Solipsism Gradient

Jeremy Zawodny wants an easier way to export his blogroll from NetNewsWire:

…does anyone know how to automatically export my subscriptions from NNW and scp (or ftp?) them somewhere? Can AppleScript (about which I know nothing) do this? Can I do it in Perl and not have to learn Yet Another Scripting Language?

Some weeks ago I wrote to Brent Simmons suggesting a FTP export option for NetNewsWire, and he agreed it would be a good thing for a future version. So, if there are more requests for this, he’ll probably increase the priority…

Evan Williams is back on the air, and points at a Blogger+Google FAQ. The FAQ doesn’t really say anything new – it just tries to reassure people that Blogger will go on, and that the folks at Google are nice.

However, Evan also promises “details to come” in the evening of Mar.12…

As you can see to your left, one more item has been crossed off the to-do list: the “blogroll”. In keeping with the purist’s tendency towards saying “weblog” (not “blog”!), and because “weblogroll” sounds weird, a suitably bland substitute name was put into the header. Thanks to Jeremy Zawodny for the gentle reminder .

These links are mostly straight from my NetNewsWire subscription list. If you’re interested, here is the .opml file. There are a few sites and weblogs which I read even though no RSS feed is available – they’ll be included later. Slowly.

Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s top daily newspapers, today had several articles about weblogs (all in Portuguese):

“How to set up your weblog”, a step-by-step article using the Brazilian Blogger clone;

“Virtual diaries become popular on the Internet”, discusses several Brazilian alternatives to Blogger;

“Check out a selection of 50 Brazilian Weblogs” mentions several friends, such as Mario AV, Cora Rónai’s InternETC, the Boëchat Brothers’ Telescópica, and Tony de Marco’s Nada. Congratulations!

“Many still view weblogs with scepticism” cites several webloggers’ and journalists’ views;

“Users approve weblog’s simplicity” has more webloggers’ opinions.

All in all, it’s good to have weblogging noticed by mainstream news. The articles linked above are short and somewhat simplistic, practically ignoring non-hosted publishing methods. The Brazilian weblogging community is surprisingly large but somewhat insular, and the percentage of computer geeks seems to be lower than in the US; many webloggers are students or have advertising or publishing backgrounds. Most webloggers here can read English but few write it well enough to contribute effectively to the international community.

A disparity can be noted in some weblog indexes. There are no Brazilian webloggers in TechnoRati’s Top 100. On the other hand, although many of the BlogStreet’s Top 100 are found in the TechnoRati list, about 20 Brazilians are there too…

Burning Bird was interviewed about weblogging etiquette:

I told him that the reason we’re weblogging is because we want to be able to publish online without having to follow any rules. To be independent. Free thinkers and writers – as long as we write in reverse chronological order, provide perma-links, link to interesting stories or other weblogs, comment on same, attribute other sources, never delete postings, maintain archives, write only the truth, have a blogroll, and never write about cats or what we had for lunch, we can weblog anyway we want.

I’d add: provide RSS feeds and implement trackbacks…

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/;

.