For those who don’t know, MarsEdit is a Macintosh program to write blog posts.

There are a couple of small features in the way the Mars Edit works that could have been deal breakers for me, so I was going back to the MarsEdit forums to figure out if there were a work around for them. I couldn’t remember the url of the site, so I Google MarsEdit.

The problem is the results. The first result returned by Google is to a page on the Ranchero Software site mentioning that Ranchero Software sold MarsEdit to Red Sweater Software more than 7 months ago. The second Google result points to the Red Sweater Software page that describes MarsEdit.

Curiously, the PageRank for the Red Sweater page is 7 while the Ranchero page PageRank is 0, and the PageRank for the Ranchero Software home page is 7, while the Red Sweater home page is 6.

What this means is that there are so many more links out there on the web that point to MarsEdit at the Ranchero site than at the Red Sweater site, and the rating of those sites is so much higher, that a deficiency in page rank of 0 to 7 is overcome.

Even more confusingly, the absolute number of links isn’t that different. As of this moment 282 links point to the Red Sweater page and only about 592 links point to the Ranchero Software site.

I wouldn’t have thought it possible. This is a PageRank result that really confounds all my expectations.

What I did

I had been using standard WordPress themes, most recently Bosco 2.0 + Widgets. This was a fine theme, clearly organized and readable, but it was a black box that I never looked into. I needed to get a better understanding of my tools to handle some future projects that I am considering.

One of the tools that I was looking into was Instiki. While reading up on Instiki, I came across this post from Kevin Lawver on how he was using S5 with Instiki.

I loved the look of Kevin’s site (I also enjoyed reading some of his presentations on CSS) so I am giving him the sincerest form of flattery by imitating the general look of his site a WordPress theme.

I pulled my WordPress install over to my home machine and went to work. I created a new template, eventually called EarthSea, by copying the Bosco theme to a new directory. I used MAMP to run a local version of WordPress, CSSEdit to modify the CSS and TextMate to modify the php templates.

It was a really nice combination of tools. CSSEdit allowed me to modify the site CSS styles as I watched. I’d change the font and immediately see the change on my page. I could change the padding on a div by turning the mouse wheel and watching it grow or shrink.

I’m still not a fan of php. Speaking as someone who has used Perl professionally for 10 years, php looks like line noise to me, but it sure is easy poking around directly in the page source.

Also, as someone who has used Emacs for about 20 years, the adjustment to Textmate is slow. I love the look and feel of Textmate, but Emacs key bindings are stuck in my fingers.

I like the way the result looks. The design is much cleaner than any of my previous sites and I think it will be easier to manage and extend.

What next

There are some pages that are missing, mostly because they are placeholders for future work I am planning. I would also like a better version of the archive page and an automatically generated blogroll. I am currently using Google Reader, but I think I want more control than I can get from a simple automated tool.

I also want Atom 1.0 feeds, instead of the current 0.3 versions. The bottom of the sidebar is a little chaotic looking with both RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds of both entries and comments. When I get Atom 1.0, I’ll clean that up and probably just move to autodiscovery.

In general, the future direction of this blog is going to be less focused on the technical themes that most interest me — calendars, synchronization, planning for small groups, ruby on rails, application servers — and more on the personal, family and political topics. I’ll still use this as a capture point for technical details that are of broader interest, but the big topics are moving from here and to my technical blog, Cornercases.

Mena Trott, cofounder of conference sponsor Six Apart, was opening the second day and calling for “civility in blogging.” While this was going on, in fact through the entire conference, there was an irc back channel which you can read here. Mena took exception to a comment in the back channel by dotBen, “this is bullshit.”

Mena came down:

Who is dotBen? All day yesterday you’ve been an asshole to the people who’ve been in this town and I want to know why don’t you, why, what the fuck?

You can hear the callout and the response here.

Lots of people have commented on this. You can see Ben’s and Mena’s takes and checkout technorati.

Many of the comments come from people who weren’t there.

You can add me to that number. One thing that I seem to have over the other absent commentors is that I have read through (most of) the irc logs.

Before I read the logs, I was inclined to agree that “this is bullshit” from an anonymous person was out of bounds, but having read them, I changed my mind.

Reading through the first day, its a little hard to see what bothered Mena about dotBen’s comments on the first day. They didn’t seem particularly inflamatory to me. I didn’t click through to look at all the photoshop mashups so maybe that was it, but they weren’t really dotBen’s responsibility.

First off, dotBen’s comments were just the normal sort of comments that everyone makes during a presentation if they can. Like I say, I don’t view them as that inflamatory. Actually, they were reasonably targeted, or at least they seemed to move the discussion forward among the participants in the backchannel. The participants were challenging what they heard and they were learning and evaluating.

Second, dotBen was not an unknown. He seemed to be known personally to many of the other members of the channel and he seems to have become known (as dotBen) to others over the course of the conference, Marc Canter for instance. It was a big conference, but dotBen was not merely sitting on the back bench and sniping. That Mena didn’t know who he was wasn’t necessarily his fault.

Third, I’m inclined to be more accepting of Ben’s suggestion that there were cultural differences at play than others are. Contrast question time in the House of Commons with the President’s State of the Union Address as an example. I don’t think that this comparison comes out in favor of the US either. I only wish some senator had had to balls to shout “Bullshit” when Bush was lying us into war.

Fourth, where was Mena on the backchannel? She is not obviously identified in the logs. She could have logged on and read everything that happened. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as she thought? If she isn’t participating, she doesn’t really know. It’s like when you are a kid and you eat dinner at your friend’s house. Are they shouting because they are mad, or do they always shout?

The weird thing to me, and it was commented on in the log, is that the chat wasn’t always visible to participants who didn’t choose to be on irc, only at selected times. I’m willing to bet that they only showed it when there was something juicy (“this is bullshit”) to be shown.

The projection seemed to be under Six Apart’s control which seems like a mistake. Either keep it up all the time, or never. Whatever you do, don’t cherry pick the inflamatory bits out of context. It only makes them seem more inflamatory.

Net, I’m not really a fan of labelling other people’s comments “bullshit.” I don’t think it makes any difference if you are anonymous or not, but in a semi-private setting I can imagine feeling free enough to do it. On the other hand, saying someone is an asshole doesn’t really raise the tone of the converstation either. It’s probably not the message I would want to communicate at the end of my session on civility. I just see two people looking a situation from different points of view.

Finally, reading through this I am struck by the technological illiteracy of some of the big names in the the industry. I really don’t see how you can weigh in on this issue without actually looking at the irc logs. Thanks to Nick S via a comment on a Workbench posting for the link to the IRC transcript.

Scoble’s objection is that search results don’t reflect his notions of what is important in the world.

“As long as I’m the #1 Robert and Robert Redford isn’t as high up as me then you know that this is actually a search problem.”

This could be done by Google, Yahoo, or MSN pretty easily, but it would be a bad idea. The problem is that on the web we have today, Robert Scoble is more important than Robert Redford.

If you look at the Google results for Scoble and Redford, Scoble has 3.9M listings, while Redford only has 3.1M.

As near as I can tell, and with apologies to Robert’s brother, almost all 3.6M of those hits on Scoble refer to the Microsoft Geek Blogger, while there are hits on Redford that don’t refer to Sundance. All of the first 30 hits on Scoble referred to Robert Scoble, only 11 of the first 30 of the Redford results refer to Robert Redford. I also counted the 970-1000 hits on the two terms at Google. These are the highest results that Google allows the user to see. One hundred percent (28/28) of these hits referred to Robert Scoble while 92% of the sample (24/26) refer to Robert Redford.

Your mileage on these results may vary because of where and when you are pulling your results, but they make the point that Scoble is vastly more represented on the web than Redford. (If it makes Scoble feel any better, all of the links to Robert Redford are complimentary or neutral, while lots of the Scoble links are, umhh, challenging, to put it politely.)

Could Google, MSN or Yahoo make an editorial decision to boost Redford over Scoble because more people are interested in the movie star than in the geek blogger? Sure they could. When I was doing Commerce Search at Inktomi we did this all the time. There were all sorts of custom tweaks for various domains. If someone searched on “mouse,” we didn’t return mouse pads, even though mouse pads are formally as relevant as mice. If someone wants mouse pads, they will search for “mouse pad.” This seemed to make sense at the time. We were only indexing products and we were trying to build a database that made it easy for consumers to identify, locate and buy those products. We were trying to get inside the consumer’s head and send them the results that they expected.

Based on the history, consumers didn’t like it. As we were losing traffic, Google’s neutral results (and simple interface) were attracting consumers and growing like crazy.

There are a number of reasons for this, but I think the most important was that when the results are tweaked, the user experience is not as good. The user develops a mental model of how the search engine works. Even though the first time they search, they may be annoyed not to get what they want, they learn when and how to modify their search terms to get the results that they seek. Tweaking the search results makes the responses to modifications non-linear, and harder for the consumer to predict.

Consumers realize the the search results apply to the web that exists and that this web is limited in a number of ways, but they want the results to accurately reflect that reality, not some editorial reality.

I think that these problems will settle out as more people, and more types of people get on the web and start blogging, or otherwise creating content that links out to the world. If Robert Redford had a blog, and every Robert Redford fan blogged their responses to his posts and, I think most importantly, the various film and fan sites were really part of the web – linking out, taking part in the conversation – then Redford would quickly pass Scoble.

Until that time I hope the search engines resist the call to tweak for expectations based on non-web popularity. Who searches on “Robert” anyway?

I haven’t had that many people comment on any of my entries. Unaccountably, as I posted before, most of the comments are on my post about deciding to stop using Norton Anti-virus software.

Comments on that post still continue to come in. The commenters want me to check their order status, or to clarify some ambiguity in the messages that they have received from Symantec and/or DigitalRiver.

Why do people leave these comments with me? I’m complaining about Norton, not offering technical support, and certainly not order support. One of the most common search strings that I see coming into the blog is “symanteccs@digitalriver.com”. My two most recent questioners, ” e**** a****” and “c****** s****” came in on that search, although one searched from MSN and the other from Google. Is it possible that people are putting that search into their browser when they think that they are mailing and are then thinking that they have entered some Symantec operated page?

Another odd similarity that both of these most recent users’ browsers report that they have FunWebSearch. I think that this is just a curious coincidence.

On the search engine rankings front, searching for “symanteccs@digitalriver.com”:

With MSN, this blog is the first and only result.

With Google there are four results, this blog is the third.

With Google through c****** s****’s ISP, this blog is the second result of two, although there are three paid results above that.

Here’s an idea.

Providers of movie reviews should feed that information directly to me in sync with the DVD release. If you have broadcast reviews, or a print reviews, of movies, you should give me the opportunity to subscribe to a feed of your reviews that is synchronized with the DVD releases.

There are a number of sites that provide information on DVD releases. VideoETA and Amazon provide for instance give you release dates, and at Amazon at least you can click through to the reivews, but that is only useful to me if I know what I am looking for. This shiftcasting would give me useful editorial information and product guidance when I could use it.

There are a number of other cases where shiftcasting could be useful. Reviews of all sorts: shiftcast a book review in sync with the release to paperback, shiftcast the review from the trade show when the product actually reaches the stores. Newspapers and magazines have made a habit of stories and features like “On this day 25 years ago.”

Update 10:55 pm:

Microsoft is adding RSS to Longhorn. There will probably be a fair amount of ink spilled over this subject over the next few weeks. The reports I have read seem to imply that shiftcasting would be easily possible. Cool Tech Zone reports

Another different concept that Microsoft is planning on with RSS technology is opening it for developers. For example, Microsoft said it would leave the standard open for commerce sites, such as online retailers and music stores, to update the users with latest information.

It sounds like the OS will maintain your OPML, and that any interested application can have access to it. Also, the OS will pull down the content that you are interested in. Your applications can then manipulate this data, giving you access to your podcasts, putting together a news page from your feeds, pulling information into your calendar and others.

Interestingly one of the cases that is mentioned on the Microsoft site is DVD releases. The specific concept of shiftcasting mentioned, and the technology for joining an existing review with an event isn’t mentioned, but it is an obvious extension, especially once you are watching the DVD on you MS Media Center using MS Media Player. It would be instead of a thumbnail, you could see the review before you elected to view this one of 20 possible movies.

Following the instructions from the girlie matters I have added multiple RSS feeds to the site. The feeds are listed on this page. (Updated link.)

So far they aren’t auto discoverable.

I had to jump through some hoops to make it possible for MovableType to know what to call them. The were created automatically without any problem, I just created a Archive Template for each and there they were.

The issue was on the feeds page. I didn’t want to create the page by hand, so I created a template to generate them. There wasn’t a tag that held the name of the category as used on the file system for me to reference.

When the files are created, it is named like <MTCategoryArchive>.xml The problem is that is run through dirify before the file is written. So for instance, the Family Life category produces a file family_life.xml. If I tried to do that on my feeds page, <MTCategoryArchive>.xml is transformed into Family Life.xml.

I didn’t know how I could call dirify on MTCategoryArchive. <$MTCategoryArchive$ dirify="1"> doesn’t work.

Instead I created a new tag, MTCatgoryHandle. I registered a handle in MT::Template::Context, and in that handle I called dirify on MTCategoryLabel. I don’t know if this is the right way to go about this, I prefer not to be hacking in the source directly, but since I needed this once before, I decided to go for it.

Ideally I would like the index page of each category to contain both the name of the full site feeds and the specific category feeds.

Down there on the lower left, near the end of my blogroll is a search at blogdigger.com for all the blogs near to my zip code. This is basically the Haight and Western Addition of San Francisco, although it appears that the definition of “near” is pretty broad.

Unfortunately, the Geo-tags website seems to be down continuously. The home page gives a nicely framed, “The system is too busy to complete this request at this time.”

For the purpose of this blog, this isn’t a very useful technology. I have a static location, and while it may be useful for you sometimes, and meaningful for me. to know that I live in the Haight district of San Francisco, it doesn’t make too much difference. Are you going to read what I say because of where I live? Probably not, unless you are my neighbor, or I write on subjects of neighborhood interest.

Where I can see this being handy is for travelling blogs. If I’m cycling across the country with only the clothes on my back and my trusty wirelessly enabled laptop, killing my own food and posting every day for the good folks at home, it would be pretty interesting to have those post be automatically sucked up and plotted on Google maps.

This particular use case isn’t that easy to do with what I know of Movable Type. The geo-tags need to go into the head of the html document, and the vanilla configuration of Movable Type puts the head element into the template files, which are the same for all entries.

My ISP, Earthlink, blocks port 25, making it impossible for me to send mail from the warmroom.com domain to anyone except Earthlink Or Mindspring customers.

I can receive e-mail because I use the MailHop service from DynDNS, but I cannot send mail. Using MailHop, DynDNS receives my mail, and then forwards it to me on a different port. I could pay DynDNS to do the same with my outbound mail, but it is an additional expense and there are limits, which are pretty small, less than 100 messages a day as I recall. I would not exceed that amount very often, but I didn’t care to risk it.

I knew that I could send mail using my domain and by configuring my client software. I had checked into this before. Earthlink documented the work around on this FAQ on port 25 blocking. It was just a matter of Earthlink’s normal authentication through an alternate host using user name and password, but I didn’t know how to do this through sendmail, as I didn’t have much experience with configuring and administering sendmail.

There was an reference on slashdot today about some guy how claims to receive, and more significantly manage, 1 million spam e-mails a day. His story looks pretty interesting, and the layout and the clarity of the site were big pluses.

Before I got too far in the article, though, I started following along at home and poking through the sendmail configuration files. I saw the SMART_HOST configuration parameter. This seemed to address my problems with sending mail, “Uncomment and edit … if your outgoing mail needs to be sent out through an external mail server,” so I went off on a tangent. (I don’t receive that much spam anyway, courtesy the filtering that my upstream providers do for me.)

I Googled and the first hit was this page at sendmail.org.

It was a piece of cake from there. My Whitebox system had the latest versions of Cyrus SASL and sendmail. It was just a matter of creating a few configuration files, making some other changes in the sendmail config, building the authentication database and the sendmail.cf and restarting smtpd . It just worked.

The sendmail documentation is first rate. There are examples of how to do everything, including debugging. Example:

Run

sendmail -d0.1 -bv root | grep SASL

and make sure SASL appears in the output. Otherwise go back to compiling sendmail and make sure your site.config.m4 is really used.

This is brilliantly simple and direct.

One of the configuration files specifies the authentication server and the user name and password to use for authentication on that server. In my case this is the Earthlink server, user name and password. I created a special user for just this purpose. I don’t see anyway that it matters, but it seemed prudent to do, so I did.

The downside was that I received a deluge of test e-mails from myself, to my various external e-mail accounts, but since most of them had some permutation on “Test” as the subject, it was easy enough to clear up.