Standalone Trackback from the Movable Type Folks

Just noticed that this was released the other day:

The standalone TrackBack implementation is now released. This tool allows anyone with a server capable of running CGI scripts to send and receive TrackBack pings, and display those pings on their public site. Instructions for integration with other content management systems are included in the documentation. It is also a good reference point for any other tool developers interested in integrating TrackBack into their own systems.

(Note: I’m doing little or no blogging this weekend. Back in force Tuesday.)

x-pollen hub coming together. I'm

x-pollen hub coming together. I’m working through the logjam at my web server, having just set up the DNS for some new domains: antiweb.net, x-pollen.com, radiofreeblogistan.com, and a few others. Still need to restart the server to get the new virtual hosts working, set up cgi access where needed. A few need new usernames, permissions, or email forwarding set up.

It’s like the summer is ending and my attempt to do nothing for a while has succumbed to first finishing the book and now promoting it (on TV again next week), working on my new blog-about-blogging, and the attempt to get another book deal or some other kind of project to work on (or, as a last resort, a new job).

At least I’m enjoying the ride. About x-pollen: I want it to be the central aggregation hub for anything I publish online. Nice clean design, multiple feeds, easy to read, easy to filter or search. Slowly I’m geting this PEP vision in place.
 
Current Mood: bleary

Current Music: Kidney in a Cooler (Keller Williams)

x-pollen hub coming together

I’m working through the logjam at my web server, having just set up the DNS for some new domains: antiweb.net, x-pollen.com, radiofreeblogistan.com, and a few others. Still need to restart the server to get the new virtual hosts working, set up cgi access where needed. A few need new usernames, permissions, or email forwarding set up.
It’s like the summer is ending and my attempt to do nothing for a while has succumbed to first finishing the book and now promoting it (on TV again next week), working on my new blog-about-blogging, and the attempt to get another book deal or some other kind of project to work on (or, as a last resort, a new job).
At least I’m enjoying the ride. About x-pollen: I want it to be the central aggregation hub for anything I publish online. Nice clean design, multiple feeds, easy to read, easy to filter or search. Slowly I’m geting this PEP vision in place.

Play Ball

Baseball deal reached, games on [USA Today]

Link from Salon.com Worth 1000 Hits a Day

Don’t feel bad, Salon Blog writers, when you look at the rankings and see Scott’s traffic dwarfing that of the rest of us. I just took a look at his referrer log for the first time and a quick count showed over 1000 of the hits coming directly from salon.com and its variants.
Another blogger, not being as recognizable a name to Salon readers, would surely gain fewer hits from a direct page link, but a little of that flow, perhaps on a rotating basis, to the other bloggers here would probably be appreciated.
Or Scott could extend his current editorial judgement when applied to linking to Salon blogs in his blog and perhaps nominate a blog or two for a homepage link.
I frankly think RFB is a little too inside baseball for Salon’s mainstream readers, but there are some really good blogs, much less meta-recursive-infinite-regressive here that I think would benefit from a larger share of the curious Salon readership.
I wonder if Salon will ever give any of its paying bloggers a direct link from the Salon home page.
That word frankly back there still brings to mind Newt Gingrich saying it.

Darwin: Reload: The Blog Days of Summer

Darwin Magazine offers some conventional wisdom on this moment in hype/backlash about blogging. (That doesn’t look like a permalink.) Mentions Andrew’s Dreaming of China blog.

Catfight! Textism on Lileks (on Monbiot)

Fight, fight! The writer artist behind Textism (forgot to check his name and pretend to know him personally), in a single serving called Please Like Me reports on a Lileks bleat with a slow rolling boil:

James Lileks, a harmless, affable bumpkin … takes yet another drag-queen-on-poppers free-association bitch-lurch…. Sniggering like a demented janitor paging through a stroke mag found in the trash, James burbles along … for an ocean of idiots nodding right along, lapping up the know-nothing rhetoric and girlish titters like sweet rice pap.

Zeldman Recommends Tables

Let the religious war end. With the wit and panache we’ve become accustomed to, Zeldman discusses real-world pragmatic choice for commercial web design or the development of any site that wishes to be presentable and accessible to as wide an audience as possible.
As ugly as hacking and debugging nested tables can get, let’s admit that most sophisticated CSS layouts urrently requires some hacking in every environment.
Here’s Zeldman’s prescription and some ways you can learn from him to bam! kick it up a notch:

More and more, we find ourselves creating transitional layouts that incorporate simplified table structures; use sophisticated CSS to add the kind of details that formerly required nested tables, spacer gifs, and other presentational hacks; and serve a basic style sheet to 4.0 browsers that approximates the display in modern ones.

We find that with these techniques we can create attractive sites that conserve bandwidth and look almost as good in Netscape 4.x as they do in modern browsers. We can’t achieve the same results using pure CSS methods.

Table layouts are harder to maintain and somewhat less forward compatible than CSS layouts. But the combination of simple tables, sophisticated CSS for modern browsers, and basic CSS for old ones has enabled us to produce marketable work that validates … work that is accessible in every sense of the word.

We’ll be sharing our techniques at the Builder conference and writing about them in our upcoming book for New Riders.

All my years in computer-book publishing and I’ve never worked with New Riders. Meanwhile, they’ve built a very strong list of web design and development thought leadership titles, such as Powazek’s Design for Community and many others. I wonder what happened to Bob Slote‘s book? He had one coming out a while back, I thought.
Apparently, they’ve even signed PeterMe to write a book about coining the word blog. It’s got meme in the title, as I recall. Also on the blog book watch, I saw a link to an Amazon UK listing for an Osborne/McGraw book called Blog On due out in October, from one of the authors of the “How to Do Everything with…” series. I’ll have to add it to my Amazon Listmania list.
Which bugs me, that list, because their doesn’t seem to be any easy way to get my store affiilation into the URLs it generates. I’m going to grab the page and hack it and make it a Story here, I think. Then I can add these new books as they come up. I wish there was an Amazon API plug-in for Radio!
Good discussion of shilling books in the comments to an earlier entry today. I may promote them to “first-class” content.

Log Everything

I’m starting to wonder if there’s anything I shouldn’t be logging. So much of my personal knowledge management problems (read: disorganization) involve forgetting, losing track of, and worrying about issues as they come up an afterward until they are resolved.
Sure, some things are private or proprietary. Not every log (blog, k-log, or any kind of log) needs to be published on the unsecured public Internet byways. Not everything needs to go out over TCP/IP. Not everything, for that matter needs to be entered into a computer or even written in a notebook, if you want ot take the thought to its conclusion.
But it seems to me that just about everything that passes through my computer (and a number of things that sit on post-its around my desk) should be logged somewhere. One big place or some small specific place. I need to keep track of what I just finished, what I didn’t have time to get to, what new items have just occurred to me.
Every to do list grows and drifts (for me). Instead of fear of a growing list of shoulds, I’d rather relax knowing that nothing is being lost or forgot, and everything is findable when I need it, or when I make it a priority, or when external circumstances make it a priority.

Ego is Latin for I

I seem to be breaking a cardinal rule of starting a lot of sentences and paragraph with the word I and using the I-word frequently throughout my posts.
I lost count of the number of times I used the word I in the previous entry.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that overuse of the word I is a sign of bad writing. There may even be blog advice people saying not to talk about I so much.
But then again isn’t this a one-person blog. Should I give I-self a nickname and save “blinky had a nother thought today?” to give appearance of not talking about I so much? (Aside, I have always hated the word me-zine or mezine—it smacks of journalistic invention and as a word it inspires antilust in me.)
Or should I reverse-engineer and rewrite I sentences so they say the same thing but more artfully allide I presence in the thought process? Wouldn’t that just be hiding the I?
Or is I like a fnord that just vanishes from the ear of most readers and thus no foul at all?
The publisher of Coffeehouse made us rewrite the introduction and interstitial material because it was written all in first person (singular and plural). The backlash against memoirs and first-person nonfiction writing of all kinds (such as the {fray}) generally criticizes the I speaking as self-involved or solipsistic.
Comes with the territory, I say.