RSS 1.0
April 29, 2003
RSS moving forward
A group of pundits are going to work on the current RSS 2.0 spec, particular Sam Ruby. Check out his blog on Namespace Proposal, RSS not just for syndication anymore, Ghost of RSS past and Future of RSS. Lot of discussion going on, read and take an eye on it though I ain't knowledgable on RSS to contribute yet.
Busy day. All I could do is ping, read, and point to.
April 28, 2003
Amazon and Blog?
Google already bought Blogger. What sort of idea would be out with Amazon and MovableType? - Six Apart met with Jeff Bezos. This is for good, in my opinion.
TopicExchange
The Internet Topic Exchange, an implementation of Ridiculously Easy Group Forming concept, powered by Trackback, providing a centralized tracking of discussed topics/subjects/ideas. The idea is like: you post in your blogging tool, attach it to a topic/subject, public it somewhere, and ping the centralized place (e.g. TopicExchange), then users could have a list of discussed posts in their view. Better yet, linking this to blogging tool, blogger read the list of posts on certain subjects while blogging (via XMLRPC, SOAP).
It's still stage of experiments. You get new things everyday in Blog. Cool.
April 26, 2003
TypePad, top story of blog world
As many have blogged, the MT for non-geek users coming soon: TypePad. Six Apart should have done this much earlier. I am sure there are lot of users out there long for this hosted, installation/hassle free version of Movable Type, after hearing so many good things about it.
April 25, 2003
Double entries of Trackback?
I just noticed that when you accidentally post your blog entry twice (it did happen especially when you use blog client, e.g. w.bloggar), it cause the double entries of other's trackback. And if you delete the duplicated entry, it didn't reflect to your citing blog.
I don't really know how trackback in MT works. All I do is just enable the feature, it will ping to whatever URL you put in your post and generate the trackback. Obviously there is no one "rollback" feature, where you delete your post, it "ping" others to throw the trackback as well...
April 22, 2003
MT Localization
I setup my Chinese Blog using MT with zh_TW encoding. It is not actually zh_TW encode, but utf-8 (Unicode) encoding of zh_TW language (Traditional Chinese). MT Localization team did a good work (also help from Jedi). All I need to do is to download the zh_tw.utf8.pm archive and the graphs/icons. Put them into proper places (zh_tw.utf8.pm at $MT/lib/MT/L10N, lang-zh-tw graphics folder put under images). Then create an user whose language preference is zh_tw. It's done.
It suppose should be done as everything works well, from displaying proper language and icons, to posting your articles in utf-8 encoding. But the text messed up after you posted! I have tried setting browser encoding to utf-8, zh_TW. All didn't work on posting. Or it might work after you first posted, displayed properly while you viewing your site. But the text display while you edit the post, is scrambled. The utf-8 charset was manually changed in main index template instead of setting MTCharset in mt.cfg. I use the same MT system to manage 2 blogs in different language, that might be the cause.
I am wondering why not trying other software. b2 looks pretty nice. I've installed it in my Windows and trying it out. It is written in PHP, which means it's more hackable to me (I don't know Perl).
April 21, 2003
Post & Publish in w.bloggar
The feature "Post & Publish" of w.bloggar doesn't seem working with MT. I used to click Post&Publish while I was using BlogBuddy to post to Blogger. In Blogger, "post" means to add your post into your blogger database; "publish" would publish your post to where you host your blogger site (mostly through FTP). To me that's the reason why "Post & Publish" didn't work on MT. MT is hosted where the XML-RPC located and I have set the default post status as "Publish" instead of "Draft". So, clicking "Post" on w.bloggar just simply work for me.
[Update] I am wrong. I have the impression that the Post&Publish didn't function for MT because it keep showing time out while I was trying at home yesterday. Heck, my careless. It did work! "Post" would only put the post into MT database, even though you have set the default post status to publish.
April 20, 2003
Win32 Blog Clients for MT
I am searching for a blog application running under Windows, allow me to post to my weblog without going to the web. Yeah, the web interface provide the portability and it's good I could use it anywhere as long as Internet is accessible. But we lazy people just always like to use the some little rich-interface tools of the environment. From MT's manual of describing using XML-RPC implementation with existing tools, I got these options:
BlogApp is only for Mac OS X and BlogLet is a service for provide subscription of your blog via email, so these two are out of options (My home PC running WinXP so I got to use something run on Win32). The experience with the rest is as following:
BlogBuddy
Installation of BlogBuddy is easy: download the archive, unpack and point it to where you want to install. When you first running it, you'd get the following screen:
The interface is pretty obvious, go to Tools->Options, set your MT username/password. Then go to "Remote site" tab, type in your host at Host name, and input the location of your mt-xmlrpc.cgi at Endpoint. It is done, next to go to "Blogs" tab, click the "Update Blogs" button and you get blog information loaded. You could start to add new post or getting existing post for editing. (You would need to set the proxy setting if your Internet access have to go through proxy)
BlogBuddy has a simple and easy-to-use interface. But there is no option to specify the category of post. It didn't offer much help on HTML syntax except adding link and formatting your text to bold/italic/underline.
w.bloggar
w.bloggar is a freeware blog tool supports Blogger, b2, MovableType, Nucleus, BigBlogTool, BlogWorks XML, Blogalia and Drupal blogs. Indeed, most of these systems implement Blogger API (MovableType implements Blogger and metaWeblog XML-RPC API). It seem Blogger API has been de facto standard of blog XML-RPC API.
w.bloggar give users a standard Windows setup program to install it, and it come with a default English spell checker. BlogBuddy is using The Stuffed Dog's service to provide spell checking. The first running of w.bloggar would ask you to setup your blog account:
Then the setup screen pop-up for you to input the key information. It has a pretty clear instruction for MT users. Select "MovableType" from Blog Tools, give your blog an alias name. Just follow the sample given in the config box, set your host and location of mt-xmlrpc.cgi. As BlogBuddy, it is done after you set the key information (your username/password, hostname, xml-rpc cgi). You could start enjoying remote posting/editing your blog!
Jericho
At the time when I download Jericho, there is only source code provided and you need Ant to build it. I download Ant, install it, then type "ant gui" at the place where I unpack Jericho to. It start building Jericho and bring up Jericho GUI after build has been done.
At first, you have to choose a service, the option is either Blogger or Manila. Select Blogger, then input your username/password on login screen, put the Server to "other" (else it would point to the default blogger.com server). The next screen you are required to input the full path of your mt-xmlrpc.cgi (e.g. http://www.yourserver.com/mt/mt-xmlrpc.cgi if your mt-xmlrpc.cgi is put under /mt). Again, once these key information given, it's done and the blog roll. :)
I am sure there are more tools out there could achieve the same thing I needed for my MT blog. But I guess it's enough by just taking look on these 3 blogging client. Jericho is running reasonably in my PC, though its interface is a bit too plain. BlogBuddy is nice but I need the category feature. In other words, w.bloggar suit my need very well: it has category feature, with more functions supporting HTML syntax, and a nice-looking UI. At this time, w.bloggar is version 3.00.0139, BlogBuddy is version 0.5, Jericho also version 0.5. Checking the development log showing w.bloggar is more agressively developed.
In short, my choose go to w.bloggar!
April 16, 2003
Backup of the blog
I wonder could I ask my hosting company to config the my.cnf of my MySQL DB, then to setup a Master/Slave replication between their server and my home PC. I got DSL broadband at home, so it sounds feasible at my side. Is this a good way to backup the blog entries? Or we have to manually export the entries periodically?
Talk about MySQL replication, Jeremy Zawodny has posted the slides of his presentations in recent MySQL Conference. I got to start study it from his talk.
April 15, 2003
Auto-acronym
While busy on adding this little and that little tricks on MT template, it might be good to blog on them too. Acronym is apparently a good way to save typing and release your reader of scratching head in figuring out what these weird capital letters really mean.
ManiacalRage has a pretty clear instruction on automate the acronym formatting in MT's template. You have to get the useful MTPerlScript and MTMacro from Brad Choate. Then to construct a template module for macros by yourself, or grab an example in instruction above and modify it. Applying the MTMacroApply on the entries...More could be applied and extended in further deployment. But you get it, that's the beauty of MT! Lots of plugins and ready-to-use tools out there for MT community! And all you have to do just do a simple search, grab the tools, follow instructions and phew...your wanted feature is there!
MTEntriesFooter
There is no calendar for blog navigation, so it's obvious to put the link to the previous entry at the bottom. I first trying put extra MTEntries tag for MTEntryPrevious link (In fact, I have to admit not realizing whether it should be "previous" or "next" -- next blog entries or the one before the posted...). It's an obvious thought that MTEntries would recursively putting your post, so doesn't sound right to have a "previous post" link inside it. After everything is done, out of curiousity, I went searching in the manual. Bingo! There is MTEntriesFooter, which serve what I really wanted. Here's the quote from MT manual:
A container tag: the contents of this container will be displayed only if this entry is the last entry listed in thecontainer. This could be used, for example, to link to the preview entry's archive page from your index page
Another category "MT-tricks" is added. Guess figuring how to add more than 5 categories would be my next target...