104 posts tagged “blogging”
2002
Syndicated further reading recommendations
I frequently find myself reading something on someone elses blog and thinking “that’s interesting, and it fits in well with XXX that I read the other day”. I often end up blogging a link to both just to satisfy my need for completeness. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there was some standard for formalising this kind of further reading recommendation? I’m not sure exactly how it would work (it would almost certainly be XML based but I don’t know if it would require a new format or integrate with an existing one) but it could be an interesting avenue to explore. I think it’s a significantly different problem to the ones solved by XFML (external shared metadata) and Pingback for it to be worth committing some thought cycles to. Any ideas?
Peter Gabriel
Today’s weird blogging observation: Bloggers love Peter Gabriel. Jeremy Zawodny is a big fan, Scott Andrew can’t wait for his new album, Jeffrey Zeldman praises his sophistication and daypop returns 44 blogs currently talking about him. Despite being good friends with his nephew I’ve never really listened to him that much, but with glowing reviews such as these I’m tempted to grab the new album and see what the fuss is about.
Blogging my lecture notes
So what was all that about? University term started today, and with it comes my grand plan to blog my lecture notes. Don’t worry, I will be restructuring this site in the near future to keep lecture notes off the front page so people who come here for web development stuff don’t have to wade through the details of my Computer Science degree. Unfortunately I have limited internet access at the moment so it may be a week or two until I can make the necessary changes to my blog.
Styles of blogging
There’s a great discussion going on at the heart of things concerning different styles of blogging and the way the format is evolving. The range of formats evident across the blogosphere fascinates me—there are as many different styles as there are blogs, and each blogger’s style is constantly evolving. Personally I want to move towards more of a unique-content-generation model (as opposed to my current link farm) but at the same time my experiments with meta data mean that the more “shallow” content I have the more chance I will get to do interesting things with relationships between entries.
Blog Hot or Not
Blog Hot or Not. I’m surprised no one had thought of this before—it’s clever idea, well implemented. When adding my own blog I was asked to come up with some keywords to describe it, so here they are for posterity and my own future reference:
[... 67 words]Rasmus Lerdorf’s blog
Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP) has a blog. His latest entry discusses Palladium, and asks if it will actually help build up the alternative market of non wintel users.
K-Logging
Brent Ashley explains K-Logging. K-Logging is Knowledge Logging, a technique that companies can use to help share knowledge built up over the course of a project. Generally it involves the use of blogging style tools to informally record every part of a project. Brent also points to this article explaining 11 common KM problems and how K-Logging helps overcome them.
University of Blogaria
Apparently the University of Blogaria was founded on the principle that the ideal university would have no students to contaminate the educational process
(Jonathan Delacour). The only way in is to earn a position on the faculty, which no doubt requires slightly more than four days of blogging. Thank goodness their courses (or at least the benefits of their wisdom) are freely available to all.
Meg replies
Meg has replied to Jonathan’s criticism of her piece on the nature of blogging via his site’s comments system. She defends her original viewpoint, commenting on blogging that we can’t define this thing based on the content we’re outputting
. It looks like this debate still has quite a bit of life left in it.
The nature of blogging
Meg Hourihan’s explanation of blogging (which I linked to and praised earlier) is stirring up something of a storm. Meg’s suggestion that the key to blogging is the format has been ripped to pieces by the likes of BurningBird, Jonathan Delacour and Stavros. Jonathan uses photography as an analogy—some photographers are excellent technically and concentrate on taking the perfect photograph while losing sight of the art of the medium. I hope I’m not overquoting, but Jonathan clinched his argument for me with the following:
[... 331 words]Meg on blogging
Meg Hourihan: What We’re Doing When We Blog. It’s a curious fact of blogdom that many bloggers blog blogging—why they do it, what it is and why it’s so important. I feel Meg has nailed it with this article—blogging is defined by the format, not by the subject matter. She also makes some insightful comments about why the blogging format works so well:
[... 105 words]Meta weblog API
I’m itching to get an XML-RPC interface to this blog up and running so I can start playing with blogging tools (or roll my own in PythonCard). It looks like Dave Winer’s MetaWeblog API is just what I need. It describes an XML-RPC interface with 3 methods: metaWeblog.newPost, metaWeblog.editPost and metaWeblog.getPost. More importantly, the standard supports complete flexibility in the data that is sent along with the request. My entries consist of a body, an optional permalink (one is generated if none is specified), optional categories and an optional search string for a “Google It!” link if one is required. The MetaWeblog API looks ideally suited to handling this, and is fully extensible should I change the format of my entries in the future.
More FuzzyBlog stuff
More FuzzyBlog stuff. Scott runs one of my favourite blogs—constantly updated, plenty of interesting new content and most of it fits the areas I am interested in. Today’s items that caught my eye are Why Do I Blog So Much? and Very, Very Practical Tips for the Busy Person : Part 2 (actually posted on Monday, find Part 1 here.). I particularly liked the following quote from “Why Do I Blog So Much?”:
[... 151 words]Blogging aint easy
Blogging isn’t nearly as easy as it looks. After several days hacking around in PHP (I’m far too proud to use an off the shelf solution) I find myself confronted with a blank slate, and writers block has taken hold. The toughest thing is working out what style to use in blog entries—my previous writing for the web has been primarily on forums (where posts do not have to stand on their own) or news sites where a formal, unopinionated tone is required. A blog should be informal but informative, with each post hopefully adding a new angle to the topic in hand. I’m sure it will get easier as I go along...