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 Friday, October 31, 2003
As I posted earlier, I've been testing Moveable Type for the last few days. And it's become clear that there are certain advantages that Radio and MT both have, depending on what you're doing with your weblog.
First, user pain thresholds. If you just want to put up a site, and don't care about news feeds, or RSS, or anything other than throwing words up on a web page as cheaply as possible...well, go use Blogger.
If you want to read RSS feeds, and use only one software package, Radio is the only real option (though Amphetadesk --which is free-- or NetNewsWire fill that bill, and NNW interfaces with MT as a blogging client ). Additionally, if you want to host your own site, but your hosting provider doesn't support Perl or MySQL on hosted sites, then Radio might be the best answer.
If you want to share a blog with multiple editors, and have a host with Perl and MySQL (which is far better than the Berkeley DB that MT can use alternatively), and are willing to put up with some medum-lifting as far as host configuration goes, MT is the way to go.
Radio keeps all your stuff local, which makes it ideal if you shop around for hosting a lot. If you physically control the host your website runs on, The Radio Community Server offers you your own comment system and the ability to host multiple users' weblogs (though they have to each buy a copy of Radio). And if you tend to post things in reaction to RSS feeds from other sources, Radio offers natural advantages.
MT is good if you don't like running backups on your local machine--and your provider backs up your MySQL database and site regularly. It offers many things out of the box template-wise that Radio offers only after doing some macro-hacking; its in-template scripting is conceptually easier for some types of bitslingers, By contrast, Radio's FrontierScript is a pretty kick-ass programming language, oriented toward people who code and aren't afraid to do some coding to create content-handling tools.
Radio is best when hosted on a Radio Community Server; that's where trackbacks, comments, and other interactive content features work best. If you're hosting Radio on an FTP server only, you're not going to be able to leverage those(at least the trackbacks) as effectively. MT offers comments and trackbacks integrated into your site management, since it uses a Perl -based remote procedure call interface to do the work.
If you're running a server of your own, and running RCS, you've got a powerful system for building customized weblog services as well as something that works well out of the box; and the FrontierScript language may be more intelligible to traditional procedural programmers than the Perl MT is based on. But you may not need to do a whole lot of programming to with MT to get what you're looking for.
If you blog from more thant one computer or location, MT is probably a better solution than remotely logging into your computer running the Radio client.
For the moment, I've decided to keep using Radio alongside MT. In fact, I'm going to investigate ways to create hybrid Radio/MT weblogs to get the best out of both worlds.
4:49:08 PM 
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Wednesday, October 29, 2003
I'm now testing Moveable Type on my host for buzzword-compliant.com (the test blog is here). There are some screwy things with the post-entry forms, as I complain on the test blog, but otherwise it seems to be rockin'.
For now, I'm maintaining status quo, but I may consider a full shift to MT in the new year. I can also now host other people's blogs on buzzword, which is nice...
11:23:43 PM
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Thursday, October 23, 2003
I almost swallowed my tongue when I read Ed Cone's weblog entry earlier today. Especially after I had just recently ranted about When work and blogging don't mix.
I have no intention of becoming a corporate blogger--at least not without appropriate renumeration. And since Ziff has a policy against paying its employees to do freelance work for the Ziff Internet site, that's not going to happen anytime soon.
The words on my weblog pages belong solely to me. I will not call Ziff Davis, or tech, or anything else I do out of bounds for my weblog, because they are part of me. I will not link to Ziff Davis, and I will not link from Ziff Davis to me.
Period.
I am my own brand. Nobody in search of Baseline or eWeek is going to accidentally stumble across my pages and think that what I do here is competition to those publications or their websites, and I'll correct them if they do.
7:08:29 PM
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Wednesday, October 22, 2003
A couple of Java releases of note, announced over on weblogs.java.net. Perhaps the most significant (at least from my point of view) is the release of the Java Web Services Developer Pack 1.3. Problem--I don't currently have a Java dev tool that can play the J2EE game well enough to take advantage of it (as much as I'd like to screw around with JavaServer Faces). Perhaps I'll have to break down and buy a new Intel box after all (since the only one in my house at present is running primarily Windows XP Home, AIM, and Starcraft, thanks to my 12-year old son).
Anybody want to sponsor one for me? 
11:23:23 PM
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Felipe Leme reports that Oracle has released a new version of JDeveloper (version 9.0.3.3) yesterday. It's a bug-fix release.
Is anybody using JDeveloper? I got a great demo of it a few years ago, but I have yet to find reason to try it out myself. Maybe if there was a personal edition for Max OS X, with a local Oracle DB...nevermind.
10:57:51 PM
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Monday, October 20, 2003
An old friend of mine will soon be taking a freelance web gig with my employer, running a segment of the company's website. He says he wants to blogroll my personal weblog on the corporate site.
My request to him: "please, don't."
Maintaining a division between my personal and work life is hard enough, with the long hours I put in for my corporate master. The fact is, I have quit cold turkey on volunteering content for online at my company because (a) I don't get paid any more for the contribution, and (b) I have to jump through political hoops for the privilege of producing free content. This is, in my mind, a Helleresque scenario.
So, since my day job is fairly structured in terms of what I can write for publication, I use my own time to pontificate in my own personal space. It's my way of keeping engaged with the areas of technology that I used to cover, and placing what I write about in the context of daily life. And it's mine.
So, what if my buddy links to my personal site from the corporate site? Well, for one thing, someone at corporate may decide suddenly that," Hey, this is the work of one of our employees, and we should own it. It seems to be pulling hits away from us, and those are impressions we could be making money off of."
And, since my company doesn't pay print employees for web content, I would be offered the following Scylla and Charybdis: become a corporate blogger for free, or stop blogging and devote all of my writing energies to my assigned print tasks.
Not that there would be much in the way of a legitimate claim by my employers to my weblog; since it carries no advertising, and it's not technically a competitor to my employer's sites, and since it consists of work done on my own systems on my own time, they would be hard-pressed to find a way to claim ownership over it. However, they could, given the current market for tech journalists, put me over a barrel over it.
Of course, considering the number of hits I get, they might not care too much about my site. Then again, considering that my online conent in my weblog is probably seeing more traffic than the online version of my print column, maybe they will care.
This is the kind of conflict a lot of people will find themselves in in the near future--the conflict between the company's desire to "empower" them and call on them to do more to add value, and the simultaneous reflex by companies to tightly define employee roles and control every aspect of their behavior.
My company saves thousands from me working at home, and they nickel-and-dime me on every expense report I submit to cover my work-at-home expenses. They want me to help build a multiplatform brand, yet they make it as difficult as possible for me to contribute to that task and offer no compensation when I do. Why, then, should I think that having my personal ravings linked by my employers' website is a good idea?
11:07:55 PM
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Saturday, October 11, 2003
Talked to Dain last week. Once I get past filing my latest print opus, I'll expound on it here.
10:27:20 AM
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