse this several years ago on Monday Night Football (what? why are you looking at me like that?). A whole nation was exposed to this grammatical perversion. But we cannot give up. We must join together to protect the sanctity of the English language from this perversion.

This doesn't make me an anal jerk, does it? It does? Says you. Well nuts to you, go away.

Welcome to my webpage of hate.

¶ 132 Posted at 12.12 PM ⇒ No Comments ( pedantic | web )

This would look a lot better were it not so... purple. nerdgirl.com

¶ 263 Posted at 04.37 AM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | web )

Pretty weblog. pretty....

¶ 299 Posted at 04.47 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | web )

I'm seeing more and more sites requiring cookies simply to browse the site. For instance, I was looking up locations for a clothing retailer. They used MSN Expedia as a source for their maps. Fair enough. But apparently just to look at the map, I have to allow all sorts of .expedia.msn.com and .msn.com cookies to be set. Just to look at one image. Law.com won't let you read any articles without using cookies. They're somewhat less intelligent about it; they try to set the cookie and then check it in javascript embedded in the page. If you disable javascript, you can view the articles just fine. Or you could download them using a non-graphical client like curl or wget and view it locally. But that ignores the point. I can think of no instance where cookies can be justified on technical grounds. Session management is a solved problem. Now, transparent logins are convenient, but that's it for cookies. Mainly, I think the website programmers are just lazy. Either that or some exec made a bone-headed decision to try to coerce the web-browsing population at large to enable cookies. Of course, I'll just go elsewhere. And when that becomes too difficult, no doubt there will be a plugin for Mozilla that allows you to specify that certain sites get random values for the cookies they set. Trying to coerce users with this sort of strong-arming is stupid and counter-productive. At best, they set off an arms race with those trying to circumvent these measures. At worst, they drive customers away. Why go through all that trouble when they can accomplish 99% of what they want by doing a tiny amount more work (in many cases, most of which they're already doing)? Audiogalaxy still works in Lynx! The whole point of this web business is that anybody can do it. And yet we still find publishers of all shapes and sizes trying to lock users into their own fenced of pieces of the web. Companies who long for the early 90s when the only access was Compuserve or AOL or Prodigy, completely controlled environments. Not only do people not want that, it's obvious that people don't want that. Look at the number of people subscribed to an online service in 1995 and compare it to today. These people don't understand how to serve us, plain and simple.

¶ 375 Posted at 12.38 AM ⇒ No Comments ( stupid people | internet | privacy | web )

I've coined what I call the "30 second rule." If you want people to visit a web site regularly, you have to give them at least 30 seconds. If you provide enough on your site to keep them engaged for that long, they will come again. If they don't stay that long, they won't come back. Obviously that's over-simplifying quite a bit, but I'm going to make a point of providing at least 30 seconds worth of content every few days. Maybe that just reflects my impatience and attention span, but everyone has less of both these days, especially on the web.

¶ 594 Posted at 04.53 PM ⇒ No Comments ( internet | deep thoughts | web )

One of the defining properties of a weblog is the newest-to-oldest ordering. I'm starting to think that's not the best idea in all cases. The case where it breaks? Catching up. I think it would be a good idea to plant a cookie on visitors' browsers with their last visit. Then when they return, the default page would be a list of all of the posts since their last visit, in oldest-to-newest order. If there is no cookie, just do what you do today. That would make it a lot more convenient to catch up.

¶ 652 Posted at 04.30 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

Why your movable type blog must die. No MT here; just a home-grown code crap fest. It's totally right, of course. I saw some of these people at SXSW last year. I resented and envied them. Now I feel better. Thanks to vi.

¶ 676 Posted at 08.22 AM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

My current weblog code is a mess. I have a propensity for "baroque overengineering." I think way too hard about what I might want to do, or what might happen. This was exacerbated by my being unemployed at the time, which put few restraints on my "creativity." I got a little crazy with the XML and the caching and a whole bunch of things that get in my way more than they serve any useful purpose. Then I had this crazy notion that every page should be dynamically created, even though there was really no point. Finally, I had a conceit that I would make a general-purpose weblogging package, which made it yet more complicated. All that is past me now. Sometime in the future, I'm going to put together a new system. It will be very simple. It will probably not use a database at all, instead using plain old text files. From those it will generate the HTML for the site, including human-friendly paths (like /2003/04 for posts from April of last year). I could use Blogger, which does basically the same thing, but I like having post categories, and as far as I can tell, Blogger still doesn't do those. Not to mention that I have no idea how I would import my 651 (now 652!) posts. It'll probably wait till I have some 3-day weekend with nothing to do and I'll crank something quick and dirty out. As it should be, I mean, this isn't rocket science.

¶ 680 Posted at 05.34 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

I've been thinking a little lately about the idea of writing semi-fictional weblog posts. Let's face it; my life is pretty boring. I'm too cheap and too lazy to do anything exciting, so there's not much that appears here on my life. So why not make stuff up? Not complete fiction, but partial fiction. Something that could have happened. Something that did happen, except in a different way. A transposition of something real, but replacing the location/people/etc. with other ones. Who knows? I think this is one of those things that I think of but won't do. Maybe you will. semifictional.com is not taken.

¶ 686 Posted at 01.52 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

I've done some informal thinking on how my new weblog package will work. The overriding goal is to simplify. As such, I am making each weblog post a separate file instead of storing the data in an RDBMS. They will probably be numbered sequentially, as I want to guarantee uniqueness and that's as good a way as any. To make a post, I will run a script that will open an editor on a temporary file. The format of the file will be very simple, modelled after emails and the HTTP protocol. There will be a headers section followed by a single, empty line, the subject (if any), another empty line, and the body of the text. In the headers will be appropriate metadata, which at this time will be a list of categories and perhaps a reference. Here's a sample:

Category: linkage, freaky
Cite: Fark

scariest mugshot ever

From The Smoking Gun, I give you the Scariest. Mugshot. EVER.

That post would be rendered to look basically like this one. The "Cite" header would attach a little trailer to the post like this: seen at fark. Another header I'll probably do is the "references" header when a post I make is a follow-up to a previous post. That would add a little trailer to the post pointing back at that earlier one. The script would pick apart the "category" header at commas and associate this post with each one of the categories listed.

I don't see any point in having comments or similar dynamic behavior. I won't be generate each page on each request like I (sort of) do now. Instead, I'll regenerate the site every time I post. So after I exit the editor, the weblog script will pick up the post and rebuild the site from it. It will do the regular housekeeping like generating archives, making sure the index page has exactly 20 (or whatever) posts on it, indexing by date, and so forth. One advantage of doing it this way is that it makes it really easy (as opposed to just kind of easy) to do more useful urls. http://ketan.org/692 would be the direct, permanent link to this post. So I could have a URL like http://ketan.org/politics/ that would contain all of my posts on politics. I could also have URLs like http://ketan.org/2003 for, well, 2003, http://ketan.org/2003/04/ for April of 2003, and so forth.

Now, one thing that I would seem to be giving up with this methodology is a web-based posting system. That's not actually the case, however. It would be a simple matter to write a script that would allow me to do the exact same thing from a web browser. I'm never actually directly writing the files; I'm writing to a temporary file that the command-line weblog script then picks up and files appropriately. That makes it easy to have an arbitrary input mechanism. One other thing I've thought of is having a simple email gateway. I would basically just send an email to a magic address that triggers the script. The body of the email would look just like the text file outlined above. I'm leaning toward the email method, as wherever I have web access I'll have email access, but it's not necessarily true that I will have web access wherever I have email access.

Making each post relatively self-contained makes backups easy as well. The script would file each post in its own file in some directory. To back up, I'd just copy the directory somewhere. If I wanted to change this post, I would just edit ~ketan/weblog/692.txt and rebuild the site. I can also easily integrate a spell checker, since I'll just be using a standard UNIX text editor. I'll also be able to easily integrate arbitrary HTML, which I cannot do right now (for example, I can't show the raw HTML in the mock post above because I have an overzealous HTML entity encoder. i.e., a bug).

Basically, I didn't spend too much time thinking about how much effort my current system would be on a day-to-day basis. Now that I've had 18 months to get frustrated by it, I've come up with a way that is far more streamlined for daily use and will be a lot easier to maintain. I don't intend to do any fancy templating at this point; I expect the script code will be intermingled with the logic code. I went overboard with the idea last time around, and I'm still dealing with the bother that caused. The new idea is to default to the simplest way of doing things and not to overthink what I might want to do 4 years down the road.

As a way to make the project both more interesting and more intimidating, I'm thinking of using this as an opportunity to dabble in the Ruby scripting language. I've read a lot of good things about it, and this seems like just the right sized project to give it a whirl.

Now, when will this actually happen? I dunno. Depends on when I get the time. Usually, by the end of the work week, I want to rest from programming for a little while. It doesn't really matter, though, as to you, the site should look basically the same. URLs might be a little neater, and the pages will load much faster, but other than that, it'll be invisible. One thing that I haven't really thought of yet is what I will do with my image gallery code. One of the reasons I don't have much up there is because it's unnecessarily clunky in the same way the weblog itself is (another reason is that I don't take many pictures). I'll probably end up doing something similar in concept to clean that up, but that remains to be seen.

¶ 692 Posted at 04.35 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

After reading up on Ruby, I'm thinking it's not for me. It just doesn't feel right. I know that's mostly syntax, but a lot of things just seem bizarre and unnecessarily clunky. I'll just use something else, probably Java.

¶ 693 Posted at 05.25 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web | programming )

Wal-greens has bad web application designers running its site. For some foolish reason, they store your search parameters in a cookie instead of embedding it in URLs or forms. Even though it is obvious why that is a terrible idea, I'm going to list the reasons anyway:

• Not everyone has cookies enabled - So if you don't have cookies, don't bother using the site.
• Cookies are global throughout a browser; i.e., set it for one window/tab, and it's set for all of them - As a result, you can't have two different searches in two different windows at once. If you try, your second search will blow away your first search.
• Cookies are per-machine - You can't send someone else a page of search results; you have to send them instructions: "Go to the Walgreens website and search for 'loratadine.'" That's ridiculous.
.

To the extent that it is possible, store the parameters of a page in the page. Generally, you should make the next/previous navigators be simple links with a parameter indicating if you want results 1-10 or 30-40. It's acceptable to make next/previous navigators be form submission buttons with the forms populated with hidden form elements indicating the same, but only if you want to make it hard to link to your results (there are legitimate reasons for this). Page state should be stored in the page. Application state can be stored in cookies, but even then, 95% of the time, you're better off using your web application platform's session handler and putting it there. Cookies are useful primarily as a convenience measure (like saving logins from session to session, or saving preferences if you don't require a login like Google does) and as a security enhancement, when you want to make sure that the application state is non-portable. That's of limited utility, though, since you an embed a client IP in a session to make sure that a user can't hijack another user's session. That's only a possibility when the client IP is the same for both victim and attacker, such as behind a proxy or IP masquerading. Phew. That was fun.

¶ 706 Posted at 04.20 AM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

Google has relaunched Blogger with a whole pile of new features. If they had done this two months ago, I probably would not have written my own new thing. Although they still don't have categories.

¶ 735 Posted at 03.41 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

This wishlist for the ultimate weblog is over a year old, but it's still very much on target. I find myself understanding and agreeing with just about all of the points made. My homebrew system meets many of them, and several of the ones that it doesn't meet are longer-term goals.

¶ 750 Posted at 04.14 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

I'm done with bullets. Lists are just a way to avoid narrative structure. It's the lazy person's way out of organizing their thoughts. There's no connection from one idea to the next. There's no development of an argument. There is no progression. I have yet to read the Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, but I'm sure it's similar. Lists are both too constraining and too free-form, and neither serves to convey meaning effectively. Lists have a specific usage, the presentation of many, similar, "small" things. That's all they should be used to do. For anything more, you owe it to yourself to get it right.

¶ 895 Posted at 12.56 AM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

I hit upon the idea of making the Umapuma blogger files PHP instead of HTML so I could embed, well, whatever I wanted. All I'm using it for right now is the age counter, so the front page can automatically calculate Uma's age. It's really easy to do; I'm sure I'm going to come up with all kinds of ways to abuse this.

¶ 1067 Posted at 09.22 AM ⇒ No Comments ( web | software )

I found a more useful use for Blogger with PHP. The standard <BloggerArchives> tag prints out the archive links in ascending chronological order, i.e., oldest first. I'd rather have them in descending order, but I couldn't figure out if I could reverse the order with the standard Blogger tag. So I did this instead:

<?
    $archiveLinks = array(
        <BloggerArchives>
            "<$BlogArchiveURL$>" => "<$BlogArchiveName$>",
        </BloggerArchives>
    );
?>

<ul class="archive-list">
<ArchivePage><li><a href="<$BlogURL$>">Current Posts</a></li></ArchivePage>

<?
foreach (array_reverse($archiveLinks, true) as $link => $name)
{
    ?>
    <li><a href="<?= $link ?>"><?= $name ?></a></li>
    <?
}
?>
</ul>

And that's that.

¶ 1089 Posted at 10.10 AM ⇒ No Comments ( web | software )

I'm trying to change my posting style to be more appropriate to the format. I have over 30 drafts of lengthier posts in various stages of completion, some of which are a year old. I tend to think of this weblog as being like a book, where you present fully-formed thoughts, but it's not. If you present a half-baked idea in book, you're in trouble. Me, I can just say, "hey, that thing I said yesterday was dumb." That's not to say that baking things longer is a bad idea, just that I want to move the slider a little bit. I shouldn't assume that I need to fully develop an idea before publishing it. In some ways, that might be counter-productive. I figure it's more valuable to see the evolution of an idea than to be presented it as a fait accompli. It's kind of like showing your work in math class. The result is useful, but the process can be just as important.

¶ 1115 Posted at 01.17 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web | ideas )

I'd like to point you in the direction of TreeHugger's PostHugger feature. Basically, it's a standard post header using anchor tags so that you can keep clicking on the same part of the page without needing to scroll from post to post. It's handy, although probably much more so on a site like TreeHugger that sees numerous posts per day.

¶ 1201 Posted at 02.18 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

I've been using Opera as my primary browser at work for a couple of months now. I've really grown to like it. The key features for me are performance, stability, and session persistence. I am a massive, massive abuser of tabs, on the order of dozens open in a single window, with half a dozen windows open at once. The only thing that keeps me from opening more is that even Opera starts to crawl at this level, but it's still better than Firefox. Secondly... Opera has crashed maybe 3 times on me. Firefox would crash on me on average once a day. That was especially annoying because Firefox does not save your tab session. Opera does, which makes it easy to restart the application to flush out memory leaks (which both Opera and Firefox have), and also to restart in the rare case of a crash (would work for system crashes and power problems too, of course). I still haven't gotten completely used to Opera, and some things still annoy me, like how it switches you to the last used tab when closing a tab rather than the adjacent one like Firefox. Opera also doesn't have nearly as many extensions as Firefox either. Even so, I find the benefits greatly outweigh those inconveniences now that Opera is free. Give it a shot. You may like it. Ironically, the performance and stability issues are much less of a concern for me now that I am getting on the del.icio.us and RSS reader bandwagons. Still, better is better, right?

¶ 1202 Posted at 01.12 PM ⇒ No Comments ( software | web )

Using the words musing or random or thoughts to describe your weblog is l4m3.

¶ 1240 Posted at 09.41 PM ⇒ No Comments ( web )

I linked to Glenn Greenwald's weblog in my post on Bush's law-breaking. Ironically, since I post this on a weblog, I still tend to place more weight on statements like this when they appear in the mainstream media. There are many excellent weblogs like Glenn Greenwald's, but there are also many more that are awful information sources. The mainstream media has many flaws, but they're like McDonald's: you know what you're going to get. A more "independent" source has greater variability in quality. All of that is a long-winded way of saying the Boston Globe has an article analyzing Bush's law-breaking that reaches much of the same conclusions. The article begins:

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. Among the laws Bush said he can ignore are military rules and regulations, affirmative-action provisions, requirements that Congress be told about immigration services problems, ''whistle-blower" protections for nuclear regulatory officials, and safeguards against political interference in federally funded research.

The article explains why Bush hasn't wielded the veto pen: he's going to ignore laws he doesn't like anyway, so there's no need to formally veto it.

¶ 1265 Posted at 02.47 PM ⇒ No Comments ( issues | web )

A lot of websites use Javascript auto-focus to save you the click to put your input cursor into the right form field. The problem is that you might have already gotten there if the site load is slow. That's because the Javascript to set the focus usually runs only when the page has completely loaded. As the page is loading, you click your mouse pointer on the input field and start typing. When the page finishes loading, the script runs and moves the pointer to the input field where you're already typing. Sometimes this will delete what you've already typed, while other times you may end up typing the second part of your input in front of the first part. Either way, the fix is simple: don't set focus if the value in the input field has changed.

¶ 1423 Posted at 04.35 PM ⇒ No Comments ( software | web )

If you'd like to get on this whole weblog thing, go right ahead. Just don't tell anyone about it until you know you're going to stick with it. A weblog with just one post is worse than no weblog at all. A common pitfall is that you have a lot to say, but don't realize that's years worth of expression that's all been bottled up. Once you've gotten all that out, what are you going to do? There are no doubt millions of weblogs that lasted a week or even a few months, ending once their creators ran out of things to say 1 . Make sure you give it a couple of months and a few dozen posts before you even think about telling people about it. And above all, do not make your first post about starting a weblog.

¶ 1550 Posted at 11.20 AM ⇒ No Comments ( tips | web )

Why would I go and start another weblog?

¶ 1690 Posted at 08.39 PM ⇒ No Comments ( us | web )