david-s.net - David Schlosnagle's Words, Photos, and Links

Fellow PSU Alum Alex Valentine writes:

Blogs are not a person2person tool. Posting on a blog is a person -> audience tool where the audience can choose to listen and chime back.

I believe this is the epitome of why there is such a buzz about blogs, and defines the direction in which they will continue to expand.

Push-Technology

Almost a decade ago there was a company that created quite a stir in the online arena by the name of PointCast. PointCast was a client application that you ran on your computer, selected your news sources, and the PointCast servers would “push”. This was the beginning of push-technology. You could get stock quotes, business news, magazine articles, from sources that joined up with PointCast. This all seemed to be a precursor to the dot-com boom, but PointCast fell victim to the boom as well.

When Push Comes To Shove, Push Loses

What does a burnt out dot-com like PointCast have to do with weblogs? It is proof that the free-market works.

Proprietary push technology has been replaced by good old fashioned pull-technology (HTTP GET) in the form of client syndication. The syndication formats themselves provide freedom of choice, RSS and atom each with different levels of features that content providers can choose to implement.

These formats are not mutually exclusive, there are no signed contracts restricting content providers from only providing one syndication feed, they can provide either or both.

Jamie Zawinski (of Netscape fame) once stated:

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

This will soon be true for RSS and atom. We will see syndication integration into email clients, web browsers, text editors, coffee makers, etc.

Weblog tools such as WordPress and MovableType have made publishing not only web content, but have also made syndicated content instantly available. (See Rebecca Bloods’ weblog history for more background) Weblogs have become big business, with Google acquiring Blogger, Microsoft creating Spaces, and SixApart acquiring LiveJournal. All of the weblog tools continue to fight for marketshare.

Business Impact

How do weblogs fit into the corporate technology structure? As Alex stated, email covers person to person communication. Email can also extend to cover person to distribution list. However, this gray area may be better suited for a tool that has flexibility. Think about all the distribution lists you’re on. There’s one for your team, one for your project, one for your sub-project group, one for the system administrators, one for each of the functional teams, and so on. Now what if you send out an email to your team members, then later a person from another team needs that information? Someone has to dig through their archives and find the email thread and forward it along hoping that all the pertinent information is included.

Internal weblogs simplify this situation. Employees can post short blurbs, links, and articles for all other interested employees. Frequently asked questions can be answered with a simple link to an existing weblog post. In depth conversations can be retained with the original information, and links to new relevant information added as necessary. Information is only an intranet search away, solved by a rack server Google will gladly sell you.

Now we begin to see why companies like Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and Google are so interested in weblogs. They are all interested in spreading information faster and more effectively. Some have taken towards marketing, while others are targeting developers, and other have spread the spectrum. As we see how information can be spread throughout the world, we can imagine how it can be spread inside a corporate environment.

Microsoft has Scoble to spread all sorts of marketing information. They also have their MSDN blogs to spread developer info. Sun has their employee blogs available externally, and encourages other employees such as Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML. CIO Jonathan Schwartz has his space for spreading the Sun gospel. IBM isn’t about to miss out either with their developerWorks blogs, Mark Pilgrim, and Sam Ruby, although they don’t have as many externally available weblogs as Sun. Yahoo! has embraced RSS with their My Yahoo! customization. They also have a resident tech blogger in Jeremy Zawodny. The search team has its own place for all things search related. Google is almost lagging behind everyone else in the external blog game. They have the official Google blog which merely serves as a PR soapbox for their latest lab experiment, such as the amazing maps. Ebay has made an attempt to jump on the wagon with their founder Pierre Omidyar’s blog, but haven’t updated in forever. You might note one big tech company missing from this list, Apple. Their notorious secrecy may be one reason they have yet to really embrace the weblog world. The upcoming version of Mac OS X Server will come with Blojsom to provide a one click weblog server, and the next Safari browser will integrate RSS feeds. We’ll see if they continue to play catch-up to the rest of the weblog world.

These are only some of the externally available resources, there are no doubt many internal sources for each of these companies.

Yahoo! is celebrating its 10th birthday today, and is giving away free Baskin-Robbins ice cream. I already enjoyed my Peanut Butter ‘n Chocolate, but if it’s too late to get the free ice cream, at least check out the “netrospective” listing the top 100 moments of the web since Yahoo!s birth.

I haven’t used Yahoo! search in a few years (Google is my friend), but I still use My Yahoo! daily to track stocks and news.

When I registered david-s.net four years ago, VeriSign had just swallowed up Network Solutions and was one of the only registrars for domain names, so I decided to plunk down the $30 or so and make my little home on the internet. Every year, November 16th rolls around and its the big decision, do I really want to keep my domain for another year? If so, is it worth it to stay at VeriSign/Network Solutions? For the past 3 years, the answers were yes and yes (because I’m lazy).

This year, I decided that it was time to switch away from the evil dictator of registrars, and move elsewhere. That somewhere ended up being Go Daddy for two main reasons, its cheap and easy. I signed up for my new registrar on November 1st, put in my info, set my domain to transfer and thought I was on my way to freedom.

I thought it would be easy, but Network Solutions had to try and make it as difficult as possible. I check my email and I get a message “Domain Transfer Failed - Status Not Valid”. Hmm, I’ll just login to my Network Solutions try to unlock my domain so that I can transfer it over. I look around the control panel and there is no information to be found about transferring your domain to another registrar. Oh, they’ll tell you how to transfer your other domains to NetSol, but they won’t tell you how to turn off the lock. I checked the “DomainProtect” feature, and its turned off. Check the whois, see REGISTRAR-LOCK. I figure maybe it takes a day, so I wait and reinitiate the transfer two days later. No go. I don’t have time for this, so instead I go play paintball (looks like they need some help with a little XSLT) with people from work and take out my domain frustrations by shooting each other. Monday rolls around and I’m at home for a quick lunch, so I decide to call up NetSol. It only takes 3 menus and I got to speak to a real live human being (not bad). I tell him I want to unlock my domain so I can transfer it. He says ok, looks around, flips a switch and says the status should. Check the whois, still see REGISTRAR-LOCK. Give it some more time. (DNS changes take less time to propagate.) Tuesday comes along, lunch time again, call up NetSol, ask them to flip the switch again, this time for real. Guy says ok, should be set. Check whois, ACTIVE. Woo hoo!! I thank the tech support guy, and he asks why I’m leaving NetSol, maybe because I figure the world’s largest registrar would let me flip my own switches rather than have to hunt down tech support to make them do it for me. Sorry, but I’m glad you’re no longer the gatekeeper of top level domains. Welcome to something called competition. Re-re-re-initiate transfer. Fill in a couple forms, say sayonara to NetSol and konichiwa Go Daddy.

The new ICANN policy on registrar transfers takes effect today (November 12), to which Kottke over-reacts, but then corrects himself. This policy is actually meant to help out all of the poor souls who have sold themselves to the NetSol devil. Anyways, I have my new registrar and the world is at peace, correct?

No, things are never that easy. While I was busy at work the past few days, it looks like my host, bloghosts, decided to take a nose dive. Now they aren’t completely dead (you’re probably reading this off of their server right now), but its time to find a new host. In the 5 months I hosted my site with them, I was very satisfied. No longer did I have to worry about DNS, Apache, PHP, mySQL, Postfix, or anything else. All of that customer satisfaction went right down the drain. No advance notice, no email, not even a post on their RSS feed (and they called themselves bloghosts)!

I did some quick research, and decided to splurge a little to go with TextDrive. Why TextDrive? Take a look at the specs for one. I’ll have a lot more storage space to move my pictures back, shell access to a nice FreeBSD server to play around on, Subversion, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, and hack away on WordPress. Plus its run by a good group of people. Now I’m just waiting for the DNS to transfer, so if I disappear, I should be back in a bit.

This is going to be my last post from bloghosts. I’ll let you know once I’m up and running on TextDrive.

The answer to the question is only a click away (or /usr/bin/whois david-s.net if you’re so inclined).

Thanks to Spam Assassin, almost every spam I get is nicely marked and ready to delete. Every once in a while I scan through all the email that gets marked as spam to make sure there isn’t anything important in there. While I was going through all of the junk (400 messages), i noticed something strange, there were tons messages trying to sell Rolexes. I don’t know how or why they thought I’d be a great target to send 80 messages to get me to buy a watch. Somehow my email has turned into a New York City street corner trying to pawn off their shady goods. 20% of the trash I get in email is trying to sell me a thousand dollar watch. Sorry to spoil your marketing scheme, but I’ll be sticking with my Skagen, and if I ever decide to waste that much money on a watch, it’ll probably be a Movado.

This is a public service announcement. For all of my family and friends that ask for technical help whenever your computer gets a virus, worm, spyware, adware, messed up IM, or anything else, I am asking you to please go and download Mozilla Firefox . This is as much for my sanity as it is for yours. Internet Explorer has a ton of software bugs, and when 95% of the world runs buggy software, some jackass is probably going to come along and take advantage of that fact. Whenever said person comes along and infests the web with the latest virus, everyone starts swearing up and down at their computer. Many times, IE is to blame for allowing

My other major reason for asking you to ditch Internet Explorer is because IE still doesn’t render PNG images correctly. If my site looks like the thumbnail to the left, you need to upgrade to Mozilla Firefox so you can see my site in all its blue xhtml/CSS glory! (Plus, I have a few little surprises that will only work in PNG and CSS compliant browsers like the Mozilla family, Safari, and Opera.)

Of course, the even better solution is to trade in your Windows PC for a Mac , and just use Safari or Camino

Update: Well, there’s another virus on the loose infecting web servers and then propagates to web surfers using Internet Explorer . Once again, if you’re unlucky enough to be using IE, get the fix now!

Update: There was another article in Saturday’s Washington Post that echoed my reasoning for the death of IE.