ReadWriteWeb

Now you tell me! There is in fact a way to automatically ping Topic Exchange from within Movable Type. Thanks to an old Ben Hammersley post, I found out that the category attributes page has a box to enter TrackBack URIs to automatically ping.

So after all my work over the last week, I've managed to set up MT so it:
1) adds ENT data automatically to my RSS file, which allows KC to aggregate my posts; and
2) auto-ping TE, which allows it to aggregate my posts. Whew!

Right that really is the end of my topic-mapping shenanigans for a while... I've done my bit for the community. I'm off to read a biography of Hemingway (yes, really).

Topic navigation is up and running on Read/Write Web, including cross-posting to both K-Collector and Topic Exchange. You'll notice on the main menu, it now lists internal topics (or categories if you prefer - you say tom-ah-to, I say tom-ay-to). And in my RSS file, I've added references to both KC and TE. Here's basically what I added in the MT template:

<ent:cloud ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/topics">
<ent:topic ent:id="<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>" ent:href="http://topicexchange.com/t/<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>/"><$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$></ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>
<ent:cloud ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topicRoll.opml">
<ent:topic ent:classification="what" ent:href="http://w4.evectors.it/itEntDirectory/topic?topic= <$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>" ent:id="<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1"$>"><$MTEntryCategory$></ent:topic>
</ent:cloud>

The KC and TE references are pretty similar, except that KC doesn't need the dirify="1" bit for the topic name. Dirify in this context just means the topic value is made lower-case and if it's a double word an underscore is added between the two words.

Each post references R/WW, KC & TC

At the end of each individual post, you'll now notice there are 3 links: the first one takes you to the Read/Write Web archive for the topic I've specified for the post. The next two links take you to the respective KC and TE pages for that topic. This is all done automatically using the <MTCategory> tag (oh, did I mention I'm using Category now instead of Keyword?).

There is one downside: sometimes TE and KC won't have the same topic name as me. In the case of this post here, I'm using the topic name "Movable Type" - which is fine because both TE and KC have a topic by that name. But a lot of times the topics don't synch. But that's a whole other issue, which I can't fix by myself.

So that's me done with topics for a little while. I'm going to relax a bit this week and write up some laid-back R/WW posts.

All this hullaballoo about Movable Type's new licensing structure is just another example of one of the Web's enduring issues: how to make money on the Web when users are accustomed to free lunches. It's not just an issue for developers either, it's as bad (if not worse) for writers.

But before I address that wider issue, if you were to ask me does Movable Type's announcement make me regret my recent transfer from Radio Userland to Movable Type - the answer's an emphatic no. Admittedly one of my reasons was Radio's US$40 per year fee, but let me re-state the context for that. I've got no problem paying for a publishing system like Radio Userland or Movable Type, but there has to be some forward movement in the product in terms of functionality. And that's where Radio failed me, for there hasn't been a decent upgrade to the product in 2 years (as I explained in full here). Movable Type meets my needs currently and probably for the foreseeable future, even though I'm a bit concerned when someone like Mark Pilgrim makes a good case for switching to an "open source" product like Wordpress because its future is more certain.

For all the griping I've read on the Web about MT's announcement, Jason Kottke summed up my feelings the best. He advocates an MT licensing structure that provides "freewheeling personal use of MT". He rightly points out that this "is an investment that will pay off handsomely in the future." Movable Type's developer community is their most precious asset, so I join Jason in urging Six Apart to look after it. You only need to (sadly) look at Radio Userland's developer community, a shadow of what it was 2 years ago, to see what may happen to MT if they're not vigilant.

(update, the next day: Six Apart have since loosened the restrictions on number of authors/weblogs in the free version of MT, which will help appease the wailing masses. I applaud Six Apart's quick action on this. That's the sign of a company that listens to its users and wants to keep its developer community happy. Good on ya!)

Penniless Writers

I mentioned in the beginning of this post that writers have it worse than developers. If Web users have a hard time ponying up cash for software, they are even more reluctant to hand over money for content. Just ask all the newspapers and magazines that are trying desperately to adapt to the online publishing model (if you want to know more about that, check out Poynter E-Media Tidbits). How does all this affect me? Because of my goals and aspirations and how I have to balance those with my duty as a breadwinner for my family.

You see, it's my goal to be a writer. Writing is in my blood and I love doing it. It's every person's dream to earn a living doing something they love, right? Well it's my dream to earn a living as a writer. So how can I do that? This weblog is a start. It's a space for me to experiment and practice my writing. It's my own personal publishing house. It's a lot of other things too (a way of meeting and interacting with like minds, etc), but in terms of my writing dreams it's the center of my universe.

You may've noticed I've signed up for Google Ads and they are placed fairly prominently in my new weblog design (on the right, on individual entry pages). But I have to tell you that I don't expect to make any real money from those ads. Actually I just now checked my click-through rates, for the first time, and I see that I earned $5.12 in the first month (see what I mean!). The Google Ads are an experiment and I'd be grateful if they ended up paying my annual web hosting costs - but I don't expect any more from them.

So weblogging for me isn't about making money. Hmmm, how else then can I earn a crust as a writer? How about writing a novel and trying to get it published, I hear someone shout from the wings. OK, good suggestion. I've written a novel already...but I haven't attempted to get it published. Firstly, because I'm not sure it's any good. Secondly, even if it was good it's not mainstream enough. Thirdly, only Stephen King makes any money writing novels right? Well OK, lots of other "mainstream" novelists earn a living writing novels. But you have to admit the mainstream isn't what it used to be. Our culture doesn't value novels much anymore. Television, movies, and now personal computers have all eclipsed the humble novel in entertainment value. What room there is for novels in the mainstream is taken up by formulaic and unoriginal legal thrillers and novels about serial killers.

The other issue is that the opportunity costs for writing a novel are high - I'd have to forgo my career as a Web professional and the steady (if unspectacular) income that goes with it. When you have a family to support, the risks are pretty high. So trying to write fiction for a living isn't really an option for me.

How about making money writing articles and such for paper publications, I hear some wag suggesting from the back row. Yeah I'm onto it. Well, I've made a start. I've got my second Computerworld article coming up, about RSS in E-Government. But I'm not getting paid for this, just as I didn't get paid for the Marc Canter interview in Computerworld.

I didn't really expect to get paid for the first couple of articles I submitted to Computerworld. My initial aim is to make a name for myself, get my writing out into the wider world. But eventually I have to consider: well I'm putting in all this effort, staying up late to do research and write these articles, spending lots of time on the computer when I should be spending it with my family. So I must be doing all this for a reason, right? What's the reason: recognition for my writing? A bit. Creative satisfaction? A bit. Learning new things to enhance my career as a Web professional? A bit. Money to help pay the mortgage? That would be nice, eventually...

To clarify, I only want to be paid (eventually) for the "professional" writing I do. This doesn't apply to articles I write for non-profit publications such as Digital Web Magazine, which I will gladly contribute to for free because they are run by and for the community that I belong to.

So non-fiction writing is a goer. If I'm to ever earn a living as a writer, it will probably be writing non-fiction. Unless I strike it lucky and one of my novels gets made into a Peter Jackson movie ;-)

It's all about the Whuffie

Whuffie was the term coined by Cory Doctorow in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It means reputation. This weblog is enhancing my reputation (I hope) as a writer, and likewise any articles I write for Computerworld or Digital Web Magazine or any other publication will enhance my reputation too. If they're good articles. One day I might've accumulated enough whuffie to actually begin to make some money. If enough people read what I write and like it, then I may become marketable as an author/writer. That's pretty much what happened to Cory Doctorow himself. He has a hugely successful blog, Boing Boing, and that together with his earlier short stories and novels gained him enough whuffie to help him make it big with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

It's the same with web development. Ben and Mena Trott, and now Anil Dash, have put in 2-3 years of hard yakka to get Movable Type to the position it holds now: number 1 weblog system in the world. Movable Type has enormous whuffie. Now they want to get paid for it, which is totally understandable from the point of view I've laid out in this post. I'm sure people like Mark Fletcher of Bloglines (currently free) and Dave Sifry of Technorati (currently free) are thinking along the same lines. Both of those products have huge whuffie with the Web community. Sooner or later they will reach for the golden ring. Just as I will with my writing.

Yesterday I explained why I moved my blog from Radio Userland and today I'm going to explain how I did it. I'll also talk a bit about my new CSS layout.

The Move

I have to give a big shout-out to Bill Kearney, whose Radio Exporter tool made it relatively easy to export all my content from Radio to MT. There were a couple of gotchas for me though - one was I had to convert the date format Radio uses (DD-MM-YYYY) to the format MT wanted (MM-DD-YYYY). The second additional thing I had to do was get rid of all the line breaks I had in my content - I used MS Word (of all things) to do that. There was some other faffing about, but eventually I got all the content imported into MT.

The next task was to maintain the same URL structure in my new MT blog, so that permalinks to past articles wouldn't break. Again Bill Kearney had solved this - it was a matter of adjusting the date-based archive template in MT to use the same date format as Radio.

My comments system proved to be the biggest challenge (apart from the CSS that is, which I'll get to in a minute). I debated with myself whether to use MT's in-built comments system, or whether to stick with Phil Pearson's excellent Python Community Server. I decided it would be easiest to keep going with PYCS, rather than try and migrate all the comments across. Plus I like the pop-up box method of comments, rather than sticking comments on the same page as my posts. Although having said that, I do admit that having comments on the same page as the post encourages community-centred conversations. But for now I'm very happy with PYCS. A big shout-out here to Phil Pearson, who has been helping me migrate my comments.

NB: some of the old comments haven't yet made it across, so if you're wondering why a comment you made on my blog in the past is no longer present - it's not because I deleted it, unfortunately it's stuck in transit. It'll be back soon.

So that was basically how I moved my content across to MT. There were a few other gotchas along the way, but that's par for the course whenever you move weblogs - and every person's gotchas will be different, so there's little point in me describing them here.

The CSS Re-design

Now before I start talking about the CSS, I have to say that I don't think my new design is - visually speaking - anything to write home about. I'm no Zeldman or Asterisk or Simplebits. Those guys are artistes, whereas I'm not worthy to shine their shoes (in a web design sense). But even though I have the esthetic sensibilities of a bull in a paint supplies shop, nevertheless I wanted to design my very own style for my MT weblog. My goal was to design a fairly unique, CSS-positioned, table-less layout that had semantically meaningful <div> tags dripping from its very pores.

Last time I did a CSS design, I borrowed one from the fab CSS Zen Garden (with the designer's permission of course). But this time I specifically wanted to create my own CSS design from the ground up. So firstly I studied lots of existing designs, to see how others did it, and I consulted various books such as Eric Meyer on CSS (thanks to Code is Mandatory for lending me that, plus the Zeldman book). I noticed that most of the good designs out there are centred and fixed width, but eventually I decided on a left-aligned fixed width design - to be slightly different, but also I think the main menu is best positioned on the left of a page rather than horizontally below the header (where most trendy websites place it). I also opted for 3 columns, as I wanted to highlight my Quicklinks in a place that was separate from the main navigation. The right-hand column is where most bloggers put their quicklinks, and in this case I opted to go with the common wisdom (Jakob Nielsen would be proud of me).

The CSS design I created uses 'float: left' and 'float: right' to position the left and right columns, and the main content area fits in between. All 3 columns are placed within a container div. The effect of the two vertical grey lines that separate each column is attained via a vertically tiled background image - see Dan Cederholm's excellent article on Faux Columns. There is one little gotcha here that I didn't discover until the morning after I published my new CSS - in the HTML file, the code for the left and right columns must be placed before the code for the centre column. This means the left and right columns will render before the centre column, which will prevent jerky scrolling in Mozilla and overlaying divs in all browsers.

There are a few other things I need to tidy up in my CSS - e.g. there is an annoying bug in IE's rendering of pages that include an <em> tag. So if you notice the right grey line missing on a page which has italics, that's the reason. This and a few other minor things still need patching up. I also suspect I haven't covered all bases for backwards compatibility (IE 5 browsers and the like). Sigh, the joys of CSS design. I will try and fix these things up over the next few weeks.

One more thing, I will try and jazz up the design some more - e.g. with a graphical header and some more stuff in the right column...maybe music-logging (a la Lucas and Seb)?? Hmmm, have to think about that. Any suggestions?

Summary

Well that about brings to a close my latest project - moving to MT and designing a new CSS layout. I can now get back into writing and other explorations. I have an interesting RSS article coming up, regarding E-Government. Stay tuned :-)

My transition to Movable Type is mostly complete now, at least in terms of migrating content from Radio Userland and getting my new CSS design to a position of relative stability. In this post I'll explain my motives for switching to Movable Type. In my next post I'll provide some details of the process I went through to switch and how I designed the CSS.

First of all, let me say that I have nothing against Radio Userland as a product. I've been using it for over 2 years, it introduced me to the world of blogging and RSS, and it's served me well. But now it's time for a change and here are my main reasons:

The desktop model of publishing no longer suits me.
Radio Userland is a kind of web server for your PC. It's an application that resides on your PC and to publish from it, you "upstream" html pages from your PC to your web server. Movable Type on the other hand is an application that is installed on the web server and accessed via your web browser. There are benefits to both models, but the main benefit to the MT one is that you are not tied to one computer. You can publish from MT using any computer that's connected to the Internet. Which is what I want nowadays.

I want dynamic webpages.
Movable Type has strong support for PHP, which is a server-side scripting language. This is something I want to learn more about. I'm very familiar with ASP (Microsoft's server-side scripting language) and I used to run an ASP-based website in the late 90's. PHP is basically the open source counterpart of ASP, so I'd like to play around with it.

Movable Type has a very strong Developer community - e.g. lots of plug-ins.
This is something I feel that Radio Userland has lost a lot of ground in over the past year. When I first started using Radio, there was a vibrant community of developers who created new add-ons and plug-ins. But those developers have drifted away from Radio, while at the same time MT's developer community has flourished. I think this has a lot to do with Radio Userland not having had any major upgrade in functionality in the last 2 years. Radio Userland version 8.0.8 was released in May 2002 and there hasn't been another version since that date. And what's most frustrating is that Radio users have been promised new features for quite some time, but nothing has eventuated. In July 2003 then-CEO John Robb promised that "lots of great things coming for Radio will be out in the next 3-4 months" and that many of them would be "truly revolutionary".

Well I'm sick of waiting. I don't mean that to sound mean-spirited, because I'm very fond of the Radio Userland product and community. Many of the people I've met over the last year and put on my blogroll are Radio users. I just feel that we've been let down by the product not moving forward and not keeping pace with the likes of Movable Type and Wordpress.

But back to Movable Type - it has a strong developer community and a guy like me relies and thrives on plug-ins and add-ons. I'm not a programmer by trade, but I do like to tinker and mess around under the hood of software products. I've had a great deal of fun mucking around in the radio.root file, for example. I'm looking forward to doing the same with MT, but with PHP and plug-ins. btw that's also why I like XML technologies such as XSLT and XPath - they allow me to experiment and be an "information-remix junkie" (Rogers Cadenhead's term).

MT is free
As in free beer. Radio costs US$40 per year, so even if it did come up with a major new upgrade in 2004 I'd have to shell out about $75 dollars for it (NZ currency). While I have nothing against paying for software, I'm afraid $75 per year isn't trivial for me. Radio should perhaps consider a model where you pay US$40 for purchasing the product, then say US$10 every year for the privilege of downloading upgrades.

Movable Type is a lot easier to design CSS layouts with
Designing with Web Standards and CSS is important for me, not so much to show my wares as a designer (I'm "graphically-challenged", I guess you could put it!). CSS is mainly important to me because of its semantic qualities. I've written about this before, so I won't repeat myself here. But I will say that Movable Type is much easier to design in CSS with. When I did my first CSS layout in Radio, I had to change some macros and fiddle around in the root file to get it working.

Movable Type has in-built search functionality
I haven't turned this on yet, because I haven't got around to styling it. But it's coming soon...

I wanted a stronger connection between my main weblog and my linkblog.
I've been running my linkblog in Movable Type for the past 7 months. I think now's the time for me to integrate it more strongly with my main weblog. Not just in terms of what tool I use to publish it, but in the next few weeks you'll see the designs of those two blogs move closer together.

I've joked in the past about the 'Read/Write Web Media Empire', but I do have some real-life plans to have a "network" of blogs. So far I have a main writing weblog (Read/Write Web) and a blog to store links (Web of Ideas). Next up: multimedia blogging!

Summary

Those are the main reasons why I moved to Movable Type. But it's also got a lot to do with the kind of person I am - curious, an intellectual explorer, someone who likes to challenge himself with Web technologies. Those are all fancy ways of saying: time for a change. I still like Radio Userland and would recommend it to my friends. But the Movable Type era has begun at Read/Write Web!

Pardon my dust, I'm in the process of moving my weblog from Radio Userland to Movable Type. Also, as you can see, I've done a re-design. There are still a few CSS issues to iron out, so things may be a bit funky for the next few days. But I decided to publish my new weblog now anyway, because...well, I'm an impatient character and I want to get back to my writing.

I'll explain more about why I decided to move to Movable Type in my next post. Right now, I need some sleep!

ps comments for old posts haven't been hooked up yet.

pps did you get the movie reference in the title :-) The River Phoenix movie... I'm sure the joke has been done before.

I've now swapped my comments system from Radio Userland's comments server to the Python Community Server, developed and hosted by Phil Pearson. The reason I did this was because I've experienced frequent problems with Radio Userland's comments server, causing slow downloads of my webpages and sometimes no service. This is probably caused by the large number of people Radio Userland host on their servers. The PyCS comments system is also a step up in functionality - it features things like RSS feeds for comments, ability to delete comments, and other admin options. It also looks better!

But I should warn you: the set-up process wasn't as straight-forward for Radio Userland users as the instructions led me to believe. Below I've documented the process I went through. Other Radio users who want to swap to PyCS may want to follow this process, but be aware that it's not necessarily the correct or recommended one - it's just what worked for me.

1. Fill out the online form for a PyCS Comment hosting account.

2. Next, politely ask Phil to import all your old comments from Radio Userland's server to the PyCS one. Phil's automated this now, nevertheless it still takes up some of his time so ask nicely. I recommend the phrase "Pretty please with cherries on top" (not sure if it's an exclusively kiwi phrase, but I was taught to say this as a child!).

3. Now open up your Radio Userland client and browse to Preferences > Comments. In the "Specify a server" section, swap the Radio Userland URL with this one:
http://www.pycs.net/system/comments.py

4. Here's where I had problems with the instructions. It's not quite as simple as just adding in some code to the Homepage and Item templates. I ended up having to modify some things in the Radio root file. So if you're brave enough, click File > Open > Radio.root. Open each of the following 3 files and make the change below:
system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.getCommentLink
system.verbs.builtins.radio.weblog.render
system.verbs.builtins.radio.macros.CommentOnThisPage

For each of the above 3 files, look for the Comments URL's. For each of those swap "user.radio.prefs.usernum" with your PyCS user id - e.g. mine is "000280". NB: be careful not to change the Trackback URL's, as you'll still need Radio Userland's server for that (Phil is working on adding this to PyCS in the future).

5. Still in Radio.root, open this file:
system.verbs.builtins.radio.data.cloudUrls
...and swap the "CommentsPageUrl" value to this: http://www.pycs.net/system/comments.py

OK, this is how I got my Radio Userland weblog to swap to PyCS comments. Once again, I don't claim this is the easiest or even a 100% correct method. It probably needs a real Radio Userland expert like Rogers Cadenhead to cast his eyes over it.

But for now I'm really happy with the result and I hope my readers enjoy the better Comments service, provided by Phil with his 'kiwi ingenuity'. Thanks Phil!

Update: OK, Phil has discovered the Easy Way (or is it the Wasy Way?) and it doesn't involve rooting around in the Radio Userland root file. So ignore my instructions above; make life easier for yourself by following Phil's instructions instead.

Excellent, I now have Radio Userland's Trackback enabled. There have been some interesting suggestions for other new Radio features too, so hopefully some of those ideas will get implemented soon. I especially like the idea of modular templates, suggested by John Robb.

News today that Userland CEO John Robb has left the company. Dave Winer says about Userland's future direction:

"We're going to try to do something fun, unique, and powerful with UserLand's position in the weblog and content tools market, and we're going to try to include the community in the business, i.e. people will make money."

Sounds fascinating. Best of luck to the staff at Userland. I like the Radio Userland product and its community of users - lots of forward motion! I'm keen to see what strategy Userland pursues, in order to keep pace with the likes of Six Apart and Blogger/Google. People are already offering their support.

Regarding John Robb, interesting to note that his Radio weblog is no longer on the air. Here's a link to someone who appears to have recorded John Robb's last post (I couldn't help being curious about it). This is the tantalizing last sentence:

"There is a huge amount of forward motion in the weblog world from organizations that will pay real money (this answers Scoble's question) ;->

Onward!"

Onward indeed. Look forward to positive news ahead for both Userland and John Robb.

One thing that is definitely "funky" is the blogroll in Radio Userland. I updated my blogroll.opml file last night but - no matter what trickery I do - the changes won't publish. That is why my external links look a bit odd right now.

John Robb recently announced that Radio will soon release a new version, which is exciting news for us Radio fans. I look forward to the new features. But I also hope they address the little things, like the continuing blogroll funkiness. 

Radio is a wonderful product and I like playing around with it. But there are some kinks in the publishing process which need to be ironed out, pleeeease :-) 

postscript: ha ha, typically as soon as I published this I discovered how to force my blogroll to publish. In my browser, I browsed to the location of my blogroll: http://radio.weblogs.com/0105304/gems/blogroll.opml. I noticed it was still displaying the old version of my blogroll. Hmmm, so I refreshed the browser and it updated to the new version. I thought well maybe that will finally update my weblog. Nothing else had worked and I had tried everything - including deleting the blogroll.opml file from my gems folder and its reference from my homepage template, clicking 'Radio --> Publish --> Entire Website', adding the opml file back in, re-publishing, etc.

So anyway after refreshing the blogroll.opml page in my browser, I re-published this post and - lo and behold - my blogroll had finally updated on my homepage. Praise be. I can go and enjoy my Sunday now :-)