The tools we currently have available are very good for publishing. It’s easy to set up a blog for free, host your photos on flickr or picasa, or somewhere, upload your videos on youtube, embed all that in the blog and you are ready to go.

But, this approach has so many things that can (and probably will!) go wrong: what if your account is shut down, for some strange complaint, or the service goes out of business, or stops supporting a feature you use, or starts charging, or, or…

To be honest, the best solution I’ve found so far, is (surprise!) Apple’s iWeb. It creates static HTML pages, puts all extra media files in separate folders, and it’s easy to upload to an ftp server. The only thing that can go wrong is if your hosting provider fails, but then all you have to do is upload the content to an other one. One can argue that I can’t be sure iWeb will be there in 20 years. That’s right, but that’s not a problem: if Apple stops supporting it, or even if I stop using an Apple computer (iWeb runs only on OS X), the content will still be there, I’ll just have to look again for a new solution. But the content published so far, will still be accessible and portable.

So… any other, more elegant solutions?

The reason is simple. Every time you publish a new article, ALL “pages” change content. The last article of page 1 goes to page 2. The last article of page 2 goes to page 3, etc. For example, as soon as I publish this blog post, the contents of http://vrypan.net/log/page/2/ will change -and the same will happen to pages 3, 4, 5,.., 44.

As a result:
- indexing any URL that indicated pagination is useless for search engines.
- if you are using some kind of caching engine, you have to re-create all “pages”, whenever a new post is published!

The funny thing? No matter what number I assign to the page containing the very first 10 posts of the blog, I wrote back in 2004, their has been the same for 6 years now, and will continue to be the same for as long as my blog exists (unless I decide to delete one of the first 10 posts). So, why not make this page, page #1?

The way I see it, the very first post of your blog should be on page #1. The last ones on, let’s say, page #100. As you add posts, the pages increment. But the older pages don’t change.

This would cause only one inconsistency: if you have 23 posts, with 10 posts per page, on the home page you will present posts 14-23. Page #1 has 1-10, page #2 11-20, #3 21-23. This makes it impractical to have the usual “older entries” link at the homepage. This link (obviously, no home page has a “newer entries” link should be replaced by an “archive” link or something like that.

In short: a blog is read in reverse chronological order, but its archive should be numbered like a book, in chronological order.. Yes, if you want to know the end, you go to the last page, we’ve been doing this for centuries. This would solve some important problems, and wouldn’t create any new ones, IFAIK.

Google Custom Search Blog explains to add a CSE box in blogger.com.

I’m working on the WP plugin.

That was an easy one, not something spectacular, but definitely useful. Still…
- waiting for FeedBurner and Google Analytics integration
- waiting for FeedBurner and AdSense integration

BTW, shouldn’t WordPress.com provide all users with the FeedSmith plug-in?

This is important for everyone, but in some cases it may be crucial -politicians for example. It makes the platform a safe place to be active (fake identities is a major non-starter for well known people that rely on their fame).

Using OpenID may be a bit geeky now, but services like WordPress.com are starting to provide users with OpenID accounts for free -I know AOL is doing the same thing, Microsoft’s InfoCards will make OpenID even more friendlier for Windows users (it is based on OpenID as far as I know).

As the number of comments N to a (blog) post increases, the possibility that the subset of comments C (where C are all comments that refer to the fact that the number N increases) is not null tends to be 1.
It should be noted that the density of the probability function is localy higher before and after “phycological limits” such as 50, 100, 200 comments, etc.

Amazing.. So true!

Please refer to this law as “The Lazopolis Law for Comments” (that’s how he calls it, I guess it is fair to respect it.)

An other interesting point is that tagging is used more and more. If you ask me, we have to thank the new tools that make tagging so much easier, like WordPress using “categories” as tags in feeds. (And I guess social bookmarking services like del.icio.us make Technorati’s life much easier).

Unfortunately, like the real world, sometimes the blogosphere is about who you know as much as what you know.

Read the full article.

This is a point that comes up quite often lately. I’m not impressed: power is never evenly distributed. But things are not that bad. Expect the next social-something system to generate a new star system and new stars, it can’t be far…

I was just wondering, could someone who is already using the service tell me how much freedom you get? I mean, can I add my plugins, what version of PHP they are using, etc.

Please, if you have more info, leave a comment!

Paul Kedrosky says that Structured Blogging Will Flop, the reason is simple, people are too lazy to put this (little) extra effort needed to produce “structured blogging” content if they have nothing to gain.

is not going to work in the real world of lazy users who see little in it for them

But… wait! Actually, users may have something to make out of it. Niall Kennedy’s article, Paying bloggers for generating useful content, may just be the answer:

As more and more companies create business models around “consumer generated media” individual publishers are beginning to wonder when they might see a slice of the revenue. I believe there are opportunities for bloggers to be paid for their content without compromising editorial integrity and also rewarding the tool builders.

Nice.

You could say that this is not something new, sites like gizmodo exist for a while. But the editors of such sites rarely BUY the things they review. This is why they may review things that cost $20.000 -do not expect to see anything like this at Things I Bought!

Opening an account at Commission Junction, Amazon and other on-line shops with affiliate programs is easy (plus you get the commision when you buy things!), then open an account at Blogger, and your private mall is up and running!

I expect to see more bloggers opening “personal malls”.

Remember you read it here first!

Worth reading!

This was a good oportunity to experiment with an idea I had for some time. I used the Technorati API to check how many blogs link to each post, in order to “illustrate” the “virtual conversations” between blogs.

I then came up with an unexpected problem. Some blogs use Feedburner (an excelent service btw) to export their feed. This is a good idea, since Feedburner provides nice features and reduces the traffic caused by feed readers and aggregators. One of the coolest features of feedburner is tracking of clicks: Feedburner will not expose the original post URL but a custom one that redirects to the original. When a user clicks on it Feedburner will track the click and redirect to the original URL. So, using the technorati API on “fake” Feedburner URLs is useless as they are not “real” blog URLs.

I think that there should be some other way to do this. A possible solution:
1) Feedburner includes the original URL’s MD5. (i.e. instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vrypannetweblog?m=34 it will show http://feeds.feedburner.com/Vrypannetweblog?m=34&md5=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
2) Technorati will allow the use of MD5 instead of URL.

Is this possible? Do you think of some other to get arround this problem? (Sidenote: MD5(URL) can also be used by del.icio.us)

Here is the proccess in short:

WARNING!!! This may delete your DATA!!! Make sure you backup EVERYTHING before starting the procedure!!!

1. setup a fresh wordpress installation.
2. make sure term_data term_hierarchy node term_node comments (drupal tables) are in the same DB you use from WP.
3. Run the following SQL statements:
delete from weblog_wp_categories ;
delete from weblog_wp_posts;
delete from weblog_wp_post2cat ;
delete from weblog_wp_comments ;

INSERT INTO weblog_wp_comments (
comment_post_ID, comment_date, comment_content, comment_parent
)
SELECT nid, FROM_UNIXTIME(timestamp), concat('',subject, '<br />', comment), thread FROM comments ;

You should now have all your posts and comments and categories in WP. Go to the admin interface and make sure everything is in place…

Notes: This is not the perfect way to migrate. Comments are not nested in the right way. A lot of things may not work. On the other hand if, like me, made a really simple use of Drupal, this should move most of your data to WP…

However, this looks like the right time (with podcasting popularity rising and the demand for “podsafe” music rising too). And Stelios has proven to be capable where others fail…

Keep an eye on easymusic.com…

OK, is it just me or is there a pattern?