0xDECAFBAD - Tag: metablogging

Social Media Cyborg

2011-11-04T21:12:34+00:00

TL;DR: Since Google Reader lost it's sharing, I've decided to revisit my "social media strategy". I'm plugging lots of things into other things. I feel like maybe I should write about this stuff.

Started diagramming all my social media flows on LucidChart.

This is what I do for fun

Since I've mentioned in a few places that I'm a weirdo, I thought I might spend some time explaining exactly what I mean by that. You see, one of my hobbies is turning myself into a human content filter for friends on the web.

And, honestly, having my sharing habits shaken up by the Readerpocalypse makes it fun again.

The image over to the right is an attempt I made to diagram some of my social media flow. It's incomplete, though: I'm a cheapsake and ran out of free objects in my diagram. So, I had to leave out at least a half-dozen more services and a dozen additional connections. (LucidChart is very nice, by the way.)

In other words, ifttt.com is awesome

In particular, I've finally spent some time with ifttt.com. It's like Automator for the social web. It lets you define event triggers from one site that cause actions on another site.

So, I've gone crazy and created a bunch of tasks that make things like the following possible:

Pinboard bookmarks based on favorites from Twitter, identi.ca, YouTube, Last.fm, and my Kindle highlights. I'm turning my Pinboard account into both my personal social media archive and a Google Reader sharing replacement, and I don't even have to beg for new features at Pinboard.
Tumblr photo posts based on Reddit up-votes, Flickr favorites, and Pinboard bookmarks tagged "to:tumblr". Since creating it, I've left my Tumblr almost entirely neglected—but now with ifttt.com, I can route almost every nifty image I find over to that thing. It's the right side of my outboard brain to the Pinboard left.
Published items from from my private installation of Tiny Tiny RSS end up shared on Pinboard. This pretty much scratches my itch for feed reader sharing, since Google nixed those features from Reader.
Starred items from tt-rss get sent to Instapaper, so I can read them on my Kindle later. If email delivery of documents start working, then I'll have a personal long-attention span newspaper delivered regularly to that gadget.
Posts from Google+ get copied over to Facebook, because I don't want to pick sides.
In fact, almost everything I do everywhere eventually ends up posted to Facebook, because I almost never post anything in person over there. I do have friends and family over there and respond to comments, though.

What's the point?

The important principle here is that I'm lazy. If there's a single button to click somewhere that expresses my happiness about a thing, I'd like to click it and have that happiness shared and archived elsewhere without me doing much (or anything) more. The scheme I have now feels pretty good for that, and ifttt.com does a huge amount to help.

The other important thing is that I am at the center of these connections. I don't live entirely on any single service, and anything I care about is archived where I can easily grab it for backups or mashups. Should any particular service node in this web fail, I can probably do without, find an alternative, or build one myself.

My goal is to eventually replace as many of these nodes as possible with self-hosted or at least Open Source derived services. (Though, of course, I'm also lazy and my friends are where they are. So, that goal will take awhile.)

One more thing...

I've got an idea for my next book simmering. And, since I've so far managed to write books about the major things I've done for fun, I feel I'd be remiss if I skipped this stuff. I mean, I sort of covered the same ground all in my first and second books, but things have progressed since then.

What this means is that all the above feels like a warm up for the coding and prosing I'll need to do. I just need to get my shit together and carve out the time to make it happen.

The Readerpocalypse, or Occupy Google Reader

2011-11-01T10:31:54+00:00

TL;DR: Google gave Reader a face-lift and removed built-in following & sharing. In exchange, they added +1 buttons and ways to share to Google+. But, the changes seem to have removed most of the value from the service for me, so I'm moving on as I was invited to do.

What happened?

Almost a year ago, I wrote about how my habits had gotten less del.icio.us. One of the main culprits that stole my sharing flow was Google Reader: I went from using a quick bookmarklet to an even quicker icon-click in my feed reader. That meant I left most things untagged, but I shared even more than before. Eventually, Google Reader released a bookmarklet for use off-site, which meant I started sharing everything everywhere to Reader.

I also found a replacement for my old del.icio.us network in Google Reader's social features. I could follow people, and the stream of things they shared and annotated turned into a great source of news curated and pre-filtered by likeminded people.

Well, as it turns out, Google's recent changes to Reader just removed all of the above. In exchange, they added a couple of buttons to +1 and share items to Google+, which streamlines things for them and encourages more use of the new service.

As I wrote on Google+, the net result is nothing to stomp and shout about, but there's nothing there that makes me happier. As I played more, though, I came to realize that most of the value I derived from the service had evaporated.

Item-centric vs People-centric, Efficiency vs Engagement

There's a big difference between the way sharing happened on Google Reader, and the way it happens now on Google+. The best way I can think to explain is that the old way was item-centric and the new way is people-centric. In other words, people seem to be the dominant social objects in Google+, whereas Google Reader used to treat items that way.

Before, we all gathered around the news. The headline and summary were primary, and our comments were collected after the item. The result was a de-duped stream of great news filtered through smart brains. Even if the people I followed never said a word, the fact that they'd clicked "share" was value enough. In fact, it was better that way most of the time, because we all got out of the way of each other and the news.

This, by the way, is what I loved about del.icio.us and now pinboard.in: It's anti-social networking. We can provide low-effort, intelligent inputs to build something useful for each other, but we're not there to assert a presence or distract each other from the things we each came to see.

But now, that filtered news stream is gone. In its place, on a different site entirely, removed from the flow of feeding on news, is a highly-engaging flood of people babbling away, which occasionally includes repeated shares of things that have bubbled up during the day.

What's wrong with that, for me?

I don't want to wade through a heavily-padded, user-friendly flood of duplicated, echoed items.
I don't want to engage with the people—at least, not when I'm in a mood to feed on news. I want to catch up on what's been put out into the infosphere already, and then start talking about it.

The design of Google+—which has spilled over into the Google Reader face-lift—is about engagement and not fast & efficient processing of the day's news. Engagement in general puts a drag on the task—which for me is like a GTD, Inbox Zero, headline skimming, pattern recognition zen thing that might not be everyone's cup of tea.

But, for all I know, avowed weirdo and info freako that I am, these changes may drive Google Reader growth through the roof for mainstream users. But, it's no longer a product for me. The changes in sharing have removed most of the value for me, because I no longer have the warp speed cruise through news that other people used to power for me.

Circles point the wrong way

One of the things Louis Gray touted about the new sharing features reads like so:

In Reader’s previous sharing model, as a follower of your items, I would see every single item you shared, no matter what it was about. Obviously, as I have different interests than you do, not everything you shared was something I cared about, which often led to reduced sharing of off-topic content. Now, you are more in control, so you can share sports items to your sports circles, great recipes with your foodies circle, or local news to family and friends. You can keep sharing, like you always have, but now, you can better select who sees what.

But, for this purpose, Circles point the wrong way.

Circles on Google+ are lists of people controlled by me. They're not topics—again, people-centric and not item-centric. Circles are a targeting mechanism for sharing to people, and a filtering mechanism for items from people. That is, I can use a circle to set who sees something and I can decide who's stuff I see and when.

But, things that Circles don't do include:

Letting me follow Circles without the Circle-owner needing to manage membership - eg. Don't make me send a message saying "I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter". RSS doesn't work that way and it's better for it.
Letting me and others filter for what gets sent to specific Circles - eg. I'm in both your "scifi" and "politics" circles, but just show me what you sent to your "scifi" circle.

Google Reader didn't have this to begin with, but what I'm looking for is an equivalent to tagging on pinboard.in. For example, if you like my taste in scifi but could care less about my views in politics, you can subscribe to just the tag feeds you want.

I'm happy to tag my shares with topics; that's beneficial to me for search later, and helps interested people besides. But, the last thing I want to do is manage subscriber lists. That doesn't scale. There's no way for you to even know I have "scifi" or "politics" Circles, and you have no way to join either of them without asking for an add.

Too much coordination, not enough benefit. I just can't see the value in people-centric Circles here.

Other things broke, too.

And beyond the fundamental shift in sharing and reading, these things have broken for me now too:

The bookmarklet is dead, so there goes my off-site sharing.
No sharing at all from the mobile web version, so there goes at least half of my sharing on-site.
Android apps like my favorite gReader Pro still think sharing works, but they're just deluded and use an unsupported API anyway
No more feed to Facebook, so there goes most of my Facebook output. (Though, that might be a boon some friends over there.)

Now what?

The remaining value of Google Reader is as just a plain old hosted feed reader—one of the last of them out there, in fact. The problem here is that I'm a weirdo who wrote a book on feeds and feed readers, and so I'm perfectly capable of providing the remaining value for myself.

I'm sure most people won't want to do that, which is probably why "you're not going anywhere". But, there are alternatives even for people who don't want to D.I.Y. entirely:

Dave Winer's River2 (also open source, in UserTalk on the OPML Editor) runs on my laptop and lets me circle back to the code that ran my second-ever news reader, Radio UserLand. (My first was a thing called News Clipper in Perl from many, many moons ago.) And, of course, River2 is one of a suite of apps Dave's working on to build a decentrallized network of feeds and outlines.
NewsBlur looks mighty fine, and the guy running it only asks US$12-36 (your choice) for a year's worth of premium access. Remember: if you're not the customer, you're the product. And, if you want to try installing it, it's an open source Django site. While not yet very social, NewsBlur's creator has plans to head in that direction.
Tiny Tiny RSS installed on my Wordpress-capable web server in about 10 minutes, gobbled up my list of 800 feeds with no problem, and appears to have 90% of what I wanted from Google Reader. Also, it's an open source PHP site. For sharing, Tiny Tiny RSS lets you "publish" shared items in an RSS feed—kind of like the old reBlog web app—and has some experimental cross-instance sharing features.

At the end, the funny thing is that I've circled back to my old del.icio.us habits and have started tagging items on pinboard.in like never before. I'm sure there aren't nearly as many people watching me as before on either del.icio.us or Google Reader, but it's a place to go at least.

It'll probably be recognized as an illness someday, but my sharing feels compulsive at this point and I get itchy without a good outlet.

Moved to Jekyll and Disqus

2011-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

TL;DR: My blog is now produced by Jekyll, with comments hosted by Disqus.

This blog has transitioned between a handful of publishing platforms - including Movable Type, blosxom, and Wordpress. Well, apparently, it's that time again. I've been toying with making a change again for a few years, and finally just got all the pieces together over the past week. This blog is now just a pile of static files produced by Jekyll, and the comments are now hosted by Disqus.

This has a lot of interesting implications:

I can neglect my server for long periods of time without worrying that my long-outdated copy of Wordpress has been exploited. Really, there's no reason for me to have a full-featured CMS running here.
I could host my entire blog on Amazon S3 or something similar, and be more neglectful by reducing active code even further. The only crappy thing is that I don't think I can send decafbad.com directly to S3, and would need to redirect to a CNAME on a subdomain on blog.decafbad.com.
I can edit my blog directly on GitHub and, assuming I get the webhooks set up, have my server rebuild the HTML automatically on a git push. I could probably use GitHub Pages and the Jekyll support there, but I suspect I'll be doing some Weird Things that they won't handle. (And probably for good reason.)
Since Disqus has all my comments now, I can stop worrying about running that code on my server too. I'm a little antsy about putting that in the cloud, but the escape routes are well lit and I should be able to replace it easily if I need to. Self-hosted, JS-include-based comments is a project in my TODO list.
My writing here is now all stored in individual text files, formatted with Markdown, annotated with YAML metadata, and subject to revision control under git. This combination feels like it has a lot of longevity and potential for survival even beyond this current experiment with Jekyll
Writing, editing, and publishing entries here can now more closely match my daily reality of living in MacVim and git. It sounds lame, but the notion of swapping over to a Wordpress admin page and working in a browser textarea has often kept me from even starting a post.

But, some things are broken, now:

Fixed ~~No more tag pages. I don't think very many humans visit these pages, but a lot of search engines do.~~
Fixed ~~No more tag feeds. I expect to hear about this soon, since this blog gets syndicated to Planet Mozilla via my "mozilla" tag feed.~~
No more year / month archive pages or sidebar widget. Not sure how many people actually stroll down memory lane here on my blog, but I do have a gigantor huge list of all my posts evar, now.
A general lack of contextual links to related posts and such. Turns out that running the LSI option on Jekyll is completely horrible.
Regeneration seems less-than-happy in general, and I wish it did conditional regneration. That is, only produce the HTML for things that need it because dependencies have changed. No need to rebake the whole world just because I changed one file.

The bright side is that there are solutions to all the broken things, and now I have something to tinker with again on my blog. So, let me know if anything else looks broken, and hopefully this will get me spewing some more words out onto this thing soon.

Archived Comments

Les Orchard
2011-06-08T17:45:54

Testing a comment here on my new post.
bkclements
2011-06-08T17:59:01

Hi, did you happen to look at blogofile for similar functionality? I'm still trying to decide which way to go. I prefer ReST markup..
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-08T18:08:26
  
  I've had my eye on Jekyll for awhile now and have a few friends also using it, so I haven't really checked out any other packages. Might be nice to poke around at something based in Python since my Ruby-fu is not strong, but then getting stronger in Ruby is not a bad thing for me. And, for myself, I'm pretty stubbornly rooted in Markdown for all my writing online
BillSeitz
2011-06-08T22:01:56

What kind of metadata are you storing in YAML?
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-08T22:30:10
  
  Pretty simple stuff: Title, tags, etc. You can see the source for this post here on github, for example: https://raw.github.com/lmorchard/blog.decafbad.com/master/_posts/2011-06-08-moved-to-jekyll.markdown I had once-upon-a-time thought about storing posts as RFC 822 messages, with the metadata in headers like email messages. But, this "YAML front matter" approach of Jekyll is a bit more flexible
Dave Dash
2011-06-08T23:02:15

Les, Check out what I did - I actually host my site on github thanks to TofuMatt's suggestion. It works well and I have archives and whatnot. In fact, most of my links didn't break. This also means that I don't have to regenerate and sync, since github knows jekyll: https://github.com/davedash/davedash.github.com
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-08T23:56:45
  
  Hmm... I might have to try that, but on a subdomain like blog.decafbad.com. I have some non-blog stuff here on decafbad.com and don't want to turn the whole thing over to github
  - Dave Dash
    2011-06-08T23:59:33
    
    It caused a few things to happen - speed up my deploy time and force me to check things into git. Also my codez build tags and stuff...
tiernano
2011-06-09T07:19:54

So, how did you move directly from Wordpress to Jekyll? was it simple enough to migrate, or is it a pain?
- Dave Dash
  2011-06-09T13:51:27
  
  There is a migration script for posts. I may have had to adjust some minor things. Risqué has a migration for comments. it wasn't too bad.
  - tiernano
    2011-06-09T14:14:31
    
    Already using Disqus for comments on my wordpress install... It's the blog data itself that's the problem... Will have a look and play with the migrators...
    - Les Orchard
      2011-06-09T14:24:16
      
      FWIW, the script I tweaked and used for exporting from my Wordpress database is here in github: https://github.com/lmorchard/blog.decafbad.com/blob/master/_import/wordpress-decafbad.rb The only real pain was getting the SQL query to pick up tags the way I wanted. Otherwise, it's just getting things into text files.
      - tiernano
        2011-06-09T15:07:03
        
        Cool beans man. Will try that out when I get a few min...
Lee Roberson
2011-06-09T16:45:18

Google Reader keeps getting tricked into thinking several of your posts are new, might be some kind of issue with your pubDate field in RSS, not sure.
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-09T16:48:38
  
  Yeah, that's my fault. :/ I had initially exported all my posts missing the actual time part of the pubDate, and then just a little while ago re-exported with the proper datestamps
  - Dave Dash
    2011-06-09T16:59:50
    
    You are worse than Delicious!
    - Les Orchard
      2011-06-09T17:05:52
      
      That's probably my fault, too.
Lee Roberson
2011-06-09T16:45:53

Whups.
Lloyd Hilaiel
2011-06-09T17:45:00

Have you had much success in customizing the features and display of the injected DISQUS UI? Thile there are several knobs in their UI, but the only form of customization that's worked for me is fiddling with external javscript and CSS... Specifically things like disabling media upload and changing default sort, and threading seem to be no-ops.
- Les Orchard
  2011-06-09T18:12:39
  
  Hmm... I haven't even bothered to try customizing yet. I just dropped it in and it vaguely matched the rest of my page style, so I left it alone so far
Craig Maloney
2011-06-11T16:00:04

Oh c'mon, there's nothing in the world more fun than updating Wordpress blog every time someone manages to sneeze wrong and cause an exploit. Sheesh, where's your sense of discipline.
jolyonwagg1
2011-06-21T23:52:22

Love to use disqus, and would like to integrate it onto my Wordpress blog for comments, as it is so user friendly, but I am not to hot though on all the HTML stuff, any advice would be greatly appreciated, cheers from across the pond.
Johan Sundström
2011-08-15T04:23:30

Your sidebar archive widget was rather cool, layout wise; I bookmarked it as design inspiration, back when it existed.
- Les Orchard
  2011-08-16T15:58:00
  
  Hmm, I should see if I can find a way to revive that thing as a JS widget or something
Timo Zimmermann
2011-09-01T12:48:10

how do you feel about using Disqus for your comments? Any problems or the urge to write your own JS based commenting system? I just feel a bit uncomfortable with a 3rd party provider for something important like comments...
- tiernano
  2011-09-01T12:54:22
  
  Personally speaking, i have been using Disqus comments on my WordPress blogs for a while now (couple of years) and its working grand! don't have to worry too much about Spam, they manage backups, etc. you can even reply to, or delete comments (if spam does get though) by email, so you can manage them on your phone.

Further Jekyll notes

2011-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

TL;DR: This is an in-progress entry, where I plan to collect some notes on how I've set up and am using Jekyll. I may call it "done" at some random point and publish it. I may even subsequently update it from time to time, after that.

To speed up the authoring / previewing cycle on my laptop, I move all but this years' posts into a _posts_archived folder and don't commit the change.
- Kind of a pain; feels like I'm Doing It Wrong.
Github Pages seems interesting, but I don't think it's right for me.
- My plugins don't run, so my tag pages aren't created.
  - davedash has a different approach for this, though.
- I can't get the permalinks just the way I like them
- I'd have to set a CNAME in my DNS to point at a subdomain (ie. blog.decafbad.com), because I don't want to delegate my entire root domain over to GitHub.
- I would 100% totally use GitHub Pages for another project that I'm starting from scratch, though.
Since related posts via LSI is such a bear, I may try doing something with tags. That is:
- take all the tags from a post;
- find the 5 latest posts for each tag;
- display the unique set of posts
I want my permalinks to look like /2011/06/08/slug
- Not /2011/06/08/slug/ or /2011/06/08/slug.html
- Look, ma, no trailing slash!
- This is the way I've had my URLs for years, and I want to maintain my URLspace.
- And I also don't want every URL missing a trailing slash to get bounced with a 301 Moved Permanently to the equivalent with a trailing slash. That's bogus.
- So, I'm using the pretty permalinks setting, and I have this in my nginx config:
  - if (-f $request_filename/index.html) { rewrite ^(.+)$ $1/index.html last; }

Archived Comments

fluffy
2011-06-09T04:55:35

I appreciate the notion behind the no-trailing-slash permalink (because really the only thing that should care about the specific format is the user-agent, and that's what content-type is for), but does that particular rule possibly wreak havoc on relative links? Or do you ever even use those anyway? I'm one of those few weirdos who actually does use relative links wherever possible, even on blog entries with a potentially weird URL (since I like uploading one-off images to the same directory as the published entry, and only having them visible "below the cut" as all the cool kids are calling "extended entry" these days).
Michel Krämer
2011-08-17T19:19:29

Thanks for your tips. Did you have success with your custom approach for generating related posts? It would be quite cool, if you could share your plugin. Thanks, Michel
- Les Orchard
  2011-08-17T19:44:18
  
  Alas, I haven't gotten around to the related posts stuff, yet

Using Tinderbox to write articles for the web

2010-06-07T04:41:03+00:00

TL;DR: I just put together a tutorial about writing an article in HTML using Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems, Inc.

Update: There's a Belorussian translation of this post provided by PC - very cool!

Tinderbox Icon by Bryan Bell, via flickr.com/photos/factoryjoe

I've been toying with a set of writing topics to get my blog going again, apropos of my notion of writing for myself. But, I like to write at length and have finally decided that life's too short to write in browser <textarea>'s, no matter how cleverly augmented.

I did buy MarsEdit 3, which is a fine app for dashing off short entries. But, for longer things, I found myself doing the actual writing elsewhere and pasting the text into MarsEdit for posting later. I even wrote and posted a whole fanfic novella this way, and it was a silly way to do things.

Well, one of the places where writing actually happens for me over the past few years is within Tinderbox documents. And, as it turns out, Tinderbox has some powerful HTML export facilities that I've left underused until some things finally clicked for me.

So, I thought I'd try turning that experience back upon itself to produce something worth writing. Without further ado, here's the source in GitHub, and the article exported to HTML for easy reading.

The funny thing is, I started working on this tutorial in the middle of writing another article. So, this post is a particularly advanced form of Yak Shaving. I hope it ends up handy for someone, and I hope it leads to the real articles I'm hoping to produce.

Pondering the cobwebs

2010-03-10T17:55:13+00:00

It's plain to see that I've not been a blogger for a long time.

This place is a long-neglected ghost town that sees a begrudged entry every few months, when I happen to remember it still exists and I feel guilty for not feeding it with content. What I've yet to figure out is if the cause is a matter of motivation, publishing tools, audience, or writing topics.

Behold as I ramble on for many tens of words pondering the cobwebs here at 0xDECAFBAD.

Motivation

Other outlets have absorbed nearly all of my motivations that once prompted casual blogging. And those other outlets, in most cases, provide better rewards:

For quick top-of-the-head thoughts and quips, Twitter works best for the brain-spew and gets me feedback from interesting people faster than my spam-embattled comments here ever did.
For sharing things I find on the web, Delicious took that job over years ago and Google Reader has been angling for the job as well.
For sharing code and projects, I've started doing more and more over at my GitHub account.

Quite awhile ago, I even went so far as to redirect the front page of my decafbad.com domain straight to a page that's nothing more than a shell for a FriendFeed widget that aggregates my output from elsewhere. It's kind of a cop-out, but if you want to see what I'm really up to, that's a much better page than my stagnant blog index anyway. I've got a local archive of my activity, and have been meaning to make a self-hosted lifestream more front-and-center, but I've been too busy to bother.

Publishing tools

In fact, I've been thinking about killing my WordPress installation here altogether, and switching the blog over to a static fossil snapshot. Since I rarely post, there's rarely a comment inbound here these days that's not trying to slip through an ad for pills or fake handbags. Thus, most of the CPU cycles on my web host are spent on busy work processing requests that will never amount to anything real. So, why bother having an actual PHP application running here?

The one thing that I haven't done a lot of lately—and would like to carve out time to get back to—is some real long-form writing. You would think that that's where this WordPress thing would come in handy, but oddly it seems not to. I hate writing in textareas in browsers, haven't found a desktop blog client that I liked in years.

So, because of the little things that annoy me, I stop writing before I start because the anticipated process to publish seems like a chore. I'd much rather be writing in MacVim and checking text files into a git repository. Then, I could throw Jekyll or something yak-shavingly homebrewed on top of post-receive hooks to do indexing magic and such in static HTML. You know, the stuff that took forever in MovableType back in the day, but decoupled from my actual writing process.

Huh, now that I describe it, the above sounds like a chore too—but it would be a shiny new toy! At that point, I wouldn't be blogging so much as publishing an archive of essays on the web. But, at least I'd know the format would be future-proof, the platform exploit-resistant, and the overall maintenance less worrisome. If I had comments, I could even outsource them to another service and run periodic backups to be safe.

Audience

But, beyond the mechanisms, there's who I imagine might be reading this stuff. I hold off on writing a lot of things that could be posted here because they're maybe not tech-nerdy enough. If it doesn't have at least one code example, I hesitate to share it here—and if I don't share it here, I probably don't share it anywhere.

And then there's the thought that whatever I write here, no one will read it if it's too long. This entry is mostly written to myself, and I expect a single-digit comment count—most likely zero. I get the most feedback on the shortest things, which has ultimately lead to Twitter and its 140 character limit yielding some of my most rewarding interactions on the web in years. I post an essay here, and it's all crickets.

The exceptions are where I post something really useful, like that article about HTML 5 Drag & Drop or a Delicious command for Ubiquity. That is, of course, a clue if comments and feedback are what I'm after.

Writing topics

So, what could I be writing about these days? Let's see, I could write about:

what I've been up to at Mozilla since I started;
brewing beer and roasting coffee at home;
retro computing on my C64 and Amiga;
developing for Palm webOS;
random thoughts on life;

Huh. That all sounds like a blog, and one I would read myself—though that last one sounds like my LiveJournal, long neglected since I started dating my wife and got much less emo in general. We probably don't need to go there so much, but I could probably bore with more even-tempered philosophical expositions.

What's the problem?

I wonder what my real problem is, then? Is it really just a matter of butt in the seat that I'm missing? I write every day—in a paper journal, in wiki pages, in emails, to myself—I just don't write much here. Maybe all the above is just a collection of excuses.

Lately, I've had this notion that I should try writing and publishing for an earlier version of myself. That is: all these things I end up searching for and researching on the web, I should write them up in a way that I wish had been the first search result in Google. Whatever the topic, if a younger version of me wanted to find it, I should put it out there to be found. Never mind who else I think might read it or (not) comment on it.

Write for myself, write what I'd want to read—sounds pretty obvious when I put it out there like that. So, is that the deal? Who knows; we'll see if a change in perspective results in more happenings here.

Archived Comments

CiaranG
2010-03-10T19:04:04

I write about stuff (including beer brewing, Amigas and less archaic techy stuff) mostly for the pleasure of my current self, and the amusement of my future self.

I never considered writing for an earlier version of myself, but then I know for a fact he didn't have a time machine.
Carter Rabasa
2010-03-10T19:19:19

I long ago gave up on the idea of regular blogging. It made sense when that was the "only" method of sharing information/ideas/photos/etc publicly, but now (given the explosion of social nets and other sharing tools) a blog seems primarily a vehicle for long-form writing.

I wouldn't lament the dust on the blog. It used to represent "you", but now it simply exists as part of a large collection of online resources that, together, represent "you".
Dan Hallock
2010-03-10T19:23:00

I sympathize with much of what you say here. Sometimes I think that Twtiter is a little too efficient at letting me get thoughts out of my head quickly -- I end up not percolating on things long enough to come up with long-form writing; and/or maybe it's just that my itch to write is 'scratched' by the tweets.
Matt Brubeck
2010-03-10T19:24:47

Hey, I'd love to hear more from you, whether techy or random. I don't know how I ended up here, but it looks like last month was the seventh anniversary of my first comment:

http://decafbad.com/blog/2003/02/20/ooodae

"Newly Digital in 1983" is still one of my favorite stories ever. You also got me interested in ifiction and flash fiction. (I ended up publishing a few stories on 365tomorrows and Ficlets.) And this month I'm joining the Mozilla Corporation, partly because I want to work with you and other hackers whose work has influenced me over the years. Your audience may be small, but we're devoted! :)

I moved my own technical blogging to Jekyll recently. There's a bit less guilt about slow update schedules when I think of it more like a static collection of articles than an online journal. (And yeah, using a real editor and version control makes it much easier to get longer pieces done.) I use Planet Venus for my personally-hosted lifestream, though these days most of my friends get my aggregated data via Facebook or Buzz.
danmactough
2010-03-10T19:27:53

I've never used my blog as much as you've used yours -- I've never really been a blogger at all, honestly.

I like posting code snippets. Maybe I'll check out github at some point, but I've got a 2-year-old now. He's way more fun and interesting than Python or whatever. (I guess that could be interpreted as implying that my wife is NOT more fun and interesting than those things. Rather than explain why that is not the case, I'll just say that we've been together forever, and I love her very much.)

At any rate, I thought your post merited at least one comment pondering why the commenter does not blog (anymore).

For my part, it has a lot to do with privacy, I think. I knew before I ever installed blosxom that I didn't want to be a "blogger." I had no interest in sharing my deep thoughts about life, politics, or anything else. I enjoy talking with people; it's not an antisocial thing. It's just that I don't know what long-term ramifications there may be to such free expression. Likewise, you won't see pictures of me and my family generally available on Flickr or Picasa (there may be a handful). Facebook is nothing to me except somewhere to echo my Twitter stream, such as it is (and I've stopped doing that). Brightkite -- forget it! My last.fm profile is about as intimate as I get online.

I'm thinking about shutting down my WP installation. I really don't use it. The only thing I really use my VPS for is my web-based feed reader.

All of these blogging, microblogging, and social networking services -- especially the social networking services -- are really interesting to me, though. I will keep hanging around the periphery of them, dipping in a toe here and there.
bud
2010-03-10T19:44:56

Les I've followed this for a while. I admit most of the code examples are over my head, but I've learned from you.

Maybe your idea of writing for a younger you has legs. I don't think anything you've mentioned is geared toward the less knowledgeable. I don't mean explaining simple HTML "Hello World", but why not summaries or highlights of languages you know?

You could point out differences between the languages, maybe reasons certain applications are written in one instead of another? I'm sure there is a intermediate user perspective you could aim at. Parlay these things into possible book sales?

Good luck with what ever you decide.
l.m.orchard
2010-03-10T19:55:55

@CiaranG: Yeah, I think that's the best reason to have a blog. The past self thing is really thinking that someone like me might come along and appreciate what I tossed onto the web. Beyond that, I like writing and can't think of better any better topics than writing about the other stuff I like doing.

@Carter: I think my main source of lament here is that I'm a writer who never seems to write on his own site. I feel like I should be publishing more about the stuff I do. But, yeah, this place isn't really the center of my online universe anymore.

@Matt: Huh, you know, that Newly Digital in 1983 post was one of my quieter ones in terms of feedback. I always wondered if it got many reads, but it was one of my own favorites to write since it was the sort of thing I liked to see on others' blogs.

Oh, and welcome to Mozilla! I'm back out to Mountain View pretty regularly, so we'll have to hang out sometime. Might have to pick your brain about Jekyll and how you like mobile hacking.

@Dan: I'm a bit weird, since most of my friends since the age of 8 have been behind computers, modems, or the internet. And now, my job is almost entirely on the net since I'm telecommuting from my basement 3000 miles away from HQ. So, it's pretty natural for me to live online.
Still, I have gotten more and more private. My LiveJournal has some entries that I'd never write now, and I'll probably never post religious / political stuff here because it's not worth the debate or potential life / career damage.

So... yeah, I'll probably never again be a blogger, per se. I don't feel like having a diary online so much as a place where I publish interesting things.

I think really my thing here is I call myself a writer, so I should probably be doing more of it. :)
danmactough
2010-03-10T20:17:10

Regarding publishing interesting things -- I'm totally with you there. And like you said, delicious, Google Reader, etc. are much better suited than WP to most of that activity.

As far as being a writer goes, not everyone can do all their writing (drafts, edits, rewrites, etc.) in public view. Writing is intensely personal. Even if you're writing about Dojo or hacking delicious, you're exposing your imperfect innards while you do your best to create something really difficult. Hell, I write for a living -- I'm a corporate and securities lawyer. When I've finalized a document, all of my drafts get shredded!
ejk
2010-03-10T20:42:12

Sounds so familiar on so many fronts. Haven't posted in over a year. I'm thinking of moving my page to wordpress.com, just to have something for people to see at my domain.
Michael C. Harris
2010-03-11T00:31:01

For what it's worth, as the comment count edges towards double figures, I read to the end, I enjoy the stuff of yours that I've read, and I'm sure I would enjoy things from your "I could write about" list, whoever you were writing for.
Geof F. Morris
2010-03-11T02:09:44

It's your blog, my man. Make of it what you will. I'd hate to see you take it down, though.
l.m.orchard
2010-03-11T02:36:21

@Michael: Yeah, wouldn't you know when I predict no comments, everyone show up. :) (I wasn't trying to beg for comments, honest!)

@Geof: Well, I'd never take it down, just turn off the PHP bits and move to something else whenever I wrote again. Actually, this thing is mostly static HTML right now thanks to WP Super Cache.

But, now that I wrote this and I'm thinking about things again, I might just keep this around. Started playing with MarsEdit 2, and finding I don't actually hate it.
Jeff Balogh
2010-03-11T04:49:44

I started using Jekyll last month, and I like it. I had started to write my own, but then I started wondering why I had to have my own. It turned out Jekyll gets most of what I want done with a minimum of yak shaving. I think the only weakness is the lack of categories/tags and the requisite feeds. It's nice to write something up with markdown, build the site, and push it out. Jekyll feels natural for people like us.
Len Lynch
2010-03-11T04:51:08

Community is funny. And virtual ones are more so.

You're good at writing, otherwise you wouldn't have as many listeners as you do... And I believe that you're not fishing for feedback like this.

If you continue to write here, RSS will keep us clued in. I don't see RSS readers totally going away for a while.

Smiles will continue, just keep "scratching one or more of your itches" here. Just like today.

You have toyed with the idea of an audio show, but I haven't seen evidence of that. If giving that a try sparks something in you, then you best be about it...

Good Journey
Jack
2010-03-11T12:23:09

I can definitely recommend giving Jekyll a try. It lets you go from 'Hmmn, maybe I should write about that' to published weblog entry in a wonderfully seamless way, with no barriers between you and your weblog--all you have to do is open a new tab in your text editor, and write. I switched from Wordpress and immediately went from writing once in a blue moon to publishing something every day, just about.

And, for what it's worth, I'd definitely enjoy reading about brewing and coffee roasting - recipes and techniques are the kind of code examples I can understand!
Andy C
2010-03-19T00:06:39

Crikey - a couple of familiar faces here (Ciaran, Michael).

Double crikey - any blo with two mentions of 'Yak Shaving' must be entered into Google Reader. Now :-)

I think I originally 'knew' you from your sterling efforts getting embryonic releases of Laconica working (thanks) and just wondered why your identi.ca account there was dormant so I just stumbled in uninvited.

Anyway, I can identify with this post. I have endured similar crises of confidence with my blog - in fact all of my online presence.

I remember committing Web 2.0 suicide once and labouriously deleting 237 Tumblr entries. Christ - those guys need some Bulk management tools.

I'm with Ciaran. As my blog festers and sporadically bursts into life, I realise that I am only writing for myself and I have only ever written for myself.

Why - very occasionally I trawl through my own archives and laugh at my own jokes and wonder 'Why can't I produce stuff like this any more ?'

I've played with every blogging platform ever invented and currently favour Habari - mainly for the pure unadulterated beauty of the 'Compose Post' blank canvas.

However, I also played with Jekyll and the thought of writing in Emacs and 'commiting' to publish content is an attractive one.

I think your final paragraph sums it up brilliantly:

'Write for myself, write what I’d want to read'.

Couldn't agree more.

The more things change...

2008-09-02T04:46:46+00:00

So, in anticipation of hopefully carving out time to write more article-length entries like my last one on Ubiquity, I've revamped the design on this blog and updated the colophon. I'm also hoping to post more short entries as well, and get this place revived again in general. Let me know what you think about the new look!

Archived Comments

CiaranG
2008-09-02T08:24:01

Looks great to me. Even better if you were to add OpenID support. ;)
http://decafbad.com/
2008-09-02T13:35:43

I just installed WP-OpenId, let's see what this does.
http://pattimst3k.livejournal.
2008-09-02T21:24:02

Two snaps up--looks really nice :)

Delicious 2.0 is more than a pretty new face

2008-08-04T17:21:55+00:00

I'm no longer at Yahoo! and I no longer work on Delicious, but I'm still a huge supporter. And, since I'm pretty sure everyone over there is either burnt out or still insanely busy at the moment, it might be awhile before anyone tells the full story of what this relaunch offers. As it is, even I only know a bit of what all went into this effort.

So, off the top of my head, I thought I might point out just a few of the easily-missed improvements the new site offers beyond the great new love-it-or-hate-it visual redesign that seems to have occupied most of the discussion I've seen so far:

Search works and is incredibly fast. In fact, search may really be the real star of the redesign show here—especially since del.icio.us often took 30 seconds or more for a simple search, rendering it all but useless. Today, though, it's at ludicrous speed in comparison—and so finally, the real power of search applied to social bookmarking might start to shine with the critical mass of content found by real people using Delicious.

To scratch my own itch, I've created an unofficial OpenSearch search engine plugin for Delicious on Mycroft. Though I think it comes along with the browser extensions, I've yet to find this for autodiscovery from the site itself.

The notes field in bookmarks has been expanded from 255 to 1000 characters. Yes, this means that you can now include long running quotes from pages, or complete paragraphs of rambling discourse.

The feeds have all been overhauled and reorganized. An attempt at backward compatibility was made, but the old feed URLs are all deprecated. Replacing these, there's now a common and consistent URL namespace for feeds across formats.

Almost all RSS feeds have JSONP counterparts, and further feed formats could be considered. Additionally, the old mix of RSS 1.0 and 2.0 has been dropped in favor of RSS 2.0 format across the board to support podcast and media enclosure elements consistently. The linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, and tagometers now all use the new JSONP feeds—and the widgets can be examined as example code in using the feeds.

Tag bundles can now be viewed as combined bookmark views, complete with feeds. This augments bundles from a simple visual organization tool to a more powerful content aggregation function. Personally, I never had much use for tag bundles until now, but since they can actually be used to partition tags and bookmarks I might actually take the time to use them. Check out these example URLs:

Bundles now work for tags, network contacts, and subscriptions. This means, for example, that you can partition your network contacts into topical groups. From there, you can subscribe to those partitioned bookmarks in different folders in readers, or use the bundled bookmark views in mashups through JSON feeds. Check out these example URLs:

Network member and fan feeds now include the date when the contact was added. Pro tip: Subscribe to fan feeds to see when new people have started following your bookmarks.

Several previously undocumented parts of the V1 API have now been documented. In particular, the following new parameter combinations have been used with the browser extensions for primitive bookmark sync:

https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all?hashes
https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all?meta=yes
https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all?fromdt={DT}&todt={DT}
https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all?start={##}&results={##}

The posts/all API URL works again for users with large collections. With my 11k+ bookmarks, del.icio.us was keeling over with the attempt to assemble and deliver my entire collection with a posts/all call. Now, however, Delicious 2.0 appears able to handle this call for my account.

Easter eggs have been rotated and recalibrated. No, I'm not going to tell you what or where or how many they are.

Archived Comments

Aristotle Pagaltzis
2008-08-05T02:31:52

Since I’m pretty sure everyone over there is either burnt out or still insanely busy at the moment, it might be awhile before anyone tells the full story of what this relaunch offers.

Admit it, Les, you just got impatient after building a bunch of shiny toys that no one at Yahoo! seemed to be coming forth to tell the world about them. :) (I would be miffed too.)
Yining
2008-08-05T06:51:44

one thing in the new version that disappoints me is the tab-to-complete feature is gone. It was replaced with a drop-down list which not only costs me more finger/hand movement but also breaks my daily usage habit of del.icio.us. Oh, maybe I can write a GMscript to scratch my own itch....

Btw, regarding the search, I find using a keyworded bookmark is much faster. For example, I could setup keyword 'del' and just type 'del webdev+openid' to search all my bookmarks tagged with these two keywords. One plus point, it works on SeaMonkey too (which doesn't support opensearch yet).
Nick
2008-08-05T06:56:05

Yay! So glad you wrote this, Les!
Paul D. Waite
2008-08-05T17:07:03

one thing in the new version that disappoints me is the tab-to-complete feature is gone. It was replaced with a drop-down list which not only costs me more finger/hand movement but also breaks my daily usage habit of del.icio.us

Amen.

Also,the option to delete a bookmark from its own page seems to have disappeared. I have to find it in my list of bookmarks, which isn’t always easy when it’s been there for a couple of weeks.
Paul D. Waite
2008-08-05T17:09:25

Sorry, that sounded a bit negative. I do love how autocomplete now only offers me tags that I’ve used. And it is kinda neat to see how many times I’ve used each one, but I’d give that up to have the old tab-to-autocomplete back. Way too much thinking involved with the menu.
Niv Singer
2008-08-05T18:52:38

I couldn't find the "Network member and fan feeds" - where are they??
l.m.orchard
2008-08-05T19:03:00

@Niv: Not all feeds are linked in from pages - check out the feeds help page on delicious.com. For example:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/networkmembers/nivsin

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/networkfans/nivsin
Philip Dorrell
2008-08-06T02:01:52

It seems that the posting API's have all stopped accepting a "tags" parameter, which partly breaks my Firefox "deli" search keyword.

e.g. "deli toread math" used to fill in tags "toread" and "math", now it doesn't.

Also, does delicious have any equivalent to Google's site: prefix? That would be really good for a "most popular pages on my website" option.
l.m.orchard
2008-08-06T21:41:06

@philip Yup, that's broken for me too. See also: http://decafbad.com/blog/2008/08/02/delicious-20-legacy-bookmarklet-fix

As for something like site:, I think host: used to work but it seems no longer with the new search implementation.
Jon Williams
2008-08-22T18:38:43

Network member and fan feeds now include the date when the contact was added. Pro tip: Subscribe to fan feeds to see when new people have started following your bookmarks.

Where is this? (I feel silly not being able to find fan feeds)

Markdown, Oh the Humanity

2008-05-18T04:18:09+00:00

I use Markdown to write for this blog, and I don't think I could write much online without it. (Of course, that's not saying much lately—but nevermind that for now.)

Although I do appreciate all the effort put toward enhancing <textareas> on the web, I'm not a fan of WYSIWYG writing interfaces. They hide too much in an effort to make things "easy"—yet, for all that ease, they make me miss Reveal Codes in WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Hell, I wish I could write books using Markdown instead of Microsoft Word. (And, yeah, I know that some O'Reilly authors have written books in perlpod—but that's a bit too far even for me.)

Anyway, I think the issue is that it really bothers me to compose HTML in the same mental context as writing prose—HTML is too much like code. Coding and prosing are two different modes for me, and I don't like the constant context-switching thrash. (And, yes, I've just learned today that prosing is a word.)

So, apropos of this, there's been a thread in the blogophere lately naysaying non-HTML, wiki-text, and smart-ASCII formats. They seem to be mostly attacking the idea from a technical perspective, where it's more like a usability problem to me.

I don't see where Jeff Atwood's "Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?" makes the case for HTML as humane. As far as I can tell, the inhumanity is that markup schemes are harder to keep track of than HTML. Yet, there's a kind of coder macho thing going on there that's decidedly not humane—i.e. real programmers should be fine with getting their eyes poked by angle brackets on a regular basis.

Anyway, I do agree that some of these formats are horrendous. Wikipedia markup and BBCode are nasty in particular. Though, Wikipedia markup at least has some semantic purpose beyond HTML. But, I can't follow from that to seeing how the whole idea is wrong.

I used Textile for awhile, and then switched to Markdown when it came around. At this point, I've been using Markdown since it came out in 2004. I now plug Markdown into everything I can where I'll be doing any writing. There's a version of Markdown in just about every language known to the web these days—you can even find Markdown in Javascript. I write notes to myself in Markdown, even when there's no URL to view it. I've even used Markdown semi-consciously when writing by hand in a paper journal.

Perhaps I've said too much.

Anyway, I'll expend as many brain cells as it takes to not need to compose raw HTML by hand in the course of writing. As it happens, I can usually just use Markdown, so those brain cells were spent years ago. And thus, I feel I've saved more brain cells in avoiding coding/prosing thrash. So, it could just be personal preference, but I agree with the reasons why the original wiki doesn't use HTML.

Archived Comments

megalar
2008-05-18T22:19:07

I couldn't agree more on this dude. As for people like Jeff Atwood... well, pffft. I grow tired of the "real programmers" do this or that mentality and while I'm a regular reader of Coding Horror, I hear alot of that garbage there. Fortunately I have excellent noise filters for my idea factory so it doesn't make much of an impression. peace.
Dave Dash
2008-05-19T21:54:42

I use Markdown everywhere as well. I am not sure about the technical arguments against it, but personally, it does a lot less damage than wysiwyg.

In fact, it's nice in that it gives you control without sacrificing readability.
n0wak
2008-05-22T19:15:36

I dunno, I'm not a fan. By using underscores and brackets, instead of full tags, it has a tendency to break down a lot. Which has, thusly, prompted http://fuckingmarkdown.com/ in frustration.

It's too clunky and requires as much user involvement to get it working 100% of the time as simple HTML or BBCode. Nothing more frustrating than posting a URL with an underscore in it and having markdown convert those underscores into italics, breaking the whole damned thing.
Aristotle Pagaltzis
2008-05-23T09:14:33

Of course, if you put the URL in angle brackets, Markdown will refrain from touching it at all. Likewise for file- and variable names in backticks. That said, John Gruber has repeatedly said that he considers the underscore issue a bug, and the next release will fix this so internal underscores inside words will not trigger emphasis markup.

So that particular issue, pain in the bottom as it can on rare occasions be, is easy to work around now and will completely vanish in the future.
gavin
2008-06-28T00:53:01

Doesn't markdown lack necessary things for being a template engine? (similar to Smarty)

I mean, ${some_variable} to echo a variable, and if/else, and foreach an array?

Or, do you just use something like PHP's and use PHP's if/else/foreach? Or Ruby or Python, etc, I mean.
l.m.orchard
2008-06-29T00:11:21

@gavin: Markdown's not a template engine, it's like wiki text or "smart ASCII" It's a set of rules allowing users to write in plain text that later gets converted to HTML. No logic or variables or control structures involved.
jr
2008-06-29T02:18:36

Meh. I use HTML because that's my preferred syntax of choice. I have a vested interest in using it because I don't want to learn a "simpler" form that requires me learning something different, solely because it's different and therefore involves learning.

That's not to say that Markdown, WikiScript, LaTEX, or using in-lined emacs command syntax is any more or less valid than HTML or whatever other syntax someone else has a vested interest in using.

The only thing that matters is whether or not the output of said syntax methodology is readable with zero effort on my part.

(Heck, you could code this using straight MIME encoded UNICODE variables for all I care at that point.)
Joseph Kern
2009-06-18T11:41:08

If you wish you could write books in markdown, checkout pandoc. It's a Markdown to html,latex,pdf,etc,etc. converter written in haskell.
Simon
2010-01-17T17:32:40

I'm new to the markdown languages, and must say there are a plethora of them. Can I ask if you guys are still using markdown or whether you've switched to something else? Also, what think ye of multimarkdown and Pandoc?

My constant hassle with markdown is it's inability to align images, or am I missing something?

I totally agree that tags inhibit creative writing. I can hand code HTML/CSS, but I can't write anything decent whilst doing it. The other major pain with tags is that the flow of your original document is crap. Markdown leaves you with a readable document.

My only difficulty is that I want to take things one step further and use it for all my writing needs. Markdown hasn't seen any development in a while and the missing image manipulation is an issue for me, especially as most blogs contain images.

I have some 3000 pages of MS Word documents that I need to find another format for so if anyone things any of these markup languages are up to it it would be great to hear.

sorry for writing so much!

Greatest Hits Vol. 2, the Babble Bits

2008-04-26T17:21:21+00:00

Following right on the heels of Greatest Hits Vol. 1 is another volume, this time including the entries that were more made of babble or ramble and not so much with code. Again I welcome additions, comments, criticisms, and complaints.

2007 Sep 25: l.m.orchard's OPML blog: Tuesday, September 25, 2007
- My dad passed away, and I tried to take something positive away from it.
2006 Sep 18: Just call me "Crash"
- The conditions for my hermitage in Silicon Valley were established early.
2006 Aug 09: Hacking del.icio.us is out and about!
- Wherein I celebrate my second book appearing on store shelves.
2006 Jun 24: Go West, Young Man!
- The one where we pack it all up and head to California.
2006 Jun 09: Wedding Day is Today
- An announcement of becoming the luckiest man on the planet.
2006 May 26: Confessions of a Serial Enthusiast
- An analysis of my inability to finish anything on my own site.
2006 Feb 09: A Long-Tailed Creative Yawp
- A celebration of the long tail and befriendable creators.
2006 Jan 27: Don't Pee in the Potato Chips
- Wherein I try to acknowledge some of the things I owe to Dave Winer and be nice in the future.
2006 Jan 01: Look, Mom, I'm on the radio!
- I got interviewed on a radio show about my first book, yay!
2005 Sep 13: Hacking RSS and Atom is out!
- Wherein I celebrate my first book hitting the shelves.
2005 Jun 17: We're engaged!
- An announcement of intention of becoming the luckiest man on the planet.
2005 Jan 07: Beginner’s Mind versus Teacher’s Mind
- Cultivating an open mind and an attenuated ego.
2004 Dec 03: If you snore, get tested for sleep apnea. Now.
- Sleep apnea sucks. If you snore, get checked out.
2004 Nov 02: I ran out of costume ideas
- The one where I dress up like an iPod for Halloween.
2004 Oct 11: All Growed Up as an Info Freako
- A reflection on how I grew up to be this odd and information addicted.
2004 Oct 07: Falling for the Podcasting Hype
- Wherein I express my early interest in podcasting, despite or because of amateurism.
2004 Jul 14: Dork Funk
- Another periodic navel-gaze into my life as a blogger and a dork.
2004 May 25: I was a pre-teen Transactor author wannabe (and still am!)
- A declaration of what my perfect blog might look like.
2003 Jul 23: This evening’s sleep brought to me by science
- Wherein I first start using a CPAP machine and treat my sleep apnea. Go get tested if you snore.
2003 Oct 16: Seeking Out Opposites
- Another way to keep forcing brain expansion.

Greatest Hits Vol. 1, the Tinkery Bits

2008-04-26T16:53:13+00:00

As you may have noticed, I've been shaking things up around here a little. Sorry for turbulence in the feeds! I've moved to a new server, and I've been trying out Movable Type again, but with mixed luck.

Why? Because I've been using WordPress for a few years, and I felt like a change. Maybe in another few months I'll convert over to Blosxom again, or try ExpressionEngine for the first time. Now, if only I could get all the timestamps right so some of my late-night posts don't have broken permalinks due to day changes. Maybe I'll end up just sticking with WordPress after all.

But anyway, I'm also having another bout of periodic existential doubt about what I'm doing here with a blog. So, in navel-gaze mode, I spent time a few nights ago skimming and reading through all 1000 or so entries I've written here. I do this periodically with the scores of paper journals I've accumulated to recenter and reconnect with myself, but I've never done it here.

So, for my own reference more than anything, here's 0xDECAFBAD Greatest Hits Vol 1, the Tinkery Bits.

It may be presumptuous to ask, but if anyone actually reads through this list and thinks of something worth surfacing that I missed—by all means, let me know. I'm trying to remind myself what I started this thing for.

2008 Jan 31: Metablogging
- A look at all the different tools I've tried using for blogging lately.
2007 Dec 24: An Accumulator for all my stuff
- About building my own lifestreaming thingy.
2007 Oct 17: OPML reading lists in FeedMagick2
- More work on OPML reading lists and merging feeds.
2007 Jul 23: A Curmudgeon Playing with the CodeIgniter Framework and OpenID
- Reporting on learning a new PHP framework.
2006 Apr 21: An S3 AJAX Wiki
- Building a wiki based on Amazon S3 and client-side code.
2006 Mar 25: About XoxoOutliner
- Building a browser-based outliner that deals in XHTML and XOXO.
2005 Dec 13: FeedMagick, the feed filter that doesn’t know much about feeds
- Munging, converting, and merging feeds without destroying content.
2005 Oct 05: FeedSpool is progressing nicely
- Fetching, caching, and spooling up feed updates without destroying content.
2005 Jul 12: In-browser XOXO Outliner Experiment
- Early experiments in microformat-based outlining.
2005 Jun 08: Magic Microformat Forms Redux, Now with GreaseMonkey!
- Expressing my enthusiasm for microformats in code.
2004 Dec 12: Building an Address Book as a Modern Web App
- An unfinished attempt to demonstrate what everyone would soon be doing with AJAX.
2004 Nov 30: Next generation web apps using REST, XML, XSLT, and XmlHTTPRequest
- Wherein I try to talk about AJAX before the the name was coined.
2004 Jun 16: Wish-of-the-Month Club, Part 1 of 3
- The first in a series of articles building a wishlist project atop Amazon web services, an attempt at writing something publication-worthy.
2003 Sep 02: Using web services and XSLT to scrape RSS from HTML
- Progressing from perl scraping hacks to cleaner XSLT-based feed scraping.
2003 Aug 31: Bookmark Blogger in Python
- I would later abandon this entirely for del.icio.us, but I've been bookmark-blogging for awhile.
2003 Aug 22: Scraping HTML with curl, tidy, and XSL
- Trying to bring some cleaner approaches to web scraping beyond regular expressions.
2003 Jun 19: Desktop server + Flash GUI?
- Eventually, things like Adobe Air would fill this niche, I think.
2003 Mar 06: Building Pipelines with Web Services
- I still haven't seen much work toward using pipelined HTTP-based web services.
2003 Feb 15: Say hello to Agent Frank
- This project got abandoned, but I did release this overly-complex Java-based personal HTTP proxy.
2003 Feb 04: Bookmark blogging from Safari via a quick hack
- Prescient of my eventual extreme enthusiasm for del.icio.us, I started blogging my bookmarks.
2002 Dec 28: Universal personal proxies & agent companions
- Initial thoughts toward Agent Frank and filtering / analyzing my own web consumption.
2002 Nov 26: XML-RPC, a mini case study
- Wherein I talk about how XML-RPC has worked for me.
2002 May 31: RSS autodiscovery via the HTML LINK element
- It's the orange feed button everywhere now—here's how it started.
2002 Apr 18: Auto-backlinks from blog entries via referral logs
- Building backlinks from referer logs to help weave the blogosphere. It was great until the spammers ruined it, though Sam Ruby has a neat implementation.
2002 Apr 18: Pipelining the web makes for messy URLs
- It's awkward to express pipelines on the web using URLs.
2002 Apr 17: REST. What is it good for?
- At one point, I was pretty dubious about this REST thing.
2002 Feb 26: Almost done with another implementation of the Wiki XML-RPC API
- I was working on XML-RPC APIs for various wiki installs at one point.

An Accumulator for all my stuff

2007-12-25T05:25:16+00:00

No one's really noticed, but I've changed email providers about a dozen times in the past decade. And, that's because my email address hasn't changed — thanks very much to the wonderful and awesome Pobox.com.

Likewise, I've hopped from platform to platform in blogging and writing and generally emitting memelets from my brain. In contrast to Pobox.com though, anyone who could be bothered to follow me would have had to keep track of every new feed and site which happened to strike my fancy. Knowing myself, I don't expect that my wandering ways to change — so the number of feeds in which my stuff lands will only increase.

So, I'd like to fix that. In case you haven't seen it, I've started building an Accumulator for all the various feeds and accounts between which I'm distributing my attention and User Generated Content these days.

I'm hoping to make this the definitive one-stop-shop for following me and my crap, eventually offering feeds at the root of decafbad.com with facilities for picking and choosing what to include and what to leave out. Hopefully, this will leave me able to just simply point interested parties at decafbad.com, and let them explore from there — rather than wandering over to this blog that's mostly quiet these days.

And, of course, if in the end no one actually cares about my spew anyway — at least I'll have had fun with yet another new project.

Oh, and Happy Holidays to you and yours!

cheating on my "real" blog

2007-11-13T01:00:40+00:00

decafbad recaffeinated is what I'm so far calling the Tinderbox-built blog with which I'm cheating on both my OPML blog and my "real" blog. Come take a look, if you're so inclined to watch another of my experiments. (Update: It's recaffeinated, not recaffinated. I ar gud speler.)

it's so quiet, time for an editorial calendar?

2007-09-20T16:59:10+00:00

Hmm. Time for this blogging cliché: Been awhile since last I posted here with any reliable volume.

But, I'm thinking about whether another revamp of this place might get me going again. I've also considered making myself whip up an editorial calendar and actually commit myself to writing something on interesting topics on a regular basis. It might be the only way to do it.

Archived Comments

Kevin Francis
2007-09-21T04:52:40

I support this commitment to assured periodic content.
Aristotle Pagaltzis
2007-09-21T10:57:19

I’ve also considered making myself whip up an editorial calendar

You might be interested in Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret.

Sticky Tags for Twitter?

2007-08-22T03:31:26+00:00

I should elaborate on what I mean by tags in Twitter, since I got a few head-scratching responses.

No, fitting tags into the 140 characters for a message won't work. And, no, tagging every tweet as you go is a horrible approach - no one will do it. What I've thought might work, though, are sticky tags.

Sticky tags would persist from update to update. From the web UI, you could drop "work" or "gnomedex" or "l:95051 beer concert somerandomband" into an additional tags field and all tweets from then on will gain those tags until you empty the tag field.

There could be shortcut commands to change or clear tags - ala "d someone" for direct messaging. This would be especially useful while out and about and mobile. Say you text "t bus commute" to Twitter when you get on the bus for home, then anything you might emit from then on, until you change the tags, gets tagged with "bus" and "commute".

Then, you and others could follow this particular thread of tweets via http://twitter.com/yourname/commute - or even with tag intersections ala delicious: http://twitter.com/yourname/commute+bus.

Going to be at SxSW for awhile? Drop "sxsw" into your sticky tags. Maybe someday everyone who doesn't want to hear it can filter out tweets with that tag rather than stop following you altogether.

Having some sticky tags can allow a bit of metadata and filtering hooks to follow you for awhile without requiring you to do or remember much. Keeping them as free-form text strings allows some cow-pathing as people invent conventions.

Think of these tags as kind of long-running meta-status.

Archived Comments

Julian Bond
2007-08-22T07:35:44

Dave Troy's location nanoformat does this already as you've shown above. There's potential for some third party to do exactly the same thing. Invent a format like T:mycurrenttag And then provide some UI to do something with the aggregated tags. The problem with this, as with Twittervision, is the need to take a backup of the whole twitter stream to work on.
l.m.orchard
2007-08-22T08:25:09

The problem with tag-as-nanoformat is that there's already enough message trying to get crammed into the 140 characters, adding more metacrap there just squishes that even further and doesn't get the stickiness to boot.

I could address the second in my browser with a GreaseMonkey script, and maybe build a proxy to which I can text from my phone to manage tag stickiness there... But, it's not just the ability to express the tags - it's also being able to filter updates incoming in the present and retrieve them later by way of tags.
karl
2007-08-22T09:15:17

simpler, make every words a tag. The fact that some words will become more used will be natural.
Joe Grossberg
2007-08-22T13:13:10

With all due respect ... PLEASE NO. Keep it simple. That's the beauty of Twitter. No comments. No titles. No extended entries. No metadata other than username and datetime.
Bill Seitz
2007-08-22T15:29:10

Les, you know what I'm gonna say: WikiWordAsTag

http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiWordAsTag
l.m.orchard
2007-08-22T17:17:55

I do agree that simplicity is the beauty of Twitter. I don't want titles, comments, or extended entries - that's what a blog is for. I don't want features added just for coolness sake or whatever.

But, I can see a set of problems with the Twitter experience that might be helped with something that adds a bit more context - and something like tags seems like a lightweight and somewhat simple way to do it. Making them sticky helps make them less cumbersome to use.

I'd really like to be able to pick and choose the sorts of updates I receive from people I follow, across different means of receiving them. For example, I might not want to get all of someone's random ponderings on my phone, but I'd like to get pinged when they start talking about when they're leaving for the party tonight. If they switch to a new set of tags I'm watching for, this can happen.

Or, maybe after a Hack Day London, I'd like to go back and see what the chatter was about - ie. I can see what went on via the hackdaylondon tag on Flickr, and I'd like something like that for Twitter.
Elroy Jetson
2007-08-22T17:48:55

I have to agree that having tags would make it nice to filter the wheat from the chafe. Let's face it. Not everything someone microblogs about is important to me.

Take this post from Robert Scoble who does occasionally have something intelligent to say, but not in this case: "I'm done filling up Twitter and peeing in the pool for tonight. Good night!"

I don't really need this zipping in to my cell phone when I am looking for that golden nugget of information. By tagging I could have filtered this out.
Zach Hale
2007-08-23T01:07:36

This idea for sticky tags seems like it may be useful for rare mass gatherings like SXSW but I can't see this to be anything more than a headache other times. Most of the time messages I post and I see others post to Twitter are random and inconsistent. In these normal circumstances having to send TWO messages to set the tags then send the tweet would be absurd.

I like the idea but, for sticky tags, I can't see anything more than a conference tag to be actually useful AND easy to manage.

Tagging IN the message might be useful but seems like a lot of overhead when we're already limited to 140 characters and not something I could see people actually starting to use. I don't ever wish I could filter out my friends posts. I never know what I'm interested in until I hear it -- that's the beauty of Twitter!
kellan
2007-08-23T01:19:03

Because no one ever got confused by sticky tags in CVS! :)

Though really this is the only possible version of tagging on twitter which could work, statuses tagged with inherited context.

That said I think that features which need new syntax are going to appear very very slowly cf. groups.

Thinking a capital A at the beginning of the line should clear all sticky tags.
Zach Hale
2007-08-23T04:51:06

Adding to my previous comments, I really like what karl said about making every word a tag. Why not? This would allow almost infinite flexibility with how the user would like to add tags to their content.
megalar
2007-08-24T01:15:38

I concur and obviously this can't be a user created convention by something in the post. The 140 character limit would require the developers to add a field to the db if regular tagging was used, which given the past db issues at twitter might be unlikely. This might be more workable with the sticky tags method.
Teketen
2007-08-30T05:24:38

Do you know nanoformats? I'm working in this for a time. For example we are using some nanoformats to construct events and then transform to microformats (http://www.txioka.net/ekitaldiak.php is an example). Tag nanoformat exist an is used to give people the oportunnity to filter information.
Edward Vielmetti
2007-09-18T17:18:01

@stoweboyd has been experimenting with the leading octothorpe as a tag indicator, used thusly: #tag

I find that it looks kind of goofy, since I associate that character with a name of an IRC channel. That does suggest though the use of a # namespace where you could reasonably tag something with a tag like #a2b3 and then have a way to tune into everyone who used that tag recently (a la what you can do if you are a user and someone tags a post with @username).
jonoble
2009-02-18T11:09:48

I know this is quite an old post now, but at risk of sounding like comment spam, I wanted to mention a new Twitter app that we've recently launched which may be of interest to you - tweetertags.com lets you tag your Twitter profile, not individual tweets. The intention is to help you find, and be found by, people with similar interest on Twitter. Please check us out and we'd welcome any feedback to @tweetertags on Twitter.