Not virtual
February 28, 2005 | Life
I have a lot happening today so I left the house at around 6:15 AM to head into work. I swung by a client's office to pick up some reports, and waltzed to the door at about 6:45. Pulling on the handle, I was much surprised to find it locked! Both doors even. WTF??
And then I thought, Right, this building is not like the Internet. It is not always open, available for my use, waiting for my request. Employees get keys, the rest of us wait until they arrive. Then I thought: I must get a life; is anyone else caught off guard by events like this?
Ev surfaces
February 25, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
Evan Williams, founder of Blogger, today resurfaces with Odeo. [NY Times profile. Odeo blog.] Product will be introduced later this morning at the TED conference. Because of founder celebrity, and meme-full intersection with "podcasting," expect blogosphere cacophony.
Tech note: Odeo is built using Ruby on Rails, previously mentioned on this very weblog. Did I say this was going to be big, or what? (Yesterday, Rails had a major update to v0.10.0.)
Ajax web applications
February 25, 2005 | Products & Opportunites
Jesse James Garrett explains how Asynchronous JavaScript + XML ("Ajax") is changing the face of web-based user-interaction design. Canonical example: Google Maps. Web applications are changing rapidly for the better.
Visualizing Data
February 24, 2005 | Science
This is an amazing data visualization.
The reality of running a weblog
February 23, 2005 | Science
I didn't pay attention to Notio for a month, and accumulated nearly 900 comment spams. I deleted with extreme prejeduce. This morning I found a new legitimate comment on an older post. If I perhaps accidentially deleted a comment you made, my apologies. Comments are one of the great aspects of weblogs; I'm hesitant to turn them off. Spam sucks; I don't have time to look at each of 900 comments individually. If I check Notio each day then I can delete them more easily.
Moveable Type still doesn't have good tools to deal with all this. Yes, MT-Blacklist is okay. But why can't I say, "Entries older than X days; close the comments." The only choice is to send them to moderation, where I have to manually click a checkbox for each deletion.
And, I notice that I've also got trackback spam. Great. So, show me the entries where trackback is on, and trackback pings are present. No can do good buddy. I will have to go through each of the 133 posts, change a pop-up menu, and manually delete the spam trackbacks. I'm certainly not turning trackbacks on ever again. They're just not worth it.
From a product point of view, it's clear that the pace of change for Moveable Type is very slow, and perhaps still slowing. It's the hobbyist platform, or the "professional" platform, depending on your point of view. I imagine the license revenue is no where near seven figures (just a guess), and that TypePad, the hosted solution, is where all the cashflow comes from. They can make changes there and roll them out to tens of thousands of people in a few minutes.
The idea of running a public weblog is great. The reality is that there is a lot of grunt-work management. Perhaps the reality of all this management will motivate me to write more entries, otherwise why bother?
Kottke goes full-time
February 22, 2005 | People & Society
Details....
