Solipsism Gradient

Dave Pollard writes about the loneliness of the new blogger:

So what can the new blogger do to salvage his (or her) self-esteem when, like the guy that sets up a snazzy new office, sends out flyers and then sits by the phone wondering why no one is calling, his brilliant new blog flounders at the bottom of the page-reads list, unloved and, worse, unread?…

He goes on to give excellent advice… thanks to Radio Free Blogistan for the link.

The Hairy Eyeball pointed me at Lingua Blogs, a list of blogs interested in/about language – a long-time interest of mine – and one of those is the Enigmatic Mermaid. Good stuff…

…and Enig was the one that linked to Japanese Smileys some days ago, and I lost the link. Sorry about that.

Can’t recall what links I followed to get there, but I ran into The Hairy Eyeball. Mostly in English, some stuff in Portuguese – the author lives in São Paulo. Great design, great content, lots of content… only the RSS feed wasn’t working, and I sent e-mail. (It works now )

And he liked my disclaimer! Thanks, Colin!

Sébastien Paquet‘s weblog reminded me to look at Topic Exchange, which I’d been meaning to do for a couple of weeks. Basically, it’s a central database for trackbacks about a given topic… very interesting. I’ll be using it to debug my trackback implementation.

Slowly, I’m getting rid of several bugs in my phpBB code, and implementing new features.

Subscribing to a topic’s feed was crashing if the feed contained a poll; this has been fixed.

I’m implementing threading and trackback now. In preparation for this, the per-message “reply” button now copies the subject line – just like the “quote” button, but no quote is generated. In the next version, “quote” and “reply” will tie the whole thread together.

In contrast, the former top-level “reply” button now says “New Post” and will open up a new thread inside the current topic.

I’ve been getting some comments from people used to standard phpBB forums, mostly complaining about not being able to open new topics.

My intention is to slowly evolve phpBB towards a MovableType-like model. Since I’m the principal poster on this weblog and the forums, and other people post occasional comments and suggestions, this seems very convenient; I’m not interested in running a completely open forum with hundreds of topics.

So, I see my Forum Index as similar to a weblog’s categories, and the topics themselves as sub-categories. And the way I’ll do threads and trackbacks will make them similar to in-line comments on MovableType weblogs.

Found and fixed several bugs in the RSS code.

You can now subscribe to topics containing polls, and the RSS items have been cleared of superfluous <span>s and references to styles – simple old-style HTML tags are now used.

Also, the per-message “reply” button now works the same as the “quote” button, except that no quote is generated. In other words, it repeats the “Subject” line. In the near future, it will also keep a special thread index to keep all posts on the same thread together.

The former top-level “reply” button now says “new post”. It will open a new thread inside the topic.

In the works: threads and trackbacks.

Andrew Zolli, in his guestblog on Boing boing, writes about Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico (with photos and links):

Although few history books mention his name, in the mid-1800’s Joshua Abraham Norton proclaimed himself Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico.

… Indulged by the local populace, Norton ate free in the best restaurants, which accepted his ‘currency’. During his reign, he issued a steady stream of proclamations, in which (among many other things) he abolished the Congress, called for the building of the Bay Bridge, and banished the F-word (“Frisco”) from polite speech.

Though a complete loon, he was beloved by San Franciscans during his time, and more than 30,000 people attended his funeral. Fittingly, no quote marks or other explanatory notes mark his epitaph.

Sébastien Paquet wrote “Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research”, an excellent paper on weblogging.

Link courtesy of Der Schockwellenreiter.