Category Archives: blogging

Local blogging goes Wild!

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I just added the next set of blogs to Perth Blog Feeds. There are now 23 blogs being aggregated into the feed and I’m really starting to like the way it feels. There are a lot of us out there, writing from all sorts of different places and experience about all sorts of things. It brings the place alive.

Now I wish I’d made the Meetup this week. A nasty chest cold kept me away and the last thing I wanted to do was infect all of Perth bloggers with a few coughs. But I want to meet all you people. Next month for sure.

So, to the Perth Bloggers — keep those words flowing, and as Johnny Bannister would say:

Love your work. Don’t go changing.

Perth Blog Feeds update

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As you all probably know, the aggregated Perth Blog Feeds were broken for a bit there. While the html version was working ok, the RSS 1 and RSS 2 feeds failed to validate and would break some news readers.

Well, I’ve made some progress with the planet aggregation code and now it works a lot better. Pardon me while I go into a bit of technical detail here. The dc:creator elements in the feeds were occasionally getting stray greater-than or less-than symbols in them, making validation break and busting news readers. I added HTML escaping into the template for the dc:creator elements, and now that problem has gone away.

The original source of the problem hasn’t gone, however. You’ll still see the occasional stray greater-than or less-than symbols showing up in some posts in the feed. There is some interaction between the source feeds and what comes out of the aggregator leading to stray stuff getting left in the feeds.

Strangely, it gets a lot worse if I include the feed from Robert Corr’s Kick & Scream. Why? Not sure. Nothing about his feed looks strange or broken. I’m not sure, will diagnose that one next.

I missed the meetup

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Not only was I not there, but I really missed being at the blogger meetup it as well. Thanks to ‘minutes’ from Mark, Ben, Anthony and others, I can see it was illuminating. Oh well. See you all and perhaps even more next month.

And in other news, the RSS versions of the Perth Blog Feed are broken again, or at least some of the RSS feeds are. Seems that python magic planetplanet is somehow producing bad xml, resulting in dummy spitting by my news reader at least :-( I’ll look more into it in a few days. Until then, the html version still seems to be working ok.

middle~path newsfeed changes

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If you are using RSS, RSS2 or atom new feeds from middle~path, you’ll eventually need to update the feed URLs in your aggregation or feed reading software, because they have changed due to my change over to WordPress powering the blog.

Here are the new locations:

RSS 0.92: http://barkingowl.com/middle~path/feed/rss/

RSS2: http://barkingowl.com/middle~path/feed/rss2/

atom: http://barkingowl.com/middle~path/feed/atom/

I’ve got a script periodically generating the old files anyway, so don’t panic about changing this. As if you would :-)

Move to WordPress

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I’ve just completed migration of my middle~path blog over to using WordPress rather than good old Movable Type, and have done some re-design in the process. A lot of it looks the same, but I’ve tidied things up a bit and added a lot of stuff to the template that I’ve been meaning to for ever.

So, welcome to the new look. There might be a few wrinkles to sort out. Bear with me.

Update: And I just patched things a bit to get my blogging client, ecto, to work. Thanks to jr for the xmlrpc patches needed.

Perth Blog Feed update

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I’ve added a bunch more local blogs (from the growing list of local blogs at the Perth Blogs wiki) to the Perth Blog Feed. It was a bit shakey there for a while, and there are still a few issues with spurious angle brackets and stuff.

I can see I’m going to have to come up with an automatic add and remove page for this. Stay tuned. For a while. Possible for quite a while :-)

If people are reading and enjoying the feed, I’d love to know it. How about leaving me a comment here:

Perth Blog Feeds are Go

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New! We now have an aggregated RSS feed of Perth Blogs listed on the Perth Blogs . You can now pop either of these two feeds (below) into your feed reading software and enjoy a list of recent Perth blog entries.

RSS 1.0

RSS 2.0

I have to add blogs manually at this point, so I’ll try and keep up as new ones come along. But for now, it works nicely. Enjoy!

Thanks to Rich for the pointer to planet planet which does the hard work of aggregating so smoothly.

Perth Blogs Wiki

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At the blogger meetup last night we decided we needed to do some thing to raise our profile as a group. Announcing the Perth Blogs wiki, which is a shared place for Perth bloggers and a definitive list of Blogs in Perth.

If you have a Perth blog, please add yourself to the list. If you don’t, wander over anyway and have a look at who else around here is blogging.

Coming soon — an aggregated RSS feed of Perth Blogs. Stay tuned.

Last night’s meetup was excellent. Read the reports by Rich (with photo!) and Mark.

People make bad metadata

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Cory Doctorow writes about humans and metadata in Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia.

((Metadata is one of those slippery things to define. I can say it is data about data but does that help? For example, the metadata for a word processing document includes all the title, summary, category and keyword kind of stuff that you are asked to fill in when you create a document, but almost nobody ever does. Dealing intelligently with metadata helps us link things together and make sense of our data in a bigger way than on an item-by-item basis.))

In torching the seven straw straw men, Cory explains how people tend to be lazy, liars, inconsistent, stupid and unable to categorise things reliably. Plus other big human failings. People will never fill in the metadata reliably. It is better to stick to metadata that can be arrived at automatically.

The O’Reilly Radar

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I’m always telling people about Tim O’Reilly’s speech at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference this year. He talked through a lot of particularly interesting stuff that is emerging on the net, and if you are doing anything with the Internet and content, you need to hear what he is saying.

To paraphrase: Where do the big internet successes (Google, eBay, Amazon) get lots of their content from? Leveraged from their community. For free.

Read a Transcript, download MP3s or stream audio from IT Conversations (simple registration required).

Comment spam

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I’ve not been blogging much lately. Well, I haven’t been adding entries to the blog as such. Instead I’ve been dealing with lots and lots of comment spam on comments to my entries, and that has taken the fun out of blogging for a while :-(

((Comment spam is a bunch of comments left in a weblog that are put there to advertise something or raise some site’s google rank. Comment spamming is disrespectful and unfriendly.))

Now I’ve made some changes to the blog, including adding the MT-Blacklist plugin, so the evil spammers and their vile robots will have to try harder to get spam comments into the blog and it is much easier for me to go through and delete them.

So now blogging is fun again. Huge respect to the kind people that have worked out the changes to make to Movable Type and have made plugins like MT-Blacklist. You folk are great.

That photo from the blogger meetup was awful…

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Local bloggers that showed up where at the blogger meetup a week ago are probably wondering where the photo is. Well, the sad truth is that the photo, which looked ok on the tiny preview screen of the camera, is out of focus and all round awful. The camera must have focussed on something else, and all you can see are blurry grins and red eyes. Not a Good Look.

So, I haven’t posted it. I’ll try again next month and see if we can do better.

Blogger Meetup Wednesday night

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Last night, for the first time, we managed to get a blogger meetup to happen in Perth. We met at Little Creatures and had a great evening just talking about our blogs and favourite blogs, the net and who we are and what we did and all of that. A pretty cool bunch of folk, I think.

Who was there?

Mark of still got butterflies
Bret of NotTheWest and son.
Richard of Richard Giles blog

Next meeting: The third Wednesday in April, hopefully somewhere that has WiFi. I’m looking forward to it. Come along.

Creative Commons 1st birthday flash

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Creative Commons have a new flash presentation that talks about the first year of the amazing creative commons license. It is called Reticulum Rex or is that Remix Culture.

Very clever, very inspiring. Doesn’t look like anybody is adapting the licenses for Australian law yet. This is something we should get onto. Know any good Australian Copyright lawyers?

moving to categories — more structure

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I’m a little over 100 entries into this blog and loving it. I’m not posting as frequently as I’d like to, but that seems to be something that goes in bursts. From time to time I post a lot, then take a break, do something else, and then come back fresh. That kind of cycle feels good.

At entry 100+, though, I’m having a blog content crisis. It all seems a bit of a random mess, so I want to start putting some structure in the postings here. I’m going to start using categories for entries, and then have recent entries listed by category, so you can see and read the different streams here. The categories will help me keep a track of what I am up to, as well.

All this stuff will emerge over the next few days. A lot of existing entries to put into categories.