adoption curve dot net

I’ve been meaning to mention this one for a while, but a post from Johnnie Moore has finally prompted me to get on with it. John Strande, the Business Evolutionist (how’s that for a job title?) has set up StoryBlog – a sort of clearing house for anecdotes and stories that you can use in presentations and so on. There’s a small but growing collection – not all are necessarily going to sound right for a non-American audience (some are a tad on the shmaltzy side), but there’s a number that would be quite good to use in that awkward opening stage of a presentation.

Of course, if you’re completely stuck for presentation inspiration, then a browse through the archives of Beyond Bullets could be what you need…

It seems that not everyone at Sony is asleep at the wheel – just having a looong lie-in. According to ZDNet,

Sony confirmed on Wednesday that it is working to add native MP3 support to its portable music players–a major strategy reversal that could help it compete more effectively with rivals such as Apple Computer.

A long overdue awakening to the harsh realities of the world – I can imagine that there’s a strategy battle-royal raging inside Sony right now, with the consumer electronics people watching Apple et al pulling away, and the content lawyers stubbornly insisting that it’s MP3 over their dead bodies. Of course, it remains to be seen whether Sony’s idea of supporting MP3 is the same as yours and mine – no doubt there will be serious internal pressure for some kind of half-arsed DRM scheme. The history of Sony isn’t particularly reassuring – they’re still stubbornly flogging Memory Stick, after all.

But I find the comment about maintaining the ATRAC-only stance at the Sony Connect store interesting. It’s easy to sneer at Sony for doing this, not to mention locking out non-Windows users. But then you have to remember that that’s exactly what Apple are doing with iTunes and AAC – except they have the benefit of selling a device that people actually want.

Ranchero, they of NetNewsWire, have just made a version one beta of their offline blog client available – MarsEdit 1.0. Given that NetNewsWire is the most popular news aggregator for the Mac, it seems logical that MarsEdit is also going to be popular, so I downloaded it and gave it a whirl. Specifically I was whirling it against Ecto, which is the offline client that I currently use.

First impressions are reasonable – it’s a chrome-less Cocoa app which uses a pretty standard layout – if you’re familiar with any other offline client, you’ll be able to find your way around MarsEdit reasonably painlessly. It supports multiple blogs, which are displayed in a drawer on the right, together with a list of previous posting in the main window. Creating a new post, or editing an existing one, brings up a new window, with post options such as categories and comments status in a drawer.

Editing posts

The editing screen is basically an HTML editor – there’s a drop-down list of common tags, and a custom drop-down list where you can add your own. Selecting a tag drops the HTML into the editing window and places the cursor inbetween – so tags are automatically closed. Highlighting a selection of text and inserting a tag places them at each end of the selection. Adding a link pops up a dialog box where you can enter the URL, and if the clipboard contents are a valid URL this is automatically entered for you. Other properties – alt text or target for example – have to entered manually.

Within the main editing screen, there are buttons to select the extended entry, summary or keywords, so you can enter pretty much all the post contents that you’re likely to want. The HTML code is displayed in a contrasting font so it’s obvious what’s HTML and what’s not.

Inserting images is done through a separate option – files can be uploaded and inserted in a single action, although I didn’t test this as it’s not supported by Wordpress.

The preview window gives you an approximation of what the post will look like, although it doesn’t pick up the template from your blog itself. You can enter an approximation of your blog template within MarsEdit itself.

Managing weblogs

There’s a pretty straight-forward dialog to create or edit individual weblog accounts, and MarsEdit attempts to autodiscover the RPC url, although this didn’t work on my Wordpress blog. It supports pretty much all the known blogging engines, plus generic Blogger, Blosoxm and MetaWeblog standards.

Conclusions

It’s not bad for a first attempt, but it’s completely outstripped by the latest version of Ecto in a number of areas. Firstly, there’s no WYSIWYG interface – you edit the posts in HTML, and although you can preview the layout, you can’t edit in the preview screen. Ecto provides a rich text interface, and although it’s not 100% foolproof in the current beta, it’s useful to be able to edit in what-you-see-is-almost-what-you-get mode. I wasn’t able to figure out if MarsEdit will give you a live preview either – although there’s a checkbox on the Preview pane, it didn’t seem to do anything.

Ecto also gives you much greater control over tasks like inserting links – it allows you to edit alt text and target windows for each link, whereas MarsEdit requires this to set globally or manually edited.

Although it’s a perfectly solid application, offline blog clients have moved on – Ecto’s WYSIWYG editing is now setting the standard for functionality. No doubt it will sell well on the back of NetNewsWire’s reputation as a good news aggregator, but for my money the latest version of Ecto is the better package – I’ve not been tempted to change.

To celebrate the fact that my desktop is finally (more or less) sorted out, I thought I’d try and embarrass myself by starting a meme. You can play along at home – just post a picture of your desktop (or wherever else you work) and trackback to this post…

Courtesy of Steve Rubel, here’s an ingenious way of turning non-RSS enabled news sources into RSS feeds, using GoogleNews and Gnews2RSS. Exceedingly useful for keeping up with those sites that haven’t got around to smelling the coffee and turning on their RSS feeds.

A similar way of achieving the same ends is through NewsIsFree, who have taken a portal approach – they claim to monitor 13,166 sources (currently) and offer a range of premium services. Interestingly they’re also including advertisements interleaved with the actual news items, something which I’m finding suprisingly unobtrusive. Effectively I just scan over the ads in much the same way as I would an article that doesn’t interest me – so it’s not entirely clear what kind of CPM metrics could be used to work out the ad’s payback.

But this type of ultra-personalised news is most definitely the future – now if only electronic paper would hurry itself up and arrive…

This is a test post to check the webfeeds…

the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy on Radio 4.

Geek heaven…

I’ve just been hit by a tsunami of comment spam from someone on a network in Sweden (assuming that they’re not spoofing their IP address, of course.) I’ve set Wordpress to automatically moderate all comments so they don’t get posted unless I specifically allow each one, but it’s still a pain having to delete a hundred-odd rogue ones. So as they were all coming from a specific IP address, I’ve banned it using a .htaccess file.

For my future reference, this is the format – in the .htaccess file, add the following lines:

order allow,deny

deny from 122.222.333.444

deny from 999.888.777.

allow from all

The first line sets the default action – allow first, then deny.

The second line denies access from a specific IP address

The third line denies access from a specific subnet – i.e. anything with an address of 999.888.777.1 to 999.888.777.254

The fourth line allows access to all other addresses.

The best part is looking at the server logs, and seeing them battering their heads against the block…

I might find his “bloggers are sad wankers who do nothing but post articles online expressing their often fatuous opinions” opinion a little – erm – ironic given that’s pretty much what he does for a living, but Andrew Orlowski does spout some sense every now and again:

Both the technology people and the music people are sharing the collective hallucination that technology will save them but it won’t

Somehow, you’d expect David Trimble – a lawyer-turned-politician who always seems to have an uptight holding-my-breath-until-I-turn-blue expression that makes me wonder if he went into politics because he found law lecturing too exciting – to have a wife called Daphne, wouldn’t you?

(She’s a solicitor, too…)