bedeviled mojo slop

I think I've resolved myself to the fact that the snowboarding season is over. I could drive 2+ hours to Vermont to take advantage of the colder weather and snow making, but I don't think it's going to happen.

Less than 2 months ago, I first stepped onto a snowboard. That first mountain I snowboarded on was small and safe. The last mountain I snowboarded on this season was large and in charge. I feel pretty good about it all. I started as a falling leaf. I ended being comfortable making my way down black diamond trails.

I know there are many mountains out there. I'm coming for 'ya. Until next season ...

It's been a busy few days. I guess I should post about when and where I'm going to travel. In any event, here's a rundown.

• Saturday I was snowboarding in Vermont
• Sunday I was visiting with family in New York
• Monday I was visiting with friends in one of the five boroughs of Manhattan
• Tuesday I was back home for a spell and ...

Now I'm sitting in a non-descript hotel in Virginia. Tomorrow I talk with important people and then fly back home to New York.

So ... travels.

• going commando blog - I guess if you're really into the allure of pictures of people wearing pants who may or may not be wearing underwear
• bacardi liquor pics - Almost as yucky as their liquors
• download old podcasts - "You're living in the past man." - Drew of the Dawn and Drew Show
• images of cristal - Here.
• angry bird picture - The closest I've got is an angry fist and bird.
• to avoid the bmh - Is to avoid the truth
• livejournal icons of england - I'm seriously here folks. There isn't a thing on this Earth that hasn't been photoshop'd into a LiveJournal icon
• mike cannon-brookes is evil - Par-tic-u-lar-ly evil
• katamari ipod - I would seriously pay good money for one of these
• in 2005 how long does it take to make one marshmallow peep - Inquiring minds want to know

Jeremy Zawodny gives his impressions of where Wordpress and MovableType might find themselves capturing market share in the future.

WordPress will come to be the de-facto choice in the world of self-hosted personal weblogs and low-end webhosting "value added" package. MovableType will be the blogware of choice in the corporate blogging world, both for internal weblogs and those that face the outside world.

Of course, there will be many exceptions to these generalizations, but these are the trends that I see. Matt's decision to create a WordPress Inc. shift things around a bit as well.

I'm of course biased here as I'm the author of blojsom. I've built blojsom over the past 2 years to be adept in either environment: the self-hosted personal weblogs or as a choice for internal/external corporate weblogs. The "powered by" page is starting to reflect a good mix of both representations.

And, as noted on the blojsom site, it's also the software behind Apple's Mac OS X Tiger Server Weblog Server. Here's Apple's press release. Once Tiger Server is released, I imagine there's going to be a flurry of activity on the mailing lists as folks get into developing and understanding how to manipulate the software. Administrators and developers can always enhance the functionality of Weblog Server by developing their own extensions and plugins. And from what I've seen, it looks like any core changes were minimal.

That and we've got some of the best schwag in the business ...

... next to Blogger's of course. But then, even Evan Williams has been spotted rocking the blojsom gear

Troy, N.Y. — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has launched an online student journal showcasing student life and experience at Rensselaer. The weblog, or PolyBlogs features three undergraduate students — Mary Dalton, Laura Henry, and Bryan Knight — as they go through their daily routines and share their real-life experiences with an online community.

• jω: a casual brain dump
• Horse Size Pills
• Shade's House of Crackrock
• Bleddyn from Morpheus & IGNITe400
• Rant 24/7

A year ago, if there was a report of a snow storm rolling in towards the end of March, I'd have gone off the deep end. In fact, I wrote to Mother Nature to express my disgust with the snow. Now, given my new winter hobby, I'm all for the snow. Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow. Hopefully that works ala Beetlejuice

This weekend I'll be in VT Friday night through Saturday. Saturday should be a good day for tromping around in the white stuff. Sadly this will probably be the last set of runs this season.

Oh, and Mother Nature, about that letter ... I apologize. I'm still totally your best friend. Thanks.

My Life Story - MXPX

Here's a movie demonstrating how easy it is to do podcasting or attach files as RSS enclosures to your entries in blojsom.

All you need to do is to upload a file to your blog. When you're writing an entry, select the file you've just upload as an RSS enclosure. If you've enabled RSS enclosure support in your RSS 2.0 template, it'll show up as an enclosure. All the information about the enclosure element is filled in automatically for you!

You can go watch a performance of the latest NIN single, "The Hand That Feeds". It's a 35 MB quicktime video, so it might take a bit of time to load.

I want this album now!

Original art created in Powerpoint. I titled this piece "Digital David".

Now that the edits are checked into CVS, I guess I feel I can go ahead and post some screenshots of blojsom's new administration console.

Click on the links for larger images. You'll notice nice new things like a box telling you who you're logged in as and to what site you're logged into. The look and feel blends in nicely with the default theme. Very eye pleasing. The sidebar is used for contextual help and displaying relevant information. Drop down menus for easy navigation. Hotkeys or keyboard shortcuts will make it into the final templates.

It's damn smooth. And now that the UI is becoming more and more dynamic since I've got some hooks for that in the just released blojsom 2.24, expect to see even more sin-tilating integration! Come on ... you know you want to use blojsom!

And finally, a special thanks to Jeremy Koempel over at smallTransport. He's the mastermind behind it all.

Login screen

Main Console

Drop down Menus

Permissions

Plugins

At the moment I'm updating blojsom's administration console with a new look and feel. It's sexy, but that's besides the point.

What's really sexy is the fact that all of my edits are being done from the blog's templates directory. I don't even have to touch the actual administration console pages in CVS until I'm ready to commit all of the new pages into CVS. blojsom's templating system allows me to override any or all of the packaged templates. So, page-by-page, I'm making my edits in my blog and testing to make sure everything looks and acts correctly. If there's a page I haven't started yet, blojsom just uses the one that's already packaged.

All of this can, of course, be done on a per-blog basis. So, let's say I had 6 blogs running on an installation of blojsom. Conceivably, there could be 6 entirely different look and feels for the administration console. Entirely different could mean each page has been tweaked or just a subset of the pages could be different.

This also applies to other packaged templates like the template used for comment and trackback e-mail messages. Don't like the default one that comes with blojsom? Override it and add, edit, remove any information you want from the template.

<tommy-boy>

Tommy: Did you hear I graduated?
Richard Hayden: Yeah and just a shade under a decade. All right.
Tommy: You know a lot of people go to college for seven years.
Richard Hayden: I know, they're called doctors.

</tommy-boy>

blojsom 2.24 (Codename: 42 Below) is available. Might take a little before the SourceForge mirrors get the "juice".

Changelog. Upgrading. Quickstart download. Update, source, add-ons download.

Now that we've got that out of the way, onto some specific highlights.

1. Adding blogs got a *whole* lot easier. I wanted to enable sites to tie into existing registration processes and to have the ability to use automated scripts to create new blogs. All you have to do now is to create the proper blog directories and configuration files and blojsom will pickup the new blog. Simple as that.

I'll detail the steps tomorrow.

2. You can now use MD5 encrypted passwords for blojsom. This is a per-blog setting. Add the following property to your blog.properties file.

use-encrypted-passwords=true

You may also use the encrypted password conversion utility to convert your existing authorization.properties file.
Be sure to backup this file before doing the conversion in case anything should go wrong. Usage of the utility is as follows.

java -cp blojsom-core-2.24.jar org.blojsom.util.password.EncryptedPasswordConversion full-path-to-authorization.properties-file

3. There are 3 plugins which now dynamically add content to the admin console when adding/editing a blog entry. They are the language selection plugin allowing you to select a language for the entry, the markup selection plugin allowing you to select the type of markup to apply to the entry, and the RSS enclosure plugin allowing you to select a file as an RSS enclosure for the entry (think podcasting).

I'm going to be exploring this capability a lot in further releases. It's a gas for sure.

And expect to see the plugins from the developer's contest in the next release.

Unfortunately tonight I got the edits for the new look and feel for the administration console. I was really hoping to have that integrated into this release, but cross-browser issues and schedules got in the way. Now that all of that is taken care of, I'll be updating the administration console templates to use the new look and feel. Comparing the current and soon-to-be-previous interface and the new interface is really night and day. It's looking that good! Don't despair. Once the administration templates have been modified accordingly, I'll make a template update available.

And so there it is. Adding new blogs to an installation is now far easier. If you want, authorization information is now more secure. And this is just the start of plugins being able to dynamically modify the administration console.

Litefeeds seems to be in the mobile device aggregator business. Looks like they have an online reader where you can select those that you want to target for your mobile device. Along with that there's a mobile newsreader application. Good deal.

They're running 3 blogs at the moment. General, John Goodall, and Darren Inouye.

I'm sure they can school me on targeting syndication feeds for mobile devices. Thanks for choosing blojsom.

Practice Doctorate - A forum for information related to the AACN position on the Practice Doctorate.

Thanks for choosing blojsom.

During the break, Marc Canter and I talked about the fact that both the Atom syndication format and Atom publishing protocol are simply not rich enough to support existing blogging tools let alone future advances in blogging technologies. For example, in MSN Spaces we already have data types such as music lists and photo albums which don't fit in the traditional blog entry syndication paradigm that Atom is based upon. More importantly it is unclear how one would even extend to do this in an acceptable way. Similar issues exist with the API.

For the TypeList API, we use the standard Atom namespace for certain elements, and custom namespaces for additional metadata.

In designing the namespaces for TypeLists, we have tried to leverage existing specifications such as RVW and bio, as well as using as much of the Atom format as possible. This has been balanced with a desire to encapsulate as much information as possible about the item itself (a book, for example) in its own namespace.

I just sent out e-mails to the folks who entered the blojsom developers contest. Nice thing is, everyone who entered won something!

And so ...

1st place: Richard Spackmann - Advanced search plugin using Lucene
2nd place (2 winners): Jay Fienberg - Link List plugin and Andrew Newton - Poll plugin
3rd place (2 winners): Eric Fixler - MP3 Metadata plugin and Eric Olson - Include plugin

Expect to see all of the submissions in the next next release of blojsom, that is, blojsom 2.25.

Related: Blojsom Developers Contest Submissions

Snowboarding is going quite well. Over the past month since I started, I think I've gone out about 7 or 8 times locally to West Mountain.

Today I was at Plattekill Mountain. Today I also did my first double black diamond. Plunge. I guess since each mountain rates its trails differently than a double black diamond there doesn't compare to some of the larger mountains in the area, but ... I did it. At times I would just skid down, but other times I would make my best effort at turns and doing the right thing.

So far, so good.

I originally purchased the A Perfect Circle album eMOTIVe for the song "Passive" from the movie Constantine. To quote the review of the album from their site (my emphasis).

With “eMOTIVe,” A Perfect Circle restore rock ‘n’ roll to its revolutionary roots by throwing a 12-megaton musical bomb in the face of the ruling class. Described by APC’s Maynard James Keenan as “a collection of songs about war, peace, love and greed,” the astonishing set blends all-new original material with a provocative selection of cover versions. The tracks chosen bridge three decades of protest songs, spanning an array of genres – hardcore punk and heavy metal, new wave and Delta blues, folk rock and rhythm & blues. Among the insurgent classics reinterpreted on “eMOTIVe” are John Lennon’s “Imagine,” Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Memphis Minnie’s blues stomper, “When The Levee Breaks” (made famous by Led Zeppelin), Depeche Mode’s “People Are People,” Devo’s “Freedom Of Choice,” Black Flag’s “Gimmie Gimmie Gimmie,” Fear’s “Let’s Have A War,” Joni Mitchell’s “Fiddle And The Drum,” and the Nick Lowe (by way of Elvis Costello) anti-anthem, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding.” The album kicks off with an explosive take on “Annihilation,” originally recorded by Berkeley aggro-punk legends, Crucifix. The eMOTIVe release is a limited edition special package that includes a lenticular cover.

The covers are amazing. Their take on "When The Levee Breaks" is spectacular. Not in a million years would I have thought a Led Zeppelin popularized song could have the same emotion done in an entirely different way.

Remember the blojsom theme contest? Well, if not, then it's along the lines of our blojsom developer's contest, but the end goal is to develop some new themes for blojsom. It's being run until March 31st, 2005, so you've still got time if you'd like to enter.

Visit the theme contest submissions page to see the entries as I get them. There's only one submission so far, Autumn Theme. It's quite nice.

And if that's the only submission I get for the contest, well ... then ... Cliffano automatically gets the first prize $50 Amazon.com gift certificate and I get to keep the other two $15 Amazon.com gift certificates and t-shirts.

Good thing he did a fine, fine job

I'll spare you the bit about the capability in blojsom for multi-blog and multi-user capability since you already know it does both. And hey, the permissions capability for users of a blog is icing on the cake. A day ago someone asked on the mailing list about ways to add new blogs to the system. If I was a camel in a former life, well, that was the straw that broke my back

In any event, I wanted to make blojsom easier for administrators to tie into the existing site registration process so that if you've got a site where people can signup, maybe they also register for a blog and that gets created for them. In the next version of blojsom, all you need to do is to create the proper blog configuration directory with the appropriate configuration files, create the resource directory, and create a location for storage of categories and entries and you're done.

blojsom now knows about the new blog.

Again, this should make it easier for you to tie blojsom into an existing site registration workflow. You could probably also do things like if someone paid for a premium account on your site, maybe they get remote posting via blog client permissions. Who knows.

So, whether you use the existing plugin to create new blogs, some shell script, or some other mechanism to create new blogs, with blojsom it's lickety split easy-as-pie.

Adds a field when you add or edit a blog entry to specify the metadata used to apply any text markup filters to the entry.

Thank You - Dido

PolyBlog is a group of select Rensselaer students who have agreed to share their life and experiences as they attend RPI.

Introducing, in no particular order: Mary, Laura and Bryan.

Read their posts. Get to know them. Get to know what it's like at RPI.

• Duane Nickull's Blog
• Desperate Pundit

delicious-java version 1.5, a Java API for interacting with the del.icio.us social bookmarks service, is now available.

It's used in Erik Thauvin's mobibot and like 3 other applications out there on the Internets

Version 1.5 - Codename: Porno for Pyros

- Update: Changed from GET to POST with addPost method

French localization added! Look for it in the next release of blojsom.

Once I get the Japanese localization in a few weeks that'll be English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and Brazilian Portuguese. Nice!

blojsom momentum is building. This past week the following has transpired:

• Uncle Sam - Interest from "the Feds" on using blojsom.
• Localization - Offer for Japanese localization of the admin UI and our site documentation and to administer a support list for Japanese users.
• Administration Interface - Arguably not the prettiest interface, but it's workable. And in the next release it's going to be even more dynamic. However, I've now got professional UI folks helping out with the re-design. I'll post teaser shots as I can.
• More sites powered by blojsom - Stay tuned.

Don't be afraid to join the bandwagon

Shameless self-promotion: TypeKey4J

Hey Man, Nice Shot - Filter

So, I ran this developer's contest to see what plugins people might develop for blojsom. As asked on the blojsom-developers list, what plugins were submitted? Here they are. Sorry if the descriptions don't do them justice. They're all excellent. Judging and prizes to be awarded shortly!

Stay tuned ... we'll run another contest to give away more gift certificate $$$ and blojsom gear!

Jay Fienberg -

Link List plugin - A fairly comprehensive blog roll plugin.

Andrew Newton -

Entries By Category plugin - Creates a "linkroll" of a blogs entries (similar to the All Entries plugin) organized by category.
OPML Blog Roll plugin - The OPML blogroll plugin parses an OPML source file given by a URI, and creates the necessary objects for the templates to reproduce the blogroll.
Password Entry plugin - This plugin looks for a <div class="excerpt"></div> in your blog entry and replaces the description with a the excerpt and either link to view the full text of the entry or a password form to view the full text of the entry (depending on whether or not the entry has a password in its meta-data).
Poll plugin - The Poll plugin creates entries that are interactive and can be used for creating polls.

Eric Fixler -

MP3 Metadata plugin - Introspect mp3 (and to a lesser degree, other file types) files attached with the RSS Enclosure plugin, and display file and id3 data inside templates.

Richard Spackmann -

Blog Statistics plugin - Calculates various statistics about your blog.
Advanced Search plugin - Multi-blog searching capability for your blog using Lucene.

Eric Olson -

Include plugin - Allows external content to be included in templates. The included content may be pulled from anywhere via a URL.

If I'm a day or a few hours in responding to your e-mail, rest assured I'm not ignoring you. It's not that I'm known for my prompt e-mail responses, but well, I guess I'm known for that ... somewhat.

Anyhoo, it's probably because I'm having a romp in the snow with my new snowboard. The local mountain does $12 from 5-10 PM on Mondays and Tuesdays. That is soooooooooooo a deal.

Stupid grin because I hadn't lip balmed

Roughly 1800 students at the College of Fine Arts - University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia will have a blog. There are about 800 up and running at the moment. They're using blojsom and authentication for administration is done via LDAP using our LDAP authorization provider. 'Cause we rock it like that