Breaking Windows

This weekend I was a guest on the Pigskin Podcast to talk about NCAA Football 09. Be sure and check it out!

Bryan Tighe, the app developer is helping me out. I think we have got it working.

It seems that there is an issue with MT 3.35 where it puts in extra spaces on the published page, even though if you login to MT and republish, things look fine again. The problem I was having (consistently) was that I had not changed my Web Services password from the default one. Once I did that, everything was peachy again.

So, I need to upgrade Breaking Windows to MT 4, and Blog It needs to support Categories. Then this will be a Facebook application that I would use on a daily basis. Read my original review.

UPDATE: Bryan Tighe, the app developer is helping me out. I think we have got it working. 

It seems that there is an issue with MT 3.35 where it puts in extra spaces on the published page, even though if you login to MT and republish, things look fine again. The problem I was having (consistently) was that I had not changed my Web Services password from the default one. Once I did that, everything was peachy again.

So, I need to upgrade Breaking Windows to MT 4, and Blog It needs to support Categories. Then this will be a Facebook application that I would use on a daily basis.

Read full, original, review, after the break.

So Six Apart released this new Facebook app today, it is called Blog It. I know, how original. Well, it lets me post to my MT, WP, Tumblr, Twitter, Pownce, and of course Facebook mini-feed all at once.

It seems to do a good job, as I just sent my first post. The problem seems to be that is it taking line breaks and doubling them in the HTML coding. To be more clear, it looks like this:

P (text) BR BR /P for every graph I write. That is no good. So, I am using this as another test. My main blog is using MT 3.36, so I will have to test it out with MT 4 as well. I should also note that in the Blog It app in Facebook that I am using the 'Plain Text' Format. They have added Markdown already today which is nice. I hope they add TinyMCE or similar WYSIWYG soon.

Funny story: I shoot alltop.com an email asking to include us in their gaming.alltop.com aggregation page. I knew Alltop was the brainchild of Nononina and Guy Kawasaki, but I did not expect a personal email from him.

But that is just what I got, and after a bunch of back-and-forth, BC Gaming is listed on their Gaming page -- which is a great list of gaming sites.

On their Gaming page if you click "Acknowledgements" my name is listed; pretty cool. Guy had not listed GamePolitics, which is a crime in itself, so I suggested them, too.

As Brian said on the radio show "we're Internet famous!" 

Watch this video as Guy offers his thoughts on the Macbook Air, the blogosphere, and talks about his new online venture, Alltop.

His comment at the end about the blogosphere is priceless.

Oh, and my thoughts exactly on the MacBook Air.

I have logged over 40 hrs. in just four days this week (today was a short day, as I only worked 12 hrs.). No, I am not trying to break a record, or kill myself -- I had exactly three days to take a design comp for a newspaper, complete production, and implement it for The BG News.

The paper went down tonight. It looks great. There are still some styles that need tweaked and added, a bulk of the library created, and I still have to fix up the almost useful style book, but the brunt of the work is over.

I love it when stuff like this is dropped in my lap like this. At least if I knew it was coming, I would have prepared for it.

Those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.

A Reuters employee was suspended after using the company's internet access to issue a threat saying "I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut."

The e-mail was sent to Charles Johnson, who maintains the of Little Green Footballs blog.

Reuters really hates bloggers. First they foil a photoshop job, and now they are writing about Israel and jihadist terrorist activities (OMG!).

How stupid was it to send an email from within the company network? I would have at least used an anonymous proxy.

Two black eyes for Reuters, back-to-back no less. Nice job fellas.

Last night, I had the pleasure of giving a guest lecture at Trinity University in San Antonio... But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to talk about the future. Instead, I wanted to focus on one of the biggest challenges of today: in our celebration of the amateur, we kind of forget what it means to be professional.

This is a very long, but quite good speech that the author posted, even in PDF. It is really worth a read, and has a bunch of stuff to digest.

While defending my position on the capitalization of words such as Internet, Web, and Net, I found this great resource. The site has some great info on it, and most is found on this page - such as their Cyberwords Style page.

Briefly, I just saw this at snopes.com: A National Geographic article from a year ago basically predicted the entire Katrina/New Orleans scenario.

Now you can use Blogger right within Word. Just download and install the Blogger for Word add-in and a Blogger toolbar will be added to Word. Its for Windows of course, with at least Word 2000. But thats pretty nice if you are a Windows Blogger user.

I thought I posted this a long time ago. I can't find it. This is an indispensable tool for finding Movable Type tags fast. MT Tabs adds a sidebar in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

I am really behind the curve on MT plugins. MT RebuildBlogs is really worth installing.

SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- Chinese bloggers, even on foreign-sponsored sites, better chose their words carefully -- the censors are watching.

Users of the MSN Spaces section of Microsoft Corp.'s new China-based Web portal get a scolding message each time they input words deemed taboo by the communist authorities -- such as democracy, freedom and human rights.

"Prohibited language in text, please delete," the message says.

Aren't you glad you live in (insert country here) where you can voice your own opinion?

LONDON - The involvement of blogging in marketing has taken a step up with the news that Microsoft is recruiting a team of bloggers to help generate a buzz for the next generation of its Windows operating system.

I guess they are banking on the readership. What if it backfires? I am sure at least one person is going to have problems, or just simply tell it like it is and talk bad about it.

But since they will be signing a NDA, I don't really see the point.

Movable Type 3.16 sports significant improvements to application security and over one hundred other fixes which really make it a highly recommended upgrade for all users.

There is a big list of changes. Yes, you should upgrade.

Yahoo Corp. has acquired the Flickr photo sharing Web site and Ludicorp Research and Development Ltd., the privately held Vancouver company that runs it, according to a posting on Flickr's staff blog.

Wow, Yahoo! is going all out - starting a blogging service in the U.S. and now Flickr. Look out Six Apart.

SAN FRANCISCO, California (Reuters) -- Yahoo Inc. said Wednesday it will soon start invitation-only testing of its new Web log and social networking service Yahoo 360, which aims to better connect users to people they already know.

The Yahoo 360 test release will mark the first time the company provides a service to create and share Web logs, also known as blogs, in the United States. Yahoo already offers such tools in some international markets like Japan and South Korea.

If you use Movable Type chances are you use MT-Blacklist. If you don't you should think about using it. Two days ago I added a string to MT-Blacklist that has so far blocked 531 spam comments. That is 531 blocked in 2 days. What did I block? The H1 tag. Yep, thats it. I found that the majority of comment spam I get starts with a H1 tag.

I have eliminated at least 95% of my comment spam. Any time saved cleansing comment spam from the system is such a relief. Comment spam eradication is the worst part of maintaining a blog.

I really wish that Six Apart (or anyone else) could do something significant with the problem. There have been large contributions to the effort like MT-Blacklist and MT-Moderate that make my life easier, but there needs to be even more effort to eliminate the spam. Spam takes the fun out of blogging.

I am just glad it was something as easy as adding a simple H1 string to MT-Blacklist that killed so much spam for me. I should have done it months ago.

One of the benefits of being a member of the Six Apart ProNet is the ProNet mailing list. MT-Moderate 1.0.0's announcement showed up in my mailbox yesterday. Neil has already wrote some on it, but I have some more to add. MT-Moderate plugs one of the biggest holes that Movable Type 3 - there is no way to moderate trackbacks.

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Mark Jen landed a dream job with Google Inc. in January. He was fired less than a month later.

His infraction? He ran a Web log, where he freely gabbed about his impressions of life at the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet search giant.

As far as I have read, this guy from Google lost his job for more reasons then just having a blog. It is his fault for what he blogged about, and what he did. Same thing for the Microsoft contractor who posted photos of new G5's arriving at Microsoft's campus. It was his fault for being stupid.

There are plenty more people in "corporate America" that have blogs and keep their jobs. There are a lot of businesses in "corporate America" that have their employees keep blogs, Google included.

Will articles like this scare people away from keeping a blog? Probably. Are the majority of the employed bloggers that stupid? No.

Blogcritics has a pretty long list of 2004 lists. We even contributed.

Be sure to check out the Blogcritics 2004 Year End Lists!

There are a lot of changes, which I had to make if I was going to respect the suggestions made by quite a few users. I'll just list them all one by one as that may give you the best overview:

A new improved XMLRPC backend
Blog more than one entry
New interface for drafts
A rich text editing mode
One blog isn't the other
Attachments
Other small additions

CMS Matrix now has 200 products for you to compare, making it the single largest CMS listing site anywhere.

Google Inc., which implemented an internal Web log system behind its firewall about 18 months ago, has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, a Google executive said.

Who thought that blogging would be part of companies like HP, Google, and Microsoft, to name a few.

A cool new site for you: Everything TypeKey, a new wiki about (you guessed it) TypeKey that Andre Torrez put together. There's sample code for using TypeKey as authentication in PHP, Perl, and ASP.Net, and a number of interesting tutorials and samples.

This is more or less a bookmark post for me, but if you find it useful, more power to you!

The screen shot here sure is tempting. Its nice to see TypePad getting these improvements. But as I too am a paying customer of Six Apart I hope that Movable Type gets similar, if not the same, improvements.

Will Six Apart add these new TypePad features to MT?

"We imagine a tool that everybody can use. We’re in the wireframe stage of a new way of blogging, and we’re extremely excited about that..."

Source: Digital Web Magazine

On a related note, wow did that site get a nice makeover!

Task Scheduler, which comes bundled with Windows attempts to make automation of tasks effortless. Unfortunately, it is not very configurable and basic in what it is capable of. On UNIX and Linux systems, Cron is what is used for task scheduling. This scheduler is very configurable, and is capable of well more then its Windows counterpart. Luckily, there is a little freeware tool available which simulates such a Cron-Job on Windows, PyrCron...

Source: Lutz-R. Frank

The first few times I saw people worrying that the new dynamic PHP-based publishing in Movable Type 3.1x would mess up their permalinks, and make Google stop loving them, I didn't worry too much about it...

Source: phil ringnalda dot com

Having had some issues to get the dynamic pages up n' running on my WindowsXP/IIS server, I decided to put down the main steps as a short tutorial for you. So, setup your new blog or take your old, upgraded one - I recommend going to MT 3.11, the currently latest version to ensure everything is running perfect.

Source: Lutz-R. Frank

What is MT-Medic you ask? It is a CGI for performing useful MT tasks, such as listing and verifying plugins, resetting passwords and granting blog creation permissions. It also just saved me a lot of grief. I did a stupid thing and nixed permissions to one of my blogs for my login. Bad idea! Thanks to 6A tech support for pointing this gem out. I got the permissions fixed in no time. Great little app to have installed!

All is well, as the mt-upgrade26.cgi said to me when i ran it. so i am now running the new 2.6 version of Movable Type. upgrade was a snap. and the new features look pretty cool, ill have a look see this weekend.

I have also updated my main template. now the drop down menus for the archives include the post count per month, and per catagory. whoo hoo!

w.bloggar is a great UI for posting to a blog, it has the text editing features that i think MT should have, like link buttons, bold, font, color, etc. etc. stuff that you would find in any forum software "new post" page. its great. and its free. thats more than i can say about NetNewsWire for Mac OS X. wich charges for its blog editing capabilities. but if you use Windows check out w.bloggar. i think the best part is i dont have to type [a href"http.... when i want to put in a link, i just click the link button.

the other thing i really like about w.bloggar is that it lets you predefine 9 custom HTML tags. such as [blockquote] that is a huge time saver! it also has a HTML menu to put in all the common tags. i cant tell you how much i enjoy the built in spell checker, hell yea!