brainscat.com

I need to revisit my previous post about OneNote and the MS Office blog integration…

Apparently, using lists screws things up to holy hell. There were tons of malformed <p> tags, a bunch of whitespace, as well as complete disregard for switching from numeric order lists to alpha ordered lists, when nesting lists. Manual intervention was needed to clean up the gobs of whitespace strewn about my last post on fatblogging.

So… needless to say, I wouldn’t recommend using OneNote/Office’s automatic blog posting feature for anything more than the simplest of posts.

Recently, I’ve considered adding cigar, whiskey, beer, and wine reviews to this site. So many times I’m tempted to write any and every interesting thing here on brainscat and more often than not my first reaction is, “No.” I’m realizing more and more where that instinct is coming from…

Most of my favorite bloggers, (Robert Scoble, Joel Spolsky, Mark Cuban, Gabe and Tycho, Tim Bray, Iggy, and Tracy and Trev) besides being authoritative, all share a focus and consistency of content that makes their respective sites worthwhile. Their adherance to a topic is one of the key qualities that makes their respective sites valuable.

I’m sure Scoble is a well rounded individual and is interested in many things besides Microsoft and related technology, but I don’t care. I don’t read Ongoing because I think Tim Bray is a good person and I don’t read his site expecting to hear about his newest hobby. I read their blogs because they give me focused info on topics I’m interested in and I don’t have to wade through crap.

So many bloggers would do well to remember their audience when they are searching for what to make of their webspace. I’ll do my best to keep this from turning into this.

Update: Forget this. I may not read “shotgun” blogs that jump around from topic to topic, but I realize that shouldn’t have anything to do with how and why I blog. I write for my own sanity, to keep a record of interesting bits, and to hopefully help someone else out.

Update 2: Don’t forget this, just forgive me for being to rash in both previous revisions. I just don’t think strict adherance is what’s going to make my blog good. More accurately, I have a need to stray every now and then from regular technological writings to keep my own sanity. To be a useful resource though, I have to stay on target. The best place for myself and brainscat is somewhere in the middle. End of navel-gazing. I promise…. for now.

I got this from Alex who got this from Scott, who blames it all on Simon. Clearly, this post is not my fault.

1. At bloglines, find your own blog.
2. If it’s not there, register and add your blog.
3. After searching by your blog url, click related feeds.
4. Select “include” feeds that you’re subscribed to, if that’s your fancy.
5. Post the top 5 (or more) on your blog.

Results for brainscat.com follow…

1. Joe Beda’s EightyPercent.net — never heard of him, but I’m subscribed now.
2. Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger — everybody reads him, no suprise here.
3. Alain Leroy’s view on our world — another wildcard, but I’ll give him a shot.
4. Nate Furtwangler — coworker’s blog. Brandon’s leetle brother.
5. brandon.furtwangler blog — Brandon’s blog, not a suprise at all, since we both started blogging at the same time.

Previously, my frustrated rant against the lackluster product evangelism by Sun and Apple went off with little to no effect. So, yesterday, I shot off an email to Mary Smaragdis, connected Sun employee extrodinaire. In the span of a few hours, I was able to contact somone in the Sun organization, and receive a meaningful response. This wasn’t tech support or any other front line channel, this was someone who works in the department I was having qualms with. Her quick response reaffirms to me that no other model could have gotten my questions answered faster or better, and no amount of PR can make up for this kind of experience. Blogging is a Good Thing.

Moving on… Mary said she’d bring up my concerns to others in the office and gave me some links that might help. While these are interesting, they can’t possibly compete with a discussion led by a few people “in the know” who are good at summarizing products and new technologies.

• java.sun.com
• java.net
• research.sun.com
• Calvin Austin — J2SE
• Chris Melissinos — Java Gaming
• James Todd — JXTA
• John Clingan — Solaris

Now, if only someone at Apple were easy to reach… Then again, the fact that their organization isn’t transparent at all means I can’t get ahold of anyone and that they just don’t get it.

Today is one of those days I can’t get ideas out fast enough and it’s very frustrating. It all started with the idea of me setting up a work blog internally. The things I’d like to use it for are as follows.

1. Give project updates as things progress.
2. Clip interesting posts from other blogs to my work blog.
3. Code review with peers.
4. Share experience and tips as I find them.

So, I talked with my friend Ryan about the best interface for clipping from a blog and having a tool grab the pertinent RSS area. Turns out we want the following process to appear to users who want to linkblog.

1. Right click a permalink for a blog.
2. Click “clip this”.
3. Full contents of the article (taken from rss item block) are credited and syndicated in new blog.

We didn’t care if this behavior was in an aggregator like Bloglines, or a plugin to Firefox that posted the necessary information to WordPress. We didn’t care if the tool created a feed somewhere that a WordPress plugin could read, or if it spoke directly with WordPress. What I wanted is a tool to automatically clip a post and make the clip go live on my site.

Inspired, I downloaded another cvs copy of WordPress and started to hack on this. But in the midst of that, I started thinking about how co-workers were going to use the internal blog, and I realized they should be able to read the blog from anywhere. Okay, so I want a private blog that’s accessable anywhere… riight. The only practical, scalable solution for this is to use a VPN. Okay, no biggie, we need a VPN anyways at work. People connect to VPN, they can read the dev-blog and get RSS now.

But shit, I don’t get RSS, Bloglines gets it for me, and there’s no chance in hell of them getting into my VPN. The whole point of putting it on an intranet is so Bloglines and other people can’t read it. >_<

How do I fix this? Install Bloglines behind the VPN so it can access the site and serve me my feeds over a secure connection. But I can’t install Bloglines, I don’t own it.

So, Mark Fletcher, I know you’ve been concerned with a revenue model for Bloglines. If you’re reading this, please, take heed. Either offer a separate Bloglines installation to my employer for a reasonable price, or open source the Bloglines engine. Bloglines has overcome the performance problems I’ve complained about before and I’ve come to love your service because of the user interface. I hope that you see that your unique value, to me, is in your interface, not your centralized service. For the most part, AmphetaDesk does the same centralized aggregator deal, but its interface is terrible. You’re kicking ass when it comes to centralized aggregator user interface.

Even if your strategy for Bloglines is as a portal, as you imply in your recent writings, there’s no reason licensing of your engine can’t provide supplemental revenue. Google does it, I don’t see why you can’t. Allowing custom installations is valuable to the enterprise market with VPNs, it’s valuable to anyone who can’t use your service because it belongs to you alone. Better yet, make the engine extendable, let me customize it. Create great hooks for a plugin system. Open source Bloglines, and sell dual-licenses like MySQL. Give discounts to educational institutions. Really add to the Bloglines web-service, give us way more options than we have now. I don’t care how I get to customize it, as long as I can for a reasonable cost.

You see, as it stands, your centralized hosting hurts me. I know it allows users to get feed suggestions and search feeds for topics, but I’d really be interested in hearing how many users actually are using that functionality. My guess is few, though I may be wrong.

Bloglines is a great aggregator and there are many things I’d like to modify and tweak but I just can’t. Take the clipping solution I’d like above. This would be so simple if when bloglines clipped a post, it offered to keep the original rss item block instead of a link back to Bloglines. If your clipping feature built a custom rss of my clips, I could easily use it and syndicate the “best of” my blogroll. Alas, you probably won’t implement this feature in a timeframe reasonable to me, but if I could could somehow extend your system… well, then the sky would be the limit.

This post’s been sitting in my queue for some time because I didn’t quite know how to verbalize my frustration over the fact that it’s nearly impossible to find valuable primary content relating to new technologies from Sun and Apple. Today, Steve Gillmor gave me the final moment of clarity needed to solidify what I’ve been meaning to say. Steve opened a piece, stating that Robert Scoble has done a lot to give Microsoft the visibility and innovative face that it needs to project in order to be successful.

Combine Scoble’s evangelism with the great content that Channel 9 is providing and it’s easy to see why Microsoft technology is dominating the developer’s blogosphere. Channel 9 consistently pushes great content that showcases how easy it is to do specific cool new things with the Microsoft toolset whereas Scoble serves as an aggregating demigod. With two easy rss feeds, I get the best of what the MS blogosphere has to offer at any given moment.

Contrast this model with Apple. Almost everything technical is centered at the Apple Developer Connection which has only one RSS feed. Sure, Apple’s content is concise and relatively easy to keep tabs on but that’s only because of the paltry amount of content. Furthermore, the ADC model has no transperancy, no trust, and no conversation about their development. I wouldn’t know if Apple has something great down the pipe at all, and it’s extremely hard to get excited about their platform when their developer site is merely a feed containing code samples. It’s the conversation that gives Scoble and Channel 9 so much authenticity and Microsoft a higher degree of credibility. Conversely, everything on Apple’s site is sterile and restricted, and thus hardly engaging at all.

Sun’s relatively recent unveiling of Sun Blogs is a great step because the conversation is very real, but it’s deficient because it’s a free-for-all and impossible to digest. Tim Bray used to do a decent job of this with his Sunbeam posts, but that hasn’t been updated in forever. To be fair, it’s not Tim’s responsibility to provide the development face of Sun as Ongoing is his personal blog. Sun Bloggers has a signal to noise ratio that is extremely low and I wish they’d get their act together on this and create some mechanism for letting the cream rise to top. What does get passed around the community are things like Schwartz’s latest insights and sure, Schwartz has a great blog, but it’s about the business strategy of Sun. They need to focus part of their PR strategy on pushing the upcoming technologies that are going to persuade developers like myself to use their platform.

Right now, Sun and Apple need to get their act together and evangelize the technology that’s going to give their respective entities an attractive carrot to developers. I refuse to believe that they aren’t developing something that is revolutionary and can only chalk the silence of the blogosphere up to the fact that their public presence is so low. Please, reclaim part of the developer mindshare with great demos and engaging interviews. Let us know you have a pulse.

Jason Calacanis, of Weblogs, Inc fame, posts a spot-on set of reasons why bloggers shouldn’t take ads from single sources.

Oddly at odds with this set of rules is the fact that I find Penny-Arcade’s advertisements so relevant. They rarely get my clicks, but they frequently get my eyeballs’ attention, something that most ads on the web can’t claim. Maybe it’s because their constant ridicule and banter of one another inspires confidence in their degree of honesty. Probably not, though.

Found by way of Scoble.