Category: socialware-online

I'm still to this day unsure of what trackbacks are, and even more confused after reading the moveabletype documatation about it.

I'm not the only one, Bob DuCharme is having issues. And he tries to explain in his post about the same issue.

Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregation system. Many blogs and newsfeed services publish RSS feeds, special files containing the content of the site formatted for easy parsing. Bloglines allows people to subscribe to these feeds. Once subscribed, Bloglines periodically checks the feed for changes or additions.

My first thoughts are this is good for those without access to a server of there own or no broadband connection. And its looks very simular to flock, but it says there using a combination of things. On the minus side it doesnt allow you to collect the aggeration outputs like flock does. So no sharing onwards which is a bad idea. I will need to sign up to check it out for sure.
It does however let you use opml to inport and export feeds, which makes me wonder what they would make of my many feeds

I wonder what there revenue model will be? email marketing or feed in advertising into there listed feeds? The easy subscription bookmarklet sounds dodgy as heck.

How Much Does Bloglines Cost?
Bloglines is completely free to use. Text advertising and additional fee-based services will be launched in the near future.

Using mailinator for the first time then it would seem. Using the email address testuser@mailinator.com with the password testuser.

Got my validated email a sec ago

Hello,

Your email address has been validated and your Bloglines membership has
been confirmed.

Now that you have a Bloglines account, you can subscribe to blogs
easily. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/topblogs to see a list of the
most popular blogs on Bloglines. Also see http://www.bloglines.com/newblogs
for a list of new blogs, updated daily. If you already have a list of
subscriptions in OPML format, you can import them automatically. Go to http://www.bloglines.com/manage for more information. For an easy way
to subscribe to new blogs that you find, see http://www.bloglines.com/help/easysub

How can we improve Bloglines? We would appreciate your feedback. Go
to http://www.bloglines.com/contact to send us comments.

Thank you for using Bloglines.

The Bloglines Team

Uploaded my opml file from flock and it worked!

So its now, my own flock server vs bloglines. We shall see what happens, you know I'll blog the results.

So where did it all start?

Well we needed a blogger app for staff and students to blog from anywhere in the college. And our college has the additional problems of using mac as well as pcs and laptops not only desktops.

So how would we do this? Well I evaluated many blogger apps but they were either too complex or not cross platform. But yes there was one which was simple and cross platform. Chronicle lite

Anyway theres major problems with the graphics display on mac osx, so much of a problem I sent Paul a screenshot of the problem.
Paul replied that he had no mac to test on and that he wouldnt support the mac because of that. Oh, were a little stuck then?

Not if we send him a mac complete with osx! Yes thats right, we are going to send Paul a mac so he can fix the problem and maybe do some of the things we want to include into clite. Obviously because clite is opensource, everything we suggest for development will be open to everyone. Its a odd sitution because everyone wins. Paul gets a new mac, we get unlimited licences of software which does what we want and everyone else can use the same software with or without modifications. Yep the only people loosing out are those who charge for software. It really does pay to go opensource…

And in the spirit of opensource, I will now be plugging clite and its development when ever i can. lol.

Oh and here's Pauls wishlist if anyone else feels the need to help him out.

Smartmobs has a link about the debate between blogging and journalism. And its a really well thought out article at that.

The Rss issue spelt out, with some interesting views from some of the most inflentual people on the net, well worth a read.Dispute exposes bitter power struggle behind Web logs

I wont comment too much, because I havent yet made my mind up. I like RSS2 because its really simple. But prefer RSS 1.0 because its using a standard (rdf) which makes alot of sense. How Pie, Echo and others come into this, I dont know but this is going to go on and on and on. Thank god we can just write xsl which will convert between whatever format is prefered.

So this guy from the school of infomatics is doing some research on writing styles using blogging. My Blog Experiement, do I get involved? Hummm, I'm not sure… Maybe I will.

Hey theres little to loose from doing it, just a little bit of my time, I have to submit all my blogs made during May 2003 and fill in a questionnaire. All for this guys PhD?
Oh what the heck lets do it.

Mainly blogging this one for myself, Data mining.
Just a great source of links for me to read at somepoint soon.

So I have the reasons why blogging should be put into the college for next year, but how am I going to do it? Well here's a few issues and thoughts buzzing around my head at the moment.

First up, how is blojsom going to cope with 1100 students and staff using it?
I know it scales but how far does it scale really? I mean blojsom like most blogging systems seem to be made for single people or groups of trusted people.
What were basicly building is something like moveable type or blogger, the system in which blojsom will exist as such. Here are a few ideas for the system…

1. The simple way = the way i can see it working for now.

We use blojsom on one server under one servlet only. There will be no xmlrpc access, people can only blog by putting the entry files in a certain directory. That directory will be mapped on to there desktops or user area. We will use standard file system authentication to stop people changing other peoples files, etc.
They are welcome to use any kind of text editing tool they like, but we will deploy and have training on one we rate highly. More than likely this tool will support xhtml and be multiplatform for osx and nt support.

2. The email drop

Basicly the same as above but we add email to blog feature for those's who want to blog offsite. I have not yet tried this feature out, but it could be the same authentication problem as xmlrpc, where the person blogging can blog to any part of the system. Which is not what we want.

3. The xmlrpc way = the way were doing it at the moment

This way we use one server and blojsom but allow blogging over xmlrpc only. We deploy a blogging app on peoples desktops and direct people to use that to blog. Now this runs into the major headache of xmlrpc authentication.
First up how do you maintain the list of authenticated users?
And how do you stop people from publishing to areas where they shouldnt?

4. The xmlrpc way 2 = I think the best way at the moment

This is the same as above but we deploy a staff blojsom and a 2nd servelet running the student one. That way students can fight it out and the like but not interfere with the critical newsletter system.

5. The multiple servlets

We deploy multiple servlets and allow different departments or areas of studies to take care of one. But its pretty much the same as the above solution and has the same problems too.

6. The webdavvy

This is based around version 1, but allows offsite access by the webdav protocal. Each persons weblog folder will also be a webdav folder.
Nice idea but it adds another layer of confusion to the system, but this would also allow the uploading of images, audio and video.

So the issues are,
We need to check against our ldap server to make sure the person writing the weblog is writing to the correct folders. And what kinda of configuration are we going to deploy for blojsom?
On top of all this we have to decide on the input for users. We have the oppotunity to deploy a application on the desktops and that also requires great consideration, which I wont go into now…

Dave dropped me a email today pointing me at Amazon RSS.

Another Amazon Web Services experiment. The idea is this: say you're interested in books about weblogs. Wouldn't it be nice to have an RSS feed for all weblog-related books at Amazon, so that when new books became available you'd know about them? Thanks to the magic of web pipelines (Amazon >> XML over HTTP >> XSLT >> ASP >> RSS >> Your News Aggregator), it's become a pretty trivial thing to put together.

Yep this a fantastic use of standard technology, all i need to do now is swap the ASP for XSP…

HP have just realeased a demo of there blogging app, blojsomIT!. At the moment it does a small amount of things but the next step SemBlogIT! looks to be really powerful and clever app which could come in useful later.

I have set it up for testing here. Obviously you need a user name and password to use it unfortually. But you can try out HP's own here.

I hope to add some serious feedback once I try it out over time.