Edd Dumbill's Weblog: 'weblogs' articles

Colophonically and conversationally yours

Edd Dumbill — 2008-06-10T13:47:25Z

I've been trying out some new social discussion tools recently, trying to keep up to date and figure out which ones are actually helpful.

FriendFeed

I initially signed up to FriendFeed too early, but took a second look recently. It's an aggregator for all the random places we create content — blogs, Flickr, Twitter and so on.

On top of that it lets you add comments and "favorite" content items. So far so similar. But the really neat feature is in showing you content from friends-of-friends, if one of your friends has commented it or made it a favorite.

The result is a high signal/noise ratio in the content, and an aggregation of activity into a coherent conversation, something that's generally frustrating on blogs or Twitter alone.

Seesmic

Following the theme of conversation, Seesmic is a site for video conversations. I never really got into podcasting, as my production standards are higher than I think I could actually manage. Plus, who wants to hear me waffle on?

Seesmic is something different. There's no expectation of high production values, and most people are just talking through their laptop's built in camera and microphone. The real difference though is the humanity of the conversations. When you can see somebody's face and expressions it returns the soul to online debate.

I'm often turned off by the callous nastiness of comments and blog wars, so I'm interested to see if Seesmic can create a different kind of conversation. Seesmic's in alpha-testing right now, and lacks a few useful features such as tagging, but I'm really excited about using it.

For an example of an engaging, human and worthwhile debate, see this Seesmic post from Suw Charman (the topic of conversation is how to grow Seesmic while keeping it useful.)

Disqus

Finally, I figured it was about time I added comments to this blog. There are several long-standing popular items that would be usefully augmented by third-party contributions, and I'd like to give people the right to reply inline if they so wished.

Hence there's now a Disqus link at the bottom of every article, and also included in the RSS and Atom feeds. I enabled the video feature, so you could leave me a video comment via Seesmic too. It's easy!

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A clean sweep

Edd Dumbill — 2006-01-15T13:33:57Z

Firstly, if you haven't the faintest interest in the software I use to write this weblog, please feel free to go and do something more interesting right now.

Now I'm in the company of dedicated readers of colophons, I will proceed.

Redesign and reimplementation

This weblog, which has now been running for over two and a half years, originally ran on some custom software I'd hacked up in Zope: at that time my web development platform of choice.

Today, I've relaunched with another custom content management engine, this time written using Rails. It's been a lot of fun to write, and a good excuse to sharpen my Rails skills further.

The design has also been fun. It's a little basic right now, but I hope easy to read. Of course, the font is Lucida Grande, which ensures that I am fully Web 2.0 compliant.

The main new feature is that the tags I give articles are now made public. I used to tag posts for my RSS feed, but not publish them on the site. Now they are public--what few tags I currently have--and it's possible to find RSS and Atom feeds just for certain subsections of my writing.

I worry sometimes about spamming the various Planet aggregator sites my blog features in, so this gives me a way to direct content specifically at them. That said, at least for Planet XML I like hearing about everything the community members have to say, not just their on-topic posts.

New URLs

My blog now has a new location, http://times.usefulinc.com/, and new places for RSS and Atom feeds:

Tools used

Emacs
Ruby on Rails
Firefox
GIMP
Bazaar
TinyMCE

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Announcing Daily Chump 2.0

Edd Dumbill — 2005-09-17T16:49:28Z

At long last I've got round to releasing version 2.0 of the Daily Chump bot. This is a program that sits on an IRC channel, listens out for URLs mentioned, and lets the users of the channel create a weblog. A long time ago, I wrote an article explaining how it works: Running a weblog from IRC.

One of the most long-standing weblogs created using the software is that of the Semantic Web Interest Group.

Highlights of the new version include:

Switch to using Twisted for the network framework
Built-in web server to serve the weblog (requires Quixote)
Can ping a URL to notify changes (this can be used, for instance, to effect real-time indexing of the weblog)
Web page chat form to make the bot deliver notifications to channel users
Not a new feature, but mentioned for "Web 2.0" compliance: ability to tag URLs in the style of del.icio.us.

Download it here: chump-2.0.tar.gz.

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