Xagronaut

“Trackback” [Daypop Top 40]

Dave Winer thinks that the whole discussion concept in blogs lately is not so great.  But surely he’s seen all the rage lately about unintended uses of stuff, right?

“summarizing” [Daypop Top 40]

OK, don’t take this post as whining, but, after all, it is my blog, and I can come off as whining if I want.  Between working two jobs and other home duties, keeping up an active weblog is difficult.  If I have something profound or brilliant to say, I usually wait until Wednesday, so Dean might just pick it up for his Thursday technoCache over at .

I haven’t been posting quite as much as I would like.  I have, however, been journaling .  I currently use to maintain several spaces that keep my equivalent of the Franklin Covey Daily Record of Events.  I often journal things that might make good blog entries.  In fact, I often tag entries with some kind of designator to describe the type of post/entry.  One of these tags is [Blog].  This means “I don’t have the time to blog this right now, but I’m including it in my journal for blogging later.”

OK, so here are some of my [Blog] entries from March:

I couldn’t resist any longer.  After reading so many cool BlogSpot blogs, I had to get the RSS version.  Unfortunately, there is usually no obvious way on the blog page to get the RSS feed.  So, of course, Google came to the rescue.

Dean at went to to help bloggers at BlogSpot syndicate the articles.  I wonder if he knows about this article which gives .  Cool!

It says you can use this form to get the RSS feed:

http: //[BLOGNAME].blogspot.com/rss/[BLOGNAME].xml  

The websites4all site makes a great randomizer. Just scroll part way down and click somewhere in the “dark” (“light”). You come out with a high chance of seeing something you wouldn’t have found before. You might even find something you like a lot.

Another “randomizer” is the Recently Updated list on Weblogs.com.  You never know what you’ll find there.

What’s not random in the weblog world? The HotList/Top 100 and Ranking By Page-Reads lists on UserLand. That doesn’t seem to move much. It’s kind of like expecting a new artist to outsell the all-time hits of Elvis, The Beatles, and Michael Jackson. A world record is exactly that . So let’s move on. Thankfully, they do give you two time frames to use: Today and Since a Long Time Ago (currently 10/27/2001).

Here’s a good write-up on web services (“Five Myths About Web Services”) on John Patrick’s site that I found by “clicking in the dark” (through tweney).

This is great! I’m composing in a veritable notepad. Not connected. Not distracted by the blogosphere. Just writing typing. Later on I will post this to my Radio weblog and share it with you.

My train of thought seems to work a little bit better this way. When another spin-off happens, I can arrange as needed without waiting for the next post to develop a thought.

seems to be on my posts now that I have enabled the trackback feature in Radio. My reference to the Fade To White trick later in the post will surely ping again. The trackback feature seems to work well enough.

I can’t say as much for the mail-from-aggregator feature which has stopped working.

I get an email every hour that does not have any links–no body, just a message about “This message contains the latest headlines, courtesy of Radio Userland” (actually not a quote). Well, I tried to tweak it just a tad by adding a couple of extra content substitution tags (or so I thought) I was hoping to have the permalink and site link appear in the email (it doesn’t by default).

I’ve been writing a bookmarklet to parse out hyperlinks, text selections, and stylesheet references from a web page. While it has multiple uses, my primary goal is to create a custom “blog this” tool. I know they exist, but I’m reinventing the wheel. And whoever said that reinventing the wheel was bad, should consider the intellectual property wheel before applying that sentiment universally. Yeah, sometimes I reinvent the wheel, but *it’s my wheel*. And I’m starting to get to the point, familiarity-wise, where I might actually be able to pull off the .

And it was working great until I tried to get Radio to give me just one or two more links in the emails I was getting. You’re supposed to credit the source blog right? But the source blog is not consistently in the default mail-from-aggregator template. Is that too much to ask? It’s not as though the format of the email wasn’t intended to be customized. There’s even a dedicated interface for just that. After I tried the web interface unsuccessfully (because of faulty assumptions that this feature would work like the text file interface where ).

So I dug into the database, as I’m becoming accustomed to doing lately. I really don’t think I changed the code. I might have goofed and accidentally saved something, but I’m almost positive I didn’t. I was a little disappointed in digging through the code to find out that the substitutions are hard-coded string replacements. I can’t just pick some common substitutions like <%permalink%> on the item or <%link%> or <%url%> on the feed. Guess they just never thought of that.

There was some cool code that I did find, though. I was hoping it would save my butt, but no luck. Well, anyway, the cool part was that there was an “init” procedure that would create the default configuration entries if they were not already defined. Which means that if I wanted to restore the intial default settings, I had only to delete the existing values in Radio’s outliner database explorer interface. They even reappeared mysteriously just seconds after I whacked them. For a second, I thought Radio was flaking, or Windows had a repaint problem, or I was trying to delete too many items (yeah, 3) at once.

Nope. Radio magically detects or polls and discovers that the entries are gone and need to be recreated. Just like it does with the cached upstream server stuff. You delete the entries and it instantly detects that they’ve disappeared and reads them from the disk if they still exist.

Now I’ll have to do some research to find out if this is happening to anybody else. [Update: I found another tool called that to already have the links I need.]

So, I wonder if at will see this post before . Either way, it sounds like he has a problem similar to the one Sam Ruby solved with the –changing the color of the contents displayed in his deprecated RSS feed. I was puzzled at first when I saw it, but it was definitely effective.

Since he has , he is advertising his new feed. I’m a little confused, and a little surprised, too, with the next change going on there. I haven’t read enough to get all the background. Now, maybe this is a second blog, and I can understand that. The cool thing is that , a . I had a tough time getting back to his because he’s done a pretty effective job of redirecting his Radio weblog version to the Movable Type blog, which ironically still has a link to his Radio version which redirects back to Movable Type. Oh, well. I think it’s par for the course when trying to manage all this stuff despite tools that are only partially customizable, reasonable, agreeable, etc.

Man, is really starting to catch on–so much so that I can barely keep up with the host of blogging tools and news aggregators. Yowza! Well, I had better before it’s a given that everyone can publish without thinking or without writing code, and .

Of course, I’m all about . That’s half the reason that with , and half the reason I’m impressed by it. It’s kind of a love-hate thing. [Note: I would give you a couple more links for the love-hate phrase in the last sentence, but I've already spent 2 and a half hours tweaking this post. Good night.]

Some of my blogging friends like Randy McRoberts at the use as their weblog tool.  I was hoping to find a way to subscribe to an RSS feed for the Greymatter weblogs I read.

I found these two links on Google that might help Greymatter users produce an RSS feed, but since I’m not a Greymatter user/administrator/guru, I certainly am not qualified to pontificate on the usefulness and appropriateness of the content:

Could some of you Greymatter users enlighten me on how to get an RSS feed from your weblogs?

OK, OK, just one more style tweak, I promise!  You probably won’t notice, but I’ve been tweeking my templates once again.  We’ll see how it turns out.

Man, I am really having to spend some time tweaking this Radio theme to my liking.  It doesn’t seem to have a place for comments on the item template!  My apologies folks–if you have wanted to leave a comment on any of my recent posts, I will try to have a comment link available soon.  Thanks for being patient (cricket sounds).  Yeah, like anybody’s just dying to respond. 

On another note: I have this problem.  See, I often find myself tweaking configuration files for various applications in various locations on my computer (Linux or Windows, it matters not).  After a while I have 40 or 50 or more files that have my personal touch.  But what if I ever have to back up my configuration or recreate it.  Tracking all of the file tweaks I have made is troublesome.  I’m not habitual at things like that.  Maybe I should start keeping a log of configuration file tweaks now using something like TreePad.

Back to the missing comments link.  Apparently, there is some magic macro name that I need to discover that I just need to insert into the template text file for a single item.  It appears that adding <%commentLink%>, it seems to do the trick.  Phew!