John LeMasney asked a good question during my RSS and Atom presentation last night to the Princeton Linux Users Group that I didn’t know how to answer. Do Podcast clients, especially iTunes, support Atom Podcasts yet? I know Atom has the necessary elements but do the clients recognize them?
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I’m investigating external Weblog editors. I’m surprised there are no simple plugins for BBEdit or jEdit to handle this, and there doesn’t appear to any real open source software.
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Feed readers work better for full text feeds like enplaned or The Cafes that contain the real content.
Essentially headline feeds like the Cafe au Lait Recommended Reading or Memorandom work better in a browser. In fact, a feed like Memeorandum’s that forces you to visit their site first just to get the real link is almost completely pointless. The Cafe au Lait/Cafe con Leche recommended reading feeds are much nicer (though of course the real difference is in the content).
The Cafe au Lait/Cafe con Leche story feeds are sort of in the middle, but they probably run more to the headline end of the spectrum because the individual stories, even when syndicated as full text, are usually pretty small.
Like most blogs that enable comments, this one has attracted its share of spam. Interestingly I’ve noticed that most of these comment spams start off with something really complimentary. Some examples:
I’m asking myself: How can it be that I’ve never ran through your site before? It’s a great one!
Very nice. You’re site is very helpful.
I guess they hope I’ll be so excited by the ego-boo I’ll promptly approve it before reading on, where I find such Dadaist gems as “Table becomes Small Slot in final when Plane is Game it will Fetch Boy” and “when Stake is Chair it will Hope Cosmos”.
Cafe au Lait dates back to 1995. I know I’m not the first blogger. Ric Ford’s Macintouch precedes me, and probably others do as well. However, I was there quite early on, I think before the word “blog” was coined. Truth is I’ve never even really thought of Cafe au Lait, Cafe con Leche, and The Cafes as blogs, even after I added RSS feeds. Most obviously they’re organized by date rather than by post. And despite occasional off-topic posts, I mostly keep them focused on Java and XML respectively.
However, Mokka mit Schlag is very much a blog. It looks like a blog. It feels like a blog. It reads like a blog. Most importantly for me, it writes like a blog instead of a static set of web pages. Most importantly for you, the reader, it is no longer limited to one topic. Here I feel free to expound on any subject that wanders into my field of vision. I have carefully categorized posts so my birder friends can read about birds and my programmer friends can read about programming and my family can read my travel stories, without having to pay attention to the parts that don’t interest them; but I still get to write about anything I like; and that’s a good thing.
WordPress is surprisingly addictive. I’ve always been an active writer: e-mail, Usenet, the Cafes, 12+ books, so I’m probably more susceptible than most. I’m always astonished at people who say how much work it is to update their site every day. My problem is ususally how to write less, not more. Still maybe the people who said you shouldn’t be writing XML by hand were right.
On the other hand, I just discovered that WordPress’s editor doesn’t recognize CDATA sections. Very annoying. I’m going to have to manually escape all my markup examples. Bleah. I should probably file an RFE. Let me dig out the password they e-mailed me. There. Done.
Interesting. That’s only bug #1965. I would have expected a lot more. Either WordPress is even cleaner code than I thought, or they’re not really logging everything into the bug tracking system. I suspect the latter. They seem to prefer IRC and Wikis to a more formal issue tracker.
