January 03, 2006

Contactability

Oops. The mail server which handles my main email account, which also happens to provide DNS for jimbo.org.uk, died a little before 2pm today. I should be able to bring it back on Friday some time, but until then, anyone wanting to contact me should try my gmail address, jimbo.green @ gmail.com, or something more old fashioned like the telephone.

My vague understanding of DNS suggests that this site should remain reachable, because there are secondary DNS servers available, but there might be delays if you try to contact the dead one first. Sorry about that!

[Update: everything seems to be back online.]

Posted by James at 20:33 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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July 21, 2005

Gooooooodbye

With the infrequency of Google's crawlstto see what I was talking about, and the varied content of this blog, Google's adsense program just wasn't working out for me. I made a couple of cents, which will no doubt sit in the account to be claimed when I put adsense onto another web project I'm currently toying with. So, rejoice! Be glad! The ads are gone! They never did look very pretty, anyway...

In other meta news, I'm playing with Technorati style tags, and categories, and stuff. The front page lists all the tags, and I've so far tagged everything back to where I started using version 3 of Movable Type. I might carry on back to the beginning at some point, but, I got pretty bored. :)

Posted by James at 02:27 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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July 01, 2005

Without letting slip

Suppose I were to create an anonymous blog somewhere. How would I go about promoting it, without letting slip that I was associated with it?

Answers on a postcard!

Posted by James at 02:38 | Comments (2) | TrackBack
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June 23, 2005

Wary of editing

Does anybody know what's going on with Zempt? Their roadmap says they want Linux support in version 0.4, but that was released in November last year, and I can only see a Windows version on the download page. The site doesn't seem to offer a lot in the way of contact details, either, except for some crappy web forum. Hope they check their referrers!

I've installed gnome-blog, but it doesn't seem to be particularly clever, lacking any kind of preview facility or understanding of textile markup. I'm wary of editing entries directly in the MT interface at the moment, because firefox is crashing on me a lot at the moment. And of course, Zempt isn't available on my platform.

So, my other question is this: what do other people use to post to their weblogs, if not web interfaces, Zempt, or gnome-blog? Answers which work with MT3 and run under Linux are particularly appreciated :-)

Posted by James at 01:57 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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June 17, 2005

We interrupt your scheduled programming...

Eep. I just broke my atom feed and fixed it again, but I think in doing so I may have caused syndicated versions of this site to explode, gaining 15 new unread posts. This doesn't seem to include Planet OxIRC and Planet #nott, but may well fool Livejournal, and the various offline syndication things people use. It definitely did affect bloglines. Sorry folks!

While I'm doing the meta thing, the observant among you may have noticed I've now added a few small advert blocks to the site. I'm not sure I'm comfortable doing it, but figured there was only one way to find out - having a go. If in a few weeks the feeling of dirtiness isn't outweighed by the profits, I'll probably ditch them again. Incidentally, I'm not allowed to draw attention to them in any way, so please, whatever you do, don't click them! Or something...

And finally, this post will take the total on the site to 100. It's only taken something like 17 months, which I make to be roughly a post every 5 days — probably a slightly higher rate than I'd have guessed.

We now return you to your regular programming.

Posted by James at 02:44 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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June 15, 2005

Somebody hates you

You're not really famous until people you don't know start attacking you.

"But perhaps no recognition that I've received is quite so flattering as the fact that there's been a vote for deletion (VfD) for the Wikipedia page about me. There's certainly good reasons for haters to be annoyed by me, but you're nobody until somebody hates you for no good reason at all."
-- Anil Dash, VP at Six Apart

Posted by James at 02:14 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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January 27, 2005

Paging Dave Winer

Dear Dave,

On behalf of the rest of the blogosphere, I would like to congratulate you on your recent award, most arrogant post of 2005. You've done us all proud! It's just a shame you're no more in the running for any of the other awards than, say, I am...

See, you didn't invent podcasting: at the very least, Harry Gilchrist was audioblogging ages before you, and Wikipedia's entry on podcasting, while mentioning you as playing a big part in the automation of the process with enclosures (which, given they're part of your spec, you can take complete credit for) and special aggregators, neither credits you with the first proper implementation, nor with coining the term. I didn't invent podcasting either, but hey, I don't claim to be eligible for any awards.

Regarding best technology — deary me, Dave, you don't even have a comment or trackback implementation! The google-powered citations thing is cool, but, doesn't really offer much over a standard search function to the average user. In fact, I tried to use it to find out when you first mentioned the term "podcasting", but it wouldn't let me page through the results, so I couldn't. Great.

Sorry, but I think there are far, far cooler bits of technology out there. As for Best Weblog and Best Technology Weblog... well, my mummy says my blog is better than yours. Sorry.

All the best, and I hope this blogging thing works out well for you.

Cheers,
James.

[I emailed Dave a link to this article; I'll keep you posted about his response, if any.]

[Update: Dave says "Wow!"]

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January 12, 2005

Subscibe!!

Yesterday, Dave Winer pointed out the problem caused by more and more online RSS aggregators advising sites to include "Subscribe with $aggregator!!" icons on their sites (see my "Sub | Bloglines" and "LJ Friend" icons on the right) to get more subscribers — there comes a point when you just can't sensibly include that many buttons.

Luckily, Aquarion (of ESF fame) has first designed and then gone and coded a solution. The result is called SubscribeMe, and this is my SubscribeMe link

Do let me know how it works with your favourite aggregator!

Posted by James at 20:27 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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January 06, 2005

Feeding Frenzy

Blog comment threads suck. Mostly, they suck because once you've moved on and are reading other posts, there's no way of knowing if your comment has been responded to, and hence of knowing whether or not you want to go back and continue the discussion. It'd be nice if you could subscribe to the comments on a blog, just as you subscribe to the entries with your favourite RSS aggregator

As an experiment, then, I've set up various XML feeds of the comments on this blog. There's an RSS 1.0 feed of all comments across all entries, and an RSS 2.0 feed of the comments for each individual entry — if you go to the entry page there's a link to the feed above the comments section, and as soon as I frob the templates after posting this, it'll be in a <link /> element, so all those subscribe bookmarklets/widgets should work nicely.

[Update: here's the feed for this entry]

Feedback on their usefulness and their brokenness, and on their lack of these things, is very much appreciated! Also, would people reading this through Planet #nott be interested in comment feeds for the blogs on there being syndicated there, as well as blog entries? I don't expect to use it much either way, so I'm interested in opinions.

Posted by James at 01:30 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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December 23, 2004

A slight change of style

So, I finally gave in and installed Movable Type 3. Expect to see some kind of moderation/authentication system for comments appearing shortly, along with a complete redesign (I'm not hugely keen on the default templates).

Everything is probably broken. I'm interested in hearing what, though, so I know what to fix...

Posted by James at 02:25 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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