Solipsism Gradient

Buzz Andersen, the author of PodWorks, weighs in on the shareware debate with a great suggestion:

I have personally thought about the problems with the “shareware” designation for awhile now, and I’ve come to one conclusion: that the term I prefer is independent software.

…Shareware may be dead, but who cares: indieware is alive and kicking!

I think it’s an excellent idea. So, “indieware” it is. This can also be considered an abbreviation of “individual software”, which is very fitting. Now, every former shareware author should write in to VersionTracker (info@versiontracker.com) and similar websites to have them change their labeling…

Joi Ito is asking if long RSS items are rude:

Are long RSS items rude? More and more people are reading inside of news readers and not bothering to go to the blogs themselves. (My logs show this.) Should we put full text of the blog entry in the RSS feed, even if it’s long? It will surely slow your refresh rate. Has anyone written a style guide for RSS feeds? It’s a moving target, but I would be interested to hear about how readers and writers are designing their RSS feeds.

Jason Kottke suggests offering two at least two feed options; one with full items, one with excerpts. Some weblogs already have this option, I recall.

Currently this weblog shows full items only. I’ve considered following Jason’s suggestion, and I may do so as soon as time (and my slowly growing PHP skills) allow. But personally, I prefer getting full items in the RSS feed, as I now do 95% of my reading inside NetNewsWire – and I’ll probably skip an item altogether if the excerpt is too short or not descriptive, or if there’s no proper title.

The problem with excerpts is with how they’re generated. If I recall correctly, there’s an option in Movable Type to write the full article and an excerpt. I doubt that many users take advantage of this, and apparently the usual practice is to have the RSS feed cut the item off after a certain number of bytes or words. While this may be positive, forcing people to say what they’re going to say before saying it, it often doesn’t work that way. I myself often lead off with a quote from somewhere else, which would cause a simplistic excerpting algorithm to cut off before my own comments start.

So how large is a full-item RSS feed? According to NNW’s statistics window, my average feed size is around 22K. Since I implemented ETag/if-modified-since support, my average NNW download size hovers around 5K. I frankly don’t think this is unreasonable bandwidth. On the other hand, some of the feeds I subscribe to don’t use ETags, and the feed size is quite larger. The heaviest feed I’m subscribing to currently is from Jon Udell’s weblog, which comes in at 60K average – and it’s downloaded every time.

One trick to doing lighter feeds is to avoid HTML-encoding in item texts by using the CDATA tag. Here’s how Jon’s current feed’s first item starts out:

<content:encoded>&lt;table align=&quot;right&quot; border=&quot;0&quot; cellpadding=&quot;6&quot; cellspacing=&quot;0&quot;&gt;
&lt;tr&gt;&lt;td&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.windley.com/categories/networkingAndWifi/2003/02/04.html#a421&quot;&gt;&lt;img width=&quot;200&quot; src=&quot;http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/windleyPringles.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;div align=&quot;center&quot; class=&quot;realsmall&quot;&gt;Phil Windley&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;
&lt;/table&gt;
Hey, Phil Windley&apos;s...
</content:encoded>

and for comparison, here’s how an item from my own feed begins:

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<b>By Rainer Brockerhoff:</b><br /><br /><table width="90%" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="3" border="0" align="center"><tr> <td><b>Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:</b></td> </tr> <tr> <td>...just after being chided by my editor for not turning in a couple of articles that are somewhat overdue... </td> </tr></table><br />...
]]></content:encoded>

I’m comparing RSS 2.0 formats here. Actually, Jon’s feed is even heavier because he’s duplicating full item content inside both <description> and <content:encoded> tags. Even stranger, the<content:encoded> content isn’t encoded at all, since no CDATA section is included.

Now, of course I’m not picking on Jon specifically here. But one thing which helped me a lot while debugging my feed was to subscribe to myself, and using NNW’s “View RSS Source” and “Validate this Feed” contextual menu commands.

Finally, one pitfall with including HTML item content when using the <content:encoded><![CDATA[…]]></content:encoded> format is to use the item’s full formatting. I rewrote the feed generator to exclude all external tables, style sheet references, <span> and<div> tags, and am working on eliminating all superfluous whitespace.

Erik J. Barzeski did a complete site reorganization and is asking:

If you’ve linked to me previously, or I’ve sent you a TrackBack, please search your site for links to mine and update them.…

Unfortunately, I don’t know what the etiquette is. People have links to my articles. Even I have links to my articles. “PermaLinks” are not very permanent. I don’t want to ruin the links other people have coded up, but I have to do something.

What should I do? Please let me know.

Erik, I’m not sure what resources other weblogging software has, but in my case, I’d have to hand-update every link. I’ll do it if necessary, but this will change the timestamp and make a “recently edited” message to appear in every such post… rather awkward.

My suggestion is: drop that funny 404 message you have now, and put a PHP script in its place. See this article for details.

In the script, set up an array associating the number in the /archives/000xxx.php with your new URL. This may be a hassle, but you only have to do it once – chances are, you already have this in some format. Then have the script return a “301 – Moved Permanently” response containing the new URL.

And you can even return the funny message if the 404 doesn’t refer to /archives… if you’d like some help with this, drop me a line. 🙂

Update: it turns out Erik’s a PHP wizard and no, he doesn’t have the old-to-new URL table. So I went back and changed the 4 or 5 links I had to his site.

One more chapter in the trackback saga.

I installed a test Movable Type weblog (version 2.6) and succeeded in getting trackback and autodiscovery to work. Contrarily to what I said below, the & in the trackback URL can’t be escaped to &, or MT gets confused. So I changed everything back; in the process, I changed the trackback post format a little, as you can see in the test below. Also, the whole topic now has a separate trackback URL, for trackbacks not pertaining to a specific post; the URL is up near the topic header.

One stumbling block was that MT has a built-in check to never ping the same site, as NSLog() also complains. To turn this off, go to your MT folder, find the file /Lib/MT/Entry.pm, and comment out line#289, which should be

next if $url =~ /^$archive_url/;

.

Slava Karpenko of Unsanity proclaimed that Shareware Is Dead:

So I think it is time to rethink our vision of this world and get rid of the Shareware and Commercial distinction. Shareware existed a few years ago, and now has merged with other types of software distribution. I think we all have to realize that we sell and buy software, and not “shareware”, “nagware”, “commercial” and so on.

Erik J. Barzesky says it died long ago:

…shareware died when the Internet became popular…

Nowadays, being tagged with the flag “shareware” can be a death warrant to a lot of people or small companies. “Shareware” means “please steal me.” “Shareware” is too vague…

So yeah, “shareware” is dead. The term may live on, unfortunately, but “shareware” itself no longer exists. It all died right around 1994, as best I can peg it.

I must say that I hesitated between calling my product “shareware” or “low-priced commercial software”. In the end I went with the “shareware” tag, so as to not give the wrongful impressions of a larger company with a help desk and huge support resources, as seems to be expected nowadays… I’d rather be known as a one-man operation that gives excellent support under those circumstances. And of course, more informed people know that the definition of “shareware” today is very different from that of a decade ago;while less informed users may refrain from trying out software labeled as “commercial”.

…still, in a year or so I may change my labeling. Let’s see how the market evolves.

Posted by Michael Tsai’s Weblog:
Michael Tsai’s Weblog linked to this post

Is Shareware Dead?

Slava Karpenko Erik Barzeski Rainer Brockerhoff Daniel Sandler Steven Frank At present, I call my software shareware. By that I mean that it’s free to try and isn’t crippled, although it will nag you. Users get support directly from me, and I’m responsive to their suggestions. I encourage people to share the software (but not their serial numbers) with their friends, and it’s available on various compilation CDs and at Info-Mac. But I guess I agree that the term “shareware” has become meaningless because everyone has a different idea of what it means. We stopped saying in ATPM reviews whether a piece of software claimed to be shareware. It wasn’t a distinction worth making. After all, BBEdit now has a shareware-style trial, and it’s backed by a responsive company, but it isn’t shareware, is it? Instead, we list the price and briefly state whether you can try before buying and how the trial is limited (if at all). I should probably start doing this for my software. The question that remains is what to select in VersionTracker’s the License popup.

Several modern browsers seem to be dropping the “www.” in front of domain names under certain circumstances (like auto-completion), so I was getting a certain volume of complaints that while http://www.brockerhoff.net/ worked, / fell through into my provider’s default page instead of redirecting or providing a 404, as is customary.

Yesterday I finally got through to support, and they promptly misunderstood, taking http://www.brockerhoff.net/ completely off the air (but making / work correctly).

Due to several circumstances I was off the net until today in the morning, when I was shocked to see what happened, and am now trying to have them fix it ASAP. If you’re seeing the “www.” in front of the URL, this has been fixed.

My apologies for the mixup…

Rainer Brockerhoff wrote:

…just after being chided by my editor for not turning in a couple of articles that are somewhat overdue…

My ADSL connection went down this morning and I held off withdrawal symptoms just enough to write the first of the articles: a review of “The Wireless Networking Starter Kit: The practical guide to Wi-Fi Networks for Windows and Macintosh”, by Adam Engst and Glenn Fleishman. I’ll post an English translation here sometime today.

Also, my RSS feed subscription list today reached the 150-sites mark. (The file is in the .opml format exported and imported by NetNewsWire.) From my empirical observations, 150 subscriptions is the critical mass; NNW needs about 5 minutes to update all those subscriptions, and you need the remaining 55 minutes to read everything. Assuming NNW is set to scan hourly, the cycle immediately begins anew and any orbiting consciousness will never be able to leave the informational black hole. Time is relativistically compressed in such a way that you sit down at the computer in after breakfast, say “just a few minutes, honey, I swear”, and boom – time to go to bed again!

That reminds me: I still have to write a review of NetNewsWire…