nicholasjon.com :: a weblog >> posts tagged: blogging

Photosynth demo

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:43:01 GMT

Aggregating collective photography. Amazing.

Link: http://blog.photoshelter.com/2008/05/let-the-photosynth-demo-blow-your-mind.html

The vanishing personal site

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:47:24 GMT

Link: http://www.zeldman.com/2008/04/27/content-outsourcing-and-the-disappearing-personal-site/

Telling stories online

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:00:04 GMT

An interesting study of the crossroads of disparate web services.

Link: http://designnotes.info/?p=1209

Amy's Back

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:08:14 GMT

Blogging that is. She’s no longer “somewhat amiable” though—instead you’ll find her at amyybeth.com.

Comment spam

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 20:00:40 GMT

Being on the receiving end of comment spam sucks. I use two techniques to try to slow it down, but some still manages to get through.

The first of my techniques is wrapping the actual comment posting form in an ajax request. This weeds out bots that can’t handle javascript or XMLHttpRequests. The second is a double-encoded hidden form field in the actual comment posting form. Both the name and the value of that form change every few minutes, rendering old name-value pairs useless and basically preventing comment spam posting without actually hitting the site immediately beforehand.

Like I said, some manages to get through anyway. But I’m trying to do what I can without resorting to blacklists or capchas — which I think are tantamount to giving up, though I admit they may be in my near-future.

The basics

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:51:02 GMT

The world does not need another blogging engine, and yet I continue to write the stuff in my free time. I really don’t do it because have any notion of writing the “next great bit of blog software.” In a way, I do it for practice.

When I hear about some new-fangled technique for say rounding corners, or perhaps I discover a nifty little trick for ajaxifying permalinks, I like to have a safe place to test it out and play with it a bit. Rather than forcing those for whom I work to endure my sifting and winnowing process, I inflict it upon myself and let my own personal weblog suffer the consequences.

Since I started blogging in 1999, I’ve averaged writing about one new complete blogging engine per year. This post is the first post written in the new Motivated Hamsters. It builds upon the last verson of MH, but it’s also a bit of a throwback. At the core of it, the new MH is about letting me post how I want to, and where I want to. It integrates with Flickr and del.icio.us so I can tag and post my pictures and links once, and then bring them over here for display on my blog when I want to. Likewise, though no APIs were harmed during the process, copying and pasting a single URL will let me post a video from YouTube to my site. It makes posting easy, which (theory goes) will make it easier to post more often.

And if I don’t post more often, I assure you it’s because I just started writing another blog engine.

Note: There was supposed to be a neat little feature to MH that worked with Ferret to provide all sorts of “related posts” functionality. That’s still coming, but I’m having trouble getting it to work in production on Dreamhost. Soon…

How to blog from Greenland

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:31:26 GMT

Ben Saunders’s expedition to Greenland

Link: http://www.bensaunders.com/archives/2006/05/22/arctic-geeks/

The Podcasting Legal Guide

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:31:10 GMT

So sad the world needs one of these

Link: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Welcome_To_The_Podcasting_Legal_Guide

Recasting the concept of podcasting

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:31:28 GMT

Apparently 80% of all downloaded podcasts never make it to a portable media player — makes sense to me, I listen to them while I’m working at my desk and never saw much reason to port them over to my iPod

Link: http://news.designtechnica.com/talkback109.html

A tutorial from Measure Map on getting "unsupported" blog platforms to work with their stats

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:31:06 GMT

Good to know if you’re newly “independant”

Link: http://forums.measuremap.com/index.php?showtopic=8

Measure Map bought by Google

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:31:16 GMT

I’m forced to wonder who’s next?

Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/here-comes-measure-map.html

Digg vs. Slashdot

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:31:13 GMT

I’ve been playing around with Digg lately and love it — here’s Kottke’s take on the diferences between being “dugg” and being “slashdotted”

Link: http://www.kottke.org/06/01/digg-vs-slashdot

Jason asks, "have we jumped the shark?"

nicholasjon@nicholasjon.com (Nick) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 20:31:09 GMT

As a fan of 37signals from day one I hate to see them raked over the coals like this — but I admit something about the atmosphere on SVN has changed recently

Link: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/have_we_jumped_the_shark.php?91#comments