Category: Website

Userland: Using the Google API in Radio and Manila. I was all ready to go on this until Dave pointed out the flaw in his implementation for Manila—it only supports one key per server at present, which means I’d be sharing the key with every other weblog user on editthispage.com. I think I’ll wait for the revised implementation.
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I’m reverting the page to a two column CSS layout. I hope this helps some of the issues that people had with the three column layout. While I think one day it would be nice to have the three column version, as long as I don’t have fine control over the formatting of every element of the page (fixed width form elements, the calendar, etc.) it will have to be set up this way.

On the plus side, this makes the calendar much more prominent, which I think is a good thing. On the minus side, I think it’s broken again on NS 4.x. Sorry folks. But if you want to read the page, you can either click the print friendly link at the bottom of the page or subscribe to my RSS feed (XML icon in the navigation bar).

The site is now running a design that is almost 100% CSS. I know there are still issues, so if you have problems viewing the site drop me an email.

I’m breaking out the Internet department of the site as it’s gotten too crowded. First new department: WebDesign. I will post things I learn as I work on the site redesign here (no, I haven’t abandoned it, especially not now that my dad is on a CSS-compliant browser and off Netscape 4).

So everyone seems to be junking their tables these days and going to CSS-based layouts. I’m working on it … right now I’m getting close on the basic CSS layout and am going looking for pictures. Maybe I’ll launch the new look soon… we’ll see.

You can now use Radio UserLand to submit comments against any item that appears on this weblog. BTW, if you want to subscribe, the news feed for the page is here: [Macro error: Can’t call the script because the name “rssLink” hasn’t been defined.]
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Ten days ago I said I’d stop looking at referral logs until I was happy with my writing again. Looking back over the last ten days, I note two things:

1. I’ve successfully kept away from looking at my referral logs.
2. I’ve written a lot less.

The second, I think, was to be expected. I’m trying on some new styles of thinking (more about that shortly). It’s only natural that output falls as my brain changes its way of thinking and expressing itself.

The first requires one confession–I did go back to the discussion group, which shows the number of times a news item is read, one time last week and saw that my “Confessions of a Referral Junkie” had gotten something like 250 reads (normal levels somewhere between 0 and 30). Irony?

…when your own mother says she’s stopped reading your blog because programming news is boring. 🙂 Ok, got the message. I’m finding more things to think and write about starting right now!

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Hmm. This could be harder than I thought.

Okay, so I admit it. I have become addicted to my referral logs.

In the beginning, they were mostly a curiosity–no one was referring to me. Then I did some minor punditry on something Apple was going to do with scripting and XML. And wrote to Macintouch and to Dave to tell them what I thought. I had no idea what I was in for; suppose I thought I was just showing off how clever I was.

By the end of that day I was at over 2500 reads of that one article. Today the high water mark stands at 3313. It is by far the most popular single story I ever wrote, at least before I made the shiftf to news items (which the Most Read Messages stat doesn’t track). I was hooked. If the Internet was ever an attention economy, it was making me an attention junkie. And it affected the way I write.

I would have written my scripts anyway, and Manila Envelope. But I think unconsciously I was adjusting my web writing to the stuff that had gotten me attention in the first place. And I’m not super happy about that.

So I’m going to try an experiment. I currently have a bookmark menu for my web site on the Personal Toolbar of my browser. It has a folder containing links to the reports that Manila provides me about who’s pointing to me. I’m going to delete that folder. And until I’m happy with my writing again it’s going to stay deleted. I’ll report here how my behavior modification is going.

I’ve been playing around more with Radio UserLand. As a reminder, my blog is available for subscription in RSS format. The link is http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com/xml/rss.xml.

I was so busy with classwork, I almost didn’t notice. But I got one of Dave‘s nominations for the Scripting News Awards, in the category of Best Scripting Weblog. I guess that’s further validation that what I’ve been doing is valuable.

I don’t really feel worthy to be on the same list as Suck, Blogdex, Adam Curry, Doc Searls, and all the rest of the talented nominees. I have no illusions about my worthiness relative to Mark Pilgrim, Sjoerd Visscher, or View from an Iowa Homestead. But I’m putting up a “Vote for me” link anyway.

Hi all. Looking back over the last few days, I’m pretty happy with the format change experiment. I’m updating more frequently and it’s easier to go and pull all related stories together (I used to have to update the topic pages by hand, and probably will continue to have to do so a bit longer).

On the downside, my writing style has changed a bit. I used to be a bit better at remembering to write about me as well as whatever random link I happened to be looking at at the time. I think that’ll come back soon. It seems that there’s just an adjustment period to settling into a new writing style before my voice comes out again.

This is an experiment with using the news items feature of Manila. This feature will do a few things for the site

• It will enable me to post things more directly to the website
• It will eliminate some of the date and time confusion that the site has occasionally had when posting an item late on a certain day
• It will improve the syndication of the site, making it easier for users of tools like Radio to point to things on my site

We’ll see how it goes.

Ignore this — I’ll fill something real in later. I’m showing my e-Commerce project team how this system works.