Into the Void

In a previous article I was babbling about subscribing to RSS feeds in order to reduce information overload. But let’s look at it from the other side now. Webmasters use RSS feeds to keep customers up-to-date. Customers use a feed reader to grab the raw XML from their favorite sites, and the feed reader formats it so that it is easy to skim.

How does that work? Do I have to remember to update the RSS feed everytime I update my site? Well, yes! That’s the point! However, it doesn’t have to be that difficult. Nobody has to hand-code web sites any more, though some of us still do. As a hobby. Yes, I know, geekess. Read on…

So now you’ve decided you want to be on that web thing too. There are lots of ways to share your information on the web. I’m going to talk about four of them: blogs, content-management systems (CMS), bulletin boards (BBS, “board,’” or forum), and wikis.

A blog is a web-log, a sort of a diary or journal. The software has a web-based interface and is pretty much transparent to the user. The user logs in to a regular web page and types what she wants to say. The blog software formats her Pearls of Wisdom and presents them to the reader in a pleasing format. Very nice. The blog software also creates an RSS feed automatically.
Whether you use a blogging site or maintain your own page depends on your technical level and how much mojo you’ll get from hosting it on your own domain. Hosted blogging accounts can be set up quickly and require no maintenance. The data can be hosted on their site or it can be published on yours via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This is a quick-and-easy way to find out whether you get what you want out of blogging.
Blogger is a popular general-purpose blogging host, now owned by Google. It gives you the option of exporting your blog to your own web page if you have one.
LiveJournal is probably the most popular host. It is centered around personal diaries, and is used to create a community.
TypePad is another popular hosted weblogging service.
If you are technically inclined, you may decide to use blogging software. This also allows you greater control over the look-and-feel of your blog, and gives you the ability to customize.
WordPress is a free, state-of-the-art personal blogging tool. It is easy-to-use. Themes and plugins are available to customize WordPress and give it more features.
Moveable Type is another popular weblog platform for businesses and organizations.

A CMS is similar to blog software, except that it manages entire web sites rather than just your Dear Diary. It offers more features and better flexibility in formatting the pages. Again, data entry is web-based: authors log in to the software and start typing. CMS software also creates RSS feeds. If you’re interested in creating a web site or portal rather than just an online diary, a CMS may be the way to go.
SubDreamer is an easy-to-use CMS. It has a WYSIWIG editor and also provides an image manager. The best part for me is that it will integrate an existing forum, preserving membership information and re-skinning the forum to match. The only drawback is that it costs money.
Mambo is a free CMS. It’s more feature-rich but consequentially slightly more difficult to use. Skins and plugins are available. Did I mention that it’s free?
Joomla is a spin-off of Mambo. They are still almost identical.
PHP-Nuke is another CMS, an oldie-but-goodie. Because it has been around a while, there are many, many addons available. The latest version costs a nominal fee of $10 but I believe you can get a previous version for free. Heck, I donate at least that much for free software if they have a PayPal button and I use the software a lot.

A BBS or Forum is just what you’d think it is, a CMS of sorts that helps to create an on-line community. Members log in, find a topic or conversation that interests them, and leave messages.
Again, you can choose between using on-line forum site or using forum software. The forum software takes care of registration, private messages between members, and permissions. A BBS requires a bit more maintenance because access is usually more public.
Delphi Forums is a popular on-line forum host.
Again, if you are technically inclined, there are many forum software packages available.
phpBB is totally free. It is easy-to-install, easy-to-use, and requires little maintenance.
Invision Power Board is another popular forum application. Themes and plugins are available. However, it is rather expensive at $70 per year or $185 for a perpetual license.
VBulletin is a popular forums package suitable for medium-to-large size sites. The price includes tech support including installation.

I’m still trying to get my brain around the concept of a wiki. A Wiki is a collaborative system. Multiple authors contribute information, which is categorized and cross-referenced. The presentation is clean and simple, and it is waaaaaaay to easy to get lost surfing in one. The cross-referencing makes it fairly easy to find exactly what you are looking for, assuming you came in on a related topic. It also frees you from the site authors’ internal concept of how the information should be organized.
If you’d like to participate, find one of the many Wikis in your field of interest and try it out. I’m rather partial to the humorous Encyclopedia Dramatica.
WikiPedia is a great general-purpose encyclopedia site.
If you have the technical knowledge to start a wiki on a specialized topic, there are several easy-to-install, easy-to-maintain applications.
MediaWiki is the engine behind WikiPedia. It is free, and is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, feature-rich wiki implementation. It requires PHP and a MySQL database.
TikiWiki is another free wiki system. It has many excellent features and is easy to use.
Apache::MiniWiki is a small wiki implementation that doesn’t require MySQL. It isn’t as full-featured at MediaWiki or TikiWiki, but you can run it on any Apache server with mod_perl.

If you have something - anything - to say, by all means start a web site. It doesn’t have to be momentous or earth-shattering, but it’s a good idea to write things that others are likely to read. (I don’t follow my own advice.) You don’t have to get a domain name and servers and expensive software, at least not to start out, as there are a number of excellent free services.

So what are you waiting for?

Google flagged me on the 11th page of results for doing an exhaustive search. If I’m a virus, why do they want to see me again?
I hope this isn’t a ploy to force users to download their branded apps.

We’re sorry…

… but we can’t process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.

I was babbling about the early days, before the web and search engines. Remember Archie and Gopher servers? And WAIS and Veronica? It was *still* hard to find what you wanted.
The first search engine I came across, I mean the first *spider* type, was Lycos at CMU. Except back then there was no fancy news page, just a picture of a hairy spider and a box to type the search term in. But still, what a thrill that was!
You newbies don’t know how good you’ve got it…
I don’t even bother to read news portals any more unless for some reason I want to kill time. It’s far faster to subscribe to newsfeeds and read them in a news aggregator. You can even subscribe to lots of special-interest site feeds so that you don’t have to wade through pages of irrelevant information. If something looks useful, then click and read the article.
There are some nice RSS apps - news aggregators - that run on the Windows desktop. I will look into RSS apps for Linux. Is there a Linux Firefox? That might do it. The Windows version allows you to create “live bookmarks” that contain all the items in the RSS file.
I prefer to use a speedy stand-alone news aggregator called AmphetaDesk. They don’t have a linux version, but you can download the source and try to compile it yourself. akregator is a news aggregator for Linux. It’s on SourceForge, which is a great place to download useful, sometimes intriguing open-source applications.

This is what Amphetadesk looks like in use. I can blow through the headlines for specialized topics on what, 90 web pages? in less than ten minutes, then click on anything I want to read more about. Tell me this isn’t way easier than watching fifteen minutes of house fires and muggings just to find out whether the rest of the world still exists.
If you get an RSS reader, you can download my .opml file, which contains all of my subscriptions, and your reader will import them.
Most websites using Content Management Systems (CMS) of some sort - including blogging software like WordPress - offer feeds. Look for the little orange button.
Now that we’ve talked about RSS feeds, let’s move on and talk about how to create the Extensible Markup Language (XML) file that comprises an RSS feed.

The Internet is big. No, really BIG. It is possible to look online for a recipe, follow a link to the history of the recipe and the culture of the people who created the recipe. Before you know it, dinnertime is a distant memory, bedtime is long past, and tomorrow morning is shining right into your tired, bloodshot eyes.

The problem is one of information overload. Information, you see, doesn’t create wisdom. Wisdom comes from choosing which information is useful for the task at hand, whether that task is cooking dinner or writing an essay on the funerary practices of the Fore tribe in New Guinea. Or both.

When I first had net access - and Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet - information was limited and it was sometimes difficult to locate it. There were several types of indexing, with special command-line programs to access them. Gopher was the very apt name of a commonly-used program used to dig into the information indexes. When you eventually found what you wanted, you’d then have to launch a separate application to handle the File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

When I finally gained access again, a fledgling HyperText Transport Protocol (HTTP), in conjunction with the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the MAC and of Microsoft Windows, provided easy access to related information, and yes, I got lost surfing more times than I can count.

Here it is several years later, and I hardly ever surf aimlessly. I also have given up on wordy but rather content-sparse general news outlets, including TV, newspapers, radio and even the big online news portals. Frankly, most news articles can be absorbed from the title and first paragraph. So how do I surf for titles and first paragraphs?

Well, in the last couple of years it is becoming more common for on-line resources to provide Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. An RSS feed is a text file that contains, at minimum, titles and summaries of recent articles on the main site. RSS feeds play an important part driving traffic to the information provider.

In future articles I will be exploring new tools for presenting information on the web, and their attendant issues. It is my hope that in clarifying the issues for myself, I will help clarify them for others.

Business Opportunities Weblog | How Much Is My Blog Worth

In case you wonder where your comment went, well, my bad. I blew out the MySQL database last weekend. I was able to reconstruct my posts from cached versions on Google, and in some cases I was able to set the date to the same as the original. But I ran out of steam before getting the comments added - and I wouldn’t have been able to set up the user accounts anyway.
So that’s why.
I must get into the habit of archiving the database every week.

This is the first post in the new category Meta, which will be, of course, blog entries about blogging. The purpose of this post is to clarify my own opinions and practices with respect to advertising.

Dear Leslie,
Thank you for participating in the Edelman/Technorati blog survey. We conducted this study to:

• Better understand bloggers’ attitudes towards corporations and PR firms
• Help clients understand why and how they should engage the blogosphere

Technorati contacted tens of thousands of active bloggers via email, blog posts and the networks of discussion and links those posts generated. The survey generated 821 responses during the week of September 26, 2005.
[..]
Thanks again for participating.
Richard
Richard Edelman
President & CEO, Edelman
richard.edelman@edelman.com

My answers:

1. The primary reason I blog is to Create a record of my thoughts. The secondary reason, of course, is to occasionally engage like-minded readers in conversations on a topic.
2. I post Every few days. I tend to post in bunches when my cognition and energy are up.
3. I write about companies or their products Less than once a week. I usually share by email with friends. No reason I can’t cc: the blog.
4. Yes, I would like samples to write about in my blog. I occasionally do this on another web site, specifically with books related to bipolar disorder.
5. I am contacted by bona fide companies or their reps Daily or almost daily. I’m only counting contacts from real businesses, not spam with a fake email address.
6. I most often actively interact with Product teams. These people are more likely to engage in dialog than PR people, and they’re usually pretty enthusiastic.
7. Companies usually contact me with Form email. I don’t generally finish reading an email that isn’t written to me personally. Oh, I can tell if vendor is using a mail-merge program.
8. Messages that come from an outside PR group generally go in the junk folder unread. These groups are less concerned about a product’s reputation and more concerned with whether they can sell me one. I trust them about 1 out of 10. Eudora has a very nice integrated SPAM filter.
9. Messages directly from a company are more likely to be read, and I’ll even pull them out of the junk bin if they contain solid information - technical details - about a product I’m interested in. I’d say I trust them 6 out of 10.
10. I have wondered whether to correct inaccuracies in a way that draws regular readers’ attention to the change. Perhaps Leave the error but append a correction is the best way.
11. If I post misinformation, I’d like a company rep to Post a comment. On web pages they must use the contact form.
12. I like to talk tech with Mid-level employees who work on research and development.
13. A blog endorsed and produced by a company is Occasionally trustworthy.
14. A blog by an employee is better, Somewhat trustworthy. Although they must toe the corporate line, they are more likely to talk about their experiences using the product.
15. I trust technical data from Company web sites. I rely on friends for product reviews.

What does all this mean?
Well, it means that the line between advertising and reality is blurring. We must decide right now whether to become whores for the products we use every day.
TAGS: Edelman, spam, corporate whore

I suppose I’ll go in to work today for an hour or so. The ADHD got the better of me of Friday and I burnt out at about 5PM. But before I go in, I think I’ll surf the Internets.
Let’s see who is linking to me. The Bipolar Planet has been in existence since 1995 but has only been at this URL for a couple of years. I don’t advertise very well, I’m afraid. To see who links to me on Google, I type link:bipolarplanet.com. Try it for your site.

Google has news feeds!
Manic Digest looks kind of interesting - though I don’t see the linkback. Look at her cute little pout: I’m thinking high drama. Could be worth following.
Of course I’m listed on the Pendulum Resources Bipolar Pholks page. Pendulum was the first ever bipolar web page, formed as an information repository for the email list of the same name.
I’m glad to see that BPSO has found my new address. This is the absolute best place on the web for SOs of bipolars.
Ah, yes, Soberrecovery has found me too. They have an excellent collection of resources for addiction.
Oooh, slipped to the 8th page on Bipolar Central.
Here’s one I haven’t seen before, Bipol-art.de. I’ll have to send them some of my tragically untalented artwork.

Technorati: ADHD Bipolar+Planet BPSO

Pendulum Resources is opening new bipolar forums, probably in early September. You can get a sneak preview now.