Wiki weaving

An interesting idea, this one - wikis are one of those ideas that seem instinctively like a good one, but are very difficult to explicitly explain why. The idea of everyone being encouraged to contribute is somewhat alien in an IT world where user rights lock everything down. The obvious objection is that the Usenet factor will come into play and most postings will be more or less crap, but there seems to be something about wikis that form a community-wide bozo filter that prevents that happening.

Instinctively I can see a use in my line of work (or the potential line of work that is about to be proposed to the Most Backward Client, at any rate) - but it would be a question of whether it would be possible to adequately explain the concept and use to a bunch of people with more or less interest in the technology and processes behind the platform. Let alone convincing the Most Backward Client that it was an answer to some of their problems. Probably not, is my gut feel.

View from the bridge

It’s currently throwing it down in Leeds, which means that the river is looking a lot deeper and greyer than it did a few hours ago, and the greenhouse/balcony is getting wetter by the second. Which is giving the plants a new lease of life - compared to yesterday, they’re looking distinctly greener and more vibrant than they did. Give it a couple of weeks, and it will be like having a greenhouse in the sky - at the current rate of growth, we won’t be able to see out of the window for foliage…

Moblogging

Just to see if I can, this entry comes via a P800, GPRS and Opera.

First impressions: it works quite well, although the pages aren’t exactly optimised for a mobile client. There’s quite a lot of scrolling around that’s needed to find things, although it works quite well once you find wherever it is you’re supposed to be located on the page. Having the GPRS charges clicking up is a bit disconcerting, too.

Next job is to try a true mobile client…

Catblogging

Via Gromblog comes news of PawSense, an indispensible utilty for blogging feline owners everywhere. (That’s bloggers who own cats, not people who own cats that blog. Although the way blogging is taking off these days, it wouldn’t suprise me to hear of the first RSS-enabled cat being listed on Technorati.)

Useful as the software is, there was no mention of whether it was able to deal with this kind of situation…

ukblogs

Bloody hell, I’ve made it onto the ukblogs listing.

This means I shall have to start posting things…

MT hacking again

More surfing leads me to believe that a) email notification-per-category can’t be done at the moment; and b) it’s something that looks as if it’s going to be in MT Pro.

Bugger.

This could conceiveably be an excuse to find some Perl books and start hacking, but there are one or two other things I should be doing at the moment, not to mention the fact that the requirement for the hack is actually dependent on the client deciding that they’re actually going to deal with us. It could be a trifle premature…

Hacking Moveable Type

Much surfing has ensued looking for ways of implementing a “post-to-email-per-category” function within Moveable Type. The idea was to set up a ping to a distribution list so every time a post was posted (too many posts in this sentence?) to a particular category, an email would be fired off to alert the distribution list that something new had been posted.

Not difficult to do as far as announcing all new posts is concerned, but I can’t find a way of doing it per category. The nearest I can think of without the need to start hacking MT itself (which presumably would involve writing Perl, so beyond my current capabilities) would be to set up an RSS feed for each category (found a way of doing that) and using something like HEP to manage the conversion between the RSS and email.

Except that RSS is a pull mechanism, of course, so that there would need to be some kind of script to a) handle an inbound email announcing that something had been posted to the blog; b) work out in which category the post had been made; c) go off to the blog and pull down the RSS feed for the relevant category; and d) convert the feed to an email destined for the distribution list.

While I’m quite pleased with myself for working all this out by myself, I’m less pleased with the fact that this is way beyond my Perl skills. Normally at this point I’d gleefully reach for a manual and start to pick up yet another geeky skill, but time isn’t quite on my side on this one. It seems such a straight-forward requirement, but if someone’s done it I can’t find a mention of it, at least relevant to Moveable Type. Which probably means it’s something built into Radio, and that costs money

Business Week gets it wrong

Business Week on file-sharing: “As long as file-sharing is rampant, music labels, artists, and songwriters have little reason to invest in or promote the creative, flexible digital services that music lovers crave. “

Isn’t that a line that’s swallowed the RIAA’s argument hook, line and sinker? The fact that file-sharing is rampant is at least as much to do with the fact that there aren’t any creative, flexible digital services that John Q. Public can use, and nature abhors a vacuum. It didn’t stop Apple from launching iTunes, and if the competition is the type of brain-dead, restrictive garbage that typifies Pressplay etc, it’s not entirely suprising that they did. Surely the fact that more people are sharing files than voted for Dubya is a flag-waving, foghorn-blowing, brass band-accompanied signal that there’s a huge gap in the market that is waiting to be filled - something that the RIAA appears to be genetically-incapable of noticing…

As a matter of interest, who owns Business Week? Any connection to the conglomerates that also control the RIAA??

RSS feeds from the BBC news site

I was thinking the other day that the volume of news items on the BBC news site had reduced since they redesigned it - it seems that there are headlines that linger for two or three days in a way that never used to happen. I’m not sure if this is actually the case or whether it’s just a side effect of the redesign, but it was starting to make me spend more time on other news sites such as the Guardian.

Then through the wonder that is RSS syndication, I come across a post from Adrian Holovaty announcing the BBC’s RSS feeds for the news site. I think this is a big deal - not just because it’s damn useful from my point of view, but also because the BBC is about as prestigious a news organisation as it’s possible to get. If they are providing RSS feeds, then it’s only a matter of time before it goes completely mainstream. And that is going to have an interesting effect on my web browsing habits - I’m sure I spend less time in a browser and more in Outlook thanks to Newsgator, and this is only going to accelerate the trend.

Now if the Guardian would take the same approach, that would be my mainstream news sources pretty much taken care of…

Quote from Gary Hamel

“The market for pre-washed, ready-to-eat salad grew from nothing in 1980 to $1.4 billion by 1999. Send an email to everyone you know in your company: table-ready lettuce, $1.4 billion. If someone can do this with a vegetable, what the hell is our excuse?”