Day 2 with TypePad and so far, so good. Radio Userland is an odd amalgam of both a thick and a thin client - some days it feels like the best of both worlds and some days it feels like the worst. I expect that Rogers Cadenhead’s Radio UserLand Kick Start will help me eliminate some of the lows once it’s available.
I’m still waiting for TypePad to reveal it’s inner nature.
Here we go. I plan to post in parallel to my Radio Userland Take the First Step and my TypePad Take the First Step for a while to get the feel of things. The Beta limited non disclosure terms prevent me from talking about TypePad service itself, but there’s probably some wiggle room on the fringe.
Today’s title courtesy of Today I Am a Ham by Ethelyn M. Parkinson. I may be a lot older now, but I still have a fondness for favorite books from my youth. In fact, I think our dog-eared copy is still on my brother’s bookshelf.
AOL enters the weblog market and everything changes. Will AOL to respect the existing community? Will the market will punish AOL if they ignore the necho initiative? In the face of these new uncertainties, Dave Winer pleads for unity in the weblog community. I hope that Blogger and Six Apart are listening.
Hubris: overbearing pride or presumption.
I think that watching the common syndication format and publishing API evolve is like watching an accident unfold in slow motion - I’m sure that it’s going to end up badly and I just can’t look away. There is a time for evolution and a time for revolution. I think that this was a time for evolution. Unfortunately, now we’ve got a number of folks committed to revolution.
Meddling with RSS was bad enough. At least that had the potential to produce some new applications. Now they’re going to muck around with the underlying XML-RPC API plumbing. Seems to me that this is a case of extremely premature optimization. Is there a paying end user in the world who cares whether they’re using XML-RPC, SOAP or REST?
Weblogs and RSS had some nice forward momentum just a few weeks ago. This isn’t the right time to call a 3 month time out to think things over and rebuild all our tools. Please stop the madness, and let product innovation begin again.
5 July: Don Park points out that if you want some control, join the project. I think they’ve already got too many developers, not enough project managers. I’m hoping that Blogger, Six Apart, and Userland decide to take control of their own destinies and settle on a common API in a preemptive strike. Yes, I am a dreamer.
I’ve been keeping my distance from the Echo discussions, because I don’t really have anything at stake. But I’d just like to remind everyone to Keep It Simple, Stupid. Because Echo is going to be either under defined or over defined and right now I’d bet on over defined. Now when a spec is under defined and extensible, it often ends up as an opportunity. But when a spec is over defined and extensible, it often ends up as a burden. So keep it simple, for all of us.
Wow, Scripting News went dark and then lit back up before I was able to assemble my thoughts. I saw the news Sunday evening and decided to let it sink in before posting. I usually look forward to seeing Scripting News in my inbox every morning, but I wasn’t looking forward to it today. However, I was pleased to see that Dave was back.
Maybe he needed to hear some supportive voices. And maybe he needed to demonstrate to himself that he had some control over the situation and that he could walk away if that is what it took to make him happy. But I’m glad that he’s back.
I never really consided Scripting News to be a progenitor of this site - Take the First Step is different in tone and style. But it was years of reading the Scripting News via email that taught me what a weblog could be and do. And I’m sure that Take the First Step would not be here today if not for Dave. So thank you Dave. And Don’t let the Turkeys get you down.
Another reader writes in with a comment on my Java tutorials - Jan points out that I neglected to set a dependency in my second Ant tutorial. While I would rather be right, hearing from helpful readers is a pretty good consolation prize.
It also demonstrates that they don’t call it the world wide web for nothing. Jan writes in from Germany. And today’s referrer log shows inbound Google traffic from Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, and Taiwan.
A month ago, I noted that my Java Tutorials had been added to the Open Directory’s Beginning Java Tutorials page. Over the past month, my referrer logs show almost no inbound traffic from the Open Directory. But the Google PageRank for my tutorials page has gone from 0 to 3. I’m on the first page of a Google search for ant tutorial. And over 90% of my inbound traffic comes from search engines. So the DMOZ listing seems to have been a big step for Take the First Step.
And now that I have gotten these RSS postings out of my system, I expect to start posting on development in Java again.
Jython seems to be bubbling to the top of the integrated consciousness with two recent posts in my RSS feeds. Your mileage may very, but I’d also recommend looking at the BeanShell. The beanshell is included in the Java Development Environment for Emacs, and it’s better for me to increase my understanding of my existing tools.
The College World Series comes down to a single game tonight between Stanford and Rice. This is the first time that the championship will be decided by a 3 game series and the first time that a team with 2 CWS losses (Stanford) has a chance at the title. Originally, the CWS was a double elimination tournament. The format was altered in the late 80’s to match an undefeated team against a team with one loss in a single championship game for network TV. And now that the championship is back on ESPN, the single championship game has been replaced by a 3 game series.
While I must confess my fondness of the original double elimination format, the 3 games series is a great improvement over the single championship game. So ESPN, welcome back to the College World Series.