When Blogs Go Dark

I don't know how many "Sorry I haven't posted in a while" apology posts I have read in the years I have been following blogs, but they always seem a little out of place.  With very few exceptions, blogs generally don't imply any sort of commitment on the volume of content, and honestly for most folks I would really rather they didn't post if they don't have anything interesting to say.

This highlights another interesting benefit of the RSS syndication model.  A non-updated feed does not take away from my attention.  It doesn't waste my time the way that visiting a stale website would.

So to all the dark bloggers out there, release yourselves from the guilt of not posting.  It doesn't matter to me or my feed reader that you haven't posted in a month.  Your subscribers will still be here ready to read your next post, and very few will drop your feed from their blogrolls.  I would argue that you are more likely to lose subscribers from repeated apology posts, or uninteresting filler posts.

So, when family commitments get in the way, or when work hits crunch time, or when you just don't have anything interesting to say, just lay low. The blogosphere will be waiting when you have the time, energy and inspiration.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006 7:55:28 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Jason Kolb is trying to reinvent the Internet.

Alex Barnett linked to Jason Kolb's recent blog miniseries about online presence and identity.  

Here's links to all of Jason's posts (descriptions from Jason's "Featured Posts" listing)

Reinventing the Internet, part one - How the evolution of social networks is going to fundamentally change the Internet and the way we use it to communicate.
Reinventing the Internet, part two - A domain name in every pot - Why and how our online identities will eventually revolve around our own personal domain names. 
Reinventing the Internet, part three - Unlocking the potential of the URI - this is really WHY everyone needs to have their own domain name.
Reinventing the Internet, part four - Connecting the dots - A look at the open peer-to-peer social network at various levels, and an overview of how it's all hooked together.
Reinventing the Internet, part five - Decentralized network, centralized identity - Why and how our online identities should be nodes in a decentralized social network.

If you think you might someday want to have a part in the evolution of the internet, Jason's posts are a great read.  He has some very interesting ideas that relate to how our personal data is stored and located on the internet.

After reading through these posts, I have a few thoughts to contribute.

1. DNS is not a solved problem.  Jason seems to think that since DNS has served him reliable for over a decade, it is sufficient.  There are many problems with DNS, and they mainly come down to trust.  The distributed nature of DNS makes it powerful and reliable, but it also makes it susceptible to many different attacks, including spoofing & cache poisoning.  Now this doesn't really matter much for a lot of information, but what if we were relying on the security of DNS to verify the authenticity of stock tips coming from Warren Buffet?  As the payoff for fraud gets higher, we need to increase the security of the underlying systems.  The good news is that this problem has mostly been solved from a technology standpoint, check out http://www.dnssec.org/ for links to lots of resources, and this PDF specifically for a great overview on threats and mitigation details.  An alternative to this is requiring the personal server to have an authentication certificate from a reputable authority, and then relying on that to bootstrap any authentication.
2. Jason seems to focus on individuals, but this model could be applied to business entities as well.  Businesses have for the most part missed the social networking boat.  Yeah there are some entities that have set up shop on MySpace, or who publish company-focused blogs, but the value proposition hasn't really taken off.  Jason's model for publishing and consumption of information should apply to businesses as well, and it might be easier for early versions of it to gain traction in this space.
3. Something that will probably be critical in both the personal and business space is the idea of Views, or adapters that will convert the format and protocol of the data.  This way, I post some new family photos to my private data store, they get emailed to my email savvy relatives, they show up in a rss feed for those using newsreaders, they get published to a picture site for those who only want to occasionally browse my pics,  and possibly get sent off to kodak.com for printing and delivery to the grandparents. That way adoption isn't held up because the folks on the receiving end aren't living in the land of XMPP yet.  Of course with this last bit this beast would start overlapping with products like BizTalk.
4. Many of these issues have been solved in very complicated ways in the past by CORBA, and more recently HLA implementations.  These are both distributed models that allow publishing and subscribing of information, based on some predetermined schema, although HLA calls the schema the Object Model Template, and CORBA uses its Interface Definition Language.  What Jason is proposing seems much simpler at first, but the lessons learned from HLA and CORBA, especially in terms of schema development probably apply.
5. Many folks see this idea as being at odds with the MySpace crowd, but really it just requires that the main players allow you to use your own domain name on their servers.  In reality, not too many people want to run a server in their basement (Unless it's dirt-simple and provides real perceived value).  It'd be great if this framework was open enough that I could own my personal domain name and get access to all of the tools of Myspace, Youtube, Flickr, etc.  Ideally, they would just be service providers (format conversion, friendly interface, etc.) and the the data would be pushed back and stored on my personal server (which is hosted by yet another company).  Microsoft and Google are already getting into this space with Live Domains, Office Live, and Google Apps.
6. Social networking sites provide a hub for communities to form around.  The "social momentum" that these sites have is going to make implementing the distributed model more difficult.  Right now soandso.myspace.com equates to "cool" and soandso.com means you are a geek.  Unless the "cool factor" of the distributed model can be raised above MySpace, then there's no chance it'll get any traction.  All of us geeks see this personal server idea and think it's a utopia because it plays to things we think are important, data ownership & verifiable authentication without sharing personal information.  Will it really matter to the teens who sign up on MySpace because it's "cool"?

That's it for now.  Cool ideas Jason, it'll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

Friday, September 08, 2006 6:49:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Blogging | Internet | Quattro

Newsgator ate my clippings...

Update 8/21/2006, 8:19PM: Newsgator is on top of this.  They have escalated the bug, and will post updated info here: http://www.newsgator.com/forum/FindPost20446.aspx

---

Newsgator just ate approximately 300 entries that I had saved in the "My Clippings" folder.  I use Newsgator Online as my primary aggregator, and a technical glitch just made me really want to switch.

I had a pretty extensive collection of clippings.  A "Blog This" folder with about 10 entries.  A "Read in Detail" folder with many entries that I wanted to read when I had time to concentrate & absorb the information.  A couple of reference folders with info on different topics that I might want to look back on.  The list goes on and on, and now they're all gone.

I was going through my clippings, and I was viewing a folder that had 4 entries in it.  I decided that I no longer needed any of the four entries, so I clicked the "Delete All Posts On This Page" button.  Well, instead of deleting all the posts on that page, it wiped out all 300 clippings I had made.  All gone.

I was able to repeat this by saving some current articles into different clipping folders, and trying the "Delete All Posts On This Page" button again.  Without fail, using this function wipes out ALL saved clips, not just the ones in the displayed page, not just the ones in the selected folder.  All of them.

 

 

Saturday, August 19, 2006 8:25:54 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Internet

Quickie: Think of a blog as a thought-transmitter - David St Lawrence

I dug this one out of my "Blog This" folder...  David St Lawrence pontificates on the significance of blogs.  My favorite quote: "Your message is spread by the power of your ideas."

Monday, June 19, 2006 8:09:45 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Monetizing the Blog

I’ve always hated having ads on my site, but I also hate hosting bills, so I’m experimenting with some ideas for balancing my distaste for ads with making a few bucks to help with the hosting costs. I'm hoping that the ads will be contextual enough to be of value to the visitors to this site.

Right now I’ve got a reading list with Amazon associate links, and a small Google adsense banner at the top of the blog. I’ not sure if my traffic levels are going to turn any of this into real cash, but every little bit helps.

I’ll be experimenting with how the different ad vehicles work, and with placement, so if you have any opinions, feel free to pass it along. If you really want to help out with the hosting bills, and you’re in the market for a really expensive watch, here’s an ad just for you:

Wednesday, May 31, 2006 7:06:02 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

MSN/Live Spaces Feature Request

Let me set up a pointer to a Blogger API or MetaWeblog API endpoint (or any other endpoint that a significant number of people use), and then mirror any content I post to my Space to that endpoint.  That's it.  This solves the "Let me have my own domain name" request that has caused many bloggers to turn away from Spaces.  If this feature was implemented, I could use Spaces as my Editor and still keep my blog on my own server using dasBlog.  It would also enable me to us all of the Spaces-integrated goodness of Live messenger, Expo, etc., while still maintaining control of my blog.

Just a thought...

 

Thursday, April 06, 2006 4:52:29 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | MSN

Rebranding Blobservations...

I've taken the step of rebranding Blobservations.net as One Man Shouting.  The new site can be found at http://onemanshouting.com and the new feed url is http://feeds.feedburner.com/onemanshouting

The decision to rebrand is mostly because I found it hard to talk about "Blobservations".  It was a nice gimmicky name when I first started the blog, and I thought it read ok, but it just didn’t hold out in conversations.  I always found myself explaining it (“It’s like observations with a B L on the front…”), and quite honestly I felt a bit silly saying it.  This was never really a problem until I attended Search Champs this past January, and I found that I actually had occasion to talk about my blog with strangers.

The new name will hopefully be a little easier on the tongue, and I think it also reflects my blogging style a little bit better.  While I enjoy it when I get into conversations in the blogosphere, and I do occasionally link to other bloggers, a good portion of my blogging is more as an outlet for me.  I have an opinion about something, or an interesting idea, and I want to put it out into the ether.  I shout – You’re welcome to listen…

Welcome to One Man Shouting…

Wednesday, March 01, 2006 10:28:25 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

What Is Conversational Blogging?

What is conversational blogging?  MSN has a few relevent pages, Google does too, but the answer doesn't seem very clear.  I'm going to propose a definition.  Feel free to track-back or comment to add your 2 cents...

Conversational blogging is the act of publishing or reading blog entries in a way that groups related posts into a coherent dialogue.

There are several mechanisms that people use to build conversations in the blogosphere. 

• Comments are the simplist, and often the easiest method.  It keeps all the relevent info in one place, and anyone who visits the post page can easily find the dialogue.  Comment spam, and all the things that fight comment spam (CAPTCHA, Moderation, etc.) detract from the usefulness of comments for dialogue.
• Referrers are dead in my opinion.  Publishing referrers is just spam-bait.
• Trackbacks may be the best we have for current technology.  Spam is still a problem, but automated checking and blacklists seem to be holding back the tide.
• Tags.  Tags can be used to follow almost anything, and if they are specific enough, they can limit their results to a single conversation.
• Search.  The various blog searches have ways to subscribe to "who links to this or that" feeds, or you can follow conversations by tailoring your searches properly.

How could it be better?  From a user perspective, when I'm reading feeds and find an interesting entry that might have an good conversation surrounding it, I'd love to be able to click something and set a "follow this conversation" flag.  My feed reader should then give me some good way to visualize a threaded representation of all the chunks of information that relate to that specific entry.  Comments, links, trackbacks, whatever, I'd want it all to be available in an organized manner.  Let me un-follow the conversation later if I lose interest, but otherwise, bring me the new bits as they appear on the web, and provide some context for how they fit in to the dialogue.

This is a feed reader problem, but it's gonna need a great search back-end, and a well thought-out UI on the front.

 

 

Wednesday, January 18, 2006 10:51:23 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [3]  Blogging | Search

Conversation Blogging Is Still Too Hard
Tris Hussey links to a post by Amy Gahran pointing out that Blogging really isn't mainstream enough yet.  Amy says that email discussion lists and forums are easier for new or non-technical users to pick up and start using.  Is it possible to make conversational blogging easy enough for these users, or are we forever doomed to a world where blogging is dominated by the technically savy?
Wednesday, January 18, 2006 10:33:22 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [2]  Blogging

Do Bloggers Catch More Flies With Vinegar?

Want to get a link?  Complain…  I was looking through some of my old posts, and I realized that the times that I have received links from other bloggers are almost exclusively on complaint or suggestion posts.

There is an upside to this.  I know if I complain about a Microsoft product, my logs will show at least a handful of hits from Microsoft IP’s over the next few days. (This effect is even more pronounced if I include Robert Scoble’s name, coincidence?)  I’ve also seen hits directly from other companies whose names have appeared in my posts.  This is cool…  The consumer has a voice, and the same search tools that are finding posts in my blog are indexing MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournel, etc., so the barrier to entry is low.  Still, I can’t help feeling a bit guilty for the fact that I get more traffic from negative posts than I do from positive posts.  I even looked back and found that (in my opinion anyway) my postings have become more negative as time has progressed.   I always hated the negative slant of TV news, and I feel bad that I fell into the same traffic/link-hungry rutt.

How can this get better?  Well, I’m going to try to post about more positive topics in the future, and I’m going to make an effort to link to some positive posts as well.  I know this isn’t going to even come close to changing the blogosphere, but at least my little neighborhood will have some glimmers of light.

Wednesday, January 18, 2006 9:18:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Blogging | Random

OPML Chaining

OPML is a simply, yet very useful format.  I have an idea that I believe would make it more useful.  I’m not sure if this would fit best as an extension, or an addition to the spec.  I did a quick review of the spec, and I don’t believe this functionality is included yet.

What I would like to be able to do is add an outline element that instead of being a node contained within the OPLM file, would link to another OPML file.  Basically something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml>
  <head />
  <body>
    <outline title="Scoble’s Blogroll" text="Scoble’s Blogroll" link=”http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/scOPML.opml” />
    <outline title="Hallihan Family Blogroll" text="Hallihan Family Blogroll " link=”http://hallihan.us/familyblogs.opml” />
    <outline title="Geek Blogs I Like" text=" Geek Blogs I Like" link=”http://blobservations.net/publicblogroll.opml” />
  </body>
</opml>

What does this get me?  It allows me to define my attention field using dynamic outlines.  Assuming that Scoble actually posted a straight OPML file, and kept it up to date, I’d have a dynamic view of what he had in his blogroll.  The Family Blogroll could be maintained by one family member to include any family-related blogs.  Everyone could add it to their own OPLM file, and now a new family blog only has to be added in one place for everyone to have it show up in their feed reader. 

The missing piece to this pie is that RSS Aggregators would have to allow me to use an arbitrary OPML file, and then they's have to process the links.  I’d like this better anyway, but the impression I have gotten from most readers I’ve tried is that they are maintaining feed lists in some internal data structure, and they only export OPML.  They would have to start using OPML more natively, and then they either have to extend OPLM to handle things like read status, or maintain a separate data structure.  There’s a ton more details on the implementation front (cycle detection, removing duplicates, etc.), but if the basic idea is sound, then these can be overcome.

Taking this one step further, we could expand the above to include:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml>
  <head />
  <body>
    <outline title="Scoble’s Blogroll" text="Scoble’s Blogroll" link=”http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/scOPML.opml”>
      <filter type=”random” value=”1:100”/>
    </outline>
    <outline title="Hallihan Family Blogroll" text="Hallihan Family Blogroll " link=”http://hallihan.us/familyblogs.opml”>
      <filter type=”priority” value=”10”/>
    </outline>
    <outline title="Geek Blogs I Like" text=" Geek Blogs I Like" link=”http://blobservations.net/publicblogroll.opml” >
      <filter type=”priority” value=”5”/>
    </outline>
  </body>
</opml>

Now I only get a 1/100 sampling from Robert Scoble's extensive blogroll & my family's blog posts go to the top of my news stack.

If you think this is useful, then trackback with your thoughts & ideas.

----

Note, as I was doing some due diligence on this post, I stumbled upon Attention.xml.  That format already incorporates some of what I outline above, with the notable omission of the filtering.  Attention.xml looks like more of a swiss-army-knife solve every problem fortmat, and I'm not sure if it still comes in under the "simple" format idea, but it's not a simple problem so I guess that's ok.  I had seen many mentions before about Attention.xml, but I never "got it".  Not I "get it" and I'm hopeful that the Newsgator's and Bloglines' of the world catch on soon.

Tuesday, December 06, 2005 9:26:58 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Say Something Interesting... Feedscanning and Commentary on Feed Management Interfaces.

I recently joined about 80 other folks in the blogosphere and imported Scoble's OMPL file into my newsreader.  Why would I do this?  I like reading Scoble's blog, and he tends to find some interesting posts.  I thought it might be interesting to take a peek through the ScobleFilter and see the raw stream of data.  Interesting?  Yes.  Overwhelming?  Yes!

I added an extra <Outline> element to the file so that Newsgator would keep the feeds contained to a subfolder, and then loaded it in.  My first impression had nothing to do with the OPML file or the list of feeds.  I was reminded that Newsgator Online doesn't have a "Delete All" function (that I could find) anywhere on the web interface.  What a pain!  I remembered that the mobile interface does have that magic "delete all", so I browsed to the Mobile URL and waited forever for it to load all the feeds, and then hit the "delete all".  It timed out a couple times, but eventually I was left with a clean slate.

After watching these feeds for a while, I must say that there is quite a large volume of content coming through Scoble's blogroll.  I decided that I would basically put all feeds on probation.  I'll read the first one or two posts that come through on each feed.  If I've already read something on this topic elsewhere in my blogroll, then I unsubscribe.  If the post is nothing more than a thinly veiled advertisement, I unsubscribe.  Scoble has many interests reflected in his blogroll that I have no desire to read about, so those feeds go away too.  How does a feed stay in my list?  They have to say something interesting and relevant to me.  It's a very personal choice, and I can usually make the call one or two sentences into a post.

I think I'm picking up about 1 in 50 from Scoble's list as the feeds come through.  There are many that I had already subscribed to, so that number is a little lower than it would have been otherwise.  The ones I'm keeping are going into a second "probation" folder.  They have to prove themselves before I'm going to commit to keeping them on.  

All in all it's been a fun little exercise.  I've been pairing down my blogroll over the last year, and it had started to seem a little stale.  It's good to get an infusion of new content, and many of these folks I would never have discovered if not for Scoble's blogroll.

This entire exercise has left me with a short wishlist for Newsgator's feed management interface, or for any rss aggregator.  If you know any that fit the bill, feel free to leave a comment here.

• I'd like to tag my feeds.  Not just posts, but feeds.  Then let me build "Views" that are combinations of tags. 
• Let me manage my feeds as I read them.  This should include deleting feeds, moving to different folders, or tagging.  I generally make decisions about feeds when I'm looking at the articles.  I hate having to go to the "Organize Folders" in Newsgator. Give me an AJAX'y little icon that pops up a submenu.  Doesn't take much real estate, but gives users much more control.
• Let me add feeds without jumping through hoops. Again, a little AJAX'y popup dialog from a small icon at the top.  Let me paste in a URL, and then retrieve it and offer me a choice on importing individual items (if it's OPML) or placement into a specific folder (for RSS).
• Let me "catch up" or "delete all" from any view.  And then let me roll back my read state to a specific date/time if I feel that I missed something.

I've also got some new ideas on OPML, "Views" and attention, but I need to hash them out a bit and try to pull together something coherent.

 

 

Monday, December 05, 2005 8:42:34 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [2]  Blogging

More Subscribers? Thanks Scoble!

I logged in this evening to delete some comment spam, and I noticed that my little FeedBurner reader count on my blog had spiked up to the mid-nineties.  It generally hangs out around a slightly more modest 30 subscribers.  My first thought was that someone had linked to one of my posts.  I checked my referral logs, and the only thing I saw was a huge spike in visitors with a blank referrer.  I also ran a check against Pubsub, but still didn’t see any good explanation for the spike.  I then remembered that Robert Scoble had recently published his OMPL file via his blog.  I had clipped that entry to read later, since I was curious what blogs Scoble is reading these days, but I didn’t for the life of me think that my blog would be included.  A quick search of the document showed that my blog was indeed included.  Thanks to Scoble for including me.

 

For the new subscribers, here’s what you can expect from this blog.  I’m not a prolific blogger.  I post occasionally, and sometimes I go silent for a few weeks.  I only post when I feel I have something interesting to say.  I’ve found that when I force myself to post, I’m not as happy with what I produce.  I’m also balancing time between a job, a wife, two young kids, and I’m also working on a master’s degree.  I know everybody is busy.  I could make more time for blogging, but several of the aforementioned take a higher priority in my life.  I’m not trying to be famous or make money with my blog. I just like having a venue to publish interesting ideas & commentary.

 

Here's a sampling of my favorite posts from the past:

 

Transient (Throwaway) Email Addresses

 

Beware of Bloggers, a Warning to the Traditional Press

 

Disruptive Google

 

Interview With Mike Hall

 

A New Media Model

 

Windows Server, Home Edition

 

Is Blogging Really Conversational?

Monday, November 28, 2005 10:16:55 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Beware of Bloggers, a Warning to the Traditional Press

The traditional press, newspapers, magazines, etc., have long enjoyed a unique power over the information that they present to their readers.  They could selectively quote, frame the discussion, and in many ways make the information portray a preconceived story.

That era is coming to an end.

Mark Jen recently posted a preemptive disclosure of a conversation he had with a Forbes Magazine fact checker.

Mark Cuban went so far as to post the entire text of an email interview he did with a NY Times reporter, who evidently twisted Cuban's words to fit his story.

Blogs are flattening the world of information.  Big media will continue to hold large amounts of power, but abusing that power will become riskier, especially in instances where you are using quotes out of context, or framing articles in ways that totally disregard the source material.  While it's true that the majority of your readers may never see the other side of the story directly, your direct competitors may pick it up, and use it to undermine your credibility.

Blogging lowers the bar.  It used to take a great deal of time & money to get a message to thousands or even millions of people.  Now, any person can start a blog for free.  Whether or not their words reach any audience will be determined by relevence, and the indexing of blogs that is being shaped by the likes of PubSub, Technorati, Google, and MSN.

Now, re-read that last sentence, and see if you can guess who the new Media Superpowers are going to be...

Tuesday, September 27, 2005 9:50:50 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Media | Search

Google finally launches a blog search engine (Beta)

Google has launched a Blog Search Engine (From DownloadSquad). 

It fairs pretty will for my favorite vanity searches:

Blobservations and Hallihan

Actually, I'm not being quite fair, it does awesome on those searches.  I'm pretty familiar with what those searches provide on Pubsub, Technorati, and the normal Google Search and MSN Search.  And it's fast...  Two ways.  It had a nine hour old blog post as my first result, so it's updating fairly quickly, and the UI is lightning fast.  No perceived wait (although I'm sure it's measurable).

This is Google's biggest advantage over MSN search.  Google has that perceived wait down to nothing.

While Google is late to the party on blog search, they have put together a quality offering that I'm sure will become many folks engine of choice for blog searching.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005 4:57:02 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Google | Search

Wish list for all feed readers, Newsgator, Bloglines, FeedDemon, etc...

I want to be able to subscribe to a feed for a limited time.  Let me say:  "I want to pay attention to this feed for 2 weeks", or 3 months, or whatever.  When the time is up, prompt me to re-subscribe, and show me the dates and contents of a couple of the most recent posts.  This would make subscribing to threads on message boards (like Channel9 or MSDN Forums) so much more practical, and it would let me decide to "try out" feeds that I would otherwise ignore.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005 7:03:27 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Long time no posts...

Life's been busy lately, so I haven't had a lot of time to post.  I did manage to upgrade my blog software to dasBlog 1.8.  Thanks to Scott Hanselman and the rest of the crew that made this happen.  Details on the release are here.

Tuesday, August 16, 2005 7:48:07 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Awesome ASP.NET 2.0 Shared Web Hosting

Ok, I'll throw the disclaimer up front.  If you sign up using the link below, I get a referral commission.  With that said, I'm going to try to give a fair review of my current hosting service, Webhost4Life.

A while back I decided that I needed to find a new hosting provider.  My old host had limited support for ASP.Net, and although they allowed multiple domains to be hosted on one account, they required that they all be pointed to the root directory of the hosting account.  This made it necessary to have a gimmicky default.aspx that redirected by the host header, and didn't support having full web applications in subdirectories.

I ran through trials on several hosts, and ended up signing on with Webhost4life.  I'm on the $20 per month plan, and am very happy with the interfaces that they provide.  The big bonuses in my mind are:

• I can point any domain name to a subdirectory in my hosting account.
• I can set any directory in my hosting account as an independent web application, through the web control panel.
• I have access to SQL server, My SQL, etc.
• They have a decent online interface for setting file & directory security permissions.
• They will put you on a server that has the beta .Net framework 2.0 if you ask through tech support.

On the down-side, I have found that they have a tendency to nickel-and-dime for many features.  It's free to point a new domain to your hosting root, but if you want it pointed to a subdirectory, it's an extra $10 a year.  Want to use their e-commerce wizard (it's not that great) then there's a one-time setup fee.  When they switched me over to the server with the 2.0 framework, there was a one-time fee (and some downtime) since they manually copied my websites over.

Overall I've been very happy.  My family picture website runs great, and much faster than on my old host.  Dasblog was very easy to setup, and I've got a couple of side projects using ASP.Net with the 2.0 framework, and they're working great as well.

If you want to found out more, click here, and feel free to comment or email with questions.

Update 7/13/2005: I'm not sure what the problem is yet, but my hosting server has been having some random failings lately.  It usually comes back within a couple of minutes, but the reliability isn't quite up to par for business purposes.  Just a fair warning for anyone taking the ASP.NET 2.0 route. I never had any reliability problems before I moved to the server with the ASP.NET 2.0 Beta.  To be fair, it is a beta.

Update2 7/13/2005: I had tech support switch the virtual directory for my blog site back to ASP.NET 1.1 and everything appears to be working fine now, and I haven't had any site drops since.

 

Thursday, June 23, 2005 5:23:06 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [1]  Blogging | Business | Development

Linkblog no longer on the main feed

I have taken the linkblog off the main feed.  I've recently come to the realization that I'm not a big fan of links being inserted into content blogs, so I figured I'd give readers a choice.  If you want links, subscribe to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/blobservationswithlinks

othewise keep your aggregators pointed to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/blobservations

or if you just want the links with no content, subscribe to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlobservationsLink

Hopefully this will lower the noise floor a bit.

--Rick

Tuesday, June 21, 2005 5:01:17 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

start.com/3 isn't quite what I was hoping for....

Microsoft opened up start.com/3 over the weekend and it isn't quite what I was hoping for.  Granted, it's pretty cool.  The user interface has lots of DHTML goodness, and is highly configurable, but this is in the realm of Google's Portal or My Yahoo!.  Basically, start.com/3 is a RSS-centric portal.  To all those who are calling it an aggregator, it's not quite there yet.  Take a look at Bloglines, Rojo, or Newsgator Online for examples of an aggregator.  Key points are: Unified Viewing of Feeds, Tracking of Read/Unread items, and preferably Nested Folders for organizing feeds.

I'm betting that Microsoft still has an aggregator up their sleeves, and hopefully it'll have the same great design elements that the latest start.com incubator has shown off.  We'll just have to keep waiting...

 

Monday, June 06, 2005 5:09:13 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Microsoft

Blogger to dasBlog Redirect Hack

Using the following Blogger.com template, I have been able to redirect all the traffic hitting my old Blogger.com generated pages to the new pages hosted under DasBlog.  If you want to try this, change the dasblog_root variables, paste into your Blogger.com template, and then republish your blog.  It's probably a good idea to backup your old template first.  No warranties or guarantees, use at your own risk!

For information on porting your content over, see my previous post.

<html>
<Blogger>
<MainOrArchivePage>
<script language="javascript">
var dasblog_root="http://blobservations.net/dasblog/";

document.location.href=dasblog_root;
</script>
</MainOrArchivePage>
<ItemPage>
<script language="javascript">
var dasblog_root="http://blobservations.net/dasblog/";
var newpage=dasblog_root;
var oldstring="<$BlogItemTitle$>";
var newstring="";
var toreplace=['-','\'','!',' ',':',';',',','.','+','!'];
for (i=0; i<toreplace.length; ++i) {
 oldstring=oldstring.replace(toreplace[i],"");
 while(newstring!=oldstring)
 {
  newstring=oldstring;
  oldstring=oldstring.replace(toreplace[i],"");
 }
}

newpage+=oldstring+".aspx";

newpage=newpage.toLowerCase();

document.location.href=newpage;
</script>
</ItemPage>
</Blogger>
</html>

Thursday, April 28, 2005 4:06:27 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [2]  Blogging

How I Ported My Content from Blogger to DasBlog

I finally got DasBLog up and running on Blobservations and decided that I wanted to import all of my old content from Blogger.com.  I figured that this challenge had to have been overcome in the past, so I hit MSN Search and Google with keywords like: Import Export DasBlog Blogger.  I located a few half-baked tools (as-in, not quite ready for prime-time). Some didn't support titles, other wouldn't grab the links.  Most of them could easily blame their failings on the fact that they were attempting to use the underpowered Blogger API.

I hacked around a little, trying to implement a simple ATOM API client in C#, and to do a fully automated conversion tool, but eventually I decided to drop back and punt.  I only needed to do this one time, so a little manual intervention would be acceptable.

I ended up following these steps:

1.  Change Blogger.com settings, under "Formatting" tell it to show 999 days on the front page.  DO NOT PUBLISH

2.  Modify your blogger template to:

<?xml encoding="utf-8" ?>
<entries>
<Blogger>
<bi_url><![CDATA[<$BlogItemURL$>]]></bi_url>
<bi_title><![CDATA[<$BlogItemTitle$>]]></bi_title>
<bi_body><![CDATA[<$BlogItemBody$>]]></bi_body>
<bi_author><![CDATA[<$BlogItemAuthorNickname$>]]></bi_author>
<bi_date><![CDATA[<$BlogItemDateTime$>]]></bi_date>
</Blogger>
</entries>

3.  DO NOT PUBLISH, instead hit the "Preview" button

4.  In the resulting screen, you'll see a bunch of unformatted text.  Select "View Source" and then copy everything from the opening <? xml ?> tag down to the closing <entries> tag.  Paste that text into notepad and save as archive.xml.  On the edit screen, hit the "Discard Edits" button.  Go back and restore the settings from step 1.

5.  Warning, very rough C# code ahead.  The following is snipped from the C# program I threw together to convert from the raw xml to Dasblog.  It uses some classes from the DasBlog engine, so you'll have to add a reference to the newtelligence.DasBlog.Runtime.dll file if you want to try this yourself.  Before running, make sure that the directory c:\content exists.

{
DataSet ds = new DataSet("archive");
ds.ReadXml(@"{insert directory to archive.xml file}archive.xml");

string title="";
string body="";
string link="";
string date="";
string auth="";

DateTime dt_post;

newtelligence.DasBlog.Runtime.IBlogDataService das_ds = newtelligence.DasBlog.Runtime.BlogDataServiceFactory.GetService(@"c:\content", null);

foreach(DataRow r in ds.Tables[0].Rows)
{
title=(string)r["bi_title"];
body=(string)r["bi_body"];
link=(string)r["bi_url"];
date=(string)r["bi_date"];
auth=(string)r["bi_author"];
dt_post=DateTime.Parse(date);
Entry post = new Entry();
post.Author = auth;

post.Content = body;
post.Description = "";
post.Title = title;
post.CreatedLocalTime = dt_post;
post.CreatedUtc = dt_post.ToUniversalTime();
post.ModifiedLocalTime = dt_post;
post.ModifiedUtc = dt_post.ToUniversalTime();
post.EntryId = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
das_ds.SaveEntry(post);

}
}

6.  After running, you should have a bunch of xml file in the directory c:\content.  Just upload or copy these to DasBlog's "content" directory and the posts should show up under DasBlog.  I think I may have had to create and delete a new post to make them show up.

If you have any questions, feel free to email. 

Update 6/16/2005: Ryan Jones has implemented a dotText to DasBlog and Livejournal to DasBlog content conversion using similar code. 

Update 7/13/2005: Ben Scheirman emailed me about some difficulties he was having, and we figured out that you have to have the Timestamp Format configured a certain way for the blogger template to work.  This image shows the relevent setting:

Ben is also putting together a GUI to assist with the conversion. I'll post a link when he finishes it up.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005 4:29:43 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [7]  Blogging | Development

New Blog Engine!

I'm no longer going to be relying on Blogger.com for blog publishing.

I've gotten DasBlog up and running, and have ported all of my content over.

Please update your links, and if you subscribe via RSS, the new feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blobservations

The old blog archive will live on at http://blobservations.net/blog unless I can figure out a good way to redirect traffic hitting the old links.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005 7:08:46 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

How-To: Add Blogpulse Hyperthreads to Your Blog
Blogpulse has an interesting feature called a Conversation Tracker. Basically this tool can take a permalink, and build a web showing the various blog entries that link to it, and the blogs that link to those, and so on.

If you use Blogger, you can add a link to Blogpulse by adding the following:

<a href="http://showcase.blogpulse.com/conversation?link=<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>&max_results=50&start_date=20041229" alt="Blogpulse Hyperthread for this Post"<{{Blogpulse Hyperthread}}</a>


anywhere in between the <blogger> and </blogger> tags. I added this to my blog template right after the <$BlogItemControl$> tag in my customized template. I'm sure that this should be pretty easy to implement with other blog engines as well.

This post carries no warrantees, since Blogpulse can change their interface whenever they want, but for now it produces some pretty interesting results!

Update: Just for a more interesting example, here's a link to a hyperthread for Robert Scoble's Crossfader teaser from last month...
Wednesday, April 06, 2005 6:32:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Roll Call!
Is anybody listening?

Just a quick post to see if there's anybody out there. The logs show that there are at least a few people reading. I'm looking for feedback on Blobservations.

What posts have you liked?
What posts would you have rather not seen?
What would you like to see more of?
Any other suggestions?

Feel free to email me at rick.hallihan (at) gmail.com or leave a comment.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005 5:44:00 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Webmail.us Embraces Business Blogging
While it's interesting to watch people like Robert Scoble instigating change at a large behemoth like Microsoft, I think it’ll be much more interesting to watch how smaller, agile businesses like Webmail.us (formerly Excedent Technologies) makes use of the technology to do better in business.

The key here is that this is a company that is not exclusively about blogs, who is embracing blogs and rss as a way of improving their business & improving their focus on customers. This isn’t just some stupid PR blog. If you peruse their website, or their CEO’s blog, or their company blog, you can see that they are drinking the Business Blogging Koolaid, and asking for more.

Best wishes for success to Pat and his team!
Thursday, February 24, 2005 4:50:00 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Business

Influence peddling in the blogosphere
A good article on paid blogging, influence, and ethics over at OJR.
Friday, February 18, 2005 6:10:00 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging

Scoble is interviewed on G'Day World
The guys over at G'Day world land an interview with Robert Scoble.

The first time I listened to G'Day World, I kept thinking that it sounded like a bunch of Americans doing bad Australian accents. I had to keep reminding myself that they really are from Australia.

Once I got over my mental block with the accents, I found that they seem to land some great interviews. They mix in-depth business and technology discussions with a reasonable dose of humor and commentary.

Cameron Reilly and Mick Stanic have pulled together another great podcast with the Scobleizer.

Friday, January 14, 2005 6:51:51 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  Blogging | Podcasting

Maybe Blogging is "Public Speaking"
My previous post generated a fair amount of interest, so I thought I'd follow up with some more thoughts on the nature of blogging.

Blogging is not conversation. As I said in my previous post, the permanence and the public nature of blogging places realistic inhibitions on bloggers. While you can have intelligent discourse, on blogs, it is not conversation.

Blogging is not email. I've recently read and heard many references about how RSS is the evolution of email, or that it might replace email. RSS is good for several things that people have used email for in the past(distribution lists, product information, news, etc.) but it is not an evolution of email, it's just using a new tool that performs a function better than an old tool.

Blogging is Public Speaking. Take pretty much any advice you have ever heard about speaking in front of large audiences, about giving presentations, and it should apply to the way you blog. You can frame your presentation using Audience & Objectives. You should keep in mind the biases of your audience, their existing knowledge, and their motivation for listening to you. The big difference is that your intended audience may differ greatly from your true audience. Everyone on the inter