Category: Blogging
I just noticed that comments are broken. I'll have a look at that when I get a chance, but right now I'm incredibly busy at work (hence the need for IBM support as mentioned in my last post), and can't really say when I'll next be back here.
See you all soon, I hope!
Comments (0)
philipstorry February 15th, 2007 23:33:03
I feel I've reached a decision on what I'm doing with this blog...
First up, I'd like to thank Steve Castledine for his excellent DominoBlog template. It's brilliant, and I couldn't have blogged without it. The fact that IBM bought the design says a lot about how powerful and flexible it is.
Having performed the upgrade, I have to say that I really do like the "blue rinse" look and feel. The upgrade itself was a snap, thanks to an agent that Steve provided (despite not being obliged to!).
The one problem I had was down to my own stupidity (and probably NTL's caching web proxies) more than anything else...
The only real issue I have with the upgraded blog template is the new editor, something I know Steve's aware of and hoping to deal with. And I can live with the new editor for the moment anyway.
But despite all of the great work that's gone into it, I still find myself drawn to Blogo. And that's for two fairly simple reasons:
- Blogo does almost everything via the web, whereas some things in the IBM Blog template need to be done via the Notes Client
- Blogo makes Articles easy
The latter item is very important to me. I want to put up more articles in the near future. Specifically, I've got a new shadow at work, and need to train him. I've had this crazy idea on compiling a kind of "open courseware" of brain dumps on pertinent topics, kind of like Show 'n' Tell Thursday but with a "teaching a geek" focus.
I'd rather be able to write and correct that kind of thing whilst still at work. (I have no NRPC hole in our firewall, so can't use a Notes client to do that.)
I'd always meant to make those kinds of articles available with DominoBlog, perhaps by creating pages. But I can only do that from a Notes client, which is why I'd never gotten around to doing anything about this.
Blogo makes it easier by allowing Articles, which can be rated by commenters if they wish - that should be useful. In fact, the whole Blogo articles system should allow a kind of "public conversation" between me and my shadow(s). Plus the text itself is something that could be re-used elsewhere if people want to.
Basically, Blogo's simplicity and focus on a web interface make it much easier for me to work with to do what I want to do.
Blogo is not, by the way, perfect. I'm going to have to build on Blogo to get all that I want from it. I intend to do more than a mere paint job on Blogo if I can, and hope to feed back anything I build to Ferdy as a matter of courtesy. I rather like the option to close commenting after
As and when I find a niggle, I intend to do what I can to fix it. (Blogo's lean 'n' clean design is what gives me hope that I can do this, by the way.)
A word on BlogSpere, before I close. Specifically, why I didn't evaluate it.
BlogSphere is great. It's a fantastic competitor to DominoBlog/the IBM Blog Template. And as such, I just felt it was a little too large for what I wanted. There's been a friendly arms-race between the two main blog templates for a while now, and that's resulted in more features and more complexity than I really want from a blog.
I had a quick look at BlogSphere, in its current beta incarnation. But to be absolutely honest, Blogo had already been (irrationally, emotionally) chosen and I felt that to do an evaluation in those circumstances was less than fair. BlogSphere has plenty of users in the Domino community, so I know it's a good reliable bit of code.
I also know, by that token, that the masses think I'm wrong.
Let 'em think that.
Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, and all that...
Comments (1)
philipstorry February 11th, 2007 16:46:18
I'm in the process of upgrading to the IBM Domino Blog Template.
Right now, the design has been upgraded but I don't think that it's quite right. Actually, it's obvious that it's not right. Specifically, the agent seems to still be pushing out links to the old Kubrick style.
I've checked twice, and the new templates/items don't actually point to Kubrick at all. So I think that the agent results, or a portion of the script's results, is being held in a cache somewhere on the server...
(The results in the HTML source just don't match the blocks being specified in the configuration. So something odd is going on at the server...)
As the server is a hosted one, I'm now going to sleep in the hope that when I wake up this cache will have been cleared. I can't do much else.
And anyway, sleep looks like the best option right now. :-)
UPDATE: Solved. Partly caching, partly me forgetting to change the global CSS options. I've also copied and pasted the old smilies back in to this template, and I think I'm done now. Hooray!
Next on my list - put the Google Analytics and other minor changes I'd made back in to the IBM HTML blocks.
After that, I need to do some long hard thinking...
philipstorry February 11th, 2007 10:59:33
Domino and Notes are moving faster than I can keep up, it seems.
I'm still running DominoBlog, and haven't upgraded to IBM's blogging template yet. And because my employer is stuck on R6.5.3, I'm not likely to anytime soon.
IBM's embracing of DominoBlog is great, but leaves me somewhat wondering what to do next. I like DominoBlog, but I'm currently wondering whether or not I should upgrade to 7.0.2 or just switch to some other blogging software.
(And I don't want to move to 7.02 unless I have to - the ability to edit work templates on my home machines in an emergency without worrying about recompiled LotusScript causing problems is worth a lot to me!)
Currently way ahead of the pack is Blogo. I've got a test blog running here, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to set up and how functional it is. It's not perfect - ratings seem to be linked to commenting, which is a little odd. That's about it, though. On the plus side, its handling of tagging, new article creation and so forth is very good.
Later this week, I'll tinker with customising the look and feel and see how far I can get there. But later this month, I could well be archiving this blog and moving to a whole new set of URLs. Consider yourselves warned...
Comments (7)
philipstorry February 5th, 2007 21:28:00
A while ago, I said I was changing my commenting rules to reduce blog spam. I'm pleased to say that this seems to have worked - despite not having looked at my blocked comments queue for two weeks, I had mere 500 bits of spam in it.
Which isn't bad at all.
I am astonished at just how many stupid spam bots will keep trying, though. Even after their first comment is blocked. I'm almost tempted to publicly name specific IP addresses, not that it would do much good. More as a sort of venting exercise. One spam comment being blocked should be a clue, two should be a sign to give up. By the twentieth, I'd sort of expect you to have figured it out. Ah well.
And I also noticed a subtle shift - some of my comment spam is now in German. I have no idea why. Still, if Volker wants some viagra, I know an IP address that can get him the best deals, apparently...
(In case you're wondering where I suddenly found the time to blog, I'm off ill today - having just recovered from a migraine that started at about four this morning. 
)
Comments (0)
philipstorry December 11th, 2006 16:20:00
I've had to implement a minor change to my comment policies, due to comment spam.
None of it got through, you understand. It never really does - the DominoBlog template is excellent at stopping it.
I was just getting tired of deleting hundreds of spam comments. As I've occasionally seen people's real comments get caught, I'm fairly conscientious about it and try to make sure that I do it "properly" - I eyeball each comment briefly in the view, to make sure it doesn't look genuine before I block the IP address and delete it.
Blocking the IPs has been somewhat effective, but not as much as I'd hoped. They just compromise another machine, and try it from there instead. The other day I saw a joke about proposing a ".bot" tld on the internet, for Windows machines on cable/adsl. I'm beginning to think that might not be such a bad idea...
Anyway, checking all these comments is getting tiresome, so I'm stepping up my automated efforts.
I've decided to close commenting on anything over 90 days old. Most of the spam is coming in on quite old posts, so that should stop them for a while. It's almost like they're just going to posts that they've found on other people's sites - so I don't expect this to solve the problem, but I do expect it to limit the traffic somewhat.
I'm sure that the spammers will adapt and just start spamming my newer posts, but I don't care too much about that really. I just want to make life as difficult for them as I possibly can. 
Comments (0)
philipstorry November 26th, 2006 22:52:00
One of the occasionally worrying things about being part of a vibrant, educated and passionate community is that you might just be in an echo chamber.
Blogging's like that. Most of the blogs I read would agree with what I said anyway, because we all work with the same product, have a very similar viewpoint of that product, and so forth.
Not everyone. The very recent loss of Ben Rose was, for me, a sad thing because Ben was never afraid to kick up a controversy by ignoring popular opinion and playing devil's advocate. (Then again, he's not blogging because he's getting married and planning to start new little lifes rather than new little applications. I'm as happy for him as I am sad about his non-blogging - happier, in fact!)
But in a semi-closed community, it's difficult to know if your thoughts and feelings are just stronger because of the echo chamber effect.
Which is why although I'm jazzed about the future of Notes and Domino, I sometimes wonder how the rest of the world feels.
So at first, I was kind of shocked when I read that Ed's not doing his traditional "The Boss Loves Microsoft" gig at Lotusphere. In fact, not only is he not doing it, but nobody will be doing it. It's been dropped.
That was kind of a blow. I always enjoyed it. Three or four years ago, the Microsoft roadmap made better slideware then the IBM one, so we needed it.
To be fair, I find Microsoft's roadmap pretty risible these days, and far more openly so - if I had to put project proposals forward that looked like their roadmaps, I'd be ashamed of myself. But that's a topic for another post, I suppose.
The Boss Loves Microsoft was always a good morale raiser for the technical troops, too.
So for a while, I was quite uncertain about this move. Don't get me wrong - I understand what Ed's saying about the need to stop mentioning competitors and to blow our own trumpet without constantly comparing. I see that fully. It's not going to stop me from calling competitors out when I want to here on this blog - but then I don't work for IBM in Ed's position.
(Oh, and it also explains why the recent spate of Exchange items I've blogged about weren't mentioned by him, as I'd expected. I'm kind of glad I noted them now...)
I guess my main concern was where we'd get our competitive intelligence from now. Ed's analysis was always sane and smart - perhaps Yellow Is The New Black can step into this breach? I certainly hope someone does.
Anyway, my disquiet continued for some time. An hour or so. But then, on the train home, I got it.
I'm as happy as a pig in muck now. I can really see why this is being done. And why I couldn't see why it was being done at first...
I sit behind my desk all day. I meet - on average - about one new person per day in my role, if I'm lucky. I am sitting in an echo chamber. I don't know, for certain, what it's like out there with the non-blogging customers of Notes. Or even the non-blogging non-customers of Notes.
But Ed gets about quite a bit. He knows better than I do on that one.
Ed has his head outside the echo chamber for this decision. And as such, I'm happy with it.
In fact, I'm more than happy with it. I'm very, very pleased.
Because it means that outside the echo chamber, the sounds have changed. It's no longer "You're dead, so why should we look at you?" - it's "So why are you so self-satisfied?".
Sheesh. I think I hear a competitor's marketing department screaming. Just think of all the hard work they put into that first message over the years - and now it's all looking more wasted every day!
This is the best time to be working with Lotus Not es and Domino.
The message is dead! Long live the message!
Comments (4)
philipstorry October 16th, 2006 23:17:00
Ben Rose takes some slight offence at some censorship on someone else's blog.
I feel fairly strongly about censorship, as it's part of the free speech I think everyone is entitled to. However, this is my blog, and I get to decide what stays and goes. My policy is so long as it's legal it stays.
Ben's well known as a man who likes to provoke discussion in the Domino community. (And I like that, too. A community which parrots the same message will begin to seem like it drank the kool-aid, and it's individuals that are willing to make some noise that prevent the Domino community from looking like that.)
Ben being Ben, it appears he posted a crude humerous comment on Peter de Haas' blog in response to a quoted Steve Ballmer speech. Peter took exception and removed it. It's his blog, it's his rules. I can respect that, and don't think he did anything wrong there - despite what I said about free speech. He maintains his blog, so he gets to decide what is said there - much as Ben gets to decide what he says and keeps on his blog.
But what's made me post about this is HOW Peter removed the comments. Let's go take a look...
** Comments Removed **
Why?
Peter's usually an effective communicator. So this really surprised me. If you're going to remove comments, then I feel you should say why. Did you find them offensive? Did you fear them illegal? Where they comment spam? Was it unnacceptably aggressive behaviour?
Blogging is about making the exchange of ideas and opinions - messages, if you will - easy. If we just wanted to advertise the message, we'd have a website. Instead, we have blogs because they're interactive.
So I expect a message more like:
** Unacceptably crude comments removed - please keep your comments clean! **
I really hope that the message we see is a product of the blogging software that Peter's using, because it seems very out of character for him otherwise. If the software he uses is limited in this manner, I suggest that instead he edits the comments if appopriate, or posts a comment of his own immediately afterwards to explain why previous comments were removed.
That way, people don't think that other people's messages are being stifled unfairly.
Some final clarifying notes, that I couldn't quite squeeze into the text without them feeling clunky or forced:
- I'm posting about this issue whilst it's happening over a crude Viagra joke, rather than waiting for the next huge incident. I don't mean to inflame this into a big incident, I just wanted to slip my thoughts on comment handling out into the wild using an issue that everyone could remain calm over.
- I'm still subscribed to both Ben's and Peter's blogs.
- I really don't mean to insult Ben or Peter with what I've said, or try to teach them to suck eggs. If I sounded patronising or condescending, then I didn't mean to do so.
- Everyone makes mistakes. I hope this entry isn't going to be one of mine.
Comments (4)
philipstorry October 13th, 2006 10:28:00
So, for the last couple of weeks the Not-So-Rapid Blog has been a little less rapid than usual.
This is because I had a little annual leave due to me. I found myself ina "use it or lose it" situation, and because of the project timescales I face I decided to take last week off. (Taking time off later this year would not be an option, due to project work.)
I had grand plans for the week. I really did. Lots of projects that I wanted to do some work on. But in the end, I found myself just doing nothing. Absolutely, completely and utterly nothing.
Which was just what I needed, really. A break from it all. Especially after the crushing chaos of the week before, when I was getting ready to leave all the projects I work on into some state that would survive my absence...
So, I'm back now. And I have a huge list of things to blog about, plus a lot of reading to do to catch up on the Blogosphere. My priorities will be, in no particular order:
- Finishing up my RSS reader comparison experiment
- Covering some things I wanted to talk about before I went away
- Grovellingly apologising to those I ignoed during the rush and following silence of my life
Actually, I think I'll do the grovelling apologies shortly, as necessary.
Comments (0)
philipstorry October 9th, 2006 14:09:00
In the battle of the web-based feedreaders, Bloglines just delivered a devastating 1 - 2 - 3 combination move worthy of any insane beat 'em up game in the arcades...
Firstly, they were actually there. Google Reader has been slow if not actually dead for me for occasional period this afternoon. It might just be my internet connection, but getting to Google Reader has been pretty difficult this evening. And I've seen that pesky "an error has occurred" message too often - it seems that I can read faster than Google can process its update messages, which is annoying.
Secondly, someone on the Bloglines staff noticed my comments on their UI and made time to drop by. That's worth quite a bit - they're listening and learning, and hopefully this will improve the product no end over time. Thanks very much for doing that, Ben!
Thirdly, I found an Opera widget for Bloglines - Bloglines Geiger. It's just perfect, both as an example of what Opera's Widgets are for and as an enhancement for Bloglines.
It puts a tiny little widget with a blue B onto your screen. You can set it to be always on top, and it's very discreet - here's an example I grabbed a screenshot of:
See? Very discreet. It checks in every now and again (I've specified 15 minutes, but it can go as often as every minute or as infrequently as every hour). If new posts are found, then it shows you the number of new posts - double clicking that number takes me directly to Bloglines in a new window. Here's an example with a new post waiting for me:
Discreet, fast, and practically perfect. Many thanks to Andrew Krivosheyenko for writing this, as it makes Bloglines easy to check up on yet discreet at the same time. For me, the benefit of using a widget is that it's there when I've got my web browser open, but not there when my browser is closed - such as when I'm playing a game or deep in writing fiction/code. It's got just the right level of presence. The fact that it "just works" is something I handily take for granted without further comment, which is rather rude of me really. 
A bit of research shows me that Bloglines have a number of notification agents, and an API with which to use Bloglines for projects. Google Reader also has an API, and there are notification agents but they're not as easy to find - even with a Google search!
I'll still be using both for the next week, but it seems like Bloglines has pulled massively ahead in just a few hours.
Perhaps good looks aren't everything, and capability counts after all. 
Comments (0)
philipstorry September 11th, 2006 23:04:00
Keeping up with all the blogs and news sites I follow has become a major chore.
Ironically, one of the things that originally made is so easy is now making it very difficult - Opera, my web browser of choice.
Opera makes it incredibly easy to follow an RSS feed. It was doing the "put the feed icon in the address bar" trick ages ago. It was far ahead of the pack, and its re-use of its internal mail client allowed tagging RSS entries with tags like "valuable", "funny" or "todo", which was very useful.
And best of all, it also indexed the content - so finding an old RSS entry was often very simple and quick.
The main problem I'm now having is that I have more RSS feeds than I have time to read at home.
Many of them, as you can imagine, are primarily technical blogs. Most of them are linked to from this blog, and being Lotus Notes/Domino blogs I feel fairly justified in reading them at work when I can snatch a moment. Databases like the Activity Trends db, LOG.NSF, DOMLOG.NSF and others that I like to check daily can take a while to refresh their views, so I can switch to the web browser momentarily and grab a read then.
That's lead to a simple problem - synchronising the "unread marks" between two copies of Opera.
As far as I can see, it's impossible. And all that happens is that the home copy of Opera is ignored for a while, until I finally decide to skip it and mark all articles unread anyway. Not something I like doing, but as I know I've read the "important subset" at work anyway I feel just about justified in doing it.
But this is getting impractical. My backup machine might eventually run an RSS aggregator as one of its functions, but that's a few months off. I'm impatient, and want a solution now.
So I tried some web-based RSS readers.
I'm currently testing Google Reader and Bloglines. I did try Technorati, but it only recognised four of my 153 feeds when I imported them from an OPML file, so I'm not going to continue trying to use Technorati to read the blogs now.
Google Reader
Signing up for Google Reader was pretty easy, especially as I already had a Google account (for Google Mail, of course!). I actually signed up for it when it first debuted, but wasn't too impressed at the time. However, my needs have changed so I went back with a complete lack of preconceptions...
Wow. The one thing that this shows is that Google's "standard interface" is still miles ahead of the competition. I'm instantly able to navigate a web page that feels very close to being a full native application, rather than a web page. It's slick, animated and easy to use.
It imported my OPML file quickly and easily. I tagged the various feeds without much effort, considering how many of them there were. The tagging interface could be improved a little, but at least I can quickly tag lots of feeds at once.
When reading my feeds, it's slick. I can jump quickly to a specific feed with the Subscriptions drop-down menu, and if you select a tag then you get an additional "related subscriptions" menu which allows further narrowing down to one specific feed. This makes finding what I want pretty easy.
And just like Google Mail, I can "star" items I want to mark as different from the rest. Not quite as flexible as the Opera native tagging, but this is just as useful in practice and makes it easy to find things I remembered to mark.
This simple application has got great potential. But Google Reader isn't perfect.
There are two major flaws, as far as I'm concerned. The first is that it's nigh on impossible to mark groups of posts as read easily. If I add a new feed, then I have to read the whole feed. No "mark all read" button. The discussion for t his beta product shows that they're aware of this, and know it's frustrating. Frustrating doesn't cover it. My slashdot feed had 309 articles I had to read. If I hadn 't been so impressed by the interface generally, I'd have given it no chance and stopped.
The second flaw is almost unforgivable, given it's Google.
There's no way to search the feeds.
Sure, there's a search function. But all I can do is search for new feeds, or search the web.
I'm in a tool designed to aggregate information I want into one central place. I'd like search to work for that tool first, and then to find other information later.
A pity, because the rest of their interface is so well thought out and useful that I actually WANT to use it. Which, for a web application, is pretty rare for me.
Bloglines
Bloglines was a simple signup and validation, and then I was in the application. I liked the fact that I was given a chance to pick feeds, but had to hunt around to find where I could import my OPML file...
Hunting around sort of defines the Bloglines interface. It's not a bad interface, you understand - just not a great one compared to Google's slick and simple Reader.
Once imported, I tried to move all the feeds into folders, to apply some kind of structure.
This is much harder than Google's tagging. For starters, I found it difficult to figure out what I was going to do. It turned out that there was a note at the bottom of my list of feeds explaining that I could simply drag and drop feeds around, but as I had 153 feeds I couldn't see that note.
Dragging and dropping was a little slow in Opera, but I'm prepared to write that off as a bug in Opera I suppose. The price of using an alternative browser... But once I'd created my folders and dragged/dropped everything into place, I found myself wishing for some tickboxes and a global "move to folder" action. This interface is definitely geared up to making occasional changes rather than re-arranging your data in one go...
Unlike Google, I could mark everything as read. Score on up for Bloglines, as that got me rolling almost immediately. Then I got the changes coming in from my feeds, and found that Bloglines was completely unusable. In its default settings.
Bloglines, you're suppose to help me solve information overload. Passing me 6Mb pages of feed activity is NOT solving the problem!
I soon found that the default settings didn't show me just the updates, but everything. Combined with me making the fatal mistake of clicking on folders rather than just the feeds, I was getting loads of information. Correctly configured, Bloglines was soon showing me just the updated feeds, and only the updated posts in those feeds too - much better!
Bloglines is otherwise pretty nice to use, and certainly flexible. I'm offered email updates and all sorts - but all I want right now is a web-based RSS reader, so I'm sticking to that.
I was impressed that Bloglines made it easy and clear to see feeds that no longer existed - neither Opera's internal reader nor Google do, and this is a nice touch.
The Clippings feature of Bloglines looks interesting, but I've not used it in anger much yet. I look forward to doing so...
I have registered this blog's feed, and it's waiting authorisation at the moment. I have no idea what I'll be able to DO with that registered feed, but the process for registering was smooth and easy so I'm impressed so far...
And lastly, Bloglines can search my feeds. Or all other feeds except the ones I have. Or the web. Bloglines does search excellently, and its results seem pertinent and meet my expectations. I'm not about to go and manually look to see if it missed anything - I'm just happy that it can search my feeds!
On the whole, Bloglines is missing no features whatsoever. It's just missing a slick interface.
Conclusion
I'll be using both Google Reader and Bloglines for the next week, at least. Just to see whether the slick style of Google c an keep me away from the better functionality of Bloglines. And whether the on-line reading style can keep me away from Opera's native RSS reader, of course...
philipstorry September 11th, 2006 18:43:00
Ed pointed out the interesting blog entry from Eric Mack which mentions Lotus Notes.
I can't wait to lksten to the podcast. But what's most noticable for me so far is how impressed I am by the responses to the blog entry. They're clear, they're less heated, and they keep the focus on how valuable Notes is. Everything I'd hoped for in future debate about Notes, really.
Then again, the blog entry itself is fairly positive, which sets the tone for the responses nicely. The real test will probably be coming up shortly, with press coverage of the 7.02 release. I hope that we can do this well when the negative coverage and comments are flying thick and fast...
Comments (0)
philipstorry August 29th, 2006 09:27:00
It took me the better part of a day, but I've caught up with all my RSS feeds.
I'm going to pick two highlights from it all, neither of which were actually Domino related.
The first is Andrew Pollack's take on the free DB2 announcement. He ties it in with the DB2 instance that's now available in Domino 7, and asks a very good question - we like new stuff, especially when it's free. But what are we supposed to do with it?
IBM can do excellent documentation - the Redbooks show that. But they have this huge set of product ranges which can work together, and very little "getting started" guidance on how to do so. Andrew's questions cut right to the heart of where IBM needs to do the most work in its developer/administrator education - newcomers.
My second choice is there just because it amused me immensely. You see, this is what happens when you have a bad architecture and try to end-of-life it. You have to reassure your clients that it'll still work in the future, because your marketing folks are too busy shouting about the future and disparaging the past and present. You have to direct clients to your new replacements, and if there isn't a direct and obvious replacement that's not an easy task. You have to remind customers that although you said that it was dead, it's actually required for older clients so they shouldn't do anything rash.
Oh, and you end up having to rework how your client product operates, and know that you're going to have to support this thing just because older client software will still be out there.
OK, so this is a very easy target. But the fact is that the simple removal of a poor tool that didn't deliver what it was intended to is evidently generating a lot of work here. This is a great example of why it's best to get it right first time, or at the very least cut your losses sooner when you realise it's not working out.
Comments (0)Philip Storry March 10th, 2006 13:35:39
A while back, Ed Brill asked how we keep up with the Domino blogging world as he summed up the first Show 'n' Tell Thursday.
Well, my short answer is... I haven't managed at all.
I have, at the moment, some 2017 RSS feed entries to read from Domino-related bloggers around the world. Those mostly date from mid-January, when I just became a bit too busy to read blogs anymore....
And that is just Domino-related blogging, by the way. A few SameTime/IM blogs, some Exchange blogs - but all of them in the Collaboration sphere and with some relation to Domino.
That figure is even more impressive when you realise that I've already skimmed or simply marked as read everything in my news feeds (Slashdot, The Register, Techdirt, Groklaw et al) and removed some blogs which I just felt I'd never read anymore anyway (Scoble, a few political blogs). OK, so the LotusSphere event brings the figure up a little, but it's still a nice healthy community that we've got.
It's not like I haven't been reading ANY blogs, by the way. I have a limited subset of blogs that I read at work, so I have skimmed a few occasionally. And Ed's Blog is pretty much the hub of the Domino Blogging Universe, so it gets read no matter what. But I do have a lot of reading to do now.
Comments (4)Philip Storry March 9th, 2006 16:24:41
There is much fuss in the Notes world - especially in the UK - about the Charles Arthur article in today's Guardian.
I bought a copy, and was most unimpressed. It seems inherently biased and very poorly researched. But then, the Grauniad seems to have put the article in the Opinion section anyway. At least, I think they have - the page opposite (page four) clearly states Opinion. Sadly, the new Grauniad style seems devoid of any kind of section tag on the page that holds the article, but as it reads like opinion and that's the last section title I saw I have to make the assumption...
It's very badly researched opinion, too. All credibility was lost about a quarter of the way through, when I read the paragraph on the early interface design:
..."Around this time Apple Computer released the Macintosh with a new easy-to-use graphical user interface. This influenced the developers of Notes, and they gave their new product a character-oriented graphical user interface."
So was it character-oriented, or graphical? You can't be both.
Actually, Mr. Arthur, you can be both. The last character oriented graphical program I probably used in anger would have been either PC Tools or Norton Utilities. Both drew dialogue boxes - often animated ones that exploded into view - on a text screen. And in some programs in those suites, they even allowed them to be moved around, minimised, and moved over/under each other in a kind of z-order stack. All that moving could be done via either the mouse or the keyboard, naturally.
Later versions even re-write the console font in video memory, to provide a slicker look-and-feel with custom widgets for re-sizing, minimising and so forth.
Plenty of other DOS programs used this trick - and I even did it myself with some basic programs I wrote. In BASIC, as it happens - so this was hardly advanced stuff.
Of course, I'm being incredibly petty in picking up on such a trivial display of the author's lack of knowledge. But that's intentional - if the author of the article doesn't get his trivial facts right, then what does that say about the important facts that they're trying to present?
Comments (0)Philip Storry February 9th, 2006 22:02:06
As you can probably see, the blog has a teensy problem. None of the indexes are generating, leaving me devoid of links, recent comment lists, categories and so forth.
I had a follow up post dealing with familiarity in software, but I've decided to leave it until the blog is fixed.
Comments (2)Philip Storry February 6th, 2006 21:40:53
I grabbed a quick moment to tinker with the blog, mostly to play with trackback. (I've disabled it - automated trackbacks required unrestricted agents, my hosting supplier doesn't allow unrestricted agents. I can't be doing with manual trackback, so disabling is the best option for me.)
In the process of checking my hosting plan to see what I could and couldn't do, I checked my proximity to the limits it gives me - I get 2Gb of bandwidth, and 100Mb of storage space. I'm nowhere near the bandwidth figure, believe me. But I was surprised to see that I was near the 100Mb disk space limit.
Which is odd. This is a very low traffic blog, after all. I'm pretty sure that I haven't written 74 megabytes worth of entries for it...
Continue Reading "RSS. If you write it, they will come. If you don't, they'll still come. It's great like that..." » Comments (0)Philip Storry December 27th, 2005 23:18:00
I've updated the blog template to pre-release three of Steve Castledine's excellent DominoBlog template. It'll probably take me days to explore all the new features, but I'm very happy with what I've seen so far.
So what have I been doing recently?
Work, mostly. I've gotten a webmail project to pilot stage, I've upgraded our Blackberry Enterprise Server to version 4, I've been installing servers for CRM systems, doing a presentation for our staff conference, and more. And I had very little to say during all that time, or at least little of importance.
You'd think I'd have a few things to say after all that, wouldn't you?
But I'm strangely lost for anything important. Ah well. I'm sure something will come to me...
Comments (0)Philip Storry November 24th, 2005 22:10:07
My plans for this evening were cancelled, so I spent a short while trying to figure out what had gone wrong here.
Replication conflicts is the short answer, I'm afraid.
Anyway, it all looks fixed now, but I'll test it by queueing a document up for release tomorrow whilst I'm at work.
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 25th, 2005 21:57:19
My last entry appears to have, well, disappeared. Which is odd.
I was just editing the last article to get rid of some formatting errors (the font had changed when I published it manually via the web interface) and BOOM! - it vanished. I'll try to look in to this, but won't be able to do so until Wednesday at the least I'm afraid.
Meanwhile, if you were hoping to read about the Out of Office re-engineering, please accept my apologies...
Comments (6)Philip Storry July 25th, 2005 08:09:56
I scheduled a post to go live on Friday, and happily went out to someone's leaving drinks that night. Then yesterday I went to a stag do.
So imagine my surprise today when I checked up on my blog, and found nothing new in it. Which is odd.
I had my hosting service move me to a server that's in the right time zone the other day, and no agents seem to have run recently. I think that the two are related, and I'm certainly not asking for suggestions or advice. I'm logging an issue with the host, and I hope it should be sorted out shortly.
Comments (0)Philip Storry July 17th, 2005 21:42:44
I'm not dead yet.
And neither is Notes/Domino, by the way.
I was most disturbed to see e-Pro Magazine close down, but I can see why.
Because here's something really interesting, folks...
For the last month, I've been too busy - both at work and home - to follow much on the Domino/Notes Blogosphere. At home, I subscribe to about 20 blogs of developers and administrators who work with Domino/Notes - and, of course, the Ubiquitous Brill. (You can't escape him in this game, I tell ya!). At work, I only managed to subscribe to a few - Maybe five. So I've been lurking, vaguely following those few core people. Meanwhile, my RSS reader at home continues to slurp feeds in, and I don't have time to read them.
It's now the 11th of April, and the last time I looked at any feeds appears to have been before Whisky Live - on 11th March. And I have 312 articles to read.
312.
Wow. I've got lots of reading to do. But you can see why e-Pro Mag would find it difficult to keep up with that. For a diverse group of admins and developers, many of whom have not actually met each other, that's a pretty hefty figure for a month.
And I'm sure that's just the bloggers, by the way. I've marked the couple of thousand or so articles from Slashdot, The Register, Boing Boing and the like as read - leaving just Domino/Notes material.
I have to say, it feels good not to be dead. But better to be in such illustrious undead company. *grins*
Which has led me to wonder about the future. But you'll have to wait for the next posting to read about that...
Comments (0)Philip Storry April 11th, 2005 20:36:00
A while back - before LotusSphere - a call went out for some examples of Notes being blamed for things it's not actually at fault for.
My entry went in, and I thought nothing more of it. Work continued to go more and more nuts, and it's only recently that I've gotten back into the land of the active, so to speak.
So I started to catch up on things. I'd been meaning to read some of the LotusSphere stuff, as I missed it except for headlines and summaries. A natural place to start was Ed Brill's sit, where he'd posted two PDFs of the presentations he did.
And here's my infamy - page five of the How To Sell Notes Internally PDF.
Wow. It's me alright - loquacious as ever, taking up a whole slide to say "Notes didn't print, but then neither did anything else." Nobody can fake that kind of blathering, in my experience!
Oh, how I wish I could have been there. To be at the 'Sphere as my words are pushed, by means of bright projection units, directly onto the retinas of a horde! It's just like a scene from all my world-ruling fantasies, you know!
With less whips and leather, obviously.
Anyway, this should show you all how far behind I am - I'm only just now catching up on LotusSphere.
So, to wrap up: Big thanks to Ed and Libby for picking me from a crop of fine, fine quotes.
Congratulations to Declan and Mick, who were also credited with quotes on this issue. They've also earned a slot on my private list of competitors for world domination, and will therefore be crushed underfoot by me when they least expect it...
I'm presuming that Libby or Ed are the source of the final quote, as there's no name there. They escape the list, because I never add someone to it without proof.
But they'll be scrutinised closely from here on, I assure you!
Comments (0)Philip Storry February 21st, 2005 20:08:18
The switch to the DominoBlog
template is now complete. I'm testing the new beta, which seems pretty
good.
Thanks for all your work, Steve!
philipstorry January 16th, 2005 20:01:00
When I first thought about blogging, I knew that my blog had to be a blog run by Domino.
(If you're not a Notes/Domino person, then just don't ask - just accept that I discounted all other options.)
I pulled down the two most popular blogging templates, and had a play. After some playing, I decided, as you can see, to go with the BlogSphere template.
But now doubts are setting in. When I made the decision, it was because of the following factors:
- I had to be able to add blog entries from work (as I'm doing now, incidentally) - where I have no NRPC access to my host. Therefore, web posting was a must have.
- I wanted it to be quick and easy to set up.
- I wanted it to be easy for me to administer.
I don't regret picking BlogSphere as such - it's excellent, and I'd heartily recommend it to anyone looking to evaluate a blogging template for a Domino server.
But DominoBlog now has a beta for version 3, which allows posting of entries via the web. Version 2 lacks this, which caused it to be counted out. However, because DominoBlog is more of a content management system, I'm using it at work for a project - I'll always have NRPC access there, after all! And I am starting to prefer DominoBlog.
The differences between the two are subtle, I admit. The fact that BlogSphere is pure blogging, and works well for that purpose, makes me wonder if it's worth switching. But it has many niggles which I find a little annoying, and will have to correct myself. (For instance, editing an entry changes its date and time. If I correct a spelling mistake in yesterday's entry, I do NOT want it to become today's entry. That's not good. I need to change that!)
I mention this because, as you can see, I've clearly not finished setting up my blog. If I'm going to switch to DominoBlog, now is almost certainly the best time to do it. I can keep this small stub here for posterity, and re-import these few entries into a new blog.
Does anyone have any thoughts? Which do you prefer? What would you do in my situation - stick or switch?
[EDIT: I was wrong. Whoops.]
Comments (3)philipstorry January 12th, 2005 13:49:00
Ben Poole asks me to explain what Scoble did that made me blog.
I think it was two or three blog entries, actually. I'll go back and step through his blog, and show you which ones.
The first was this one, on Microsoft creating a cool media player. Scoble used the phrase "open source the product development", as a way to give Microsoft an edge in making a cool iPod competitor. Except he didn't mean Open Source in the sense everyone else means these days.
Scoble was clearly talking about some kind of transparent development process. Maybe people could give a little feedback - "cool" or "not cool", but this thing was not going to be open in an open source sense. Microsoft does actually do Open Source, but not much. And to do Open Source for a bit of commodity hardware doesn't make much sense - it can only apply to the firmware/software process, unless you're going to put your artist's impressions, CAD drawings and marketing brochures online for collaborative development too.
I'm no open source zealot - I think that open source and closed source can live together quite nicely - but the misuse of the phrase made me inexplicably angry. I suppose that it's partly to do with the fact that Scoble works at Microsoft, and that their attitude towards open source development seems, um, hostile. (Communist? It's a cancer? I think not...)
Scoble then blogged about another an opinion piece at Linux World magazine (by Chris Spencer), which extolled the virtues of switching. Funnily enough, Scoble wasn't too thrilled at the idea.
But what fascinated me was that Scoble was also eager to blame everything on mis-configuration by a systems administrator - making an almost personal attack on Chris that I found rather distasteful.
On the one side, you had Chris - so frustrated with Microsoft's offerings that he felt it was time to switch. On the other side you had a Microsoft employee listing a litany of Microsoft technologies that he didn't think Linux would run reliably, before attacking the world (via Chris himself) for not configuring Microsoft technologies properly, and then - finally - recommending that if you switch, you should switch to Apple. (I'd speculate that Apple is a safe second choice because you can get Microsoft Office for it, but that might seem a little rude... *grins*)
I wasn't angry this time. I was frustrated and a little exacerbated, to be honest. Yes, Scoble almost redeemed himself by admitting that Microsoft's security had been poor in the past. But there was an undercurrent of what I call the "Microsoft Arrogance" in his post. I think that the Microsoft Arrogance deserves a blog entry all of its own, though - watch this space!
My comment on Scoble's post sums it up, I think - (it's a...)
"... shame the two of you can't just sit down and talk honestly and openly with each other. You've said before that the honesty and openness of the blogging world gets results. It allows marketing to be bypassed and human interaction to get results. And then you sit down and spew out a blog entry that sounds like it came from Microsoft's marketing department.
I'm a little disappointed, to be honest. But I can see exactly where both of you are coming from, and why there's nothing useful either of you can say to each other. I just find that a terrible shame..."
Lastly, Scoble just posted something very stupid. He almost predicted that because that because you can buy an expensive SmartPhone cheaply, you could do the same with a PC.
Except that the cheap phone is subsidised by the phone network provider, who sells it to you cheaply because they know that they'll make the money back in profits on the calls (if it's pay as you go) or on the subscription to the service (if it's pay monthly). Companies don't just give stuff away - not unless they're trying to crush their competition, anyway. And when an enrtire industry gives stuff away, it crashes and burns. (Remember the .com/telecoms bubble? I miss free stuff!)
I don't think I even bothered to comment on that. Within a week, Scoble had managed to make me want my own public space in which to tackle this kind of drivel in.
Actually, that's unfair. It wasn't just Scoble. There were plenty of other things happening, or things that had happened in the last quarter of 2004, which had made me think about blogging. But Scoble was the straw that broke the camel's back, in some ways.
(Amazingly, he's still on my RSS feed list though. But on my doctor's advice, I skim - not read - his entries. *grins*)
Anyway, Robert Scoble - I salute you! Thanks for making me blog!
(Now could you try thinking before you do it? *grins*)
Comments (0)philipstorry January 11th, 2005 14:38:00