a convenient truth

I want to share a moment of angst.

I read a great comment about blogs perhaps two months ago, and it’s completely clobbered my blogging.  It’s taken some time for me to realise that this one comment has caused such a period of Bloggers Block.

The comment was from someone irritating like Dave Winer, but it struck something of a chord.  The gist was that the best blogs are those where people talk about what they know - but that the world is full of blogs where people sound off about things they know nothing about.  Unfortunately this struck home - this blog is full of me sounding off about subjects that I am, realistically, on the whole, clueless about.

Of course I’d love to think my opinion on any subject is by it’s very essence the purest gold; my every sentence dripping not only with sardonic vigour but such volumes of essential wisdom that readers are stunned into respectful silence.

Lying awake at 2am though, I know this is not the case, and to pretend otherwise is rather silly.  So, do I continue writing articles that might well be complete rubbish?  I have to say it never bothered me before, but the assertion that I am somehow participating in some huge exercise in dumbing down the Internet offended me somehow, all the more so since it could be true.

I know vast quantities of stuff about some extremely obscure things, but we have a work blog for that kind of stuff.  [Not that I use it, since it's the horrible Movable Type.  We have a new WordPress blog coming soon though (like our new website it's been coming soon for about a year), and then I might do some regular blogging there.]

So, a dilemma.  I do not yet know what I’ll do but at least having articulated the problem I may find a solution.  More likely, of course, I will get bored with the dilemma and proceed as before - blogging is a strange pursuit, since it’s purpose is so ill-defined, and I’ve yet to work out why I do it.

I’ve been tagged by RDH in the latest thingsyoudontknowaboutme. I previously did 5 things, so here are the remaining 3:

1. I was on the 70s kid’s TV programme Take Two talking about the equally ancient TV programme Treasure Hunt starring Anneka Rice. Problem was, I’d never seen it, so I just made stuff up. They showed it.
2. I worked as a contract cleaner for two years when i was a teenager, cleaning Microsoft’s HQ in Reading.
3. I was drunk at the birth of my first son, and absent from the emergence of my second.  Neither of these was my fault.  honest.

This has been bubbling along for a few days now. Google have added some actual sharing functionality to their “share” function in Google Reader. I’ve been using it anyway - you can see my shared items on the side of my blog.

Now your shared items will be visible to your contacts in gmail or google talk. On the whole this seems OK - the whole point of sharing is to make them public.

There has been something of a backlash however, some of it reasonable and some rather less so. The reasonable point is that people were using the shared feed (a private RSS feed) to share items with a restricted set of people.

Most people, including me, have gmail and gtalk contacts who are friends and some who are business contacts. Now the gap between personal me and professional me is pretty small, but I am definitely the exception - and in my early twenties the gap was much larger. I have just become more boring, something I wouldn’t necessarily encourage. Many, more interesting, people are horrified at the idea of random professional contacts seeing their feeds.

Even for those of us with closely related professional and personal lives we manage those with a different conversational register, for which there does appear to be an emerging sort of protocol. This blog is my personal blog. We have a work blog too, but this is just me speaking for myself. I can say things here I wouldn’t say on the work blog not because I’m concerned that my professional contacts might see it, some of them probably will (hi there!), but because I trust them to understand that we do in fact legitimately have personal lives that diverge from our professional ones. Incidentally this blog isn’t private - if I wanted something to be private, I wouldn’t put it on the Internet (duh).

So, that point seems very fair to me - there needs to be more granularity in sharing. Share with specific users, or with groups or with all my contacts or with everyone.  Edit: And lo, they have. Not the best thought out solution, but having to roll it out on Christmas day won’t have cheered them up any.  Full marks.  I imagine a better solution will come along shortly.

There have been some other complaints. One that I’ve seen is that people have been using the sharing feed for random other things, and that now those other things won’t work. Well tough really I think.

And finally you get idiots like Cyndy Aleo-Carreira at Profy.com, normally a pretty good tech news site, who has written this appallingly researched rubbish that is basically just full of lies.

I’d probably get all annoyed about how the blogosphere is so much less reliable than Mainstream Media now - except of course when this is picked up by the newspapers I expect they’ll do even less research, and publish even more rubbish.

More handbag action from Sam Sethi and Michael Arrington.  Blognation is no more.  No need to pass comment I think - a quick read through the history should provide enough info, and some of it is quite entertaining.

It does sound like all those who wrote for BlogNation got royally stiffed though

Oh for heaven’s sake. I wrote about this before, but I must admit I didn’t expect it to keep running, or to suck in some elevated members of the internets. Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales are drafting some sort of bloggers code of conduct (which doesn’t include “thou shalt write a load of vapid nonsense”) and it even has badges!

You see this image here? Tim O’Reilly thinks it indicates that someone is going to be enforcing civility. What he has missed is that this is the Internet and that really it is a bloody great big target drawn on your website. I can’t imagine a bigger red rag to the whole world of trolls out there.

So, if you want your site defaced, or to spend the rest of your natural moderating comments (and what the hell is this “I take responsibility for the comments on my website” crap too? Am I your Dad?), then sure go put a badge like that on it. I shall enjoy sitting back and watching the fun.

I’ve switched from Movable Type to WordPress. We’ve been evaluating WordPress at work for a project, and it pretty quickly became clear that WordPress is superior to MT. It does have some disadvantages - in common with most Open Source projects the documentation is awful; out of date, incorrect and generally almost worse that useless. In some ways I prefer the look and feel of the Movable Type admin interface too, and MT would be easier to scale. That said, scaling WP would mostly just involve an accelerating proxy like Squid.

Apart from those pretty minor complaints, everything else about WP seems to be better. It’s been a painless experience importing not just my old MT content, but stuff from the blog system before that, which I wrote myself. My largest complaint about WP now is that it’s in PHP, which is bad. MT is in Perl though, which is only marginally better. And it’s not often I have to dig into the code, so that’s kind of irrelevant.

I’ve gone to some effort to preserve links, but if anyone notices any dead ones please let me know. For the record, here’s a python script to fix your links after importing from MT:

import MySQLdb
db = MySQLdb.connect(host="localhost",
    user="USERNAME", passwd="PASSWORD", db="DATABASE")
c = db.cursor()
c.execute("select ID, post_name from wp_posts")
for pid, post_name in c.fetchall():
    post_name = post_name[:30].replace("-", "_")
    print pid, post_name
    c.execute("update wp_posts set post_name=%s where ID=%s", (post_name, pid))

A short plug for a [wicked web site](http://www.parenthacks.com/). If you’ve got ankle biters, stick that in your aggregator.

My friend Antonia has started [blogging](http://yetanotherbloomingblog.blogspot.com/index.html). In fact she started ages and ages ago, but kept quiet about it. Well, her blog is a revelation. It’s actually worth reading, unlike 99% of the blogs out there (including this one). Seriously, it’s very funny and very, well, good.

Since we are now [using](http://blog.isotoma.com) [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.com) [everywhere](http://www.sleevenotez.com), I’m moving this blog to MT as well. I’ll be importing all the old blog posts in a bit. The only thing people generally look at though is the gallery which now has a [new url](http://www.winter.cx/gallery).

This is quite odd. I wonder what was really going on…