Christian Crumlish (xian): movablefeats

Migrating from Radio to Movable Type

Tue, 01 Jul 2003 21:05:03 GMT

A little more digging has yielded these links: Bill Kearney
Moving from Radio to Movable Type
Bill is an outspoken detractor of Dave Winer's and thus has a vested interest in facilitating people migrating.
Exporter tool for Radio
So far, the latest version of the Exporter tool is causing my instsanceof Radio to choke and crash. Bill doesn't really support Mac users, but he's looking into it for me. David Seidel : Wavicle
Radio to MT: Migrating the Data Archives
April 23, 2003
Seidel has some notes and suggestions for people using Kearney's approach. Tony Bowden: Understanding Nothing
Importing Radio Posts to MT
Tony Bowden offers an alternate approach, with a macro that should show all your posts on one page. So far I'm getting "[Macro error: Can't call the script because the name "showAll" hasn't been defined.]" even though I've put the file called showAll.txt containing his script in my /Macros/ folder. Eric's Weblog
Emergency site replacement
December 15, 2002
Another discussion of migrating from Radio to MT Theoblogical
Misses title-link shortcuts and wants to know how to migrate stories. matt.griffith
Migrating to Movable Type
October 03, 2002
Documents his own d.i.y. process: "Overall the entire process sucked." David Watson
June, 2002

It strikes me that content management software, particularly in the weblog space, is a lot like old mainframe stuff. How? Well, one of the reasons that big iron has stayed big for so long is that it's really difficult to migrate out of 30 years of proprietary vertical market software. I've now got that problem with only a few months of experience with a content management system (CMS). I, of all people, should be well-aware of the problem since I worked on CMS stuff a few years ago but I'm probably asleep at the wheel. One thing that is clearly needed is something along the lines of RSS that would act as a glue format between content management systems so that migrating from one to the other wasn't so damn hard. I'm not sure if anybody's thinking about or working on this, but it's clearly going to be an increasingly large problem moving forward since the content just keeps growing.

Besides the above, Google directed me to some of my own posts, less than useful in this circumstance, and to this one: Migrating from MT to Drupal
initial link to it (via fuzzyblog) broken... found searching root site for 'migrate' - hate the nodes!

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.

MT license flap

Thu, 26 Jun 2003 19:16:49 GMT

The advent of TypePad has prompted renewed scrutiny of the terms in Six Apart's license for Movable Type, specifically related to commercial uses of the product. A generally pro-MT take on the dispute can be found on MovableBlog, but it includes thorough links to the other sides of the argument.

Give up the funk

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 22:47:47 GMT

There is an interesting discussion in the comment thread for Dave Winer's Why I said Movable Type's RSS support is 'funky' post. The title for that post is accurate insofar as Dave explains why he accused Six Apart of not respecting the RSS spec, but maddeningly evasive when it comes ot explaining precisely what he meant by the original statement. In other threads on other blogs people have speculated about exactly what Dave meant, but Dave has not come out and detailed the problems he sees. The effect is to spread a meme that there is a problem with MT's RSS without in any way helping to resolve that problem, whatever it is. In his post, Dave says he wants "all tools to produce the same RSS, modulo differences that are rooted in real differences between the products." (Again, without saying how MT fails to meet this goal.) He states that "not enabling interop is a chicken-shit way to compete. It's a sure sign of a large installed base but an inadequate development team or codebase." This smells like a further slam against Six Apart again without any specifics about whether or how this is going on. When pressed, he can easily say he was just stating principles or philosophy, but under the heading of explaining his assessment of MT's RSS support, the implication of the quoted clause above is clear. Skipping past the details again, Dave suggests that Six Apart has "responded with some respect, at least now their support for 0.91 has been upgraded to 2.0," (a situation that preceded this tempest-in-a-teapot and implies that Dave's agitation resulted in an RSS upgrade for Movable Type, when the trail through other blog comments suggests instead that Dave was basing some of his criticism on the RSS 0.9x feeds produced by default by Movable Type some versions ago - again without clarifying what may have been wrong with that RSS). Then we get to the meat of the complaint: "...but they still, by default produce RDF where RSS is called for." What does Dave mean by this? Does he know that MT by default produces both an RDF (RSS 1.0)-style feed and an RSS (2.0)-style feed? Is his complaint that MT offers RDF as the default syndication feed link in the default MT template? If so, is this some sort of unethical bait-and-switch (is that why MT's default template labels that link "Syndicate this site (XML)" and not "RSS" and doesn't use the orange RSS icon Bryan Bell designed for Dave? We can have a good discussion of this if Dave will come out and identify this as the problem (or discount it as a side issue and not the real problem, which is?). Does it have to do with the header information in default MT templates that directs aggregators to the RSS 1.0 feed? Again, without knowing it's hard to have a grounded discussion about what is kosher and what isn't. It is strange to me that Dave writes, "At some point the discussion has to stop, and for me, that was the day I said publicly what I had been saying privately - MT's support for RSS is funky...." That's when the conversation stops? Upon attacking an upstart competitor in your blog? Come on. He goes on "...and guys and gals, I was being kind. I could have said it's wrong." What is wrong?! So far I don't see it, and I pay more attention to most of this stuff than most people do. If you have to be an ultratechnical insider or privy to private email debates to follow this point (and some pretty smart well informed people all asked Dave the same thing - please be more specific), then what is the point of airing the argument in public without support. It feels like spin. Dave says that MT's approach to RSS is "as wrong as it would be for UserLand to implement Trackback that doesn't work with Movable Type" (so does this mean that the RSS put out by MT blogs doesn't work with Radio? I have not observed this.) He goes on: "...or implement the Blogger API and change the order of the parameters." That's ironic, given Evan Williams' unanswered narration of how the MetaWeblog API discarded parameters from the Blogger API crucial for hosted-server blog providers like Pyra. He end with more kerfluffle, lecturing the other principals as if from a position of greater maturity, saying, "UserLand clearly moved first in RSS in blogging tools, and it's up to the people who are following, to do so with respect." (Please, Dave, detail the lack of respect, either the original disrespect or the gap now between some respect and whatever a full measure of respect would mean.) The funny thing is that I believe a majority of the blog world would agree that the blog software products of today should ionterpoperate smoothly (in most ways, especially when it comes to migration, they most assuredly do not), and that the real threat will come from a Microsoft or other large vendor embracing and extending the emerging weblog standards. The effect of this hullabaloo, however, has been to sow dissension and distrust within the ranks of the still small close-knit blog development community, and somehow (as when he pops into the comments and responds selectively to the questions posted there) Dave seems to be contributing more confusion, vagueness, evasiveness, and big-picture changes of the subject than a simple explanation of what's wrong with Movable Type's RSS and what would be required to fix it.

Note: I've posted several comments to that comment thread. This blog entry is an attempt to capture some of the issues being discussed there. Here, for the record, are my posts to the thread (slightly edited for context):

Dave, I came to this page eager to understand the nature of the funkiness and came out just as confused.

Is the problem you cite the use of RDF elements in RSS 2.0 feeds? And if that is what you're talkign about, is it being done in some way that violates the extensibility (as I understand it) of RSS 2.0.

You also mention the metaweblog API. You generously pointed to Evhead's discussion of it in his blog a while back but you never responded (that I could see) to his contention that the metaweblog API discarded some elements of the spec that Pyra needed for its hosted blogs, and thus "broke" their spec and showed the kind of disrespect and failure to interoperate that you decry here in this post.

Also , it seems like the issue re MT is now not some misformulated RSS 0.91 but the defaulting to RDF (aka the branching from RSS unfortunately known as "RSS 1.0") vs. RSS 2.0.

Would this remaining "lack of respect" problem be solved by labeling the feed an RDF feed, or would it still gall you as a vote for a competing format? For that matter, is it disrespect for RSS 0.91 or RSS 2.0 to prefer RSS 1.0 (RDF)?

Thanks!
xian 6/14/03 1:35:28 AM

Dave, you're responding with philosophy and flummery when no one is disagreeing with you (in this thread) about the beautifies of not locking out competition by "embracing and extending" standards and popular formats maliciously. That's not in question here.

People are simply asking you to be clear about what is funky about MT's RSS support. Several candidates have emerged in this thread:
MT default templates offer a syndication link to an RDF-style (aka RSS 1.0) feed.
MT default templates include a header item that offers the RDF-style feed for autodiscovery.
MT RSS 0.9x templates used to include something that violated the RSS 0.9x spec?
MT RSS 2.0 templates still include something that violates the RSS 2.0 spec?
Please simplify clarify whether the problem with MT's RSS support is one or more of those four issues or indeed something else entirely. If 3 or 4, please indicate the nature of the spec breakage. By being vague, you give the appearance of constantly shifting the justification for the original criticism of Six Apart.

Legitimate specific criticism could do some god by setting a benchmark to help others (including nonexperts) judge if Six Apart is competing fairly in this heavily self-conscious marketplace. Popping the stack when people press you for details does little to reinforce the impact of the ideals you stated.

By comparison, Ev gave specific details when asserting that the metaweblog api "broke" the blogger api.

xian 6/15/03 3:12:24 PM

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.

Open question for Dave Winer

Tue, 10 Jun 2003 20:35:30 GMT

Dave, please explain to those of us who are not down with every nuance of RSS politics exactly how Six Apart is abusing the RSS spec. Thanks! Reference:

When users flame.
Movable Type users, predictably flame me for advocating a time-tested way of evolving software, explained by Don Park. In so many ways we're hitting the reset button on old practices that worked. Embrace & Extend is respectful. Eventually SixApart will want the respect, when an upstart (or an old fart) implements something called Trackback that doesn't work with theirs. Users, of course, don't have to understand this. But that doesn't mean it isn't relevant. And one day it would be great if vendors asked their users not to flame their critics or competitors. One can hope.

This subject came up yesterday at the Jupiter conference, about transparent companies, and how that relates to weblogs. Now understand that I do not today work at UserLand, but of course I am influential there. Weblogs, it seems, are somewhat about companies speaking their truth. Some bloggers, esp Kottke, don't get this. He often jumps on me for saying what I think. Jason, listen up. I'm supposed to say what I think. That's what weblogs are about.
[Scripting News]

Me on RSS? I'm still confused why the body of a blog post is called the description of a link. Note, this won't appear until my server is up again, even though it will be timestamped when I post it.

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.

TypePad design comps

Thu, 22 May 2003 05:07:50 GMT

TypePad's newsletter has sent out its first message including answers to some frequently asked questions, such as, "Is TypePad just hosted Movable Type?" (it's not), and so on. The contents of the newsletter are also posted at the TypePad site along with some tantalizing screen shots that give a fairly good idea of the user-interface direction that Mena and Ben et al. are moving toward. No firm word on pricing yet except that there won't be a free option.

Ben Hammersley previews TypePad

Wed, 23 Apr 2003 19:59:17 GMT

Six Apart, the makers of Movable Type will be launching a new hosted service called TypePad that will go head-to-head with Userland and Google's popular Radio and Blogger hosting options. MT has long been ascendant among the technogeek crowd, but prohibitively difficult to install and host for non-websavvy newbies. It appears that this new application/service will enable many of the most popular current blogging wishlist items in a user-friendly format that will not require knowledge of HTML, let alone perl, CGI, hosting or web server management. From Ben Hammersley's article in the Guardian:

Technically, Typepad has embraced all the new things that have appeared or been requested in the blogging world in the past year. There is a built-in photo album creation tool, for instance, as well as a built-in Blogroll - a list of all your favourite sites, or lists of books and music you are reading and listening to.

The standout feature is the template maker. Users can design their blog without knowing, or seeing, any HTML code whatsoever and with a very great range of control.

Joi Ito's Neotony venture capital firm is backing this rollout and it appears that Anil Dash is on board as a marketing lead.

Embedding trackbacks alongside comments

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 02:14:15 GMT

Tom Coates posted a cogent explanation of how he has tweaked his templates so that incoming trackbacked post excerpts appear in the midst of comments on his archive pages.

CSS layout problem in my personal blog

Mon, 07 Apr 2003 18:20:41 GMT

I've been trying to sort out the design elements at X-POLLEN. Right now I'm trying to track down a CSS (style sheet) error, and it helps me visualize the various design blocks to give them distinct colors and ugly borders.

The problem is in the left two-thirds (links) area of the page. The banner (across the top) and what Movable Type calls the content div (the main area taking up the right two-thirds of the page below the banner) are working more or less as intended. I'll be tweaking the colors soon, but the various boxes appear where I expect them to with the propertiies I've given them.

It's over on the left where something is wrong. The whole links panel is supposed to show the same background color as the content area (as around the search box), but it's showing me a whie background right now. It's also supposed to have a dotted border, I think, and that's not visible either. Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Ping blogrolling.com directly

Sun, 16 Mar 2003 01:33:19 GMT

Jason DeFillippo is beta testing a ping service for blogrolling.com at this address: The address to add to the Remote Interfaces text box is http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ The beta is just for MT users at this time, but Jason invites anyone to try it:

If you are running any other blog tool that lets you specify sites to ping feel free to add it in and try it. It's exactly the same format as weblogs.com as far as the XML and XML-RPC calls. Drop me an email to support[at]blogrolling.com if you have any feedback.

The point is to reduce the lag in updating the "recently updated" formatting in blogrolling listings:

You should notice your site updating instantly in the blogrolls. Since I don't have to wait for Weblogs.com's changes.xml file to update and process it's much faster. That happens on a 5 minute timer anyway.

Is there an award for most-boring blog?

Sun, 09 Mar 2003 00:34:34 GMT

And, if so, can I nominate myself for it? Here's some boring stuff: my referrers. Like what's up with that? No, but seriously. It's funny when a referrer is on an intranet or password-protected site. I go try to check out the link - props or put-down? - and I can't get in! At least I know the subdomain/hostname of their internal k-log blog thing. Plus how about those searchers. Did I just know that using the word upskirt when talking about reverse cowgirl would function as googlebait? Plus I was checking out the search terms over at my Movable Type hub and recently there was fisting. I don't think I've ever mentioned that word, though. I'm a little scared to do the search myself, plus MT doesn't tell me which blog the user was hunting through. There's also a lot of gulfwarposter (and variants), and searches for words such as call zero and manzanita (True Dirt, no doubt), Townsend and Pompeii and 202-456-1111 and Microsoft Intel merger then Careing For Wooly Bears four times in a row in under a minute last month (elevator-clicking the search-form button?) then continuing back in time:

submissions
best episode ever
United states petroluem reserve
Petroleum reserve list
Clone of the attack
ian campbell
ian c
brautigan
how to make guns
how to render guns
pursued
bend
kikkoman
kikkomaso
archives
princeton
taxes
republican
gulf wars poster
art journals
posters
india
sullivan
gulf war
meme
watchword
Devil
Satan
how to eat pussy
masturbate
pussy
godetia
what
post modernism (3 times)
begonia (twice)
religion
roses
chandon
mack zeigen
ring off (twice)
bliss
submissions
foo
bar

I don't have cumulative search terms for the Radio parts of RFB, unfortunately. I could extract a lot of it from my logs if I was competent and not boring.

Playing with the MT-RSSfeed plugin

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 19:50:58 GMT

So far I've tried several different methods for aggregating posts from multiple blogs onto one page. One method is the multiauthor tool I use in Radio to pick up the RSS feeds from my other blogs and post them to the x-syndicate category here at RFB. Then if I want those posts to show up on the home page (as I often do, since I figure this is the one blog of mine that most people read), I have to edit the post manually (at which point I restore the title, which Radio's aggregator folds into the entry text). Another approach is to set up a TrackBack ping metablog (see Blogroots or The American Times for examples of what I mean), but there's something I still don't understand about this and I haven't managed to get it to work yet. These are really different methods, as the first one turns the picked up entry into a new post on the recipient blog, whereas the pinging method just adds a link and a description to a list, but the items in the list aren't blog entries, don't have permalinks, don't get archived, etc. Other tools I've played with but not gotten working yet include RSS Monkey, which as I understand it would enable me to list recent posts from a number of blogs (or any RSS source, in fact) but wouldn't necessarily fold them together into a single string. To get that same effect, I just installed the MTlist and MTRSSfeed plugins available at the new MT-plugins website, and set up a list of RSS feeds at my experimental metaxian blog. This does a good job of listing the headings and would enable me to include that kind of list in, say, a sidebar on any of my MT blogs. A better approach might be something like what Phil Gyford has done at haddock.org where blog posts from multiple participants are listed sequentially (but can also be sorted by blog). For all I know RSS Monkey can do this too, but this is really where I'd like to go with my metabloggery experiments. Fortunately, Phil is on the Well and has volunteered to help me set up a similar group blog front-end for Well bloggers. Once I understand that I'll try it for a few other groups I can think of, such as Salon bloggers.

Bit the bullet

Sun, 23 Feb 2003 04:17:38 GMT

Just now finally got around to upgrading the version of Movable Type driving this X-POLLEN blog. Since I installed version 2.5 there was a 2.51 upgrade and possibly a 2.52, and then the recent more substantial release of 2.6, quickly followed by bugfixes 2.61 and 2.62. So I managed to avoid a lot of interim upgrades.

Now I have to poke around a little, make the comments closeable (Textpattern has a nice feature that makes comments close after x amount of time, such as two weeks), maybe choose a Create Commons license for my various MT-driven sites, see what else is new.

I also finally installed pMachine today. It looks kind of cool but probably not worth switching anything over for. The pro version has some droolworthy features but then the teaser's for the upcoming pro version of MT sounds awfully good too.

JD's Media Musings moves

Thu, 20 Feb 2003 08:26:37 GMT

Journo-blogger J.D. Lasica has moved his JD's Media Musings blog from Manila to Movable Type, and from jd.manilasites.com to jdlasica.com. (In doing so, he notes, he is forfeiting his No. 2 ranking among Manila sites.) He doesn't mention why he left Manila.

Imminent death of Salon predicted —Film at 11

Sun, 16 Feb 2003 01:58:19 GMT

Yesterday I was tipped off by the Raven about this news story in which Salon warned that it might not survive past this month (February, 2003) and that it hasn't paid any rent on its office space since December. I dropped by the Well (which predates but is currently owned by Salon) to check in on the more-or-less permanent Salon deathwatch thrashes but found nothing beyond a reposting by jonl of the same S.F. Chronicle article linked above. The Raven nominated me to spearhead an evacuation plan for Salon blogs if one turns out to be necessary, so I've started thinking about the issues involved:

Change of address: Most likely the old URLs for any Salon blogs hosted at blogs.salon.com will stop working. A bankrupt or liquidated company is not going to maintain the domain name service for the blogs.salon.com subdomain, let alone the salon.com domain. Even if someone acquires the domain as part of an asset sale there's no reason to suppose they would continue to maintain the blogs subdomain. This means that everyone now using a blogs.salon.com/000xxxx/ URL should be prepared for possibility of losing it and having to move their blog to a new address. As I learned when I moved from blogs.salon.com/000111/ to radiofreeblogistan.com, there are a lot of little hassles involved and it's like pulling teeth trying to get people to update their links to your blog. It only gets harder as time goes on, though, and an abrupt change is the most difficult to manage, so if you have been considering moving to a new address, I'd think about speeding up that process. I'll be happy to help with the benefit of my experience in any way feasible for people considering moving their blogs.
Hosting space: If Salon goes under, the Salon RCS (Radio community server) will most likely vanish or become inaccessible. Given that people pay for a year of hosting, it's possible that Userland will honor these agreements and permit Salon bloggers to move their blogs over to weblogs.com. Maybe we could even convince them to set up a salon.weblogs.com subdomain to host old Salon bloggers? Others may prefer to relocate their blogs to a new host. When the time comes we can share experiences on how best to do that.
Backing up your content: This is probably as good a time as any to make sure you have backed up your blog's data and posted entries. You can make a copy of everything in your Radio Userland directory as a crude-but-complete backup at any time. You can also have Radio automatically write a copy of the public blog contents to a backup directory on your local system. I forget how you do this, but I think it's as easy as checking off a preference. I'll try to remember and post a reminder here when I do. If you've got your Radio software working, then upstreaming your blog to a new address isn't so hard, especially if it's going to another RCS.
Blog software: If there is no satisfactory hosting continuity solution offered or if you're planning to move to a custom domain, then you may also at that time want to think about moving to different blog software. I don't especially recommend this, but I mention it because changing software can be disruptive, but if you're already moving then it might not be incrementally more difficult to switch at that time. If you need a free hosting solution, for example, you might consider moving to Blogger. If enough people wanted to switch to Movable Type, I could set up another instance of it on my own server and perhaps set up a Salon alumni/refugee community as a subdomain of my mediajunkie.com domain for anyone who wanted to come over there. I'm frankly not sure my little Linux box could handle the traffic or strain, but it might be fun to try. If changing software, you have to do some tricks to migrate your old content to the new application. If needed, I can post some pointers here for the necessary tools and advice from people who've made the moves. It's always best when you can learn from someone else's mistakes!
The Salon Blog community: All of the above deal with technicalities and logisticts, but the real question Raven asked has to do with how to keep the Salon bloggers together as a community. Right now, many of us read each other's blogs, link to each other, appear in Virtual Occoquan, and so on. It would be a shame to lose out on that along with losing our favorite online magazine. One way or another, I'm sure we can maintain the links, although we might become a sort of alumni organization, as I doubt any new people will join a group centered around an obsolete magazine. There are already the Salon bloggers webring and Yahoo group setup by Kriselda of Different Strings, so that's a good start. We could come up with a logo or badge and share it. One interesting question will be what Scott Rosenberg would plan to do in the aftermath of a Salon shutdown. He may wish to take a hiatus from blogging or he may be in the same boat with the rest of us. I think we should all talk about what steps we can take to maintain a feeling of community, to the extent that we've managed to do so thus far.

Note: Aaron of Tenorman (formerly 10's Links) tells me that he has completed his move to Tenorman.net, so he may have some advice on how to make the move to a new host and new software. I may be overlooking some crucial issues. If so, please add your suggestions. I realize also that this may be premature. We've all heard the doomsayers before. But an ounce of prevention and all that, right?

Willis relaunches 'American Times'

Mon, 03 Feb 2003 22:51:11 GMT

Oliver Willis has relaunched The American Times as a Trackback-ping metablog:

Once again, I've re-re-relaunched The American Times, this time as an "automated" newspaper—built by bloggers, aka "the web". To participate, all you have to do is send a TrackBack ping to http://oliverwillis.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/69. Voila! Instant newspaper.

No details on recommended submission guidelines.

Playing catchup

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 03:43:50 GMT

I think I stole at least half of these links from Anil:

freegorifero: Always-on weblogs
Plasticbag: How has Blogger changed your life?
Movable Type: Features planned for version 2.6
Plasticbag: Countering Joe Clarke's screed
Fishbowl: I no longer want to know where my files are stored
Kottke: RSS readers misusing the refer[r]er field?

Wishlist: autoblogged history breadcrumbs

Sun, 26 Jan 2003 02:17:11 GMT

How hard would it be to automatically post every URL I hit in one browser to a specific category? I could go back and expand on anything that deserved comment and promote it to the mainpage, but I'd also have a running log of positively everywhere I'd been. One for the lazyweb? Something with scripting and the MetaWeblog API?

Test of Archipelago

Tue, 21 Jan 2003 19:38:55 GMT

This XML-RPC stuff is pretty cool. It looks like I could use Archipelago for Radio, MovableType, and Blogger blogs (though I'm planning to migrate the Blogger blogs to either Radio or MT or pMachine or whatever the moment I overcome inertia). This would render kung-log obsolete for me, I suppose. Recently I made a chart of the blogging and RSS tools I'm using (but excluding outside web development, media editing, and writing tools. It's insanely complicated, but that's mainly because no one system does everything I need, and I don't have the chops (yet) to roll my own from scratch. I will either scan my sketch or turn it into a powerpoint slide or something. I call it the Radio Free Blogistan network and it somewhat resembles an Ourobouros snake eating its own tail. UPDATE: It looks like I may need to use the MetaWeblog API interface if I want to get titles onto my entries through Archipelago. Also, I haven't got it talking to Movable Type yet, something kung-log does with ease, of course.

Apologies for the reruns

Thu, 16 Jan 2003 18:19:18 GMT

For readers of my X-POLLEN blog via (an RSS) news feed, which includes LiveJournal friends reading the xpollen user Mark Pasc setup for me, I apologize for the way the feed just resent something like seventeen recent posts.

I just made a minor administrivial change to this blog's archiving nomenclature. Posts are now stored in calendar directories (YYYY/mm/dd, of course, so they sort intuitively) with the filename for the single-post archive file constructed from the entry title, which makes the raw URL a tad more comprehensible. This replaces a serial system in which a typical post would be called /000171.html or something like that.

The new format rides on the URL, saying "this is a post about whatever_the_filename_says posted on mm the ddth, in the year of our Lord 20YY). The old one said "this was xian's 171 post (give or take 40 or so comments and who knows how many deleted drafts)."

But this is inside baseball.

And completely irrelevant to LiveJournal users, who ordinarily don't have to deal with URLs like that and see my blog as one of their friends in their own personal design.

What I'm more concerned about is that I hope MT did not take it upon itself to delete the old-form addresses for the first 56 posts or so, as that would of course break any external links pointing into the site. The storage hit is minor to accommodate duplicates of those original posts, though there's a chance of splitting subsequent followup comments before old and new locations, so may I should think about using symbolic links or mod_rewrite to redirect incoming links set to the old, serial URLs.

What is annoying is that I specifically declined to "rebuild" the static site Movable Type's becaused I knew I had to work out a backup or migration plan for the address changes and had not done so yet (in my lurching, hurry-up-and-wait progress). Still, it seems that I goofed or MT took it upon itself to regenerate the pages, at least for the RSS news feed, so that's why I'm worried.

In the worst case, if MT munged the old URLs outright, then I may have a tedious cleanup job ahead of me. If both versions coexist, then I can work out a better solution in due time.

At this point even my eyes begin to glaze over.

Recommended Thursday morning pickup: Patti Smith doing Land of 1000 Dances (sort of).

A passing police siren summons up a strange being dragged away from my computer door knocked in dystopian fantasy image momentarily, before it is dispelled by a feeling of "surely not here."

"Divine to define, she's moving to divine. So say so. So say so."
The Great Curve, Talking Heads

Blogware malfunctions?

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 16:58:42 GMT

For some reason a few automated processes I rely on for my blogging are failing me today. First, when I post to a Movable Type blog and include a link to another Movable Type blog, I expect MT to "autodiscover" the ping URL for the linked post and automatically send a Trackback ping. It's worked that way before and I'm pretty sure I haven't changed my preferences. But just now I posted to A Meme List with a link to the birdhouse and no Trackback ping was sent. Sure, I went to Scot's blog, clicked the TB link for the post I was commenting on, copied the TB URL, went back to MT, edited the last post, manually entered (OK, pasted) the Trackback URL, and saved the edited post, but isn't the point of autodiscovery that I shouldn't have to do all that? Then, over here in Radio land, I rely on my multiauthor tool to pick up posts from my other blogs that show up in my news aggregator and automatically post them to my x-syndicate category, where I can promote them to the home page and otherwise categorize them at my leisure if I so choose. But this morning I saw my last night's post to X-POLLEN show up just fine in my aggregator but for whatever reason it has not been autoposted to my RFB syndication category. I have no idea why this would suddenly fail to work, but it means more tedious manual transcription for me, and it may mean the same thing when the meme post shows up on the next hourly check. It's all very odd.

Movable Type / LDAP integration

Tue, 24 Dec 2002 22:32:07 GMT

Leslie Orchard (0xDECAFBAD) says he's got an early version of a method for integrating MT with LDAP. Cooooooool:

This week, at work, I cobbled together a hack for MovableType that hooks it up with an LDAP server for author accounts: MovableTypeLDAPAuthors. This is an early, early, early release of the thing, and is likely to do very nasty things for all that I know.

If I don't post again for a few days, Mele Kilikimaka everyone!