Scripting News

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 04:12:31 GMT

NY Times: "People with knowledge of the deal, which gave Pyra founders and investors shares in privately held Google, say it was signed without any real plan as to how the two companies would work together."

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 02:36:17 GMT

Daypop now has a ranking algorithm. Dan Chan explains.

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 15:37:31 GMT

Jeff Walsh: Blogging and Journalism.

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 17:34:54 GMT

Don Park: "Blogspace is a massive ant colony."

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 18:34:40 GMT

Glenn Fleishman: "In representing blogs to a non-blogging audience, reporters seem drawn to sweep them into a single heap."

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 18:17:11 GMT

Cleaning out the garage, I came across a column I wrote for Infoworld in 1982. I just typed it into my weblog so I wouldn't lose it again. I find it really interesting to see how many of my writing gestures were already established 21 years ago. Yet it's very anachronistic, deliberately so. 256K chips were unthinkable in 1982. Heh. Projection screens were rare. But syntax errors are still with us.

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 18:26:20 GMT

Steve Zellers: "It makes me cringe when Dave talks about throwing out lots of junk."

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 16:23:21 GMT

Five years ago today, Vignette, a competitor, opened a demo app that rendered Scripting News in their environment using the XML format of the day. This was an important milestone on the road to RSS 0.91.

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 21:20:05 GMT

Nelson Minar: "Trillian Pro has an RSS plug-in that delivers blog content to your IM client."

Mon, 24 Feb 2003 05:19:07 GMT

According to Bruce Loebrich, Trillian only reads RSS 0.91, and not 2.0.

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 16:49:16 GMT

Joey deVilla, the accordian guy, exposes a new sexy thing going on in Japan. You won't believe your eyes, and you'd be right not to.

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 15:57:18 GMT

How did I miss the charity wet T-shirt contest among the blogging babes?

Noah

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 15:58:27 GMT

Yesterday I mentioned talking with Noah Glass, but I didn't mention that Noah is the owner and developer of the audio blogging tool I linked to yesterday. He said he was doing something called OddBlog. Hadn't heard of it. He said "you wrote about it on Scripting News." Oh shit Alzheimer's again. "I write about lots of things," I said, "my memory ain't what it used to be." He said "you wrote about it today." Gulp. It's really getting bad. I asked for the name again. He said OddBlog. I looked at the site. \"Ohhhh AudBlog,\" I said.

There's problem number one, the name. It's descriptive, not memorable, and impossible to pronounce.

Problem number two, which I reported yesterday, is that it only works with Blogger. After talking with Noah, I understand why. Blogger is centralized, making configuration easy. Radio is not centralized, and further the user might be behind a firewall or NAT and unable to receive an XML-RPC call, which is how Noah's software works. One solution, and it's not a very pretty one, is to do a mail-to-weblog, or use instant messaging (AIM or Jabber), but then the user might not have the features enabled, or want them enabled. I suggested that we work this out with Brent Simmons, who has had to traverse many of these issues in his work on NetNewsWire. Probably for Radio users the only option that will work is some kind of polling in the opposite direction, or just send me an email and I'll do the copy-paste.

Of course, some wankers out there have given me shit for criticizing Noah's product. Comes with the territory. Alan Kay said that Macintosh was the first computer worth criticizing. I love Noah and he knows that. I've always admired his spirit, and AudBlog (change the name please!) reflects that. I want it to be a success so I tell him how I think it can be better, or in this case, made to work at all. To those who think they're better software designers, I quote Scoop Nisker. "If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own."