Six Apart News & Events: March 2003

John Gruber of Daring Fireball posts an excellent interview he conducted with Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software, maker of NetNewsWire.

Geo::Sketch
Geo::Sketch powers "simple geographic animations on the web." The accompanying Movable Type plugin could be put to interesting use--a little map for each entry to show where you're posting from, perhaps?

Daylight Saving and MovableType
Yoz Grahame gives a really great analysis of the difficulties in handling daylight saving time and time zones. We may switch over to using the DateTime perl modules in a future Movable Type release, because they provide for much more fine-grained control over the time zone setting.

A spam fighter's work is never done
"Suresh Ramasubramanian's job is to stop junk e-mail from ever getting to your in box. But for every spammer he blocks, a dozen more rise up."

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference
Before April 18th, take advantage of the Early Bird/ Friends and Family Discount Take an additional 30% off of your fees when you register with the discount code et03ff.

When a Free Download isn't Free (wired.com)
An author [Glenn Fleishman] hoping to spur sales of his book is facing a gigantic bill after an online publishing experiment went horribly awry.

Publishing a project weblog (infoworld.com)
Jon Udell writes about using Movable Type and Radio for project weblogs.

Ben and Mena
If I told you I had it stuck in my head all day, would you hold that against me? It's a catchy song with Ween undertones.

An Interview With Mike Davidson of ESPN via Anil (devedge.netscape.com)
Why ESPN adopted standards-compliant markup.

Apple Updates the WebCore/JavascriptCore distributions

The last time they did this was shortly before releasing the public v60, so by following that logic, v68 might be coming soon.

TrackBack listing for PC Forum

Nikolaj Nyholm has set up a TrackBack listing page for PC Forum 2003.

Self-Explanatory Text

Erik Benson explores the self-explanatory (to a degree) nature of FOAF and RDF in a quest to create tools that can describe and understand FOAF documents.

By popular demand, we wrote up A Beginner's Guide to TrackBack.

Note that if you are using TrackBack in a method we have not illustrated, please feel free to ping the article using the TrackBack URL on the bottom of that page.

And so I have reached the stage in my Hiptop (Sidekick) relationship when I have been forced to call customer support to request a replacement. My Sidekick has entered a "deep sleep" mode and can not be awoken by the fix of reseting/powering on or pressing the "@, 1, 0" keys at the same time.

Before contacting T-Mobile customer support, I read up on the problem on various sites and realized that because none of the solutions were working, something more sinister was afoot. Since the shipping materials insist that getting a replacement is as easy as a phone call, I consider this situation to be a non-problem.

Continue reading 'Sidekick blues'...

Developing Movable Type Plugins

Timothy Appnel published a fantastic guide to developing plugins for Movable Type. He discusses adding simple tags to the templating system, creating text formatting plugins, and using the data persistence framework to store plugin data.

KeynoteUser.com

Tips, troubleshooting, etc. relating to Apple's Keynote software. My big complaint is that it can't export to HTML. But the data is all stored in XML, so it shouldn't be that hard to write something to export a presentation to HTML. Right?

How to Do Stuff

Aaron Swartz's How to Do Stuff series looks very promising: well-written instructional pieces without a lot of technical jargon. He also mentions atx, his text-formatting language, with a processor written in Python. (Which could be wrapped in Inline::Python to create a Movable Type text formatting plugin.)

We're giving a talk/presentation about Movable Type at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary tonight, March 13 at 7:30. Thanks to AKMA and everyone at Seabury for the opportunity.

Here's the description for our talk:

For small-scale web sites with community needs, a publishing tool like Movable Type can provide the necessary power and flexibility to produce a collaborative web site, without the confusing overhead of a larger content management system. This presentation will focus on how Movable Type can contribute to knowledge management and community-building, and on the ways in which Movable Type makes it easy for non-technical people to build web sites. In particular, we will apply these aspects of Movable Type to Seabury, and discuss how Movable Type could make Seabury's web sites easier to maintain.

We're looking forward to meeting the folks from Seabury, along with other Chicago-area webloggers. More information on getting to Seabury is available at AKMA's site.

Panel description:

For this high-tech show-and-tell, audience members are allowed 10 minutes to talk about their newest project. Come hear about all the new stuff your fellow registrants are currently working on!

PB is demonstrating how the notes section of SXSWblog works using TrackBack.

Also Chip Rosenthal showed the group Austin Bloggers, "the self-aggregating meta-blog for the Austin community.

Thomas Korte from Google shows Google News and asks for feedbacks and critiques.

From Ben Hammersley:

Weblog Hacks "Part of the Hacks series, the book will consist of at least 100 cool tricks, tips and techniques for the advanced blogger."

Making Feature-Rich, Movable Type RSS Files