Posterous

Posterous is a hosted blogging service that looks like a neat alternative to Tumblr. I like the emphasis on using email to create posts. Everyone already had an email address and knows how to use it, so there’s no wasted effort learning a new interface.

Sending a Ping to PubSubHubbub from MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a handy Macintosh application that I use to compose entries for my website. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t understand, when I publish a post with MarsEdit, none of Movable Type’s plug-ins seem to fire off. At present I use Multiblog to rebuilt my Debigulated URLs blog, which allows short URLs to work for all of my main blog’s entries, and I use MT-PubSubHubbub to ping Google’s PubSubHubbub hub when I post a new entry. If Multiblog doesn’t get triggered, the short URL I’m declaring in my page’s head won’t work because the .htaccess file at my link shortener hasn’t been rebuilt. If MT-PubSubHubbub doesn’t fire, the hub won’t get notified of a new post. I can work around the first problem using Bob the Rebuilder, and I’ve written up a sloppy AppleScript to deal with pinging the hub from MarsEdit.

I am absolutely certain that there’s a better way to do this, but here’s what I’ve got going for now. It works in testing using FriendFeed, which updates within seconds of a post that pings Google’s hub¹. Here’s the script:

tell application "Safari" activate do JavaScript "window.open('http://david. ely.fm/davextreme/')" in document 1 end tell  delay 2  tell application "System Events" tell process "Safari" tell menu bar 1 tell menu bar item "Bookmarks" tell menu "Bookmarks" tell menu item "Bookmarklets" tell menu "Bookmarklets" click menu item "Publish to Hub" end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell end tell  delay 2  tell application "Safari" to close the front window 

I placed the script in my MarsEdit scripts folder (found easily by going to MarsEdit’s Scripts menu and selecting “Open Scripts Folder”).

The script requires that you have:

1. A “Bookmarklets” folder in your main Bookmarks menu in Safari; and
2. Google’s “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet in that folder, which bookmarklet can be found on Google’s site near the bottom of the page².

From there, I post an entry using MarsEdit, then select my “Ping Hub” script from the Scripts menu. It opens my webpage, waits two seconds for it to load, invokes the “Publish to Hub” bookmarklet, then closes the window.

My hope is that someone develops a plugin for MarsEdit that does this more elegantly, but maybe this will be helpful to people in the meantime. (Or someone can tell me why those plugins don’t activate when my xmlrpc updates go through.)

1. The only use I have for FriendFeed being testing this push stuff. ↩
2. Yes, I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace, so I use “which” in new ways and employ footnotes too often³. Hopefully it’ll wear off soon. ↩
3. Also I go out of my way to point out that I’ve been reading DFW (and call him DFW). ↩

Everything TypePad: Introducing TypePad for iPhone and iPod touch

Everything TypePad: Introducing TypePad for iPhone and iPod touch

Everything TypePad brings you the latest TypePad news, along with advice and ideas for making your blog great.

10 Tips from Jorn Barger

Wired’s Top 10 Tips for New Bloggers From Original Blogger Jorn Barger does indeed offer good advice. Namely the focus on providing more links to other interesting things you’ve found than on stuff you yourself have written.

Movable Type Supports OpenID

The new version of Movable Type has built-in support for OpenID commenting, which is great. I like the approach of presenting people with familiar icons to communicate the idea that the already have OpenIDs, and being able to hide all but the username and fill in the rest, they don’t even need to know that they’re using an OpenID. I’d like to see TypePad and Vox (and Blogger) add in OpenID support like this, too.

MarsEdit 2

A new version of MarsEdit is out, sporting what seem to be nice new features. I love MarsEdit. It’s one of those programs that makes you mad you can’t use a Mac all the time. Ars Technica has some info about the new release.

Six Apart Holiday Movie 2006

Six Apart Holiday Movie 2006

“Permalink, 0 comments, 0 trackbacks…”

ongoing · On Comments (II)

ongoing · On Comments (II)

10 Insights on Blogs from PEW

10 Insights on Blogs from PEW

Making Something Meaningful

Making Something Meaningful

Anil Dash, on how blogging gets hard when you’ve been doing it for a few years.

Homer Simpson on Independent Media

“You see, Lisa: instead of one bigshot controlling the media, now there’s a thousand freaks serializing their worthless opinions.”

Attribution Etiquette

Simon Willison beat me to a point my mind had filed away when I read the same Wired article this morning: attribution is good etiquette. Nothing complicated there, just if you write about an idea or post a link to something, also include a link to where you found the idea. It helps propagate ideas by letting people trace conversations, gives credit to the person who gave you the idea, and helps the magic interconnectivity that’s supposed to make the web, well, a web.

Simon has a cool show referrer bookmarklet. To use, just drag it to your bookmark bar/menu. Click it and it’ll pop up a window giving you a link to the site that brought you to where you are now.

On Comment Systems

What good is an opinion without someone to tell you why you’re wrong? The rise in popularity of weblogs has given voice to over a million people across the internet. If the best thing about them is their ability to provide an open channel for individuals to say what they want, then their most crucial feature must be the comment systems that allow the rest of the world to respond. A good-sized group of my friends stays in touch daily by posting and commenting on each other’s LiveJournal pages. Comments move fluidly from serious discussion to inside jokes to event planning because the system that manages those comments is robust enough to proctor such conversations. Still, though online discussion boards predate the visual World Wide Web, I’ve yet to see a comment system that does it all.

In “It’s all about Context,” Mena Trott remarks that in developing TypePad, “we learned that commenting methods evolve […] and we hope we never claim that anything we do can’t be improved.”

While the behavior of discussion modules in weblogs allows for an amazing amount of interaction between people all over the world, there are a number of areas that still need to be honed. I’d like to lay out below a number of features that I think would improve that ability to have online discussions.

It’s All About Context

As discussed in the above-mentioned article, comments should always appear on the same page as the post they’re talking about. They should never collapse into “headers-only” mode if their number soars above a magic threshold, and should also not continue onto a second page even if their number continues to soar. It’s important that the full context for a discussion is always available on the page, and discussion tends to stop when comments spill over to a second page.

WYSIWYG HTML

While maintaining a webpage requires some knowledge of HTML, leaving a comment on one should not. All comment fields should have WYSIWYG formatting buttons above them. The set of WYSIWYG, or “What You See Is What You Get,” buttons would work just like those in MS Word. Highlighting text and clicking the “Bold” button would make the text appear bold, while under the hood remembering to put <b> […] </b> (or strong) around the text when the user clicks the submit button. A “link” button would launch a little dialogue box asking for the link destination and link text, and would inset a working link into the text field. Colors, text-alignment, and fonts would be marked-up using in-line styles. The person leaving the comment would always see the text as it will appear, and would never see the underlying, valid, XHTML. And, of course, the user would be free to type out his own code if he’d prefer.

A spell-check button would also be nice.

eMail Addresses Should Never Be Displayed

Spam is a big problem these days. Even the best encryption can eventually be broken or foiled by people with the patience to hand-copy addresses. People leaving comments on your page don’t want their email addresses harvested by spam-bots so that they can get more ads for male enhancement. The only reason someone leaves their email address is because they don’t know any better (which you shouldn’t penalize them for), you make them do it because you don’t allow anonymous comments (which doesn’t mean you have to display their address on the page), they know you might want to write them about their comment (which, again, doesn’t mean that you have to display their address), or they want to receive emails containing future comments so they can follow the discussion long after they’ve forgotten your URL (bingo: why else are they giving you their address?).

Notification

What LiveJournal does pretty well and MovableType/TypePad doesn’t do at all is notification. There’s little point in making comments on a weblog entry if no one ever checks the entry again to respond to you. Every discussion should be available via email and RSS. ScriptyGoddess write a nice plug-in for MovableType that gets this feature mostly right. Here’s how I think it should work: every comment form should have a checkbox labeled “Subscribe to This Post.” If a reader enters his email address and leaves this box checked, he’ll get an email every time someone leaves a comment on that entry. Below the comment form is a separate form in which he can enter his email address to subscribe to comments without having to leave one of his own. Each email should contain the text of the newest comment, a link to the full post, and a link to unsubscribe to the mailing list for that discussion.

I have the vague understanding that RSS 2 has a feature that accommodates comment notification. This would be useful as long as readers are given the option of a comment-free feed as well. It’s downright annoying when every post gets marked as new whenever someone comments on it. If I care about a particular post, I should be able to subscribe to it individually.

Referring to Previous Comments

Having the entire text of a conversation readily available is a strong advantage that online discussions have over verbal conversations. If I want to directly refer to something that someone else has said, I can simply copy and paste the quote and respond directly to it. This works fine for instances in which I want to talk about a specific part of a specific comment, but what if I just want to agree or disagree with the entire comment? I could say, “I agree with Sally,” but it’s very possible that Sally’s said four different things already in this thread.

Comments should be numbered. The weblog system should automatically number and label each comment as it gets added to the page. This way, I can say, “I agree with 5,” referring without question to the fifth comment left on the page.

Each Comment Should Have Its Own Permalink

Weblogs thrive because of their interconnectivity. As they continue to mature, they have to grow to allow for themselves. Picture a future student writing a research paper for a webpage. Just as he uses parenthetical citations to refer to the page number of a book, he should be able to use them to cite a particular comment on a weblog.

Threaded Comments are a Bad Idea

I admit, the way that LiveJournal allows people to respond to individual comments adds an interesting dynamic to conversations, but I think it hurts the discussions as a whole.

Conversations in real life happen in real time. Even though you can go back and address a previous point directly, you still have to listen to everything that’s said before you get a chance to speak. Many times in an LJ discussion, there will be five or six good points that get left behind because people are too busy bickering over a previous one. Sure, they’re still there, but they’re sitting at the bottom of the page. The a-temporal grouping of comments commenting on an earlier comment disrupts the natural flow of the discussion, oftentimes neglecting or undermining comments that were made before everyone started ganging up on the earlier point.

It’s in the nature of discussions to twist and go off on tangents, but this should happen, er, naturally. If you line up twenty comments in a row, it’s very easy to follow the conversation from where it started to where it has led. This is because you’re reading the posts in one dimension (moving temporally in a straight line from the time of the original entry to the time of the most-recent comment.) But if you jumble them up so that the threaded view shows the discussion in 2-D, you add an unnatural grouping that often falsely attempts to model the flow of the tangents.

Say there’s a comment with three responses followed by another comment, each of which makes a new point about that comment. Now say that three people want to talk about the second comment. Now we have eight comments. In what order should they be read? In a threaded discussion, they would appear in the following order:

1. First Comment (10:00AM)
   1. Response One (10:10AM)
   2. Response Two (10:15AM)
      1. Response 1 to Response Two (10:18AM)
      2. Response 2 to Response Two (10:25AM)
      3. Response 3 to Response Two (11:55AM)
   3. Response Three (10:21AM)
2. Second Comment (10:02AM)

The two comments made the closest to each other chronologically are actually the farthest apart in the above example. Response Three was made before any of the responses to Response Two, but appears after them. By the time you’ve read all of those responses, you may have have forgotten enough about the original context to understand Response Three.

While I appreciate the utility of being able to comment directly on a comment, for the above reasons and more, I think that threaded comments are a bad idea. And since our weblogging system is already labeling each comment with a number, we can just refer to a comment’s label when talking about it. Should a tangent get so off-topic that the proctor (weblog owner) decides it merits its own forum, he can always start a new entry about it. (Or it could move via TrackBack to another location.)

Thoughts?

So that’s what I have to say on the subject. Please discuss. (I realize that my TypePad comment system doesn’t do it all, bear with it.)

Kalsey's Comment Spam Manifesto

Comment Spam is becoming a problem for webloggers. Adam Kalsey has written a Comment Spam Manifesto declaring war on people who want to use our pages as advertisement and abuse our hard-earned Google rankings. While I haven’t yet been a victim of this problem, I sympathize with those who’re getting hundreds of fake comments a day. We run our websites because we enjoy them, and getting preyed on isn’t cool.

What worries me about the new war on spam is that it could lead to some legal troubles. If people really start going after alleged spammers and succeed in getting their ISPs to shut their sites down, a lot of lawsuits could spring up. What the weblogging world needs is a common comment spam policy. It needs to lay out exactly what an offending post will be, dictate what the host must be able to demonstrate in order to make a claim, and prescribe a list of conditions that must be documented. Likewise, it must also provide legitimate ways an innocent accused party can show that he didn’t do anything wrong. This policy should be something that lots of people agree on, freely distributed, and should be documented on every site that uses it.

Suggestions and TrackBacks are welcome (but not from spammers).

5 Days of TypePad

The geniuses at Six Apart who invented MovableType are starting to show off more of the features of their upcoming TypePad service, and it’s looking really cool so far. The problem with having an MT weblog is that you have to run and configure it all off of your own server. LiveJournal is currently the big centralized service, but TypePad seems like it’s going to have a lot to offer. Namely, that ability to do something that doesn’t involve merely writing text posts. They’ve built in easy tools for customizing the look of your site, building pictures albums, and posting photos from your mobile phone. Sadly, as dumb a contraction as “blogging” is, they’ve gone one step farther and officially adopted “moblogging” as a term. When I hear the word I just think that it’s a new term for gay bashing.

Window to the Past

The BBC has a story on some nerd named Phil Gyford who is turning the diary of Samuel Pepys (pronounced “peeps”) into a weblog. Pepys lived in the 17th century and witnessed the Great Fire of London and the Plague. You can check out the BBC story here or just go right to the blog.