Simple and Powerful Text Formatting
Web-based content management systems have always had trouble allowing non-technical people to author content intended for the web. One method systems have used to simplify formatting is to replicate common authoring controls using Javascript. For example, Movable Type has buttons for bold, underlined, and italicized text, and a button to create links. In Movable Type, plugins can also add global text filtering capabilities, by adding filters to common template tags. And there are many plugins that do this, providing everything from quote education to Wiki formatting.
But there are problems with the global filtering approach that we hope to solve in the next version of Movable Type.
Press and Discovery
Based on the endless stream of weblog press (and the limited number of unique angles), I've come to the conclusion that a news article about weblogs is akin to a working volcano model at a science fair. Sure, it attracts everyone's attention for a minute or two, but can anyone really say that they learned anything new?
Here's a mainstream-friendly story I'd like to see written about weblogging:
The way weblogs are changing the way we're finding (and asking for) information on the web.
NetNewsWire Pro public beta
I'm posting this entry from the much-anticipated NetNewsWire Pro public beta released today.
This 1.0b1 release of NetNewsWire pro includes a weblog editor, notepad, Find command, AppleScript support, and more.
Good to see the RSD support -- it makes it quick and easy to post to one's weblog.
I'm still trying to see if there is a new option to display the titles and descriptions in the manner proposed by Jason in August.
The weblog editor is intuitive and simple to use, though I have one small peeve. While revising this post, I've clicked on an icon for an older post of mine and lost my changes. I'm not sure why I thought it would save my changes, but I did. Perhaps I just shouldn't be clicking around nervously.
I do like the "Preview" feature very much.
I live in NetNewsWire so I think I could get used to posting via its weblog editor rather than the Movable Type web interface. However, I need the ability to assign categories and at the present this is impossible since the Movable Type category method (numeric id versus name) is not supported in either the Blogger or MetaWeblog APIs.
Still, this is going to be an interesting environment to explore and it's great to see the work that has gone into the program.
Miscellany
According to the developers, the latest Chimera builds are very stable and offer a bunch of new features. Of particular interest:
Rendezvous support was added, allowing you to see local servers (for OS X 10.2.3 and later, enabled via a hidden preference)
It looks like this just shows FTP servers (like the newest version of Transmit also does). It would be neat to auto-discover HTTP services, as well, though I assume this would require modifying Apache as Apple has the FTP server, making it Rendezvous-aware.
In other news, yet another reason to use Perl: Perl Powers Christmas:
The elves also encountered a growing problem from e-mail spam. For a while, they naively assumed that Santa should be sending viagra and his bank details to relatives of the President of Nigeria, but eventually they twigged that odd things were afoot. A bit of research, and some help from the Perl community, led them quickly to Mail::Audit and spamassassin as an optimal filter.
Dan Gillmor's EJournal
Dan Gillmor, technology columnist for the Mercury News, previews his MT-powered weblog.
Broadband in San Francisco
It seems as if we have 30 days to find a new DSL provider. DirectTV, our current provider sent us an email yesterday informing us that:
With the dramatic change in the capital markets and the significant shift in the telecom operating environment, DIRECTV Broadband can no longer stand as an independent business...[and] will discontinue operations.
We chose DirectTV because, relatively speaking, it was a small provider and certainly not the nightmare which can be Pacific Bell. So now, we must look for a new provider.
Anyone in San Francisco have any good suggestions?
Support for RSD
Ben Hammersley has posted an index template to support RSD for Movable Type's XML-RPC implementation. RSD (Really Simple Discoverability) allows client software to auto-discover RPC services using nothing more than the URL for a blog. For example, this greatly simplifies the steps involved in setting up a desktop blogging client.
We'll be adding RSD support to the default templates in the next version of MT. You can use Ben's template (linked above) to support RSD now.
More Like This From Others
Ben Hammersley's LazyWeb challenge to build a "More Like This From Others" is a fantastic use of TrackBack and RSS.
Additional Update: David Raynes has released a plugin to insert your MLTFO data into your Movable Type weblog.
Update: I've released a new version (0.2) of the MLFTO implementation. The new version outputs the list of entries in RSS, and the core of the code has been moved into a module, MLTFO.pm, which should make it easier to integrate into scripts/MT.
Here's an implementation in Perl, mltfo.pl (released under the Artistic License). It requires LWP::UserAgent, XML::RSS, and HTML::Parser. (It is also indebted to the comments on Ben's entry, above, for ideas on discovering the RSS file given a permalink.)
Spring 1.0
I spent a good chunk of time yesterday playing with the latest version of the OS X application Spring, released yesterday by userCreations.
Obviously, right now, in its early stages, it lacks the amount of objects and tasks that would allow it to supplant traditional desktop and task management. Regardless, it appears to be a very cool tool to develop for and use. Especially interesting is the act of imagining relationships between objects -- like an artichoke object to a FedEx object (you'll have to download Spring to see what I mean.) For the record, I think that connection should spawn a google search for "rules and regulations for shipping vegetables via FedEx." :)
What's also neat to see is that they're integrating TrackBack into the system to enhance the collaboration aspect of the tool. Read more about what they're doing on their company website.
MT-RefSearch v0.7
Richy C. has released MT-RefSearch v0.7, a substantial update to the Eliot Landrum's original script released in July of this year.
MT-RefSearch (a PHP script for Movable Type + MySQL users) helps travellers from search engines by finding related content on your blog. When a searcher clicks your blog from Google, Yahoo!, or any of the other 243 supported engines, MT-RefSearch does a query on the Movable Type database and outputs links that are of interest to the traveller. Besides having numerous improvements for error correction and configuration, the latest version also includes JavaScript to highlight the search terms on the page the visitor is looking at.
Click on the first result of this Google query to see it in action.
Blogger API Update
Steve Jenson has responded to many of my concerns regarding the Blogger API. He plans to change field names incompatible with the metaWeblog API to be compatible; he's changing the method name prefix to blogger2 (which will aid non-Blogger server implementations); he'll be changing getRecentPosts to getPosts for clarity; he'll be adding an offset parameter to the search filter struct.
PicturePop
Todd points to PicturePop, a free "contextual menu plugin for MacOS X that allows you to simply and quickly show one or a group of pictures that can be read by Quicktime, instantaneously, without opening an application."
TrackBack and Cross-Weblog threading
Jeremy Zawodny states the need for "some sort of cross-weblog threading system" and questions whether this should be TrackBack. I've been thinking about the value of TrackBack during the past couple of conference days -- mostly because of its use on the Supernova Group Weblog.
Blogger API, Version 2.0
So, a developer preview of the version 2.0 Blogger API was posted tonight.
First impression: it works well for Blogger (and not necessarily everyone else). And that's not a bad thing, of course--this is the Blogger API. But note that, in the case of Movable Type, our interest in this matter is in hoping that tools originally built for the Blogger API can be also used for MT-powered blogs without the loss in functionality that currently exists. With that in mind, some of the missed opportunities for interoperability are a bit disappointing.
Notes on Weblogging Panel at Supernova
We've been at the Supernova conference for the past two days. Today has been fairly weblog-centric with mentions in almost every panel. Meg Hourihan, Dave Winer and Nick Denton presented a talk entitled "Are Weblogs the Next Platform?" Many of the usual questions were addressed:
The Format Question: What makes a weblog a weblog?
The Venture Capitalist Question: What is the monetary value of weblogging?
The Gender Question: Where are all the women? (Thankfully, only mentioned briefly)
What piqued my interest was the discussion about the difference between weblogs and other forms of media (magazines and newspapers) and messaging (ie email, chat, telephone). Nick Denton cites weblogging as an opportunity to enable the MicroPublisher with inexpensive and easy tools. There is also discussion about the power of the weblog permeating traditional media.
Continue reading 'Notes on Weblogging Panel at Supernova'...
Verifying PGP Signatures
pb posted a while back showing how PGP signatures could be integrated into comment systems. It's a slick idea. Of course, as mentioned in the comments on his post, this really only becomes useful if there is a way to verify that the signature is valid, then use a web of trust to determine that the signer is who he says he is.
You can use your desktop PGP client to perform the verification; but what would be really cool is a web-based verification service with a trust web. Verification is easy using my Crypt::OpenPGP perl module:
use Crypt::OpenPGP;
my $pgp = Crypt::OpenPGP->new(
AutoKeyRetrieve => 1,
KeyServer => 'pgp.mit.edu'
);
my $res = $pgp->handle( Data => $data )
or die $pgp->errstr;
print $res->{Validity};
This receives a signed comment in $data, then attempts to verify it using the public key of the user who signed it. The neat thing is that the public key is automatically fetched from a PGP keyserver if it's not already in the local public keyring. So you don't even have to post your public key anywhere to make this work (provided that you have your key in a keyserver, that is), because the signature itself stores your key ID. (That said, though, key distribution could really use some improvements, and it would be great to be able to embed a link to a public key into a <link> tag or something equivalent.)
You can download a script that demonstrates this functionality. You'll need version 1.03 of Crypt::OpenPGP or later (and note that it can be kind of a pain to install all of the prerequisites).
Use PGP!
There are many reasons to use PGP, chief among them the ability to establish a digital identity that prohibits fakery, by digitally signing your mail (and, perhaps, blog comments). The more paranoid (perhaps rightly so) will also point out that encrypting all of your correspondence is good practice.
The recent release of updated PGP software for Mac OS X and Windows is a good sign that PGP, which had languished for a while under the reign of NAI, is making a comeback, as it were. If you prefer a free software alternative, install MacGPG (just updated per the GnuPG 1.21 release); the GPGMail plugin adds integration with Mail.app.
Blog from your Remote
Nathan Torkington suggests several plugins that could be written for the SliMP3 device. Here are two more:
1. Post an entry to a blog.
It looks like the server accepts data via the remote control keypresses. So you could write a server module to accept the text of a blog entry, then post it via XML-RPC to your blog. Of course, it would take about an hour to write a blog entry using the remote control, but that's just a minor inconvenience.
2. Display RSS feeds.
This would be slightly more useful than the first. Similar to the BBC News Ticker already written, this module could grab your RSS feeds and display new stories on the SliMP3 device screen.
