Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Progress report on the connection between Wordpress and the OPML Editor (in a Wordpress post, of course).  

Hey the Wordpress tool is working so well, I thought I'd release the source. Caveat: No support. If you have a problem, post a comment and maybe we'll figure out what's going wrong. Let's have fun! 

David Czarnecki has Blojsom working with the OPML Editor. 

Hacking Netflix: "When did AOL become cool again?" 

I bought the video iPod today. It's great. Can't wait to watch a movie on it. (Postscript: An anonymous reader sent me a gift on the iTunes music store, Alice's Restaurant. Now that's just plain nice. Thanks, whoever you are.) 

TopTenSources publishes "a daily 'Top 10' site of the best newsfeeds on the Internet." Each day's list is also available in OPML, and I've linked it into the Community Directory in the right margin here on Scripting News. 

Hey there are now twenty feeds in the Web 2.0 Workgroup. There must be some kind of karmic balance to the universe. When there are thirty, maybe we'll be at Web 3.0? Hey. 

Got an email from Jim Moore saying his dog ate his cell phone. He says it really happened. Wow. Yesterday I heard an interview on NPR with English teacher and novelist Frank McCourt, saying the most creative writing were the absence notes students wrote for themselves. He assigned them to write excuses for famous people like Richard Nixon and Lee Harvey Oswald.  

I hate to say this but I think I'm going to buy a video iPod today. I went down to Best Buy yesterday and got the demo. I was pretty enchanted. I hate Steve Jobs for getting me to do this, though. :-( 

Adam Green: "That is his strategy: nag until defacto." 

Adam's a really smart guy, and I'm glad he's blogging. So much stuff to add to his posts. My two role models for evangelism are Bill Gates and Guy Kawasaki, two very effective promoters of ideas. I'm sure Adam will appreciate this story. I ran into Gates at a Comdex in Las Vegas in 1985 or 1986. He was already an icon, and being in his presence was a bit intimidating. Now a lot of guys in his position would use that advantage to dominate, but not Gates. He nagged me to do a Windows app. There's no doubt my support was far from a deal-maker for him, but his persistence impressed me. A good evangelist wants to win over everyone, or almost everyone. I suspect Gates was actually kind of happy he didn't have to work with Jim Manzi.  

And Steve Jobs is not a role model for me (although at times I am tempted). Why? Well I really want to succeed, but sometimes, in some ways, I am too proud to beg.  

Re the heads up below, I was able to get it working in short order. This will probably only be of interest to about a dozen people, but it's important. Now the OPML Community Server is completely self-contained, it does not depend on an external server for static serving. I've posted my notes on the server itself. Even if you don't care, could you click on the link to make sure you see the page, with a picture of Harry Truman at the top of the page. Many thanks! 

This week's Frontline about Katrina and politics was, of course, fascinating. It turns out the big issue in disaster response is an idea that's also very big in our world. They need their systems to be interoperable. Some cities buy body armor for their dogs before they get their systems to work together. That's the biggest reason people die, they say. 

Heads up to people in the OPML Editor community. I'm pretty sure I've figured out how to easily get the OPML Community Server to work on port 80 without having to do an extensive test round, with no other web server required. I had hoped we could entice some people from the Frontier-kernel list to pitch in, but I won't hold it up. I think I should be able to post a howto on this before the end of the week.