Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forApril 12th, 2003 | back to home

12 April 2003
Filed under:Personal,Useful web resources,Weblogs at2:42 pm

Thanks to my poll I know that some people at least are interested in how I made my weblog in the first place and weblog-related hints – so here are a couple, mixed in with a rant about how complex all this stuff is getting to be.

I feel as if there’s a kind of arms race going on as more and more weblog-related technologies are implemented. Weblogs used to be simple – I just typed in some text on a web form and magically it appeared on my site.
Then I put in a counter so I could track my traffic.
Then I decided I liked the idea of being able to categorise my writing for easier access (see long list at R), so I moved to Moveable Type. Then I started to hear more and more about RSS and XML so I added this XML feed – I no longer remember how but someone else’s computer is generating it automatically.
I have always been interested in the idea of content rating as a voluntary way of ensuring kids are protected from unsuitable material, so I gave my site an ICRA rating.
Then trackback came along so I had to figure out what it is and what it does (let you see who is linking to you) and I had to change my template so that people could do it.
Then I learned about affero and decided it would be fun to give people a way to express their aggregate opinion of my site.
Then I was intrigued by the idea that sites could indicate where they come from so I registered my site at geourl.
Then I thought I would put up a poll to find out how people were using blog.org.
And now I spotted a feature I thought was really interesting – offering people the ability to search the weblogs I read myself (which you should now see at R). But in order to use Micah Halpern’s code I had to convert my list of weblogs I link to into “blogrolling” format (I still don’t quite see why editing one’s HTML template to add or subtract a simple link is so hard people use external software to do it, but it does mean that my list of links is now in a database and can be used and accessed in other ways as well). And then I got a Google API key so your searches wouldn’t use up his allowance.

So altogether having a moderately sophisticated weblog has tied me in to at least nine different organizations or sites providing different complementary capabilities! And I know there are lots of other weblog capabilities I haven’t yet implemented – and that there are features provided by the sites I have already used that I am probably not fully utilizing.

Weblogging takes too much time and intellectual energy at this moment in its evolution – and that’s not even counting the time and energy that go into writing these posts! Of course you can always just ignore the various new technologies coming out and keep plugging away with simple text and links but there’s always the risk that one of those new facilities will turn out to be the Next Big Thing and if you don’t have it your weblog risks looking hopelessly out of date.hot free movies momfree movie galleries housewifes fuckingsex movie indian freesex no movies latina membership freelesbians movie freemovie long free pornfucking machine free moviesmovies free midget porn Map