Tong Family Blog

October 26, 2004

Markdown

Daring Fireball: Markdown. We've been using Textile 2 for a while as the markup languages for all of our blogs. I see now that using Markdown, so it is an interesting language to try.

Textile is great and powerful, but hard to teach folks the more sophisticated stuff.

BTW, this is another amazing script that is 22KB!

Posted by rich at 02:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 25, 2004

Commenters must register

Because tongfamily.com is literally beseiged with spammers (even with MT Blacklist, I get probably 50 spam comments a day), I'm turning on the registration required. In order to comment you'll need a free Typekey registration in order to logon.

Sorry about this, but I'm wasting too much time editing out spam. We will convert the other sites to this ASAP.

Posted by rich at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Switch to MT3 Templates

Rather go and try to hack MT2 templates to MT3, I thought it would be easier to just flip to MT3 templates completely by overwriting all the old templates and then adding back features I like such as the list bar on the right.

Now comments are nearly working, but I still have typekey problems. Seto is helping me fix it:

Misc. Ramblings: Open Hunting UPDATE: I seem to have it figured out. In TypeKey, where it asks for the address of your applications it seems to mean where do you have, for example, mt.cgi installed. For some reason, I thought they were asking where the index.html file was (which in my installation are two different places).

So for instance it wants http://website.com/cgi-bin and not just http://website.com. How confusing!

Posted by rich at 10:02 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

October 24, 2004

Final Move from MT 2.661 to MT3

Learning Movable Type: TypeKey Authentication for Comments. I thought I was done, but it turns out there is a ton of work to be done. MT 2.661 blogs are not automatically converted to MT3.0. There is a boatload of work to do as covered in Elise.com and also in Anzi

You can see this because right now my comments are pretty broken across all the sites. Sorry, I'll try to fix this week.

Posted by rich at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 23, 2004

Hosting Your Blog

Hey if you are thinking of getting a blog, go hang out with Mark over at tqbloghosting. I've been working with him for two years now and he's great. We have about a dozen blogs all running on his servers.

Posted by rich at 09:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 08, 2004

Dean Allen's Refer Script

textism: Refer Spamming. If I ever reinstall referrer lists, I'd use Dean's stuff plus the patch that eliminates spammers bots from Eric Goldberg.

Posted by rich at 11:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2004

Offline Blog Editors

Time once again for a review of blog editing tools. I've been looking for the perfect offline tool and Messyworkbench provided a good overview to which I'll add:

1. I've been using Zempt for a while and like it. Unfortunately, its not been maintained for a while and sometimes doesn't work. Fails to post. The best feature I think is that it has a Zempt This! button for IE. I can't tell you how convenient this is. Other nice thing is that it can handle multiple logons to different sites. Very nice for folks like me with both personal and public sites.
2. w.bloggar is probably the first one that I used. Like Zempt it appears to crash with some perl errors every so often. It doesn't have a push button, but is much richer in terms of HTML editing. Since I use Textile 2 for markup though, that's not really a big deal.
3. SharpMT. This is probably my favorite for right now. Best features are that you can edit multiple entries offline (he calls them blog links). This makes editing really fast. The other editors force a server round trip everytime you change an entry. Also has a plug in architecture, but that isn't used much. This BTW is a .NET client application and I can see why people like the many UI widgets .NET has. Having multiple panes for editing is very nice for attention-deficit people like me. The spell checker is nice too!
4. MT Post This! Ironically, this is still the one I prefer the most because it autodiscovers trackback links. Something I use a bunch of. The other ones, you've got to manually get stuff out of them. It also lets you highlight a selection and stuffs it into the entry.

Posted by rich at 09:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 17, 2004

MT to Wordpress migration guides

Make the Switch. Some great posts on how to mechanically switch from Movable Type to Wordpress. Some great tips from early adopters. Much is familiar since Geekfishing.net actually startes as a b2/cafelog site.

Main question I have is how to convert over to MovableType like links. Main issue is that there is a problem with sites that use postids (which mines do) so you have to keep both sets of sites up for a while. Not a big deal and there is mucha bout how to do this.

Main thing I wonder is how

Posted by rich at 10:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 14, 2004

Atom vs. RSS

XML Syndication Supporters Mulling W3C Move. I've never gotten to understand the deep issues in this debate. XML is so easy to read (check the RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom feeds on this Blogs as an example), but maybe time to start thinking about it.

Some folks like Steve Gillmore have argued that RSS and BitTorrent are two very important new technolgies. I get the latter, but not necessarily the former. That's because RSS lets you read a blog in essence without needing to open a web page. It is just the text and other stuff. Of course, you have to poll for it still, but its in a format that isn't a markup language, it is just the pure data.

If you layer it on top of the Bit Torrent idea. That is, there is a tracker node that folks who want a file (e.g., a feed) send a message to. The tracker responds with a list of all other people doing the download and then you can share blocks between them so it is amazingly fast and distributed.

Posted by rich at 07:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 13, 2004

Textpattern Installation

_Don't you love those packages that don't stick a how to install somewhere up front. Here's what I've been able to glean:

1. Textpattern Support Forum / I am lost Help!!!. Download textpattern_g118a, unzip it (I'm assuming you're on Windows.) Set up a MySQL database w/ your host (mine had cPanel which let me set it up). Open up your textpattern directory two levels down. You should see a file called Textpattern, one called Images, and some other files. Use an FTP program (everyone recommends Smart FTP, I think, I use Ace, both are free) to open the folder on your site marked www. Now upload the Textpattern and Images folder and the other files to this (root) directory. Close FTP, open your browser, go to your address blah.com_or_whatever/textpattern/setup.php. Now my memory gets fuzzy, especially the order of things. I had to input the name of my database, for me it was something like hass_ , my name and password for getting into that database, the URL of my host where it said something like MySQL server, and a name and password and email for using textpattern. It took a few tries to get it all right, textpattern told me if something was wrong and let me try again. I had to copy the contents of a form box and replace my config.php file contents with it. If you do everything right it says. If that went well, it asks you to delete the setup.php file from your SERVER (not from your PC) in the folder marked Textpattern. Then you can start to figure out Textpattern, it takes time. Good luck.
2. TextPattern Tutorial. The product is a little strange, so you have to go through this tutorial to use it.

Posted by rich at 11:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Moblogging: WAP and SMS Blog Entry

Joi Ito's Resource. Joi Ito has a great list of applications that allow you to take SMS and push it via an email interface onto a blog.

wapblogger - a WAP interface to Blogger, LiveJournal and other smart weblog-style tools. Hey in the course of installing all these new blogging tools, I was reminded of WAP blogger. Just type in this WAP address: http://wap.ubique.ch/wapblogger/ and you are off.

Bitwaste SMS Blogging. There is also a nice script from Bitwaste.com to do the same for a phone. Its quite dedicated. Looks at the from location to prevent spam which you need in this day and age. Also requires perl and some libraties, but cool to see. Of course it requires a dedicated email address that you hook in with /etc/aliases, so those of us without shell access to Linus are hosed.

Posted by rich at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Quick Review of MT Alternatives

Here is some deeper drill downs base on comments on Movable Type RIP | Metafilter. Folks realy like WordPress (only manages a single blog though), ExpressionEngine, b2evolution, textpattern. NEed to check them out. Others are Pivot, but the top votes are WordPress and ExpressionEngine, so here are notes about each and I'll put up trial sites on each on tongfamily.com to check them out.

• WordPress › Development Blog. OK, here is WordPress. The good news is that it is really the update version of b2/cafelog. I actually went from blogger to b2/cafelog before finally landing on MovableType two years ago. Now it looks like this is a good chance to try some others and this is at the top of the list. They do a huge new release middle of next week.
• ExpressionEngine is $149 so it is really a commercial package and out of consideration. HAs some great features though. I love hierarchical categories in particular.
• TextPerfect. By the same guy who did Textile (which I just love).

Posted by rich at 09:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Thoughtful comments about MT

Teal Sunglasses: Movable Type 3.0. Smart words from chuqui. More about what's happened with MT. Main points are you have to be careful about the loyalty in your customer base.

While you can say its no big deal to leave the first blogging community behind, from my own experience, you have to be super careful, the early movers are the recommenders.

The fact recommenders are moving to other products is not a good thing.

Posted by rich at 04:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

MovableType 3.0 Released: I'm so sad

Well, all good things have to come to an end. MoveableType will now cost are essentially $150-$900 for the personal weblogs that I manage right now (this site, Geekfishing.net and the related sites).

The real issue here is whether they should charge or not, but they are making a classic "averaging" mistake. That is, getting $50/personal user would be a home run based on getting 100K users, but the price is way, way, too low for an enterprise where the department version should be about $500 and the enterprise in the $5,000 range. Most of the cost justification based on support. That would have been fairly typical. Ironically that averages to $200/customer, but that's not the way you charge. Oh well.

Fortunately, there remain quite a few free services out there like LiveJournal and Blogger. With the improvements in Blogger, we'll look that way for a migration strategy. Good thing MovableType is popular enough that there are easy ways to suck things out of it.

Personally, I would have moved to a more generous strategy on the free version, added a charge for technical support but at all costs kept the momentum up. The point longer term is to get 1M blogs on MovableType IMHO.

Posted by rich at 03:44 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 12, 2004

Creating a private blog

Comprehensive guide to .htaccess- intro. Well, blogs are designed to be public, but what if you want a private one that no one else can see.

There are a bunch of methods, but the .htaccess file is the easiest I've found for Apache on Linux (what my hoster uses).

Posted by rich at 08:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 11, 2004

Bloglines is cool

Bloglines | Most Popular Blogs. This thing is a combination RSS reader in the sky and a blogrolling application. YOu can find the top blogs for instance. YOu can also see when there is an update. THey have a notifier that runs in OSX, Windows or within Firefox.

Interesting to see the top blogs. I don't know how they figure this out, but the ones are surprising:

• Slashdot. Since this is a still a nerd toy.
• Wired News. Also not surprising.
• Boing Boing. I actually lvoe this one
• Google Weblog. A little bit of a surprise, but the IPO causes much intereste.
• Dilbert. What else, cartoon a day
• The Register. Geek news
• NY Times. I didn't know they had a feed.
• Gizmodo. Surprising how popular this is
• Salon.com. Not surprising
• Cnet news.com. Not surprising.
• Kuro5hin.org. Thsi sia great oversite.

Posted by rich at 07:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 10, 2004

Playing with Blogger

OK, I just realized I've been blogging since 2002. Amamazing its been two years. My early posts were stuck on blogger, so here they are:

• Tongfamily. A small site
• Rich Tong. The old main site
• Connie Mao. Connie nascent site.

More up there as I play with this tool.

Posted by rich at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bloglines for Mozilla Firefox

Don't Back Down: Extending Mozilla. I'm beginning to really love this browser. The CSS edit is really cool way to understand CSS and the RSS Reader extension is amazing.

Bloglines. Now check out bloglines which add blog support for it. Very cool. This is a free utility that keeps track of RSS feeds fro you and let syou just read the new ones.

Posted by rich at 11:46 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Rich Tong's Livejournal

Rich's Journal. Saw a bunch of entries on LiveJournal. Inspired me to create a site up there so I can be authenticated when commenting up there. A nice freeware application.

Posted by rich at 09:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blogger Refresh

phil ringnalda dot com: Holy Crap! That's Blogger?. Wow, blogger gets a big refresh. Google hasn't been asleep. Something to track and try.

Posted by rich at 08:41 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 30, 2004

MediaWiki Usage

MediaWiki development. Well, I loaded this up on Tongfamily. Now the question is how to use it. Here are some notes:

• User Guide's_Guide. Naturally, the documentation is itself in Wiki format, so here it is. The main interesting things are that you can edit any page you want. The default is there is no user permissions at all.
• Markup Language's_Guide:_Editing_overview. Main advantage of a Wiki is that they have a specialized markup language that makes it easy to add things. It looks a little like Textile, but is not quite the same. For instance pound sign means do a number list and an asterisk means a bullet. The main difference is this idea of an internal Wiki link that you can forward link to with a pair of square brackets.
• Strange things's_Guide:_Using_tables. The table syntax is just amazingly complicated. All this markup reminds me of the old days of LaTEX and nroff. I bet there are Wiki WYSIWYG editors now that I look at this.

Posted by rich at 08:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2004

Wiki, wiki ho!

Well, Ludwig got a Wiki, so it was inevitable I needed one too. As usual, there seems to be no simple guide on the web to get started building one, so here it is:

1. Wiki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Here's a good general overview of what the heck a Wiki is and a history. Kind of cool that this description is itself in wikipedia which is of course a Wiki.
2. Choose a software. As usual, there are a bunch of them. The big four mentioned are MediaWiki, MoinMoin, UseModWiki and TWiki). The Wikipedia uses MediaWiki, so that's a pretty good endorsement.

Posted by rich at 08:27 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

PHP Gallery Installs

NukedGallery » Forums » Gallery Integration - PHP/NSN-Nuke » Setup Errors - not even getting to Config Wizard.

OK, so I got this error message

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: getos() in /home/tongfamily/public_html/gallery/init.php on line 101

No problem, google shows us the problem is that the FTP of PHP gallery didn't take. Seems like the version.php file didn't copy successfully. Gosh darn it if they aren't right. Caveat Emptor, make sure the FTP really does complete by looking at date stamps.

Posted by rich at 08:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2004

PHP Gallery 1.4.3 is awesome

Gallery v1.4.3 is now Available! :: Gallery :: your photos on your website. I haven't added to my photo gallery in forever. Of course, this means that all that software is old.

Biggest pain is that since the move to a new backend server set at tqhosting, I've never been able to logon. Sigh, I'll install and then try to see if I can clear the passwords.

Turns out that if you install a new version, it resets the admin password, so this is the easiest way to fix things. BTW, the features on 1.4.3 are really awesome. In particular:

1. Styles. They now have lots of cool styles. I'm using the spiral notebook. Looks much better.
2. Registration. They built a whole user registration system in so people can register rather than me having to give everyone logins. Best thing is that they have a password lookup feature to email, so folks have a chance of remembering their passwords.
3. Voting. They have voting buttons so folks can vote on various pictures.

Posted by rich at 07:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 02, 2004

Basecamp

Basecamp. A simple web-based project management system. From a web-design company. There really is a big future in these kind of simple weblications.

Tong's Basecamp. I did a quick site, put Ludwig and Zagula on it with the usual user names and passwords.

A nnice product that make it possible is from
Ruby. An interesting programming environment.

Will be fun to visit with them on June 25. $400 per head, but could be kind of interesting.

Interesting to see how many people have tried to build small and simple products and could be interesting.

Posted by rich at 11:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 09, 2004

Blog Pingers Galore

a little ludwig goes a long way: Pinging Service Rundown. What a great idea. Neil has a list of good sites to ping and Doug Gunters is working on an automated version of this.

Posted by rich at 11:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 22, 2004

Textile 2.0

Brad Choate: MT-Textile does that???. Wow, Brad does it again with very cool with additional commands like automatic link creators to connect to amazon, imdb and google. Nice work!

Posted by rich at 08:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 21, 2004

MovableType Maintenance

Finally getting around to this (and lucid enough to do it). Basically, comment spam is overwhelming all my sites. 24 of the last 25 comments were spam generated. If you’re having the same problem, here is what you have to do:

1. Install Movabletype Version 2.661. This installs a comment throttler at least. There isn’t an installer, so read the upgrade instructions carefully. The tools I used BTW are smartftp and pkunzip to get the tar.gz files and then to upload them to tqhosting.com
2. Install MT Blacklist. This tools is incredibly valuable as it prevents know spam from getting in. The main issue is that there isn’t an automatic way to update the black list. Sigh.
3. Install MT Blacklist Autoupdate. You have to install an /etc/cron job to do this, so more work. Fortunately, Mark over at tqhosting.com has installed cpanel which makes it easy to create such a job. It basically runs at a specified URL at a specified time. YOu can use PHPEdit to edit the file.
4. Install MT Textile. This is a great way to make nice looking content without having to type in HTML. Also install SmartyPants if you want the curly quotes to look nice.
5. Install MT Plugin Manager. This manages the many plug-ins that MovableType has now. It does require a bunch of libraries that you can find at Cpan

Posted by rich at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 21, 2003

IntraVnews

intraVnews | Features. Here’s a free for personal use Outlook RSS reader. The other one I tried required a subscription.

Posted by rich at 11:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Newsfeed Readers

Rss Readers. There must be a thousand of these. Here’s a Wiki that compiles them. Way too many to try in a lifetime :-)

Posted by rich at 10:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 14, 2003

bBlog

BBlog - php blog software. Bob over at Bob’s Planet mentioned this is a full PHP based blog. I may have to give it a try.

Posted by rich at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 05, 2003

Spam Clearinghouse

MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse. This is the central database that is a short term fix. You can both download this manually (ugh) and also submit new spam.

For instance, today, I got a bunch of spam that the database didn’t pick up. If you install then, you need to submit new spam entries to them via a spam form.

Posted by rich at 08:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Movable Type Anti-spam

MT-Blacklist - A Movable Type Anti-spam Plugin. Spam is completely out of control on comments now. But, help is on the way thanks for Jay Allen. Installing it now and it seems to work pretty well, although the regex database misses things of course. I’m going to also look for something that does a comment reply before doing a post. That seems like a another good way to allow this, so there is always a valid email, then you can apply the filter.

I’ve installed this now on Tongfamily.com. He’s quite smart in the way that he searchs for regular expressions because you can’t just stuff raw HTML (at least in my blog) to obscure things. Also the idea of looking at the URLs that are punched in is smart. Would be very nice if it automatically updated its list of bad addresses, but it doesn’t quite yet.

And of course since it replaces trackback and comment functions, it has to get updated on every update to Movable Type. This anti-spam stuff should just be a feature.

Posted by rich at 04:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 28, 2003

Amazon Ego-Surfing

Joi Ito’s Web: Ego-surfing on Amazon search inside the book. Joi Ito points out that you can now “ego-surf” on Amazon so you can see your name in books. They have indexed 120,000 books.

So, I could resist. Here are searches for Rich Tong at Amazon. Actually came up with three hits that I didn’t even realize were memorialized:

1. Business at the speed of thought. There is a story about the answer tracking application thing we did. Answering 90% of all field questions in 48 hours. A great project.
2. Breaking Windows. Somehow David Banks found a memo I wrote about the low reputation Windows suffered at the time. Honesty I think is always the best policy.
3. World War 3.0. Ken Auletta’s book about folks leaving Microsoft and I even get a mention.

BTW, I also looked up Steve Hooper. He’s got two good references. Cameron Myhrvold. He’s got two.

Brad Silverberg gets 23 references!

Unfortunately, other Ignition names are too common to really see if they are in Amazon books.

Since we’re at it, this blog is the #2 blog when you search google for Tong. Getting closer to the top although I notice that John Ludwig now has a 6 page rank. ANd he’s the 18th Ludwig in a google search now.

Posted by rich at 08:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Lake Arrowhead coverage

Joi Ito’s Web: Joseph Urbaszewski’s blog coverage Lake Arrowhead fire. BTW, a hat tip to Joi Ito for keeping track. There is also a scanner feed so you can hear fireman live. Wow.

Posted by rich at 08:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blogs are where the news live...

Joseph Urbaszewski’s Weblog. We were talking about this at work today. Ib et folks that the best place to find news about the California fires would be on blogs. Joesphe is proving me right.

How much more interesting than CNN!

Posted by rich at 08:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 18, 2003

Incredible Traffic

Site Meter - Counter and Statistics Tracker. I can’t quite believe it. I think the statistics must be wrong. In any case, I use Sitemeter to record page views and visits and have some history there.

In July, I changed Sitemeter to record all hits across all pages of my blog. Here are the statistics:

Month	Page Views	Visits
June	3,000	1,000
July	6,000	3,500
August	13,500	8,500
Sept	21,000	14,200
Oct (est)	36,000	25,000

Is anyone else stunned that a basically useless blog is getting hit so much. Now much of this is because of the various robots running around indexing blogs, I think. I see that technorati, popdex and so forth are trolling pretty regularly, but there does seem to be more traffic.

Posted by rich at 08:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 01, 2003

Blog Spam

HOw depressing, the spammers have figured out how to spam a blog. That’s why I’m getting a dozen comments a day from folks who sell viagra and then use the backlink feature to link me to their site.

Sad, I’m going to have to turn off comments pretty soon as I can’t keep up with the deletes. MovableType really should have a acknowledge feature for comments so robots can’t do this.

Posted by admin at 11:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 21, 2003

Arrgghh. Ensim to Cpanel

Arrgghh. Mark over at TQHosting has switched from ensim as the control panel for shared sites to cpanel. Have to say cpanel is incredibly powerful, but now ever path name has changed. Mark was nice enough to run scripts to flip over nearly everything, but gallery, so now I’m reinstalling that. Need to remember how to do it and use a tool that edits a remote FTP flle like Crimson Editor - Free Text Editor, Html Editor, Programmers Editor for Windows.

This thing treats FTP sites like regular directories, so you can open files via FTP, edit them and it knows how to save them via FTP. I know FTP is not secure, etc., but it is very nice thing. Surprising there aren’t more utilities like this.

Posted by rich at 08:48 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

September 17, 2003

How was this blog created

Markl asked me how I created this blog. A good question, so heres the equivalent of the “About” box:

Movabletype.org. This is the blogging software. They actually have a hosted service called typepad which is supposed to be very good. Very elegant stuff written in perl, so it is not a speed demon, but very flexible. Does require you know how to use Linux and mysql. The entries are stored in mysql and then emitted as static web pages.

Tqhosting. This is actually a really nice guy in North Carolina (remember when we were that young!) who has a dedicated server on which he resells space. $5/month for a basic blogging package and $12/month for 300MB, so it is pretty reasonable compared with the big guys. I used to pay $25/month to a FrontPage compatible hoster for 30MBs. Anyway, he presets mysql and you can rsh and telnet into his machine. Also has email as well

Godaddy. This is where I get my registrar services. About half the cost of register.com. They are local and the best thing is that they have a very simple user interface to add new domain names, etc. In contrast with verisign and register. (Come to think of it, they use ASP for their stuff, so guess I do use Microsoft stuff).

Blogrolling. This is a guy who supports keeping lists of other blogs and handles notifications. It is how the list the right gets updated when other folks update themselve. All these blogs ping weblo.gs so that is how they are in sync.

Sitemeter:”http://sitemeter.com”. They have a free site monitoring tool so that you can see who is on.

The Ludwigs. I mainly follow the format and improvement that John Ludwig makes. He is MovableType as well, although he is using it on top of IIS and Windows NT. But I love his MovableType template ideas.

For editing blogs, here is what I do:

MovableType supports a couple of ways. First there is the standard web interface of course, but what I really use are their javascript buttons you can stick up on the Internet Explorer bar. So you can browse and then if you see something, you can MT it! right into your blog. I mainly use a blog like a personal set of bookmarks so this is very useful. It is also free.

Textile. This is a plug in to MovableType that is kind of like latex or nroff if you remember those utilities so you don’t have to write everything in HTML. For instance, if you type hello it turns it into hello and so forth. Or if you want bullets, you type an asterisk like Word. It is free.

w.Bloggar. This is probably the most used client-side editing tool for blogs. Uses the blog API (really an XML-SOAP protocol that talks with MovableType

Zempt. This is a nice Windows utility for doing off line edits of blogs. I’ve been playing with it, but it really isn’t that much faster or more functional than movabletype.

Reading blogs, here is what I do

Feedreader. This is a .NET application that puts blogs that emit RSS into a three pane view. I like the thing because it also lets you also add entries based on what you read via w.bloggar. You just right click on an item and then it stuffs it into your blog.

Posted by rich at 09:14 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

September 16, 2003

Blog Tools Update

While looking at RSS Feed Readers, I also found that the blog clients have gotten much better. Here’s my quick review and update:

• :: w.bloggar ::. This was the original blog client that I used. He’s been buys working on it and it now supports a whole bunch of blog tools using a standard interface and is a very nice HTML editor, spell checking and also the new Windows media 9 blogger api (see below)
• Music Blogger API. Microsoft has done an API for Windows Media Player so that blogging clients can pick up the name and track of music you are listening to while writing an entry and throw it at the bottom of a post. Kind of cool. Bill has extended this to Winamp 2.0 and winamp 3.0. Too bad there is not a musicmatch version.
• Zempt. This is Bill Zeller’s dedicate MovableType blogging client. Kind of cool. Nicest thing is that he has an Internet Explorer icon that does a Zempt it! which calls up the local client. I love that Blog it! feature of Movable Type and this is even better in that it is local to the machine so very fast.

Posted by rich at 09:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

September 14, 2003

RSS Readers

According to Ludwig, he only reads using RSS instead of browsing web sites the old fashion way, so I’m off to find the best RSS reader. Not easy to find I should say. Lots of developments since the last time I looked. Here are the sources:

• RSS Readers (RSS Info). The top google reference when looking for rss readers.
• Weblogs Compendium. A list of RSS readers, but not reviewed really.

Here are reviews of the ones I’ve used so far:

1. Feedreader. The top hit from Google. Haven’t tried it yet. Doesn’t seem to work with what MovableType outputs alone, so you have to know where the rdf files are.
2. Amphetadesk. This was the original reader. It reads and spits it out in a local web server page. Main problems are that it is pretty slow because it uses a web interface and also the application itself is ugly. Has this whole notion of channels which is a little complicated.

Posted by rich at 03:58 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

August 27, 2003

AOL Blogs

Hat tip to Satoshi’s Wireless Weblog. AOL launches a blogging service. I’ve got to say that with Jon Miller taking over, they really are doing more software. Cranked out AOL 8.0 after a long hiatus. Then pumped out AOL 9.0 Optimized (don’t understand that branding myself) about six months later.

Now they are doing AOL Journals. ANd they have an Outlook Express clone called AOL Communicator. The only issue is that when I launch AOL now, I get a mess of applets. I kind of liked the unified view really. Should have been more like Outlook with a button bar.

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August 14, 2003

Moblogs - Mobile Blogs

Moblogs By TextAmerica. An amazing site. Has a complete connection to folks with camera phones.

Also see the incredible Blackout Moblogs. Amazing how real time this is.

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Recent Comments

Hat tip to Ludwig, I just added recent comments to the side panel. It is something I respond to every day and it is much more convenient to see it on the blog than to read it in email as I’ve been doing. Not clear how new trackback pings work. I don’t these are counted as comments. The numbers next to entrys are number of comments and number of trackbacks respectively in the new Recent Comments section.

Posted by rich at 08:37 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 12, 2003

Blog process

The Blogging Process. _Hat tip to the Bigpinkcookie Here’s a good note on how bloggers use the technology. Roughly the loop is read/comment, then write new content, and then figure out what folks are reading you and why.

A good analysis. I tend to atually write new content because I need to “bookmark” something that I’ve learned and then read when I have time. Dave appears to do the reverse.

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July 30, 2003

Joi Ito's Guide to FOAF

Joi Ito’s Web: Technorati talks FOAF. Hat tip to Ludwig for creating a Friend of a Friend link. He says none of his friends are FOAFed, so I thought I’d join him :-)

BTW, how does John find so much time to post. It’s amazing!

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June 12, 2003

k-collector

Integrating blogs and DMOZ. Interesting project call k-collector for integrating blogs and directory categories automatically.

Posted by rich at 12:44 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 02, 2003

Tong Family Visiter Changes

It’s interesting to see how site statistics have been changing. Initially most of the hits on this home page were from the default home pages for my many machines, so the referrers were often tongfamily.com or none.

I now get about 20,000 hits per month, so not that many, but most were from google as accidental searches. There was one amazing period where I had the only site pointed to Kazaa hacks in late 2002, but that was an aberration.

Now, most hits are not from my own personal machines, but instead seem to be from lots of google more purposeful searches and also links from Candlepower. Thanks much PhotonBoy and also from Microsoft Watch. Thanks Mary Jo!

Also getting lots more comments from random folks as well that I don’t know. Interesting the power of the web. It’s only too bad that comments don’t seem to get indexed by google. Maybe the next iteration of that machine.

Posted by rich at 07:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

May 13, 2003

Geocoding

Some cool work happening on location-awareness and blogs. Amazing what a little XML can do. Here are some things to look at:

• blogosphere. This let’s you see a globe, spin it and then click on various blogs.
• Blogosphere Usage. This thing requires two plug-ins. One called GeoURL let’s you add latitude and longitude to MovableType blog entries and another does HeadmapXML to load this in the correct format.
• Your location. Geourl gives you some links so that you can figure out where you are if you don’t have a GPS handy.

Posted by rich at 10:30 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 12, 2003

blog portals

Ludwig told me about places where there are blog portals. A quick web search revealed these sites:

• International Blog Meetup Day. There is actually someone coordinating meetings of blog folks.
• a little ludwig goes a long way: Seattle Weblog Portal This points to Seattle.

Posted by rich at 11:12 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 30, 2003

User Interface is an Art, but Trackbacks are not...

Satoshi’s Wireless Weblog: User Interface is an Art but Trackbacks are not. Satoshi is absolutely right that Trackbacks are way too hard to understand and differentiate from comments.

Interesting to think about the mobile analog to trackback and how that should work. Seems like, when I update, I should get a ping and then see the site, comment on it and that should be a trackback so when it changes, I see that on my mobile phone. Kind of like IMing to a with a web site.

Also it is wierd that when you hit Track Back, that you don’t get the permalink address, but just the overall web site. Not exactly right.

Posted by rich at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2003

Flight Risk Update

The Agonist: Flight Risk. How does the Agonist get his information. More enticing details about this woman who has run away.

Posted by rich at 11:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 23, 2003

Getting up on Blogging

Had a great discussion about the future of blogs, mobile, etc. with some incredibly smart people (Ben Slivka, Bill Valentine, Satoshi Nakajima and Kendra Vandermulen). They asked for an easy intro to blogging. A good questions. Here are some sites to look at:

• Tong Family. OK, a selfish announcement, you can see what the geeks are doing and their format. Also Geek Fishing is a place to find Steve Hooper, Bill Malloy, etc. and also The Ludwigs when his site comes back up. See the recently visited list on tongfamily too.
• Blogger. An easy way to get started. It’s free and you can try it.
• blo.gs and blogdex.com and a Google for weblog directories.
• Movable Type. A fantastic tool if you are self hosting. Nice UI and feature set.
• Daily Pundit and Command Post are two community sites.
• Joi Ito. The first mobile blogger. More like a photo gallery.

Posted by rich at 01:43 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 22, 2003

The Hiltons

The Hilton Lounge - Unofficial Paris and Nicky Hilton. Someone thought the flight risk woman was Paris Hilton. Now there is a blog that does nothing but cover Paris and Nicky. Amazing.

Posted by rich at 12:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Flight Risk

The Agonist: A Flight Risk. With the war settling into a slow pattern, it’s time to take a break and find some other strange goings on.

The best one I’ve found is about a wealthy heiress on the run from her powerful father. Much speculation about whether it is true or not. Interesting and well written web site.

Posted by rich at 12:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 11, 2003

Spaming blog comments

How depressing. Can you believe that someone has written a program to do this. I’m getting consistent spam comments now. Too bad. Another thing spoiled by spam.

Posted by rich at 08:40 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

February 25, 2003

Word Bursts

Daypop Top Word Bursts. Thanks to Joshua for this reference. Word Bursts monitor the use of terms in blogs. It is amazing what pinging a site can do. Lots easier than having a spyder. Anyway, fun to watch new words burst onto the Internet via blogs.

Posted by rich at 09:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 22, 2003

Web Hosting Advice

Brad Choate: Oh the servers, they are a changin’…. Some great advice on dedicated servers. I’m very happy with Mark but if I ever need a dedicated server here’s some great advice.

Posted by rich at 04:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

February 20, 2003

Upgrade to Movable Type 2.62

MT 2.62 is here. Tongfamily is up to the latest version of MovableType. Biggest feature is that text editing is now easier since they have a plugin architecture to do this

New Text Editors for MT. Now there are a pile of text editors. I'll have to install and test them now. More work for the weary

Posted by rich at 09:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 09, 2003

Google and DMOZ Directories

Submitting a Site to The Open Directory Project. Every want to get into Google's directory system. Right now, my buddies aren't in it. Turns out that Google uses the Open Directory structure, so all you have to do is click on Add URL in the right spot in DMOZ and hopefully you'll get linked in. I just did this for tongfamily.com. Try it for your own sites.

Posted by rich at 09:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 05, 2003

Secure blogging by email

Sam Ruby: Secure Blogging by Email. How sad, Sam tries to do blog by mail with comments and the next thing you know, you get spammed because of all those spyders looking for addresses. The address to send a comment to his blog entry is blog-1172.

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February 03, 2003

Trackbacks

tima thinking outloud. : The Next Generation of TrackBack: A Proposal. Amazing that trackback is only 6 months old. This is some great thinking about their future directions. They are very fundamental I think. It is the equivalent of a 2-way hyperlink which is just great. Thanks to John for pointing out Tema and all this great thinking.

Posted by rich at 08:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 22, 2003

Email to Blog got easier!

DentedReality: PHP Implementation of the Blogger/MoveableType XML-RPC APIs. Thanks to Gary Burd for his tip about using the Blogger API to add this email to blog stuff. He suggested a search on blogger API PHP to find a library and darn if he wasn't right. Here is one that I can work off off.

Another example of open source winning!

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January 19, 2003

New categorization ideas

PuzzlePieces on Blogosphere. wow, what a great list of the interesting new ideas about categorization on the web.

Don’t you just love the ’net and blogosphere? Post your ideas on LazyWeb, and anything onto the Internet Topic Exchange (new, the “first public implementation of the Ridiculously Easy Group Forming concept”). Find physically near websites with GeoURL ICBM Address Server. Memeufacture is adding human-categorization to the blog popularity index concept. Four new great ideas (okay, so one is a meta-idea) in just a few weeks.

Posted by rich at 09:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 05, 2003

Blog writing style debated

Joi Ito's Web: Blog style review. Joi brings up a good point. What is a blog. Is it like a verbal conversation, like email, like writing a document? Personally, I think it is more like email than a "tight" document most of the time. The thing is that blogs like web sites don't dictate a style. I remember in my old job as a marketing guy, we had these debates all the time. What should Microsoft Office sound like? I always wanted a more chatty, more personal style. The debate goes on. And, more information out more quickly rather than more polished.

Posted by rich at 10:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blogmints

Blogmints.com - What the blogs are talking about. Another interesting way to see what the important entries are. Blogmints looks at weblogs.com and figures out what are the most commented on topics. All of these methods are like higher level forms of what google.com is doing with links. Interesting to spend a day browsing it.

Posted by rich at 04:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 25, 2002

Year of the Blog

TCS: Tech - Year of the Blog. A good summary of what happened this year with blogs. It is amazing how quickly the phenomena has made it out of the high level geeks to only the partial geeks like me!

...bloggers areasking for money. Few will make a living from their blogs - but then, few free-lance writers make a living solely from writing anyway. Other, non-beggging, revenue models are also in play. Nick Denton' s gadget-blog Gizmodo.com, is reportedly already in the black (more than most web media ventures can claim) and Henry Copeland's BlogAds venture seeks to aggregate bloggers to achieve success the old-fashioned way, through advertising. John Hiler's CityBlogs and Nick Denton's Gawker.com look like they might pose threats to the entertainment-oriented alternative-weekly market niche. And, of course, Big Media outfits have joined the blog world either by bringing in bloggers (as Slate has done with Mickey Kaus) or by creating house blogs, as MSNBC has done with Eric Alterman. So it's fair to say that blogging has, to some degree, gone commercial.

Nonetheless, the beauty of weblogs is that they're cheap. This is why "thin media" ventures like Gizmodo can turn a profit: it's not hard to turn a profit when the overhead is minuscule. As Paul Boutin reported, "Media has never before been this lean." That's also why the number of weblogs - even without any revenues - has exploded beyond any counting. A.J. Liebling famously said that freedom of the press belongs to whoever owns one. Nowadays, that's anyone who wants to. There's even a blogger from Baghdad, and a homeless guy blogger from Nashville. You can't get any more open than that.

What's next? I think that falling prices for storage, bandwidth, and digital cameras will result in weblogs going multimedia over the next year. Jeff Jarvis has already experimented with video-blogging on his site: two-minute video clips with professional-looking titles and backgrounds generated by computer. Mobileweblogging, taking advantage of the ability to post pictures and text via cellphones, may offer anyone the opportunity to be a reporter. The next time there's a major disaster or terrorist attack from an area where there are a lot of cellphone-equipped individuals, the first photos to reach the outside world will almost certainly do so via weblogs.

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Joi Ito's Moblog

Joi's Moblog. Pretty cool. Joi Ito wanders around all day taking pictures. I love it.

Posted by rich at 02:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Glogs, Moblogs and Blogs

Joi Ito's Web: Steve Mann on glogs. Joi Ito points out Steve Mann's writings on so called glogs. Given digital cameras, I think he means more like mobile photo blogs moplogs???

There really isn't a good way to point through an article on MovableType, so this is the best way I've found.

Posted by rich at 02:01 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

December 23, 2002

MSNBC Weblogs

Weblog central. Amazing MSNBC actually does a update set on interesting weblogs. Of course, it is not itself a blog, but what the heck. Interesting to see what they pick out.

Posted by rich at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 16, 2002

Categories and Website organization

Categorization. An interesting piece on categorization. I'm a little obsessed with this too as I figure out how to turn the rest of my web site into a giant blog. He's a bit like John Ludwig in believing in dynamic categorization or a big content search

Posted by rich at 09:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gallery 2 column mode

Gallery is now working and up on Tong Family. It requires a logon though, so you need to send me email if you want to look at photos of the kids, etc.

Gallery :: your photos on your website. As usual, there are tweaks galore. One that I need to install right away is how the default layout works with the captions. It is really designed for short captions, but in a photo blog like application, you really want them to be longer. This is the fix.

There are a bunch of other tweaks to be made, but it looks like there really isn't a good combination of blogging plus a gallery, it is like a frame within a frame integration. Really a much deeper one is needed where you can blog off of an album. I'll need to look to see where that is

.

Posted by rich at 09:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Supernova conference notes

SUPERNOVA 2002 - by pulver.com. Hey the cool think is that the conference was actually both blogged and group blogged, so read it and weep.

See Pulvar for more general information since the blog seems to be a temporary site with no DNS address, just a TCP/IP address

Posted by rich at 12:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Great conferences (at last!)

Joi Ito's Web: World Blogging Forum and the Tao of Conferences. At last some interesting conferences to visit. I have to admit, I've done so many conferences, I'm terrified of them. I'm sorry I missed the event down in San Francisco. Nice to have a list of ones that you liked.

Sign me up for the next Supernova! It's great to hear Dave thinks there be half a dozne blog conferences next year. As long as they stay at 100 people!

Posted by rich at 12:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 13, 2002

Referrer Linking

IAwiki: ReferrerLinking. Iawiki.net seems to be a good place to find links and informaiton about doing various cool tricks like Referrer linking. Here's a good page on how to do it and the various techniques that you can use.

Posted by rich at 09:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 06, 2002

Good tutorial on TrackBack

hitormiss.org : Homebrew TrackBack Tutorial. I like this idea that you don't just spray comments into someone else's blog, but essentially link two blogs together.

I haven't figured out exactly how to use it, but here goes.

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December 05, 2002

Testing 1,2,3

Here we go!

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