Ed Cone wrote these four sentences Sunday morning. It startled me. I read on, then cried silently.
I called my mom's house. Andrew's voice on the answering machine. A tape of course, but still startling. Andrew hasn't spoken for months, and will not speak again.
Read the whole post.
Dave is writing about flipping the switch on scripting.com. He also public muses about a web CMS that uses an outliner. Dave, I'll send $40 to you now to get on the beta test list for that one. My advice: give it to the community and watch it grow. It will move faster to acceptance than if you sell it yourself or give it to Userland.
I haven't written much lately, and I certainly haven't linked much. For that, I'm sorry. I'm spending more time with a fledgling business wrestling with a thirst for change.
I've watched with interest Dave Winer's changes in Scripting News, his weblog about scripting software and technology. For the last year or two, it's been less about scripting and more about Dave. That's fine with me. Dave makes me think more about the “why's” when I do something than the “how's”. That's why I read it every day.
The header picture changed. That's good too. The other photo was a source of juvenille stress for everyone. Dave's worked through it and has produced a better result: he's relating his life to the Web through his website. It's made me once again question the “why” of my weblog, and not the “how”.
I'll be spending the rest of the month transitioning my weblog to one of two pieces of software: Movable Type or Manila. MT is free for me as a non-commerical users. Manila is $899. Both offer strengths. Opinions?
I have seen the light about my interaction with the blogosphere. I've grown out of the “link to everyone, post everything” phase. There's too much that's good *and* bad to make those kinds of rationalizations with everything I read. I'll spend more time writing introspectively, something I enjoy more than posting news from other sites.
More as it happens…
I'm playing a bit with theme files and macros, working on a tool to build themes in Radio. Bear with me if the site pages go “weird”. The RSS feed shouldn't change.
Bryan laments the passing of the cactus
Rest in piece clever cactus… you will be missed.
I am also trying to do some housecleaning on “shortcuts”, the handy auto-linking feature of “Radio”. Just like the word Radio in the last sentence, you can create shortcuts in Radio that when you type the word with quotation marks, it replaces the text with a shortcut. This is a well know feature to everyone who's used “Radio” but “me”, hence it's not on my “Radio wishlist” of features. Final shortcut: “Radio home server”
I'd bet it's in Rogers' book… [Amazon link]
I took a moment to subscribe to a couple of outlines via “Radio”. I think I'm beginning to get it. Subscribing to an outline is like subscribing to a static RSS feed: I get content, but it's ordered and easily updated. This would be great for end-user documentation, much better than HTML-based, web-connected help systems.
I'm starting a company, so I started a weblog to go with it. I'm using “Radio” running under Windows to do some of the dirty work and I've been impressed with how fast it is. The Windows version of the app is easily 50% faster than the Mac version running on equivalent hardware.
I'm hoping that the Mac version gets better soon. I'd love to run it on an iBook, but don't want to *have to* buy a 1GHz machine to do it.
As a side note,
Brent Simmons posts a couple of his favorite bug report “feedback”
Bug Guilt Trips.For me, there are three main tactics that I see:
1. I’d buy it, if…— If NetNewsWire had just this one feature I’d buy it.
2. It would be more Mac-like if…— It’s the trump card of user interface discussion. (Its brother is “it would be more intuitive if…”) The problem is, when an app gets as much feedback as NetNewsWire, you get mutually exclusive feedback. Persons A, B, and C don’t agree on what the Mac-like solution is for a given user interface problem.
3. It should be easy for you to just…— Oh no you didn’t just say that! This comes from programmers as well as people who don’t program. They know it’s good psychology, because it goes right to my pride as a programmer. The thing is, you don’t know what’s easy to implement and what isn’t. Simple-sounding things are sometimes wickedly difficult. Hard-sounding things are sometimes a piece of cake.
And one bonus tactic…
4. You don’t want to try to be Dave Hyatt— Okay, I got this one only once, but I liked it so much I have to repeat it. It came up in a discussion of how NetNewsWire uses Web Kit. (Of course, the thing was that I wanted to use Web Kit—use the great stuff Dave Hyatt and the rest of the Web Kit team has provided. Not be Dave Hyatt. Quite the opposite.)
—snip—
Sean redoes categories. He's inspired me to do the same…
the death of dot-communism. In my urge to do year-end cleaning, I've decided it's time to really get a handle on this stupid “category” feature in Radio. So I'm going to start using it the way it was intended: for subcategories within a single weblog, instead of for publishing multiple, schizophrenic weblogs with no apparent connection between them (as I have been doing for quite some time). One blog is more than enough work, thank you.
So, given how things are going these days, I've decided to retire “dot-communist” as a separate entity from my Radio weblog, Rant Central. As the new year approaches, I'll decide where I'm going to host the single resulting weblog.
–snip–
Steve Kirks 