Earth: Mostly Harmless

WordPress 2.0.5

I just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.0.5. Let me notice if anything works/looks screwy.

Cheers all.

New blog: Woman with an Opinion

Congrats to my good friend Laura, who has just (half an hour ago) started a new blog to replace her LiveJournal: Woman with an Opinion. She wanted to call it “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”, which would have been awesome…

Why I’m doing this:

I have a Livejournal and have done since I was 16. However, I have found I have wanted to broadcast my opinions further than my Livejournal friends list and to other friends who do not have access to Livejournal.

Does this mean I have a manifesto?

(Via Laura - Woman with an Opinion).

Truncated posts

Truncated..

Ahem.

I realised last night that the hellish import procedure I went through to get my posts out of the old Blogsome site was to some extent in vain.

It turns out that the XSL stylesheet I used to turn the Blogsome Atom feed into RSS 2.0 chose the summary field and not the description field for each item to use as the RSS description.

The practical results of which is that all of my imported posts were truncated to about 300 characters, and links and images were stripped out.

I’m going through all of them gradually putting the needful back in.

Arr.

Blogschool - A cautionary tale…

Blogschool:

Found on Blogshares (currently down after a DB Crash)

(Via Sen No Sen.)

Winer Whines to ‘Dixie’

Okay, yesterday I noted the need to sort the “wheat from the chaff” in blogs and podcasts. Now, you wouldn’t expect Dave Winer, pioneer of blogging, XML-RPC Frontier and Manila, to come into the ‘chaff’ category - but yesterday’s podcast is pretty dubious!

Scan forward to 1m 55s, and you’ll hear Dave’s… rendition of ‘Dixie’ - him ’singing’ with a MIDI file (played through a terrible software synth)…

On today’s podcast I ponder…:
On today’s podcast I ponder the possibilities for tomorrow’s broadcast podcast for KYOU-AM in San Francisco. More singing this time with the MIDI of Dixie. You’ll have to wade through it to get to the talk. Also includes philosophy from Ed Cone and Rogers Cadenhead.

(Via Scripting News.)

Winer also posted an expletive-laden entry criticising Adam Curry’s claims to have invented Podcasting:

I winced a half-dozen times reading this interview with Adam Curry. He didn’t invent podcasting, he didn’t figure out that RSS would be a good transport. And he didn’t write the first iPodder. Here’s what Adam actually did do. He figured out the last yard was important and worked tirelessly to get people to listen to him. I was the only one who did, and I turned that idea into RSS with enclosures, and wrote the first iPodder, in 2001, three years before Adam claims to have done all this stuff. I never denied him credit for his role in this work, quite the opposite, I praised him every way I could for his insight. I also did regular podcasts for a couple of months before he started. He was listening to them, calling me all the time, ecstatic at how I was reinventing radio. There are a couple of ideas in Daily Source Code that didn’t come from me, and for that Adam deserves full credit and our thanks. But these lies have gone on and on, he just doesn’t stop.

He then threatens to:

kick him in the ass, and then look him in the eye and say “Shouldn’t have lied so much, dickhead.”

Someone has not taken all of zee pills zis morning, no?