weblogs

I’ve been blogging since around November 2000 (arguably, earlier than that, that’s just when I started using software on the backend); this is for posts generally about blogging.

MSN Spaces reactions

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Robert Scoble is collecting reactions to MSN Spaces, including mine:

Michael Hanscom: “Power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.” (Scoble’s note to Michael: hey, did you see the Macintosh in the video?)

I actually haven’t taken the time yet to watch either of the two introductory videos that Scoble posted, so no, I hadn’t seen that yet. :) I’ll try to get a look at them later today, maybe this evening.

iTunes “Get to Know Ya” by Johnson, Jesse from the album Pretty In Pink (1986, 3:35).

MSN Spaces launches

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Microsoft finally makes their long-rumored debut into the weblogging service arena with MSN Spaces. I got curious, and it’s free, so I went ahead and signed up for a Space of my own to try it out. I have no intentions of moving over…I just wanted to kick the tires a bit, so to speak.

My MSN Spaces site

Signup is pretty easy, as long as you have a MS Passport (I didn’t…but now I do). So far, it seems to be a fairly decent option for beginning bloggers — it’s free, there are a decent number of design templates (though there’s only so much customization you can do, much like the entry-level TypePad system), you can choose whether or not to syndicate your blog (with RSS 2.0 only), comments and Trackback are both supported (interestingly, Trackback has three options: disable, accept from everywhere, and accept only from other MSN Space weblogs, with the last option being the default [and I don’t seem to be able to switch it off of the default so that I can allow Trackback pings from everyone]), there are a few default categories and custom categories can be added…all the basics, and some frills.

MSN Spaces apparently ties in tightly with both MSN Messenger and MS Outlook (though I can’t play with that, being a Mac user), and as such, adds a special privacy option that can restrict visibility of your weblog to only people on your MSN Messenger Allow list, along with an option to only allow selected contacts in your MSN Address Book to see your blog.

secure.spaces.msn.com

There are settings for moblogging (blogging via cell phone) — amusingly, though, when I first clicked on the “Mobile” settings tab, I got an “unknown authority” error dialog. Not having a cell phone, there’s not much here I can play with.

You get 10 MB of storage, with no indication if there’s a way to increase this (or if there will be a way in the future). That should be fine for a good amount of text, but enough photos will eventually eat into that, so there’s a simple file manager to allow you to delete any photos you’ve uploaded.

Finally, there are some simple statistics available, showing total page views, views this week, today, and in the last hour, along with a referrer list (no idea how extensive the referrer list is, as I’ve got all of three hits so far while poking around with things).

So far, so good — it looks like a decent entry-level weblogging service.

One thing did catch my eye, though, and it could be a big one: apparently, posts have to be written with paragraph tags (\<p> and \</p>) or linebreak tags (\
), otherwise your text gets all smooshed together into a single paragraph. I was surprised enough that this would be the default behavior after I posted my first test post, but looking through the interface, I can’t see an option to turn on any sort of automatic linebreak conversion that would allow someone to type normally and actually get paragraphs. I can see this causing some serious headaches from HTML-ignorant newcomers who expect to see paragraphs and instead get huge blocks of unseparated text!

(Caveat: I am looking at this via Safari on my Mac, so it’s entirely possible that this actually works correctly with IE/Win — though if that’s the case, that’s another strike against the system, in my view.)

There is a note on the bottom of the posting screen that “Some HTML tags may be removed from your entry for security and formatting reasons” — unfortunately, they don’t list which tags may be removed. And what’s this “may” bit? Are they or aren’t they? Will the list of which tags get removed change from time to time, and if so, why? Odd.

Clicking the “Trackback” link takes you to the comment entry form, and I can’t find a Trackback link to send a ping to. I can’t find a Trackback address in the source code, either, and auto-discovery from the MT QuickPost interface isn’t coming up with anything either. Perhaps that’s due to not being able to set the global Trackback acceptance flag?

Permalinks are ugly — for instance, the permalink for my first test post is http://spaces.msn.com/members/michaelhanscom/Blog/cns!1plKnLKPq0gBtnAfWaupqTNA!106.entry. Ouch.

Source code is also ugly (though honestly, that’s exactly what I expected). Heavily table-based, lots of crud and cruft. Running it through the W3C validator returns 193 errors, and that’s after the validator displays a big warning that no Doctype was found so it’s guessing 4.01 Transitional.

End result: it’ll keep newbies and MS fans happy (assuming that that bit with requiring paragraph or linebreak tags is fixed), but power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.

(via Scoble)

iTunes “Making Plans for Nigel” by XTC from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1979, 4:10).

2004 Weblog Awards

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Nominations are now open for the 2004 Weblog Awards.

I’m not sayin’. I’m just sayin’. ;)

Categories I might be eligible for, if I were nominated: Best Overall Blog (not going to happen), Best Blog Design (again, not going to happen), Best of the Top 100-250 Blogs or Best of the Top 2500-3500 Blogs (as ranked by the Blogging Ecosystem, where I’m currently ranked as either [#215][] [Large Mammal] or [#2525][] [Adorable Little Rodent] depending on how the URL is written — and I don’t think I’m popular enough to grab a win in either of these categories, either).

Still, it’s fun to dream, right?

iTunes “Funky Music” by Utah Saints from the album Two (2001, 3:36).

New Reads

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Thanks to tdavid‘s creation of an easy-to-import OPML file of Wednesday’s Meetup attendees, I’ve just added a good number of local webloggers — essentially, everyone who was at the meetup and has an RSS feed available — to my daily reads.

I’ve noticed from time to time just how few local writers I’ve had in my daily reading list, this should be a nice change.

Until I take the time to update the blogroll here, the curious can peek at my current reads through my Bloglines page.

Weblogger’s Meetup

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Just got back a bit ago from this month’s Seattle Weblogger’s Meetup.

Weblogger's Meetup

Roundabout 20-something people in attendance, of whom I knew three or so beforehand. A full list of attendees can be found at 8 Bit Joystick. Nice evening, lots of chatting.

Now I’m tired, though, and will be heading to bed before too terribly long.

iTunes “Chickasuarus” by Pigface from the album Preaching to the Perverted (2001, 5:04).

Googlebomb Spam Attack

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Looks like someone’s come up with a new, not-really-all-that-clever use for comment spam: using it to attempt to Googlebomb someone that they’re ticked off at.

The following showed up in my inbox three times, with three different IP addresses:

IP Address: 202.175.26.151
Name: Whiny Communist Bitch
Email Address: commie\@mamamusings.net
URL: http://www.mamamusings.net

Comment:

I just can’t shut my pie hole.

Normally, that’d be a sure sign of the standard comment spam, but I was pretty sure that mamamusings.net was another weblogger, so I headed over to be sure, and to give her the details.

Turns out that she already knows, which is good.

Heartening to know we can all be so mature, isn’t it? Didn’t “commie” go out of vogue as an insult a couple decades ago, anyway?

iTunes “Honey” by Amos, Tori from the album More Pink – The B-Sides (1994, 3:49).

Well, bummer

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Last night was the monthly Seattle Webloggers Meetup, which I’d been planning on going to.

Unfortunately, I got roped into covering at one of my work’s stores while the staff went to an employee meeting. They were supposed to be done by seven, which would have given me time to get home, change, and head to the meetup, which started around 7:30. Instead, they didn’t even get out of the meeting until 7:30, and then what with passing on information and all, I didn’t get home until eight, at which point I was too hungry and tired to face walking the twenty or so blocks to the meetup to show up at least an hour late.

Two and a half hours of OT, though — can’t whine too much. ;)

So, I stayed at home, splurged on ordering a pizza, and watched some Angel episodes.

I’ll try for the Meetup again next month.

iTunes “Love Like Blood (Gestalt)” by Killing Joke from the album Wilful Days (1984, 6:45).

New toys to play with

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Y’know, it’s really hard to get anything useful done when I run across all these nifty new toys to play with.

First up was Flickr, an online photo sharing website. I’d actually poked around with Flickr a few months ago, and it didn’t impress me enough to come back. They’ve made a lot of upgrades to the service over time, though, and something finally prompted me to take a second look tonight. I must admit, I’m fairly impressed — impressed enough that I’ll probably finally take down my all too neglected photoblog, and stick with Flickr for a pesudo-photoblog. To that end, there’s a new item in the sidebar, just underneath the linklog, that will automatically update whenever I post a new image to my Flickr page.

One of the new features that sold me on Flickr is their RSS keyword integration. Each photo that is uploaded to Flickr can be assigned an arbitrary number of keywords, or ‘tags’ in Flickr-speak (for instance, the only photo I have up at the moment has the keywords ‘seattle’, ‘bumbershoot’, ‘fountain’, ‘kids’, and ‘children’). You can search for tags on the Flickr site, and then subscribe to an RSS feed for that search. I’ve set up four subscriptions in my newsreader (bumbershoot, seattle, anchorage, and alaska), so anytime anyone uploads a photo to flickr with one of those tags, I’ll see it pop up in my newsreader. Quite nifty.

There’s also a ‘blog this’ functionality that is supposed to allow you to instantly post any photo you find on Flickr to your weblog (which is where the previous entry came from). I’m not sure how often I’ll use this, for a few reasons. The first is simply that when I tried the test post, Flickr returned an error telling me that the post failed, though it later showed up on my weblog — not sure whether this was a Flickr issue or a TypePad issue, though. Secondly, Flickr-generated posts come through with no categories set, and me being obsessive about metadata, I’m not terribly thrilled with that. Lastly, there’s the simple aspect of appropriating other people’s photographs without permission (is permission for a picture’s distribution an implicit — or even explicit — part of the Flickr community or license agreement?), which I’m not sure what I think about just yet.

The other new toy for the night is the public release of the ecto 2 public beta. I’ve been using ecto as my weblogging client for a while now, and ecto 2 is a major upgrade to the application. Most of what I’m seeing I really like, though I did immediately switch off the ‘WYSIAWYG’ rich text editing in favor of the “old-skool” HTML editing, and I miss the popup window that used to appear when using command-U to insert a URL held in the clipboard (in ecto 1, you could copy a URL, select the text you wanted to make a link, and hitting command-U would bring up a window with the URL in the top field [which was also a drop-down menu containing recently added links], the selected text in the middle field, and an empty field for the title attribute; ecto 2 simply adds the link code around the selected text, with the boilerplate “TITLE” text in the title attribute; clicking the ‘create a link’ button brings up the old dialog box, so why doesn’t hitting command-U do the same?).

The downside to all this is that I got so caught up in exploring the new toys that it’s now far too late to get any laundry done tonight (which was the original plan), so I’ll have to do that tomorrow morning instead, as tomorrow night is packing night. Yeah, I’m so prepared for this vacation…

iTunes “Redemption Song” by Bakra Batá from the album Music for Bad Guys (1994, 5:29).