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NetNewsWire and Moveable Type

More great news from Brent, Moveable Type blogs will be able to be edited and posted to directly from NetNewsWire Pro. AS noted below it is sometimes tricky to get things working outside of the blog environment where the developer of that program has concealed some of their work.

Archipelago allows posting and editing to all the major blog systems, but you still need to know some key technical details in order to get it to work. Brent notes needing the Blog ID for moveable type to work, the same issue I faced setting Archipelago up. Hopefully the info I relayed back to Daniel over the weekend during my transfer were helpful…

The more I think about how much NetNewsWire Pro will be able to do, the more I wonder what will happen to great apps like Archipelago. It seems that Daniel is involved in some way with Brent working on NNW, but if an app can pull in RSS feeds, post and edit your blog remotely it should hande all that you want. I guess certain details and preferences will always keep people using one system vs another.

NetNewsWire and MovableType: “I’ve been testing NetNewsWire‘s weblog editor with MovableType—and it’s working. Here’s my test site.

One of the painful parts of weblog editors is configuration, as Daniel Berlinger points out in his RFC on discoverability.

I had to send an XML-RPC request to get the blogID of my MovableType site. For Manila the URL of the site works as the blogID. I don’t know what I’ll find when I try other weblog publishing systems, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find them all slightly different.

This needs to get much easier.

Ideally all it would take to configure one’s editor is to know the URL of the home page of your site. (And of course you’d know your username and password also.) A user should never have to know or figure out the blogID, RPC URL, and supported API or APIs.” Source: inessential.com

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Hotmail back in your inbox?

I have not tried this yet, but it certainly seems like an easy way to take advantage of the free accounts you might already have. I’m thinking that this app into Mail.app with Spam filtering could be a nice thing. I might even consider using my hotmail account if I was successful in suppressing most of the spam.

Mail Forward for Mac OS X

Mail Forward allows you to forward mail from up to 20 Microsoft Hotmail, Yahoo web mail, or standard POP e-mail accounts to any e-mail address.

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My favorite way to blog

My favorite way to blog into Radio gets better…

new beta: “[A new beta of Archipelago is out. Over 40 changes and fixes including posting without publishing for sites that support this, a rewritten http server, and renamed and organized menus (to hopefully ease the way), and Edit in Archipelago links for one click editing of your blog…” Source: Archipelago

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At first blush

At first blush this news story might lead you to believe that the Redmond crew had figured out a way to block spam. All they seem to know, however, is how to limit your exposure to HTML in preview mode. This will only cut back on the number of return hits back to spam central, which certainly can limit the number of spams you might get in the future from that same source. With this method, you will still receive and be forced to manage the same number of spam messages you receive each day.

Thank goodness for Mac OS X and Apple’s Mail.app. I had 36 messages automatically filtered to my Junk folder this morning and I am sure there will be many more moved throughout the day. Filter and trash, never open or preview. Keep trying MS…maybe next time. Perhaps Office 12 in 2006 will be able to handle this.

New Outlook to give spammers the boot: “The first test version of Microsoft’s new e-mail software takes a different approach to handling e-mail formatted like Web pages, a move designed to cut down on unwanted messages.” Source: CNET News.com

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OSAF Chandler prototyping…

The link below was posted tonight on the OSAF Design list. After checking out, I am feeling good about the direction things are going. While not the most beautiful, it seems highly functional.

Andy Hertzfeld : “Vista is an experimental…: “Andy Hertzfeld: “Vista is an experimental prototype whose purpose is to quickly explore various design and feature ideas for Chandler, our networked personal information manager.”” Source: Scripting News

Just posted by Mitch Kapor on the OSAF list:

In the Chandler design process, we are going to think out loud. I promise you that. Some of the slowdown in OSAF responses and consequent new posts in the past two days is just a timing issue. Andy Hertzfeld’s has written long, illustrated piece about the prototype we did (called Vista) and what we learned. It’s just been posted to the web site and is linked off the front page. I think it will spark a new wave of discussion

ALSOP ON INFOTECH In the latest Fortune column, Stuart talks about Chandler as well. He makes it sound though like we are years away though from seeing some usable code. I hope it comes sooner and isn’t just for pushing Redmond into designing a better Outlook as he ponders…

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Let’s take a look

Let’s take a look at the highlights:

  1. They use the Internet, by virtue of TCP/IP, as “proof” of their thesis.

  2. They state that you cannot improve OR adopt OR commercialize GPL software.

  3. They state that you cannot integrate GPL’d software with proprietery software.

  4. They say you should keep publicly funded code away from the public sector, so that proprietary interests can make money from the work.

  5. They equate a lack of understanding of the GPL with valid reasoning against it.

In essence, that non-proprietary interests should not be allowed to use, adopt, improve, or make money from the work. That taxpayers should pay for it twice. And that nobody should be able to stop commercial entities from taking publicly funded code, they will then close off.

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Hopefully this is not too good to be true…

Hopefully this is not too good to be true… The cast of characters behind this future PIM is all-star and the features and goals of this to-be-named product sound killer. The goal of this PIM product will be to create an open source, all platform product. It’s something we can all truly use. Thanks to Aaron for the link

Mitch Kapor and Andy Hertzfeld (with Tim O’Reilly and Pamela Samuelson on the board) are making an free software RDF-backed Python Mac/Win/Lin PIM ala Agenda in public. Just look at the architecture and feature list. I must be dreaming! This is way too good to be true!

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Saturday, October 19, 2002 at

Saturday, October 19, 2002 at 1:36:23 PM

Test post 2 with Archipelago…

I have not had much time this week to work with this app, but it seems cool enough, not too mention lighter than the browser for posting.

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Last week we all read

Last week we all read eagerly about the woman who switched to windows and the significant life altering experience it was. False of course, photo taken from stock art, and written by a hired gun. Thanks to the Register, via Scripting News we get another one. This time from an amazingly sharp twelve year old boy working on a tough homework assignment…

Register: “Microsoft has yanked another of its fraudulent user testimonials, in this case a fictitious twelve-year-old boy raving about a fictional homework assignment and the indespensable insights he received from MS Encarta Reference Library in preparing it.” [Scripting News]

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It seems that iSync in

It seems that iSync in its current form does not much care for my Meeting Maker conduit. I went around a few times in order to figure out what caused a predictable crash in Conduit Manager. It would crap out writing between 3 and 400 items back up to Meeting Maker. I had to force overwrite my Palm Database once, which still did not fix things until I deleted the Addressbook.db file and started clean from Meeting Maker as the only active conduit overwriting my now blank calender on the palm.

I am now able to sync iSync – contacts only – and Meeting Maker for my Calendar. I also have SplashID, SplashShopper, SplashPhoto, Backup, Install and Vindigo running. iSync speed seems to have picked up considerably since I removed the iCal piece of the sync. It’s a shame but since I can schedule meetings based on availability of resources (people and rooms) with Meeting Maker I am currently better off there. I just won’t get to subscribe to other calendars, unless of course I run iCal without syncing… hmmm 2 calendars, it could be worse I guess.

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I read this article last

I read this article last night and did not think much of it until later when I checked my referers through Radio. I noticed that several things I have written (some recent and some older) had been picked up by Google. Unfortunately, the URL linked to my main page, not the article being referenced and upon arrival there is no easy way for someone coming into the average blog to then track down the article or story. While things like trackbacks and permalinks can be used by blogs, the bots from the search engines are not able to distinguish them yet. Hopefully soon…

Google loves blogs. Blogs loves Google. But is there trouble in paradise? When items slip of the front page of most blogs, there is an anecdotal two- to three-week delay before archived items are reindexed. As Dylan Tweney points out this is an artifact of the fact that Google’s basic unit of indexing is the web page URL and blogs are more fine-grained: the post as the basic unit, usually multiple posts on a single page.

Permalinks arose to address this same issue, allowing post-level targetting of links to web posts. This is generally implemented with named anchors within pages, although it’s also possible to assign each entry its own page in the archives, even if several entries are aggregated at any one time on the blog’s index page.

Dylan has a suggestion, though, to help the Googlesphere catch up with the blogosphere:

As it turns out, we do have a couple of data formats that understand the difference between a post and a page, include useful summary data, and even include handy pointers back to the exact archive location of a post. They’re called RSS and RDF.

These syndication formats are used to aggregate news, but they could be useful indexing tools too. What if Google (or Daypop, once they can afford to buy a few new hard drives) collected RSS and RDF feeds — and then archived them in a searchable index?

Instead of news stories scrolling off into oblivion when they get to the bottom of a feed, they’d enter a permanent index where they could be used for information retrieval later.

It seems that the same approach would work when indexing an intranet or enterprise portal. Maybe part of the solution for turning k-logs into a true knowledge sharing system is to make sure the search implementation indexes RSS feeds from k-logs, making knowledge retrieval possible without discontinuities.

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Microsoft Rivals Leave Minor Marks

Microsoft Rivals Leave Minor Marks Online : The latest Mozilla and Netscape Web browsers are cropping up on more computers worldwide, but they still only represent a few trees in a forest of Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers. (CNET News.com via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]

I think this story will be interesting one to track… The Mozilla project is spawning all kinds of fruit these days with Mozilla, Netscape 7, AOL and now Chimera and Phoenix. All come from the same roots but all are out to serve a different purpose. It’s no secret here, that my choice today is Chimera. It’s only at .5 Beta but looks to be a strong contender. The trick, I think as has been mirrored in newsgroups for the browsers as well, is tracking the variants both as separate browsers and also as a total. Right now they all seem to identitfy themselves to web servers as the same.

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Just noticed an interesting feature

Just noticed an interesting feature in Mail. I filter messages from a group on Radio Userland to a specific folder on the topic as well as retain a subfolder for news that my RSS aggregator emails to me so I can post from mail. I decided to move the folder and actually rename it as well. I thought that Mail would be smart enough to realize that I moved it and adjust the Rule accordingly. Instead, it re-created the folder (mailbox in Mail.app parlance) and the subfolder in order to correctly filter.

You can’t create a mailbox/folder while creating a rule, but the rule can create a mailbox if the reference changes…