Christian Crumlish (xian): salonika

Migration project and priorities

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 18:28:26 GMT

As promised last week, I am going to start migrating some of my weblogs from tool to tool. I'm not doing this just to demonstrate the processes and the problems, but because I have had longstanding plans to do so as a matter of trying to rationalize (or refactor) my web presence a bit. My personal view of blog tool migration is that each vendor should make it exceedingly easy to import blog entries from any other tool, probably using some dialect of XML. I think it's probably too much to expect for the vendors to bend over backwards to make you leave, but since most tools produce XML-based feeds and some even store, archive, or backup their database contents in XML formats, just having good importing should do the trick most of the time. My most immediate plans are to move several of my Blogger blogs to Movable Type and to move Radio Free Blogistan from Radio to MT. Blogger to MT isn't so tricky, though I will document that process. I also plan to convert my old personal journal/diary/blog sites from their engines (hand-rolled, diaryland, Blogger, and LiveJournal) and import them into my X-POLLEN blog. The motivation of taking Bite Media and Uncle John's Blog off of Blogger is mainly to get basic features like comments and categories enabled. I like the new "Dano" Blogger interface and I'm a paid Blogger Pro user, plus I write and speak about weblogs in my work, so I will continue using Blogger for some purposes. One possible idea is to run a simple link list through Blogger and include it as a sidebar in my other blogs. The motivation for moving RFB from Radio to MT is more complex. The primary impetus is Trackback. I use the Blogistan site primarily to discuss the weblog phenomenon, and most of the thought leaders in that space use TB to coordinate their conversations. TB has already been demoed for Manila and is coming to Radio as soon as Userland's priorities allow, but I'm impatient, especially as the not-Echo discussion rages and I feel less than a full participant in the conversation. I will also continue to use Radio, mainly because I like the news aggregator and I use it to automatically assemble all my other blog posts into one place (currently the x-syndicate category here). The main thing I don't like (and don't understand) about the multiauthor weblog tool is the way it changes folds incoming post titles into the body of reposted entries. If I knew how to fix that, I would. I also like being part of this Salon blog community, such as it is, and using Radio is kind of a prerequisite, at least for the stats side of things. So, I'll be renaming my Salon Radio weblog with usernum 1111 to something besides RFB, once I've migrated the RFB contents to MT. I may use Salonika, or x-syndicate, or something else entirely, and I'll probably rarely or never post to it directly but continue using it as a compendium site. What's interesting is that people linking to the old address blogs.salon.com/0001111/ will end up at the new site and people linking to radiofreeblogistan.com will still end up going to RFB, despite its different backend. So, this is going to be complicated. Broadly, there are three major steps:

Set up a new RFB blog in Movable Type, pointed at a staging area.
Adapt the current RFB design to MT's templates.
Convert the 2000 or so posts here to MT import format.
Import the old entries into MT.
Publish the new MT RFB blog to the rfb.com domain.
Rename my Radio blog and redirect its output elsewhere.
Delete the old Radio entries once they are safely and properly working in the new blog.

I think that's about it. So far all I've done is (1). Converting the templates shouldn't be too hard, even though there are conceptual differences. Radio breaks out the day and item as separate templates but uses the same home template for the home page and for archive pages. MT nests the day and item sections in one main index template but uses different templates for various archive views. Once I've got the new templates set up (and I still would like to improve the design, but one thing at a time!), I'll post a dummy entry there just to test it and to demonstrate that that step is completed. I plan to document all my procedures and note the gotchas when possible. The big problem is converting the backed up entries to the MT format without breaking permalinks. Also, Radio stores each day as YYYY/MM/DD.html whereas MT by default puts each entry on its own archive page, with my preferred URL being YYYY/MM/DD/entry_title.html. In order not to break old links to the site, I'll probably end up keeping a duplicate set of all past entries. That may be confusing to some, but it should minimize breakage. Krzysztof Kowalczyk's Migrate from Radio Userland to Movable Type page offers a Python script for accomplishing the conversion from Radio's XML backup files. It looks very cool. I'm still figuring out how to run Python on my Mac (OS X 10.2.6), but if I can wrap my head around that, it may solve most of my problems when I get to step 3. As I said, though, I'm impatient, and there's a chance I may do a more crude migration in the short run, which would involve just starting to post using MT and stopping using Radio. The problem is that MT's search wouldn't know about the old Radio posts, but then I could continue using the Google search aimed at my radiofreeblogistan.com and that should work just fine. It's by far less elegant to leave the entires unconsolidated in two separate data piles, but in the end I'll do what works, even if that means taking a sloppy path of least resistance. The Blogger-related migrations are easier, as I said, so I may just slip them in along the way, when I get the time. I'm still interested in other tools, especially those used for multiple-user sites, such as pMachine and Drupal, so I doubt my consolidation will last. I'm also trying to get a wiki set up at thedeadbeat.com. I downloaded phpWiki, but I'm running into problems mainly related to my own stupidity and ignorance. Updates as they come.

How to backup and restore the world

Fri, 27 Jun 2003 17:12:34 GMT

I just added David Pollard's How to Save the World weblog to my subscriptions. His blog is a nonstop source of fascinating thoughts about business, the web, society, and so on. He has also done some interesting analyses of Salon bloggers by traffic and interconnectedness. (Since Harry Potter will be knocking me out of Salon's top ten all time blogs within a day or so, I cherish my relative interleavedness with the rest of the blogosphere.) Anyway, I kept forgetting to check his site until I saw a link back in, and that was the clue that I needed to subscribe. It will also make it easier for me to quote him and x-post to the salonika category when he posts something about the Salon blogs community. I need to update the feed boxes on the salonika page, I know, especially since the untimely retirement of the Raven.

DeLaygate gathering steam

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 03:17:42 GMT

Joshua Marshall is doing his usual bang-up job of covering every angle of the ongoing Tom DeLay scandal dealing with misuse of Homeland Security resources in the Texas redistricting conflict, and subsequent attempts to cover tracks.

Googlesluts

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 16:00:33 GMT

Jan Haugland nominates David Harris for Googleslut of the century for temporarily renaming his blog Harry Potter 5 Summaries and News. Over 3000 hits this morning and counting....

Talk about your text ads

Tue, 17 Jun 2003 00:59:09 GMT

Susannah Breslin's efforts (on behalf of a loyal reader) to turn up a frontal shot of a female streaker has already yielded one slightly more revealing image. The cowgirl says "points of for pasties," but I say points off for implants. Also, outing myself as a dyed-in-the-wool word freak, I'd like to see a picture that shows what the streaker had written on her skin, front and back. One of the texts (on her back) looks like a domain name, something like goldenpalace.com (an online casino). Susannah says "Alright, who's got the streaming video, dammit," while I say who wants to bet she's a stripper or some other kind of sex business pro?

Matthew Sperry R.I.P.

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 04:07:23 GMT

While this site was down, a tragedy befell a young musician and his extended family and friends in the bay area music community when Matthew Sperry was struck by a pickup truck and killed while riding his bicycle at an intersection near the Emeryville-Oakland border on Stanford Avenue. I didn't know Matthew, but I had several friends who knew and loved him, and played music with him, and loved his playing. A page at Scot Hacker's Birdhouse blog has become the de facto tribute page for Matthew. Several of us went to see Mike Watt in San Franciso on Saturday and when told about the accident Watt dedicated his encore to Sperry, a fellow bass player and cyclist. There was a musical memorial at Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, and there is a memorial concert in the works. Hacker has also now set up a dedicated memorial web page for Matthew at matthewsperry.org:

matthewsperry.org. Registered and set up matthewsperry.org on birdhouse hosting. Very raw for now - design and lots more content coming. But posted immediately the call for witnesses and info on the upcoming memorial concert. The concert info has also gone out on PR Newswire and is all over the net - here it is on Yahoo! ... [birdhouse.org]

Weee're back

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 20:30:19 GMT

Well, that took longer than expected. I'm still getting things re-configured and re-set up at ol' Open Publishing / ezone / x-everything industries, but most of the sites are at least now visible, and I may hope that we've cured the hacked-so-easily problem we had going there. In the meantime, off the air, I found solace in posting via Radio and Blogger even when I knew the publishing action would fail, and hanging around the Well more. Forgive the extensive cross-posting. I'm just trying to push out all the categories with current posts.

Writers who inspire me today.

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 18:35:50 GMT

If my host (and hence MT server) weren't down for maintenance and upgrade today, I'd post the following to (arts)flow or Infinite Work over at ezone. Instead, I'll save it here because damn I wish I had Susannah's balls:

Why I Like to Smoke Crack.

Today, I wrote up a two-page proposal for my novel and sent it to a famous publisher. Why? Why not. I've got nothing to lose. Except my crack supply and my adult diapers. These are the important things in life. While we're on the subject, remind me not to do yoga right before I blog. Clearly, it makes me dizzy. Anyhow, I was researching stuff online for my novel today. Fascinating. My novel takes place in Los Angeles, bien sur. LA. The City of Angels. Hell-Ay. A wack-ass town it is. These are some of the things I looked up: Big Binoculars, El Tarpits, Das Chemosphere, Los Donuts, The Tower, Angels Flight, Bougainvillea, and many other things. It was great because it was like being in LA but not leaving the house or moving at all. I also wished a lot of times I would start smoking cigarettes again. I smoked a lot when I was in graduate school. That was part of the whole "I'm A Complicated Graduate Student" vibe. Also, if you live in Chicago, you have to smoke. It's the law. I went to graduate school there with the famous author Lily James. She is fun. You can buy her novel, High Drama in Fabulous Toledo, here, and her short story collection, The Great Taste of Straight People, here, and read a great article she wrote for BookSense about being a "PoMo Mama" here. G'wan. I'll wait while you do it. OK. You're back. Hello. Well, all I have to say is that life is hard, and that's just tough shit. Word to my crack pipe. Wait. In closing, I want you to know I took the picture above on the way home from that god forsaken soul-killer of a BookShitzpo I went to last Saturday. Which, if you couldn't gather by my intentionally vague blog post about it, sucked the life out of my asshole, and I hope to never ever return. Ever. Never. No. Fittingly enough, and only in Hellay, I was driving around through shit-filled downtown LA afterwards, trying to get home, and I was sitting at this redlight, thinking what a pot of mush my brain was becoming, and thinking what a pot of shit life sometimes can turn out to be, when this bus to the right of me started making this very slow moving right turn, and it just tapped, really, just a touch, this fire hydrant, and FOOMP!, off it went, and then there was this tower of water, straight up into the air. There was a small gasping huff of delight from the crackheads on the sidewalk, and the people boredly waiting in their cars, and maybe even from the sky up above. It was a wonderful thing to see exploding over all of us. A surprise for that day, in one's life, indeed. Yes. It was. And how. That is all.
[the reverse cowgirl's blog]

I was at the book release party for a friend of mine. The book is called 12 BLISS STREET and I'm reading it now in hard cover. It's great. I forgot what a great writer Martha is and I used to be her agent (but I suck as a fiction agent because I like writing too much, so I'm glad she got a "real" literary agent and then a "real" publisher - St. Martin's). I've also been catching up with Jonathan Ames recently, who is finishing his latest novel, doing a one-man Eric Bogosian play in Brooklyn, appearing on Letterman, and headed for the Montreal Comedy Festival. I was tempted to suggest he do a blog (it would knock Neill Pollock out of the water), but he doesn't really seem to need it with all the exposure he is already getting. Jonathan is an amazing storyteller, an incredible mimic, and the master of an at-times shockingly frank voice of unselfconscious self-revelation. I vote him most likely to have already succeeded. I'll stick some links in this thing when I get a minute. I'm coming to the tail end of my manuscript submission deadlines for the FrontPage book I'm cowriting, and I expect to get a little more free time, a little more creative time, a little more downtown, a little more writing time, a little more hammock time. Also, I miss the Raven, who didn't much care for the Kowgirl's schtick let alone Nils Polchek's. Some good book news: a second edition of the Phish Companion (Backbeat Books) by the Mockingbird Foundation (ably represented by Ellis Godard) in the works, several exciting if nondisclosable upcoming titles from Peter Seebach (BSD, Unix, OS/X) and Kim Seefeld (bioinformatics, Java, R).

Decisions, decisions

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 21:14:07 GMT

She's Actual Size, Nationwide, Believe asks the musical question, "Seriously, though, if some horrible situation came up where you had to either have sex with a cat or sex with a monkey, which one would you choose?"

still lives

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 06:17:29 GMT

Dave damns Six Apart with faint praise

Fri, 23 May 2003 03:21:43 GMT

Dave often complains when people praise Six Apart products that Userland offered whatever feature in discussion years ago. Maybe that's not the point? Or maybe people are just jealous because he's rich and influential? (He also likes to use Manila sometimes as his counterexample against Movable Type when people make comparisons, but Manila is not simply a CMS.) I'm not sure what he means (hmm, Radio's autopost didn't pick up the permalink... oh well), when he writes

Hosting is a tricky business, as we found out, there are ISPs who now host MT sites that must somehow be included in their plans, yet there seems to be no mention of them in the FAQ. [Scripting News]

Since TypePad isn't MT, why must ISPs who now host MT sites be included in plans for TypePad? I'm missing something. But, hey, that weblog search thing looks cool. Does it depend on Manila (the power behind Dave's weblog) or will it work with Radio Community Servers like blogs.salon.com? Will we ever be able to search the comment hosted there? I was looking for a very kind comment Tom Coates of plasticbag.org posted once, to cull out as a little testimonial (something like "very useful" but better), but I couldn't find it via Google and got tired of hunting randomly through my old comments looking for it.

Nevermore?

Sat, 17 May 2003 16:45:33 GMT

One of this space's favorite blogs, more of a daily news commentary column really, is going at least on hiatus:

Death and Blogs.
In this case, it's us. The Raven bows out now, and hopes you've enjoyed reading this Weblog as much as we've enjoyed writing it.
For now, it's time to focus on other things. When the urge to write becomes overpowering, we'll be back. Until then, surf well.
Best regards, The Raven
[The Raven]

Nooooooo!

metageneric antiblog spot

Fri, 16 May 2003 23:27:24 GMT

Heading making clever pun on 'blog': i'm a journalist. see my daring posture vis-a-vis blogs: they are too influential to too small a group of people. popular bloggers are bad and the taste of the blogosphere is incorrect or corrupted. google is making things worse. it's giving me opinions when i expect primary sources. me not able to linkthrough! people link to each other. too many people link to the same people. it's not just unimaginative, it's unfair to me just because i dismissed this for a while but now i want in and all the good blogroll spots are taken. i hate you bloggers. i refuse to even link to snooty snoot. i hope kottke sees this.

Conceptual writing collection

Mon, 12 May 2003 04:17:43 GMT

The always-delightful Ubuweb site has assembled an anthology of conceptual writing.

[via A.P. Crumlish]

Product placement on the news

Sun, 11 May 2003 01:18:03 GMT

Jeff Green exposes how some companies pay to have their products mentioned on the TV news.

First book on a single blog tool

Wed, 30 Apr 2003 21:59:15 GMT

I've been following the blog book market pretty closely this last year and with the recent Google acquisition of Pyra to get Blogger and Neotony investment in Six Apart to support Movable Type and then TypPad, it's kind of cool to note that the firstr book dedicated to a single specific blog tool is on Radio. Scripting News reports that Rogers Cadenhead (a top selling computer-book author, writer of the Workbench weblog, and friend to Salon bloggers and Radio users alike) is doing a book called Radio Kick Start (great title!) for Sams:

Rogers Cadenhead is doing a book on Radio to be published this summer by Sams Publishing. Chapter 1 is on the Web for your review. Very cool! Thanks Rogers. [Scripting News]

Xeni is the cowgirl's stunt double this week

Mon, 21 Apr 2003 19:33:46 GMT

Xeni Jardin asks the musical question, "[W]hat do you blog about when you can be as explicit, as extreme, and as graphic as you want to be? How far will you go - at what point will you self-censor? Do you roll your sleeves up and turn up the shock, just because you can? If I do, will you respect me the morning after?"

Iranian blogger arrested

Sun, 20 Apr 2003 19:42:28 GMT

Blogging has gotten pretty big in Iran, which is no surprise given the democratic strivings emerging from the enormous Persian youth culture. Now it appears that one Iranian blogger/journalist has been arrested. He is "accused of threatening the national security by giving interviews to Persian language radios outside Iran, wrtiting articles both in newspapers and his weblog."

[via o-dub]

Enhancement to Radio's 'recently updated' page

Tue, 08 Apr 2003 00:54:15 GMT

You know, the ol' Recently Updated page here at Salon Blogs might be even cooler if it included a title or brief excerpt from the most recent post. It would make the page something of a composite blog ezine. How hard would that be? I realize this takes a back seat to getting it stable and functioning again first!

Blasphemy supersedes pr0n

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 19:06:52 GMT

In the recent community server crisis I failed to notice that Jan Haugland's Secular Blasphemy has edged out Pornographer's Picks for the No. 10 spot in the Salon Blogs rankings, knocking PP out of the top ten for the first time ever. Soon he will pass RFB in the rankings, then the Raven will pass the dormant pornograph and eventually evict me from the top ten as well, as he deserves to. It's been a good run...

Salon's Radio community server on the fritz?

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 00:16:43 GMT

The Salon blogs mailing list is abuzz with complaints about the behavior of the community server. Hit counts appear to be down, updated blogs are not registering, and the comment system keeps becoming unavailable. We don't have a formal process for inquiring about these kinds of maintenance issues, and I'm not sure anyone's emailed Scott to ask him to talk to the Userland people. It's the weekend, too, so you can't expect the landlord to fix the toilet right way, necessarily. Or you can expect it, but it may not happen.

Do you read me? (via my RSS news feed, that is?)

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 16:46:47 GMT

Quick informal "poll" (since you never know much about your RSS-feed audience). If you subscribe to RFB's newsfeed and read this blog in an aggregator, please email me at this nonce address: <aggre-readers@freeblogistan.com>; with the name of your feedreader as the subject (for example "Subject: Radio" or "Subject: NetNewsWire Pro" or "Subject: AmphetaDesk," etc.). Don't worry about capitalization or spacing. I'll be sorting with some very simple keyword matches. You can leave the message area blank or use that space to give me feedback, prove you're not an automated process, or just say hi. It's up to you. Will this work?

I claim Free Blogistan in the name of the People

Tue, 01 Apr 2003 00:23:57 GMT

Because the freest markets are imaginary markets.

A brief history of sexblogs

Mon, 31 Mar 2003 17:26:38 GMT

A month or so ago, Debra Hyde wrote a piece for Yes Portal called Sexblogs: Observations from an Early Adopter. In it, she recounts her own experiences, starting a sex blog (or journal as we probably would have called it then) called Pursed Lips just before the advent of Blogger. There's a touch of regret that her own offerings may have been relatively overlooked, but Hyde's memory of that time tracks with my own. I also believe that one of the precursor's of today's blog were the what's new page or journal page that was part of most prepackaged porn sites (and probably still is) when they first started proliferating. She points to our own Reverse Cowgirl's blog's bustout success as a watershed in the story of sexblogs. Susannah's cred, she says, comes because she walks the walk:

Susannah Breslin's site steps into the porn arena.... [S]he strolls the most sex-saturated streets in America. (She has the pictures to prove it.)

Best new blog name

Sat, 29 Mar 2003 16:36:32 GMT

Seems to be a salonika Friday for me, when I should be taking screenshots for my long overdue Chapter 9 of (yes, they just told me I can mention it in public, wait for it...) FrontPage Savvy, but more on that another time. Best named new notable Salon blog has to be Why Your Wife Won't Have Sex with You. Best of all, it really does address this topic in a serious, knowing, but down-to-earth way. Could be great therapy for repressed couples worldwide. The blog's author, Julia Deckham Grey, also features religious news and folly in a category called 'The Nine Billion Links of God.' reminiscent of the classic Arthur C. Clarke short story (I think it was, right?). Has the Cowgirl given her her props yet? She would rate a link for the name alone, but I think Susannah would like the whole package (hmreh).