Scripting News

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 00:42:30 GMT

NY Times: "Howard Dean became the first Democrat to opt out of the presidential public financing system in 30 years."

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 22:54:19 GMT

Changes to Scripting News RSS.

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 01:41:22 GMT

Today's song: "Let's all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago."

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 01:02:53 GMT

Clark campaign: "We'll probably soft-launch the tools on Monday and label it a 'Public Beta.'"

Sun, 09 Nov 2003 01:36:41 GMT

Howard Greenstein's pictures of the lunar eclipse.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 19:48:46 GMT

My copy of Cadenhead's Radio book came yesterday. I've read two or three chapters, and it's excellent. We've been very lucky in this community to first have Matt Neuburg's book, published by O'Reilly in 1998, and now an up-to-date book on the 2003 environment published by Sams. If you've been wondering about the programming and content management environment behind the blogging tool and aggregator; the object database, verb set, outliner, debugger, website framework, get this book, it's great. I'm really excited about this. We should see another boost of growth in the community. The timing is also good because the new management team is booting up, and instead of asking Lawrence and Jake lots of questions, they can RTFM. ";->"

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 17:09:36 GMT

AP: "In a historic move, Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean will skip public financing and the spending limits that come with it."

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 17:13:56 GMT

Berkman fellow Jim Moore is at Dean headquarters in Burlington today.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 12:10:56 GMT

Wired: "Wallop is Microsoft's venture into the red-hot social-networking arena."

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 16:16:26 GMT

"Everyone now has got their guns locked and loaded at Howard Dean," said Rachel Gorlin, a Democratic strategist.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 12:26:39 GMT

Reminder, here's an RSS feed for upcoming New Hampshire visits by presidential candidates. If you attend one of these events and post about it on your weblog, please send me a link. Even better if you have pictures.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 13:39:25 GMT

Another dynamic OPML element in the Scripting News archive redesign. Each item links to a page where you can see the full content for a given month. Example.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 16:42:33 GMT

The new archive now has a primitive Referers page.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 18:48:32 GMT

Halley would like you to buy a copy of Penthouse. No kidding.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 10:54:45 GMT

Three years ago, a Dewey-Defeats-Truman front page. CNN had one too.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 10:45:47 GMT

Next trip to California is booked. Nov 22 through the 29th. Speaking at Stanford on the 24th. Visiting friends and family, doing light work, staying in Mountain View.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 12:23:14 GMT

Excellent NY Times article about Web sites with information about ski trips.

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 17:06:53 GMT

Library Planet gathers comments on Shirky's latest.

Changes to Scripting News RSS

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 22:50:26 GMT

Several changes today in the RSS feed for this weblog.

1. The beginning of category support. I now have a basic user interface in the outliner that allows me to route each post through a hierarchic set of categories of things that I am interested in. This maps directly on to the RSS 2.0 category sub-element of item. I'll post a screen shot of the user interface when it looks a little prettier.

2. Stopped generating the <skipHours> element. It was supposed to be a bandwidth-saver, but it confuses people who are emulating Scripting News, and I think Radio is the only aggregator that respects it.

3. Stopped generating the <ttl> element. The P2P network I was working on with Morpheus didn't deploy because I got sick last summer. When and if it ever comes back, I can uncomment the code that generates it.

4. Stopped generating the channel-level <category> element for Syndic8. This was intended as an olive branch, but they didn't reciprocate. If someone else is working on a taxonomy of feeds, let me know. Rule of Win-Win.

5. Changed <webMaster> and <managingEditor> to my Harvard email address.

6. In the <docs> element, point to the spec at Harvard, not at UserLand.

7. Add a channel-level <pubDate> element.

The shape of weblog software

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 13:01:06 GMT

Weblog software is going to be like mail servers. Lots of ways to deploy, every niche filled. For the masses, services like Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Blogging servers for corporations, inside and outside of the firewall. For schools, for the military, specialized systems for lawyers, librarians, professors, reporters, magazines, daily newspapers. The next President will have a blog. Writing for the Web, the prevailing form of publishing in the early 21st Century, will come in many sizes and shapes, flavors and styles. It won't be one-size-fits-all. Open formats and protocols will make this possible. I'd bet on the formats and protocols we're using now, RSS 2.0, OPML and the Blogger API.