Posts Tagged ‘blogging’
The mephisto liquid tags, drops, and filters are not very well documented. You have to look in the source code (specifically drop_filters.rb) to discover what’s available.
I was able to add rendering of tags/keywords by using:
{{article | linked_tag_list}}
in my template.
UPDATE (2007.03.20.084041): Don’t do this. It’s an awful hack and will grind your computer to a halt.
I want to hack the textmate blogging bundle to do a full download of all posts in a blog and save those posts to local disk.
First, I just hacked the bundle to allow user to fetch any post from the blog.
Note: This is a slow hack and should only sparingly be used.
Knud M√∂ller talks about using XMLRPC to get all posts from a blog. I opted to use the “number of post requests is ridiculously large” approach. Mephisto implements the GetRecentPost call with a limit indicating number of posts to retrieve, so it’s still only one database hit (but creates a whole lot more objects in memory).
/Applications/TextMate.app/Contents/SharedSupport/Bundles/Blogging.tmbundle/Support/lib/blogging.rbdef fetch begin # Makes sure endpoint is determined and elements are parsed current_password = self.password require "#{ENV['TM_SUPPORT_PATH']}/lib/progress.rb" result = nil TextMate.call_with_progress(:title => "Fetch Post", :message => "Contacting Server “#{@host}”…") do result = self.client.getRecentPosts(self.blog_id, self.username, current_password, 100000) # HERE IS WHERE YOU SPECIFY NUMBER OF POSTS TO RETRIEVE end if !result || !result.length TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip("No posts are available!") end @mw_success = true if self.post = select_post(result) TextMate.exit_create_new_document(post_to_document()) else TextMate.exit_discard end rescue XMLRPC::FaultException => e TextMate.exit_show_tool_tip("Error retrieving posts. Check your configuration and try again.") end end
This works fine. Next up:
- Create a separate command for Fetch latest 20 and Fetch All
- Create command to “create index listing”
- Create command to “Fetch All Posts and then save each post to separate file in specified directory”
Mephisto and ecto do not get along readily… I mean, things work, but they are not fast and feel far from bulletproof.
I just started using the textmate blog editing bundle by Brad Choate to update this blog.
I watched a screencast that convinced me.
I’m liking it quite a lot… Working solely in text with markdown is somewhat liberating. I think with some good quicksilver-foo, it would make for some fun blogging workflow.
Furthermore, I can then keep local versions of all my blog posts as subversion-friendly text.
I’d like to work on hacking into the bundle to grab a full backup in text-friendly format.
Most bloggers do not follow the same rigor as journalists accountable to a newspaper which has some editorial oversight and liability.
That’s not to say that blogs and bloggers cannot provide valuable, timely and important information. However, FINDING that information in the sea of noise is very difficult.
I know the urge and trend is to bemoan the Big, Bad, Media companies, but the truth is that there are economies of information scale that are yet to be addressed in blogger communities.
- disproportional and artificial influence of A-Listers
- mob think and cross-posting
- difficulty in finding primary sources
- most blogging is NOT real-time reporting, it’s real-time interpreting. So much interpretation leads to limited fact-checking and research
- very noisy channels leads to limits on diversity as individuals go to the same “trusted” sources time and again
There are monopoly, editorial, and trust issues with large media outlets. When there are mistakes at media companies, people get fired. Nobody cares when a blogger lies.
What happens when the two meet? Fascinating juxtaposition, that.
Who Let the Blogs Out? Legal Experts Offer Tips on Avoiding Trouble:
But with all the excitement and potential for new readers and financial invigoration, something else is rippling: growing unease about the dangers of blogs — especially legal liabilities in the land of the free and perhaps overly brave.
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Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, journalism, media
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About a month ago, I spoke on a panel about blogging at the Texas Writer’s League annual conference. I spent some time talking about how people (i.e. David Sifry, uber-smart founder of Technorati) were claiming millions and millions of blogs were being created and talked about the exponential growth of blogging.
Then I put up this slide:
Here is why putting numbers in perspective is important:
When large numbers are thrown around, that gets investors listening. When investors listen, they throw down lots of money. When lots of money is thrown down at phantom numbers (i.e. false value), money is wasted, companies fold, and people like me get the shaft, yet again. (Please see the years 1999-2000).
We all intuitively know that if we pick blogs at random then they will be garbage – not everyone is a fantastic writer (or even human, for that matter – spam blogs are a virus). It’s rare to find anything that can even generously be called journalism (it’s there, but there is NO good, automated way to find it… human editorial functions are necessary). It seems the truly valuable propositions involve finding ways to FILTER AWAY as much of the 50 million “blogs” as possible.
Let’s not get overambitious with our little blogging project, ok? The vast majority of the planet’s population doesn’t even have access to a computer, much less internet, much less blogs, much less the knowledge to author a valuable blog.
50 million blogs. Nah. A mere sliver of that is what we should care about.
Here is a more mathematical approach:
STATS.org – Bursting Technorati’s Blogosphere:
This presumes, of course, that the number of blogs being tracked by Technorati is a real measure of virtual life in the blogosphere; but what this measure of diminishing output points to is that the number of blogs isn’t real at all: The 50-million figure is meaningless, an artifact of blogs past and present, derelict and dying, of virtual enthusiasm and manifest lassitude.
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Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, statistics, technorati
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