Category: Radio Free Blogistan

  • DailyKos's community blogging

    DailyKos is a hugely popular left-leaning political weblog with a very active comment section. It originally ran on Movable Type but developed growing pains as the readership (and commentariat) expanded. A few months ago, Kos transitioned to Scoop, the open source codebase that underlies kuro5hin, is designed for community participation and collaborative filtering of content…

  • Drupal getting major overhaul

    Looks like the upcoming version of Drupal with have some significant improvements: The Drupal developers have been little busy bees ever since the new development branch has been created about 1.5 months ago. Those that do not track the CVS commit messages or read the mailing lists might wonder what we have been up to,…

  • Rebranding RSS and syndication

    Your grandmother doesn’t do HTTP and she doesn’t know from XHTML. You didn’t buy her a computer so she could access SMTP and IMAP and POP. No, it took words like internet, web, and e-mail to help people who hadn’t been reading William Gibson make sense of this strange new world. Bloggers and people who…

  • New TypePad features

    Everything TypePad announcesthree new features for TypePad, namely additional sorting options for TypeLists (blogroll-like lists), the ability to upload a zipped folder of photos (a vast improvement over the tedious, one-at-a-time 15-at-most original method), and the ability to password-protect your entire TypePad site. (via Buzzmachine)

  • All things must pass

    In my blog book (still looking for a publisher, note), I tried to address the whole weblog lifecycle, from setup and launch, through the daily routine of writing the blog and occasionally reorganizing it, down to how to end a blog. Yes, stop blogging. Some blogs die. They are attached to a project that has…

  • BlogShares was fun while it lasted

    Seyed Razavi announces that he is closing down BlogShares, since the effort to maintain it became unsustainable. So you can take the “listed on BlogShares” badge off your weblog any time now. [via Buzzmachine]

  • Shelley to the rescue

    Looks like Shelley Powers has addressed the exact trackback-ping-not-rebuilding-the-archive-page and thus not-showing-up-inline-automatically problem I was just noticing: Weblogging for Poets: Adding Trackback entries to individual archive pages BTW, we’d better get password protection going here soon, or make a conscious decision to leave this site visible to random visitors, because Andrew lists it among his…

  • An erudite law blogger

    I stumbled across an incredibly well written and thoughtful weblog lately, called unbillable hours. The author (TPB, Esq.) includes a long and entertaining biography that gives you a good idea of his education, cultural influences, and experiences – all of which inform his writing, which ranges from silly to serious. (His takedown of Kim du…

  • More trackback problems

    I saw that “life – listed chronologically” sent a trackback ping to Rayne’s latest post but it doesn’t show up on the archive page. My theory is that the page is not being rebuilt automatically as it is when comments are posted. To check this, I will rebuild the page manually. If the trackback appears,…

  • Spammers find MT's open relay

    Been busy holidayin’ and doing other stuff lately, so a lot of the basic substrate of blog news and blog gossip is passing unremarked. By now, most MT users probably know that Movable Type is vulnerable as an open spam relay. If you are not using the “mail this entry” feature, it is highly recommended…

  • Dating the next killer app?

    First of all, Happy Thanksgiving everyone, whether here in the U.S. or not. On this day where so many of us convene with our families and talk about or avoid talking about politics, religion, and sex, I find myself thinking about online dating. A lot of us are scratching our heads as we see venture…

  • RSS feeds for Channel Z nodes?

    This is a question for Dave Winer but maybe Andrew Grumet or someone else who has insight into Dave’s latest innovations in weblog concepts could take a stab at it too: I assume each of the nodes in the aggregator hierarchy will have RSS feeds (or may already have XML renderings available)? The XML icons…

  • Tweaking the sidebar here

    I figured the link back to RFB proper should be bigger and easier to click on, so I sort of combined two sidebar-title/sidebar elements from before.

  • Template access

    filchyboy, you now have access to the templates at RFB. Anyone else want in? Please everyone check around before trying out changes. Best to demo them over here first as Liza will be doing. filchy, i didn’t give you config access. Do you need that?

  • Are blogs a new form of virtual community?

    Dr. Anita Blanchard has published a preliminary analysis of a proposition that blogs may be a new form of virtual community, based on a studio of the Julie/Julia Project Salon blog: This research provides an initial look into the complicated topic of blogs as virtual communities. For many readers, the Julie/Julia Project is simply an…

  • Now I have two problems

    I’m trying to get the hang of the mod_rewrite module of my Apache web server. This enables me to trap certain URLs or patterns of URLs and rewrite them to point somewhere different on the back end. This has two practical benefits: It makes migration from an old path or permalink scheme much easier to…

  • Real Live Preacher has a book deal

    Hugely popular pseudonymous Salon blogger Real Live Preacher announced that he has been offered a book deal with Eerdmans (he also had an offer from Jossey-Bass): What does this mean for the blog? Chuck and I agree that the blog must continue. If I didn’t have the blog driving me, I’d just go back to…

  • IranFilter: English-language group weblog

    Hossein Derakhshan (better known as ‘hoder’) of Editor: Myself posted an announcement to Blogroots about a new project, iranFilter, writing: iranFilter is a collective weblog in English, focused on news, reports and everything one can find about Iran on the Internet. Although the name can’t be more cliché, honestly, I couldn’t come up with a…

  • Secret Santa for bloggers

    Sign up at Secret Santa to give and receive.

  • Jarvis posts full text of Denton interview

    At BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis has posted the complete transcript of his interview with the New York Times reporter who wrote the article the other day about Nick Denton’s nanopublishing empire. It’s nice to get the complete context for Jarvis’s comments, not that he was quoted out of context or anything. Here’s a snatch: JARVIS: Weblogs…

  • Making this blog more useful

    OK, I added a direct link to the RFB home page to the top of the sidebar, got rid of the relatively useless calendar, and added a list of the last 17 entries to RFB with direct links to their individual archive pages. I also took the popup code off the home page of this…