The Ten Thousand Year Blog

Content migration of Ten Thousand Year Blog

Fri, 04 Jul 2003 00:15:33 GMT

I plan on migrating content from this Radio UserLand blog to Tiki, but this will take some time to sort out the best way to do this. Tiki uses MySQL as part of its backend, so likely I'll try some kind of conversion and data import of the Radio UserLand XML files.

Goodbye to Radio UserLand and hello to DavidMattison.ca on Tiki

Thu, 03 Jul 2003 22:09:43 GMT

I'm saying goodbye and it was fun time with Radio UserLand over the past year. My subscription has 14 days till it elapses and I get bounced from the UserLand server. So set your bookmarks now to http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki where The Ten Thousand Year Blog continues in a slightly different form. The RSS 1.0 feed URL for all blogs (two at the moment) at my new home on the Web is http://www.davidmattison.ca/tiki/tiki-blogs_rss.php

The Tiki Wiki version I'm running is 1.6.1 and I am eagerly awaiting the release of 1.7 which updates the blog functionality of Tiki so it's more in tune with other blogging software, with features like multipage posts, posting by e-mail, permalinks and trackbacks.

In case you're wondering, Tiki Wiki, as its name implies, includes wiki functionality, and it runs on a LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP)-type platform. I gave up on Zope as being needlessly complex and with too steep a learning curve for my requirements. Tiki gives me everything and more in one open source, free, sweet package.

The Bot Wars: MSNbot vs Googlebot vs The Bloggers

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 14:28:53 GMT

The Bot from Redmond.

This story is about the search engine robot released into the Web wild by Microsoft. You can read about MSNbot at the source. Some bloggers no like.

[via Scripting News, 02003 06 18, via Zawodny, 02003 06 17]

Gemstar phases out eBooks

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 14:23:50 GMT

Jenny Levine (The Shifted Librarian) posted a long e-mail from Gemstar announcing the company is phasing out its eBook product line. Effective immediately they stop selling their eBook reader (the handheld device) and on July 17, 2003 all sales of books and periodicals. Product support will continue "for at least the next three years" (until July 16, 2006).

Jenny Levine noted in her post that:

"While I hate to see ebooks decline even further, this was entirely predictable. If you're going to hang your hat on proprietary standards and dedicated devices, you'd better be prepared for the worst. The whole point of ebooks is portability. I knew this genre of ebook technology was dead the minute they locked down their content to the point where I couldn't put it on a new ebook reader that they themselves had manufactured. I completely gave up years ago when they stopped allowing users to load their own content onto the devices.

It's a shame, but the truth is that we can do better. The lesson here is don't get hung up on paranoia and DRM. The Apple iTunes Store can attest to that basic fact."

[via The Shifted Librarian, 02003 06 18]

RSS feed via POP3

Wed, 18 Jun 2003 14:56:19 GMT

Graeme Foster: "Why not expose RSS feeds as POP3 and have an RSS aggregator in any email client?" [via Scripting News]

Sounds like an idea whose time may have come. NewsGator, a commercial RSS aggregator (reader) for Microsoft Outlook, already exists and now allows reposting an RSS message to a blog via different plugins. Regular old news from UseNet channels never did seem to take off.

Microsoft buys Linux antivirus technology company

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 04:48:06 GMT

Microsoft to kill popular Linux antivirus product [from IDG InfoWorld]

Put this in the if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em out category.

RSS aggregator story from The Shifted Librarian

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 04:42:23 GMT

RSS Aggregators Gaining Ground!.

Should the big pubs be paying attention to RSS? Just ask Andy Rhinehart at GoUpstate.com, home of the Spartanburg Herald-Journal newspaper.

Last year Andy led the pack by offering an RSS feed for their top news stories. This year he enhanced the SHJ's status by creating a feed for their classified ads, and he topped himself with a third feed for stories about the war in Iraq.

So GoUpstate.com is a good model for other newspapers to emulate, but we all know you need numbers to help sell the benefits of RSS at that level. Once again, here comes Andy to the rescue. He provides us with some hard facts from the Spartanburg Herald-Journal's experience (emphasis is mine):

"From March 1-May 31, users accessing our RSS feeds accounted for 7.97 percent of our total traffic. This doesn't include people coming to the site from the various blogs who used the RSS items, but just the number of times our feeds were accessed.

The one disclaimer that probably should be noted - some folks may have their aggregators hitting us often throughout the day, especially back during the war.

Looking at my top 25 referers from yesterday [Monday], I see NetNewsWire, Radio's aggregator, Frontier's aggregator, and Amphetadesk. I'd say the aggregator movement is gaining ground."

If you figure that we're still in the "early adopters" stage for RSS, 8% is a pretty staggering number for a major newspaper's traffic. Even with Andy's disclaimer, this is far more than just a handful of people reading the paper via an aggregator. This is going to be big, and the Spartanburg Herald-Journal is going to ride the crest of the wave!

[from The Shifted Librarian]

Out of Africa again

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 04:39:57 GMT

Skulls of Oldest Homo sapiens Recovered [from Scientific American]

Not really a freaky science item, but another important fossil discovery. How will the Creationists explain this one?

RSS feed from Oracle Corporation

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 04:38:09 GMT

Oracle technology news now has an RSS feed. [from Scripting News]

BizBlog Conference, have blogs gone corporate at last

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 04:35:55 GMT

Blogs from BizBlog Conference. I missed the Weblog Business Strategies conference in Boston earlier this week, but Heath Row didn't. He practically transcribed the... [from Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

More visibility for blogging enthusiasts and corporate evangelists ....

Javapedia and Java.net Wiki from Sun Microsystems, O'Reilly and Collabnet

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 05:28:08 GMT

Javapedia: http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javapedia/WebHome, powered by Twiki, and sponsored by Sun Microsystems, O'Reilly.com and Collabnet, this wiki aims to be the ultimate user-built guide to all things Java. The Javapedia is part of a larger aggregation of wikis organized under the name Java.net Wiki: http://wiki.java.net.

Source: http://www.kottke.org/remainder/, 11 June 2003

Peek at the new Ten Thousand Year Blog (Squishdot)

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 03:09:07 GMT

A peek at the, hopefully, new Ten Thousand Year Blog. I'm not sure what version the RSS feed is, but I think it's 1.0. It is valid as you'll see from this link via the RSS Validator (Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby) http://feeds.archive.org/validator/check?url=http://www.davidmattison.ca/10KYearBlog/rdf.

RSS feed on The Zen of Portalship

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 03:04:08 GMT

Heck, yeah, that's darned cool! So now at least I know that even though the RDF doesn't validate as RSS 1.0, tacking on the RSS suffix does permit me to syndicate site content, which means others can do so as well. Next experiment is to see if I can Blogroll to The Zen of Portalship. The RSS feed is 0.91 (the Netscape RDF-based one).

David Mattison Bibliography

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 02:55:12 GMT

David Mattison Bibliography A bibliography of my offline and online publications.

[via The Zen of Portalship]

Ok, let's see if blogging my own RSS feed from The Zen of Portalship works!

Thank you from me to you my readers!

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 02:10:19 GMT

A big thank you to those who continue to link to and comment on my wiki article for Searcher magazine (April 2003). Also, thanks to those who've utilized the copy of the resource list I pulled together for a presentation I gave on blogs, RSS and wikis to a handful of librarians and information technologists in and outside the British Columbia government. The list is also available at DavidMattison.ca on my public Zwiki (http://www.davidmattison.ca/zwiki/blogs-rss-wikis). I will be integrating the two versions and deleting the one at the Searchers ZWiki (but leave a link pointing to the current version). Thanks to those of you who annotated the Searchers' ZWiki one. It's not intended to be a canonical list, just a few sites that interested me, and some explanatory text based on my very limited knowledge of this stuff.

NewsGator 1.2 with blogging APIs support

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 02:04:14 GMT

NewsGator 1.2 is out and now offers plugin support for external blogging tools. See the developer's Weblog (Greg Reinacker of Reinacker & Associates Inc.) for other tidbits about NewsGator. I believe this is the tool that will bring RSS into the corporate world. These are the plugins listed on the NewsGator site as of June 9, 02003:

Blogger plug-in

For users of blogger.com, or other weblog systems which support the Blogger API.

Current version: 1.0.2.2 (22 May 2003)

Download: MSI installer | ZIP file

Radio plug-in

For users of Radio Userland, or other weblog systems which support the MetaWeblog API.

Current version: 1.0.3.2 (05 June 2003)

Download: MSI installer | ZIP file

BlogX plug-in

For users of the BlogX weblog system.

Current version: 1.0.3.1 (29 May 2003)

Download: MSI installer | ZIP file

ASPNetWebLog plug-in

For users of dotnetweblogs.com, and other weblog systems powered by ASPNetWebLog.

Current version: 1.0.2.2 (22 May 2003)

Download: MSI installer | ZIP file

Third Party Plug-ins

The following plug-ins have been developed by third-party partners. For support, contact the vendors directly.

Movable Type plug-in

For users of Movable Type. More information at http://www.mattberther.com.

Current version: 1.0.1.4 (31 May 2003)

Download: MSI installer | ZIP file

EraBlog.NET plug-in

For users of erablog.net. More information at http://erablog.net/tools.

Current version: 1.0.0.0 (20 May 2003)

Download: MSI installer | ZIP file

Welcome to DavidMattison.ca

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 01:56:21 GMT

My new domain (davidmattison.ca) is up and running. Not much on the home page. I've installed a public Zwiki and will move content from http://searcher.freezope.org/zwiki to http://www.davidmattison.ca/zwiki. The shared hosting service I'm on has some limitations that affect the use of the Zope Content Management Framework as expressed in the default CMF Site and some of the 3rd party tools such as the CMFWeblog Tool. For example, RPCAuth is required to run the CMFWeblog Tool, but the Zettai.net owner is unwilling to install RPCAuth for the shared hosting service.

I've now learned that Zope has XML-RPC built in through a Python library called xmlrpclib.py and xml, so we'll see how successful I'll be at pretending to be a programmer!

davidmattison.ca

Sun, 01 Jun 2003 01:21:07 GMT

Getting ready to unveil my new domain: davidmattison.ca ....

Silva open source Content Management System

Sat, 31 May 2003 17:34:30 GMT

Check out Silva, an open source Content Management System that's browser-based and uses Zope as the backend. It's from Infrae.

Photography Online May 2003 article

Sat, 31 May 2003 15:59:29 GMT

I forgot about this little interview I did a couple of months ago with Jennie D'Amato. The result is this article in her column Photography Online for the May 2003 issue of Photography in New York International, also known as Photography Guide.

support@microsoft.com spammer

Sat, 31 May 2003 04:18:36 GMT

The following are copies of two of several e-mails I've been receiving from support@microsoft.com on my Victoria Telecommunity Network account which I access with the Pine reader. Whoever this is must be awfully bold to be spoofing Microsoft.com. I hope word gets to Microsoft and they catch this person.

Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 15:34:13 --0400
From: support@microsoft.com
To:
Subject: Your details
Parts/attachments:
1 Shown 0 lines Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
2 51 Kb Application
----------------------------------------

    [The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set]
    [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
    [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]

All information is in the attached file.
[Part 2, Application/OCTET-STREAM (Name: "application.pif") 68Kb]
[Cannot display this part. Press "V" then "S" to save in a file]

Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 15:40:24 --0400
From: support@microsoft.com
To:
Subject: Re: Approved (Ref: 3394-65467)
Parts/attachments:
1 Shown 0 lines Text (charset: ISO-8859-1)
2 54 Kb Application
----------------------------------------

    [The following text is in the "iso-8859-1" character set]
    [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set]
    [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly]

All information is in the attached file.
[Part 2, Application/OCTET-STREAM (Name: "movie28.pif") 72Kb]
[Cannot display this part. Press "V" then "S" to save in a file]

Roller Weblogger Java application and FreeRoller.net blog hosting service

Fri, 30 May 2003 02:54:12 GMT

FreeRoller.net offers free blog hosting that includes support for RSS headline aggregation (not very useful) and RSS syndication of your blog content via the Java-based Roller Weblogger Version 0.9.6.5+ application. You can easily post without publishing, and use an external Blogger API client such as w.bloggar (a little short on details in the Roller Weblogger manual on how to do this through FreeRoller.net). There's also supposed to be an export feature by which you can export your blog entries into the Roller XML format as a safeguard against a Roller administrator who's not regularly backing up the blog database. Bookmarks are included, and some other goodies you can check out for yourself.

The Roller Weblogger site also points you to some other interesting Java-based blog authoring/publishing software, some of which incorporate wiki-like functionality.

Canada e-Book from Statistics Canada

Wed, 28 May 2003 14:57:49 GMT

The Canada e-Book from Statistics Canada is out. It's based on the 2001 edition of the Canada Year Book.

Plone vs Tiki

Tue, 27 May 2003 14:56:41 GMT

Did want to mention too that Plone, a frontend for Zope, a multiplatform Web publishing system, is a very comparable tool to Tiki. Because Zope has a much bigger community of developers than Tiki, more backend tools will always be available for integration with Plone. Zope also does not restrict you to the use of MySQL.

Microsoft MSDN Releases RSS Feeds

Tue, 27 May 2003 04:39:50 GMT

Microsoft MSDN has several RSS 2.0 feeds available at http://msdn.microsoft.com/aboutmsdn/rss.asp

I wonder if Dave Winer, who did a Microsoft on RSS by creating this second, 2.0 version, knows that

"Our feeds are based on the RSS 2.0 specification, but we are actively looking to methods for allowing developers to custom-tailor the feeds based on individual preferences. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the feeds, and please let us know if anything seems unusual or out of place as you use them."