Results tagged “blogosphere”

Very good news. They were the best, fastest, and most solid aggregator around.

We're happy to announce that Ask.com has entered into an agreement with MerchantCircle to keep Bloglines up and running! That means your news feeds will remain available (with your same password) indefinitely. Ask.com will maintain the current Bloglines service as-is until at least December 1, 2010 after which the service will transition wholly to MerchantCircle.

You can read more detail about MerchantCircle and its plans for the service at the MerchantCircle blog and the Ask.com blog.

Bloglines back from the dead

... apparently. Well, this is good news. I'm a big fan of Cory.

I write like
Cory Doctorow

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I Write Like Cory Doctorow

Trying to restore the backup database again. Looks like it might have been a mysql issue.

A little unforseen maintenance and one broken RAID controller later, we're back online. Lost a few days, though, and for some reason, the ZuckerBlog page appeared to be publishing from the MissingLinks page as well. In fact, all the blogs I manage had some kind of content bleed into other published blogs. The origin of this was that I imported the backup .sql file into the wrong version of MySQL, and although everything looked good in the Movable Type web interface, the database was moving everything around. The best way to fix this was to pull everything apart again, and reinstall the older MySQL server.

So far, everything's OK. The only thing I'm still having problems with is email posting, and I should have that fixed up in a little while.

By the way, Movable Type 5.2 looks pretty awesome. And it appears much faster than version 4, though this may actually be because I gutted the old server and replaced it with a newer one.

And it has revision control! Finally.

Here are some of the new and improved features in MT5:

• A new user dashboard for both the website and blogs. This makes it easy for authors, editors, designers and other publishers to easily navigate between the two.
• A new theme mechanism that makes it easy to apply a new theme across a website and blogs with a single click that proliferates changes throughout the published site.
• Enhanced content management features that include revision history and new custom fields. There are five new object types for custom fields: website, blog, comment, template and asset.

Introducing Movable Type 5 - Movable Type

I've been using the MT-Twitter plugin for a while now, so that when updating the MissingLinks page, a corresponding twitter posting is made. It used to be using bit.ly to shorten the URLs (prior to the big server crash, I was using icanhaz.com, but lost all my code when the RAID controller on the server failed). Sometime in mid-November, the bit.ly URLs just disappeared, making me thing something went wrong on twitter's API. Either that, or something went wrong on my server, which I hadn't even touched that month.

So, I looked around for some suitable Perl code to re-introduce the bit.ly API calls that mysteriously went missing. The answer was a chunk of code from openclue.org (now apparently defunct). I'm reposting it here, so it might help someone out (myself included -- I'm backing stuff up properly now).

The twitter.pl script just needs a few extra lines. I inserted this code just after the "my $intro" line in the _update_twitter function:

my $bitly = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $url_response =
    $bitly->get("http://bit.ly/api?url=" . $obj->permalink);
my $small_url;
if($url_response->is_success) {
   $small_url = $url_response->content;
} else {
   $small_url = $obj->permalink;
}

Then you have to update the part of the script which creates the twitter message. Replace the original $text string with the $small_url string:

# my $text = $intro . $entry->title . ' ' . $obj->permalink;
my $text = $intro . $entry->title . ' ' . $small_url;

Presumably, you can use any URL shortener API you want -- just insert the proper API call. Or, if you're enterprising, make your own URL shortener. That way, you own all the links.

Someone even came up with an idea to use .htaccess 301 redirects to bounce a link ending with <mt:EntryID> to the proper <$mt:EntryLink$>. Of course, this really only works if your domain name is short to begin with.

Wait, you can get money or freebies for reviewing things? Sheeit. I must be some kind of chump.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results.

The FTC will require that writers on the Web clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products. The commission also said advertisers featuring testimonials that claim dramatic results cannot hide behind disclaimers that the results aren't typical.

Bloggers Must Disclose Payments for Reviews - NYTimes.com

Neat way to get new content for better blogging.

Need a photo to match a post you're writing? Zemanta to the rescue. Like to be reminded to tag your post so that it's search engine optimized? Zemanta will help you out. Zemanta has indexed more than a million top media sources and quality blogs, including Wikimedia Commons, Flickr and various stock photo providers to make it easier for you to create compelling posts.

Movable Type 4.32 Now Available - with Zemanta Built In - Movable Type

Ooooh, big surprise there.

Predictably, things went exactly as Karp's detractors had warned. Karp was never able to make enough money on advertising to cover the costs of running the business--running up his own personal credit card debt and dwindling his savings in the process--and was unable to get commitments from investors.

In his letter to readers, Karp said that The Printed Blog saw 16 issues before closing down. In a telltale sign that online media is destined to stay online, he also noted that 80,000 print copies were distributed, while another 100,000 copies were downloaded from the Internet

Printed blog publication fails; world dies of shock - Ars Technica

Good little tip from BrainLog

In MT 4, the QuickPost bookmarklet pre-populates the entry's title with the title of the page, and sticks the URL of the page and the selected text in the message body. The URL is not a link, it's just the URL, followed by two <br /> tags, then the selected text, if any. Like this:

[Title:] Title Of Page
[Body:]
http://url-of-page/<br /><br />

Selected text, if any.

The new behavior is weird. Entry titles are all the rage with newer blogs and RSS feeds, so I'll grant that I'm behind the times for not using entry titles on short link-y entries. And perhaps usability studies showed that most people didn't want the page title to be the link text, though it doesn't seem like a hassle to make that the default. But I can't think of a reason why I'd want to use the URL without being a link.

Revising Movable Type 4's QuickPost Bookmarklet - BrainLog

After playing around with the Movable Type Motion Beta (I've got a copy of it running somewhere), I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to figure out if the problems with updating external app streams (such as Twitter updates) were related to some kind of configuration problem or related to the beta-state of Motion. After realizing that the run-periodic-tasks script for my permanent blog does nothing for installed betas, or other instances of Movable Type (me stupid), I realized that MT still hasn't corrected some easy errors in their modules. Nor have I. The problem is fixed now, and I'm writing down two simple fixes to two hard-to-research problems.

Problem 1: Can't locate MT/Bootstrap.pm in @INC

So, say you're getting a constant error in your daily cron logs when trying to do background publishing in Movable Type. You know, you're trying to run the run-periodic-tasks script to take care of background tasks by setting up a cron job, either daily, or six times an hour. Assuming your crontab syntax doesn't suck ass, now you're getting messages that look like this:

Can't locate MT/Bootstrap.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ...

This website has some good examples on how to fix this (hint: you don't have to modify @INC, you can simply modify your run-periodic-tasks file).

Getting background publishing to work in MT 4.1 -- GoBecky.net

The problem is that '..lib';. It's simply pointing to the wrong place in the MT file structure, which is weird, given that it's their app and all, but whatev. So what you need to do is point the script to Bootstrap.pm using the absolute filepath, and all will be well.

Problem 2: Subroutine MT::Template::Context::post_process_handler and Subroutine MT::Template::Context::add_global_filter

After upgrading your v2.x of Movable Type to v3.x or even v4, you may see these messages in your daily cron logs, if you're running the run-periodic-tasks script to enable background publishing and housekeeping:

Subroutine MT::Template::Context::post_process_handler redefined at /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm line 41.

Subroutine MT::Template::Context::add_global_filter redefined at /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/extlib/bradchoate/postproc.pm line 22.

Took me a while to sort this out, but only because I enabed run-periodic-tasks for two fresh installations of v4, and there were no errors in the logs. As discussed here, the problem is that the postproc.pm isn't used in v3 or v4 of Movable Type. To fix these very noisy messages in your crontab logs, go into /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/mt/plugins and edit the processtags.pl file, replacing:

use bradchoate::postproc;

with something like this:

if (MT->VERSION =~ m/^2.2/) { require bradchoate::postproc; }

or even just comment out the line altogether. You'll notice all your post processing still works, and you'll get no more error messages.

So, say you're getting a constant error in your daily cron messages when trying to do background publishing in Movable Type. You know, you're trying to run the run-periodic-tasks script to take care of background tasks by setting up a cron job, either daily, or six times an hour. Now you're getting messages that look like this:

Can't locate MT/Bootstrap.pm in @INC (@INC contains: ...

This website has some good examples on how to fix this (hint: you don't have to modify @INC, you can simply modify your run-periodic-tasks file).

Getting background publishing to work in MT 4.1 â.. GoBecky.net

The problem is that '..lib';. It's simply pointing to the wrong place in the MT file structure, which is weird, given that it's their app and all, but whatev. So what you need to do is point the script to Bootstrap.pm using the absolute filepath, and all will be well.

I could learn a few things here.

Sexy CSS Tips | Design You Trust. World's Most Famous Social Inspiration.

Not that LiveJournal's going out of business anytime soon. Just saying it's good to be prepared.

ljdump - livejournal archive

ljArchive

This could spell the end of LJ as we know it. Oh well. That's why I use my own server.

Six Apart - Blog - Six Apart Announces New Home for LiveJournal

Six Apart, the world's leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal (LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by millions of people around the world to connect through personal journals and topic-based communities. SUP has established an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.

This agreement builds on the established and successful relationship between Six Apart and SUP, which entered into a licensing agreement in October 2006 permitting SUP to manage LiveJournal in Russia. The Russian LiveJournal community is second only to the U.S. in number of accounts, and has been influential enough in that country to make â..LiveJournalâ. synonymous with â..bloggingâ. in Russian.

Yes, but why?

Wordpress Interface for Movable Type (MT Hacks)

Why?

You may be asking yourself why I would create a Wordpress Interface for Movable Type. Partly, I did it as a bit of a joke (but it is real and is does work). Partly as a proof of concept, demonstrating that alternative user interfaces can be created for Movable Type, without a huge effort. Partly to provide a simpler user interface that may be suited to some users. While Movable Type has always (and will remain) my preferred platform, I have always admired the clean intuitive interface of Wordpress. Finally, I did it as a fun way to show that Movable Type and Wordpress can work together (at least in some ways), despite the "rivalry" between the two platforms.

An obviously right-wing troll who knows nothing about Canadian legislature gets their comeuppance when they posted the following editorialized entry on the current political situation.

Canada the victim of power-grabbing politicians. | MetaFilter

Canada the victim of power-grabbing politicians. December 2, 2008 12:31 PM

Canada is going through a bloodless coup less than two months after its last election. The world-wide financial crisis has proved too tempting a target for the three parties that didn't win the election and they have decided to overthrow the Conservative minority government based on the latest financial report. This hasn't been done in Canada since World War I.

Not only is it a perfectly legal procedure, a non-confidence vote has been done many times, and a coalition government was attempted in 1985 with Trudeau and Broadbent. It's also been done at the provincial level, and unofficial coalitions are practically commonplace in Canada. Sort of like when you're playing RISK.

What's probably not legal is trying to prorogue the legislature just because you're likely to lose a non-confidence vote. What makes you a douchebag is when you try to do this when you condemned it only 4 years earlier.

No, no. Internet trolls. This gargantuan 7 page NYTimes article examines the history and motivations of the Internet's bridge-dwelling monsters.

Magazine Preview - Malwebolence - The World of Web Trolling - NYTimes.com

Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? Itâ..s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldnâ..t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly â.. a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy thatâ..s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. Thereâ..s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

So far, despite all this discord, the Internetâ..s system of civil machines has proved more resilient than anyone imagined. As early as 1994, the head of the Internet Society warned that spam â..will destroy the network.â. The news media continually present the online world as a Wild West infested with villainous hackers, spammers and pedophiles. And yet the Internet is doing very well for a frontier town on the brink of anarchy. Its traffic is expected to quadruple by 2012. To say that trolls pose a threat to the Internet at this point is like saying that crows pose a threat to farming.

Very neat blog about a guy who goes to Peru and talks about the food you can get in Lima. Our Sales rep is from Peru and promises me a bottle of pisco and a bottle of their local rum when he goes back.

Peru Food: Travelog: Peru Food In Peru, The First Three Days In Lima

I am a creature of habit, and I have a culinary tradition when arriving in Lima which I have kept during the last few years of travel here. On this trip, I was able to maintain my tradition. After checking into our hotel in the Miraflores district of Lima, we had a stroll around Miraflores' main park, Parque Kennedy, and I picked up the Lima daily, El Comercio, and headed to the Café Haiti, one of the grand old-fashioned Lima cafés to have my first Peruvian meal (lomo saltado and a frothy pisco sour) while people-watching. The waiters are definitely old-school and after so many times there, they know who I am. "In Lima again?" one of the waiters asked me, "Are you ready for your lomo saltado?" You have to love that type of service.

Finally, someone was able to combine the cute kitten picture meme with a CAPTCHA device.

mental_floss Blog - CAPTCHA Variants: KittenAuth

Developed by programmer Oli Warner, the KittenAuth system presents a series of pictures of cute animals, and asks the user to click on all the kittens. Well, thatâ..s the simplest form â.. the current version may ask you to pick out a different animal, so you may have to click on all the pandas or lambs â.. this adds some fun to the game, and presumably prevents spammers from investing all their effort on kitten-detection software.

Strange feeling harvesting app which rakes the blogosphere for people's moods. Then it shuffles them into a funky Flash interface. You can sort by locales, ages, gender, and what kind of feeling they're expressing.

I feel pretty creeped out by this. Yet it looks cool.

We Feel Fine / mission

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.