Scripting News

Sat, 10 Aug 2002 01:10:15 GMT

Evan Williams: How We're Spending Our Time At Pyra.

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 22:15:53 GMT

Jake Savin: "Blogrolling.Com now supports OPML." Bing!

Sat, 10 Aug 2002 01:12:51 GMT

Philip Pearson: "Nothing says 'this is not a waste of my time' like being the top link in Doc Searls's blogroll!"

Sat, 10 Aug 2002 02:12:41 GMT

Rolling on the floor, laughing. ";->"

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 14:02:37 GMT

Fast Company only begins to sketch the Washington-Hollywood power grab. It's true Silicon Valley isn't doing anything to stop it. Our reps in Washington also represent the SouthLand. But I part company with the author of the article on two counts. 1. No matter what the discredited venture capital industry does or doesn't do, the laws they're passing won't stand up to a First Amendment test, and 2. Bad laws are not obeyed by the people. "Think different," as one Silicon Valley company requests.

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 14:35:31 GMT

John Robb: \"The RIAA, following its sue everybody strategy, is ready to go after the Librarian of Congress.\"

1/1/1904; 12:00:00 AM

Sam Gentile: "How do we get people to collaborate?"

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 18:26:48 GMT

Bryan Bell: "I am now a disciple of Mark."

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 14:39:56 GMT

Last night's movie, Sadie McKee, starring Joan Crawford, was fan-tas-tic. I never thought I'd develop a taste for movies that were filmed in the 1930s. I wish they'd make movies like this now. The songs were great too, including the theme -- All I Do Is Dream Of You. "Morning, noon and nighttime, too; all I do the whole day through, is dream of you." Yes, that's what being in love is like. You must remember this..

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 14:45:54 GMT

Weekly smoking update: 56 days since my last puff.

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 16:25:42 GMT

Joe Eszterhas: "Some movie stars are more likely to play a part if they can smoke -- because they are so addicted to smoking that they have difficulty stopping even during the shooting of a scene."

What about TrackBack?

Fri, 09 Aug 2002 14:09:53 GMT

While I was in the hospital in June, the Movable Type folks implemented a feature called TrackBack.

I'm not exactly sure all that it can do, but here's at least part of the story. (I'm posting this so I can get corrected if I don't understand the feature. It occurs to me that this post could use the feature, heh.)

Anyone, anywhere can send a message to any Movable Type server to associate a URL with a weblog post. That URL will be shown in the list of TrackBack links for the post.

Further, based on an email from Matt Mower, for some reason that I don't understand, this can only work with Movable Type servers. I doubt this, because from all outward appearances it is using HTTP, which could be emulated by any program capable of doing HTTP. Matt thinks this feature should be implemented with XML-RPC. I'm not sure it'll take off no matter what it's implemented in.

Here's the problem. By design it seems to assume that everyone plays fair. But eventually we all attract a relatively small number of people who would mark up every post with trash talk, if given the chance to. It's a predictable process. That's why I don't have a discussion group here (I used to), or a comments feature. It's why MSNBC is moving to weblogs over discussion software. It's basically why weblogs have a future for thoughtful discourse where mail-list-like collaboration tools are dead-ends. When I think about evolving weblogs, I try to avoid features that turn them into discussion groups.

Follow-up: A page of non-Movable Type implementations of TrackBack. Hit-Or-Miss implemented it. BlogRoots has a page called BlogPopuli that's based on TrackBack. They have a tutorial that's only for people who run Movable Type, and have a ping form. Do a view source on the ping form to see how to do it programmatically. Not sure if all TrackBack-capable sites support this form (probably not). Thanks to Anil Dash and Megnut for the pointers and info.

Rahul Dave: "Tracking can be simpler, and per choice, less noisy than trackback."

Evan: "Wouldn't it be neat if I could somehow automatically link this post to Dave's post?"

Dave: "What's so great about automatic?"