The other shoe drops for Manila enclosure support

UserLand () Product News: Frontier and Manila: New Enclosure macros and updates to Manila RPC and MetaWeblogAPI. This is the other shoe whose dropping I anticipated last week when UserLand rolled out a new enclosure support feature. By extending the support for the new feature into the API and into user interface macros, Manila () now gives users an unprecedented level of flexibility for managing the creation and display of content (such as podcasts ()) that contain enclosures. Bravo.

A second, very big, bravo, is due for the long-anticipated full support of the MetaWeblogAPI () for creating new binary objects such as pictures or audio files, using the standard MetaWeblogAPI.newMediaObject. By adding support for this cross-vendor standard way to upload non-text content, Manila bloggers can take advantage of tools like MarsEdit () to manage image uploads. (Note that this announcement is the one that Brent Simmons calls out on the Ranchero blog.)

Now, if my kind host will update our Manila installation so that I can work with these new bits, I’ll be a very happy camper.

It ain’t the absolute height of the spike…

Boing Boing: Infographic of blogosphere traffic spikes. Xeni points out a curious feature of the Technorati infographic, where a point labeled “Kryptonite lock controversy” is as high as “Indian Ocean tsunami.” I say: it’s not the absolute size of the spike, it’s how it relates to its surroundings. (Uh, bow chicka chicka bow bow.)

Based on my experience interpreting online traffic, the metric of merit when comparing two events isn’t absolute amount of traffic (posts, page views, unique users) but the delta they cause from the normal volume of activity. Look at the time period around “Kryptonite lock controversy”—the spike, while high, is part of a consistently high series of spikes that appears to run from July through shortly after the election. In other words, not dramatic, considering the overall blogosphere activity at that time.

The tsunami, on the other hand, reached the same peak of activity in the middle of a seasonal down period in blog posts—in fact, as I recall, a seasonal down period for Internet activity as a whole. In other words, it’s a hell of a lot more impressive that a bunch of bloggers got off their haunches after the holidays to post about the tsunami—when they weren’t inclined to blog—than that they posted in a period of otherwise high post activity.

(This is the second in a series of occasional posts where I offer my meager expertise to interpret a BoingBoing post about online traffic trends. Maybe I should make this a series. Maybe even a sidebar.)

History is bunk, of course

Whiskey Bar: Scenes From the Cultural Revolution. A simple compare-and-contrast between rhetoric and incidents from the current conservative backlash on college campuses and Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” But we don’t need to worry about the implications of the comparison, right? Because America is different…

The Left has taken over academe. We want it back.

Mike Rosen, Rocky Mountain News columnist
CU is Worth Fighting For
March 4, 2005

In this great Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.

Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China
Resolutions of the Eleventh Plenum
August 1966

For those on the right, true freedom requires more diversity—which, to them, means more conservatives in faculty ranks. “If the system were fair,” says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.”

Time
Fighting Words 101
March 7, 2005

“We will strike down the reactionary, bourgeois academic savants! … We will vigorously establish proletarian intellectual authorities, our own academic savants.”

Lin Piao, Deputy Chairman
Communist Party of China
Speech to Red Guards
August 18, 1966

Hat tip to Fury for the link.

New mix: “cool covers”

New mix, “cool covers,” published at the Art of the Mix—I didn’t bother publishing it at iTunes because I had a less than 50% “found rate.”

This is the first mix on which I’ve experimented with using spoken word fragments as linking tracks. I used a software package called Amadeus II to do the editing. Good software; reminds me of SoundEdit Pro, the first editing package I ever used back in 1989 or so.

(Republished from a post that was made yesterday that disappeared.)

A blogger returns

My former co-worker Dave Kramer, who briefly blogged before leaving his job at Microsoft about six months before I did, has a new site called Gamestay that provides gaming info for the “casual and grown-up gamers who don’t have time to keep up with every last screenshot and tradeshow video.” The site and his personal blog are both intelligently written, and share some new-to-me tidbits about goodies like the upcoming Lego Star Wars game.

Open source testing: CSS test suite for IE 7

Alex Barnett blog: IE7 and CSS: the Acid2 test – Microsoft has now been challenged. This is a smart way to put the pressure on Microsoft to fix CSS support in their (aging, broken) browser: get a community effort going early in the development process to put together a comprehensive CSS test suite. This would be a good thing for all browsers, btw, including Safari, to work against. Let’s hope that Microsoft jumps on it.

Maybe I don’t want the callback

Boston Globe — Living / Arts News: Levine’s pace proves hard on BSO. I actually auditioned for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus (which despite its name is a year-round chorus in residence for the BSO) on Monday. The chorus is involved in far fewer concerts than the orchestra, and the chorus’s director spreads out the assignments, picking subsets of the group for each chorus, so presumably the TFC doesn’t have a lot of instances of blown pipes as a result of Levine’s vigor. I guess we’ll see.

(For recent readers: I’ve sung tenor in various choruses—symphonic, early music, church choirs, glee clubs, a cappella groups—ever since high school. My current singing hiatus, which has lasted the eight months since I left Seattle and the University Presbyterian Church choir, is the longest time I’ve spent outside of a singing group for fifteen years. Which is probably why I’m so out of sorts all the time.)

We could start seriously pushing alternative energy…

…or, as the US Senate decided yesterday in its infinite wisdom, we could just keep looking for those remaining pockets of fossil fuels like a crack addict searching for that last rock that he knows he dropped somewhere.

When one of the last pristine places on earth gets covered in pipes; when the first spill happens; when the caribou go extinct; and when the price of fuel keeps going up regardless, even after we get the first oil from that formerly pristine refuge ten years from now, I want every one of those 51 senators to wake up, look in the mirror, and say, “This is personally on my head.”

Of course, the other question has to be: where was the Democratic leadership? Given the inevitability of the Bush ideology juggernaut rolling over everything, did no one at least try to attach a rider to fund development of alternative energy resources?

UVA gets RSS

Mr. Jefferson’s University is entering the RSS age. I found a blurb on the University of Virginia web site about UVA To Go, a suite of services for news management that includes a streamlined mobile device web site at http://www.uvatogo.net/ (as well as a Pocket PC Screen Theme) and an RSS feed of news releases. The service is still in beta, so no orange and white icons can be found on the main page, but they’re looking for feedback, so get out there and let them know how you feel about the school striding boldly into the 21st century.

White male blogging

Looks like Dave—excuse me, White Male Dave Winer—is springing off a Jeff Jarvis comment to jumpstart the latest blogging meme, and outing bloggers (including myself) as White Males. I liked (White Former Professional Journalist Male) Jeff’s (unpaid) ripost to (White Professional Journalist Male) Steven Levy’s (paid) column (the point of getting to a blogosphere is so that voices, not skin colors, matter), but it is interesting—as I preface every link with a reference to the link-recipient’s sex and skin color, suddenly I’m a lot more self-conscious about what I’m doing.

Incidentally, if you annotate every single link this way, two things become apparent: there are a lot more dimensions that matter than sex and color, and divisions like pro and amateur are difficult to make.

Blogrolling over

BuzzMachine: Turn it off.. Jeff Jarvis gripes about having problems loading sites that include blogrolling lists powered by BlogRolling.com. I’ve noticed the list is slow, too.

Two things: One, you should always consider the performance of an external resource before you include it in your blog template—even if it’s just an image. But for those who like the services that Blogrolling.com provides, including the useful “updated recently” information, consider reducing the potential damage from a service outage. On this blog, for example, I address potential problems with the service by (a) only listing my blogroll on my front page and not on pages that are linked to by my RSS feed; (b) arranging the HTML of my template so that my content loads first and the column containing my blogroll loads next. This is a simple CSS layout trick (well, not so simple—read my post about getting it to work) that not only helps mitigate problems with external services—my content is fully loaded and readable while the page works to load the blogrolls from Blogrolling—but also helps make your page more navigable in screen readers and downlevel browsers.

Second, this is the flip side of the argument I had with Lisa Williams at the last Berkman Thursday Night Meeting I went to. The great thing about the blogosphere is that blogging platforms have a fairly low “lowest common denominator” of features—headline + body + comments + calendar archives + permalinks (+RSS). This means that there is lots of room for innovation by a Blogrolling.com, Technorati, Flickr, or Feedster type service to add additional “missing” features. But because there is no platform that does it all, you have to worry about dependencies on outside services for these functions.

The second point is why I haven’t hopped aboard Flickr yet—besides the incredibly slow speed of uploading multiple images. My photos are too important a part of my site for me to outsource them, and so far I haven’t seen enough benefit from the social aspects of the service to outweigh the shortcomings of being dependent on Yet Another Blog Support Service.

Podcasting might come to this blog…

UserLand Product News: Enclosure Support for News Item Sites in Manila. For non-techies, that means it will now be easier for folks with Manila sites (like mine, or the ones on the Harvard bloggs server) to produce podcasts. Thanks, UserLand!

(There is one point left unclear by the article: has the API been updated to allow for enclosure support as well? If so, then tool vendors like Ranchero will need to update their tools to facilitate this new feature.)

Potboiler

To paraphrase something that Fury wrote this weekend: if there is anything more exciting than boiled dinner, it’s making boiled dinner; and if there is anything more exciting than making boiled dinner, it’s blogging about making boiled dinner. “Lucky you!”

Ah, but the line between New England boiled dinner and a celebratory corned beef and cabbage is very fine—mostly it depends on the presence or absence of horseradish and turnips, apparently. And on the weekend before St. Patrick’s Day, we decided to cheerily conflate the two. So, having packed Lisa and her mom off to the New England Flower Show, I started getting things ready.

I had a few other things I wanted to cook at the same time. We had roasted a chicken the previous night, and I wanted to get rid of its carcass (plus the other two carcasses in the freezer) by making stock. Also, Lisa’s dad had put in a request for Boston brown bread, which turns out to be made by steam-cooking a can filled with batter consisting of graham flour, cornmeal, and rye flour (mixed with buttermilk, molasses and baking soda) for several hours. So that turned out to be three large stockpots atop a stove that could really only comfortably fit two.

I started the stock first (dead easy, incidentally: tie a carrot, several parsley stems, a celery stalk, and bay leaf together with cooking twine; add an onion in large chunks; throw in whatever chicken bones and odd scraps you have handy; cover with water; simmer for several hours, skimming as you go; remove the solids and simmer a little longer to concentrate the stock and skim off any remaining fat) and then got the bread steaming. Somewhat to my surprise, the bread came out beautifully, sliding out of its can (I used a butttered pannetone mold covered with foil) with no resistance, and just needing a few minutes in a 350º oven to firm up the sticky top.

So that was one big boiling pot off the stove, leaving enough room to start the boiled dinner. Which was good, since the recipe I consulted suggested simmering the corned beef for five hours and it was almost 1 pm. I plopped two corned beef briskets (thank you, Costco, for cheap meat) and their spice packets in a big stockpot, covered with water, and brought the thing to a boil, then backed it down to a simmer. And that’s all I really did, except for pouring a can of Guinness into the pot an hour in.

The beautiful things about the meal were: 1) the boiling. On a wetly snowy winter day, as many things should be boiled as possible; 2) the lack of interference needed. I was able (with Lisa’s dad’s assistance) to remove a door that normally goes sticky in summertime when it swells with humidity and get the bare wood top and bottom of the door painted, hopefully mitigating the problem, while the corned beef (and my stock) simmered; 3) the flavor. The vegetables, added in the last hour or so, were good, but the corned beef was spectacular—falling-apart moist and flavorful without being overly salty. And Lisa declared the Boston brown bread her new favorite.