An online notebook
Some news from the ColaLife campaign… as part of the submission to Google for the 10^100 competition, a 30 second video has been created. And it’s lovely:
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Please visit the YouTube page and mark the video as a favourite, give it a 5 star rating and embed it in your own blogs and social networks. The more that people know about this remarkable initiative, the better.
John Naughton‘s Observer column on ten years of blogging is a delightful read:
This openness to immediate criticism and/or rebuttal is another revolutionary aspect of blogging. What we are seeing, wrote Clay Shirky some years ago (available online at http://bit.ly/fkxik), is nothing less than the ‘mass amateurisation of publishing’. What’s happening is a radical shift from the old ecosystem in which publications (newspapers, magazines and books) are filtered and edited before being published, into a world in which anything can be (and is) published.
All that remains is for English departments in universities to start studying blogging styles, for example the way in which accomplished online writers use hyperlinks. If you read the work of established bloggers or contributors to slick online publications such as Salon or Slate what you see is a move from having hyperlinks clumsily embedded in a document to the use of links to provide an ironic counterpoint to the main line of the piece. It’s all very, er, postmodern. But what do you expect? It is 2008.
Simon Wakeman poses a potentially controversial question on his blog:
One idea that’s been playing on my mind for the past few days is whether a council needs a website at all.
Initially this might seem like complete heresy. Surely a public sector body providing services to local residents needs a website to help them communicate and provide online services to their residents?
But do they need a website in the sense that we might see a traditional “destination” website – a place where people go to find out information and do council stuff online?
One of the things that is making me challenge some assumptions is the increasing focus on place in local public services. For the uninitiated this means that there’s much less focus on the organisation providing particular local services (eg council, police, primary care trust…) and more on the organisations working together to provide services in a coherent way that suits residents and businesses, not service providers.
So why a council website alongside a police website alongside a primary care trust website?
He goes on to make some further really interesting points. Well worth a read.
I’m also thinking I need to add Simon to the Public Sector Bloggers list…
Akismet is a plugin for WordPress (and a few other platforms) which helps combat the problem of comment spam. That when ne’erdowells come on your blog and post nonsense comments in the hope pick click the links in them to buy some viagra, or invest in a Nigerian lottery winning syndicate.
Dealing with this stuff can be a pain.
(I have often wondered how people who run blogs or forums about the uses of bedroom-performance enhancing drugs, or genuine Nigerian investments, manage their spam. How do you decide what is and isn’t?)
Akismet makes it easy by checking your comments against a central database, which records what everyone who uses the system has marked as spam, and then removes it from view. So, no alerts telling you that you need to deal with a new comment – if Akismet thinks it’s spam, you don’t need to know about it.
You can still check the quarantined list for false-positives though, if you want. Sometimes the service works a little too well.
Anyhow, I upgraded the Akismet plugin today here on WordPress, and was surprised to see a new tab on my admin panel for ‘Akismet Stats’:
And once you click it, it makes pretty interesting reading! There are graphs and tables of data. Well worth the upgrade just to see what causes spikes in your comment spam.
Whilst technically all you need is a blog and a browser to start blogging, there are some other bits of software you can use that make your life a little easier.
Here’s a list of options for Mac users:
1. Skitch
Easily my number one choice, this is a phenomenally useful tool, which I don’t think is available on any other platform.
Skitch is simply a tool that lets you take snapshots of what is on your screen. Sounds pretty unremarkable, but Skitch does some cool stuff:
For getting image snapshots quickly onto the web, it’s brilliant. And free.
2. Transmit
Transmit is a solid, well performing Mac FTP client. Why use one? Well, if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, say, you need to upload plugins, themes and that kind of thing to your web host. And when it comes to upgrade time, having a solid FTP client is good for the blood pressure!
Transmit costs a few pennies, but is jolly reliable and so worth the investment.
3. NetNewsWire
NetNewsWire is a desktop based RSS aggregator. I used this for a long while before being won over by the advantages of Google Reader. Others still swear by this though, especially now it has its own iPhone app.
4. MarsEdit
I rather bemoaned the state of the Mac desktop blogging client in a recent post, but since then I have been giving MarsEdit another go. The main issue for me is the lack of a rich text editor, which is good for speed but not awfully user friendly.
Again, it costs a couple of quid but is worth giving a go, especially if you use NetNewsWire with which it integrates rather well.
5. TextWrangler
Sometimes you just need to edit text, and don’t want to mess about. TextWrangler comes from the same people that make the legendary Mac text editor BBedit, which is rather pricey but feature rich. TextWrangler is BBedit’s freebie little brother, and let’s you load up text, html, php or css files and edit them to your heart’s content.
What are your favourite blogging tools? Would anyone like to see a Windows version of this list?