Buzzword.Com: Down But Not Out

Buzzword.Com has been experiencing server outages this week, but should be back online and fully operational.

I'm still learning about the care and feeding of a Manila server. For the most part, it looks after itself, even to the point of rebooting automatically after a crash. If you can't bring up a site on the server, check back in 10-15 minutes and it should be back online.

This wasn't the case earlier this week: A conflict between Microsoft Internet Information Server and Manila caused all sites to be inaccessible for more than a day. I wasn't aware of the problem until I got an e-mail from the publisher of Teardrop Times.

When I begin deleting the inactive weblogs that were never updated after the initial It Worked! post, I expect to see performance improvements to the server for active sites.

Anyone who needs to notify me about a future outage should send me an e-mail on Workbench. This weblog's on a separate server, so it should be available even when Buzzword.Com go boom.

Manila · 2004/09/17 · Comment · Link

Editing Blogroll Links in Manila

A joke from 2cents, a long dormant site hosted on Buzzword.Com:

An old fellow was snoozing away contentedly when he was startled awake by the doorbell. He staggered off the couch to make his way to the door. There stood a gorgeous young woman. "Oh my goodness," the pretty young thing exclaimed, "I'm at the wrong house." "Sweetheart, you're at the right house," the old guy assured her. "But you're forty years too late."

As this is being written, a UserTalk script is plodding slowly through the 3,025 weblogs on Buzzword.Com, adding four links to each site's blogroll: Workbench, Buzzword.Com, Scripting News, and UserLand. You can check this out by visiting 2Cents.

This is a one-time change and there's no requirement for users to keep the four sponsor links in order to enjoy free hosting. Here's how to remove links from a Manila site's blogroll:

1. Log in to your weblog. The home page reloads with editing features turned on.
2. Click the Edit button below the list of links. An Edit Navigation Links page opens with an editing form containing your blogroll, a feature that Manila calls navigation links. (screenshot)
3. To remove a link, select its Delete checkbox and click the Update button.

The form also can be used to add new links and change the order in which they are displayed.

Blogroll links are the unit of currency in the attention economy of weblogs, forming communities around common interests. As soon as I solve a nagging bug, Buzzword News will publish links to the most popular and recently updated weblogs on the server.

I'm hoping this helps call attention to the server's weblogs, which may have been languishing in traffic due to a lack of Google PageRank. Since the move from Weblogs.Com, it appears that Google has yet to carry each site's old rank to its new address, so they still have a PageRank of 0.

Manila · 2004/08/30 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Sportus interruptus

Sportus interruptus: Three miles from the finish, the leader in the men's marathon was knocked to the ground by a spectator and was subsequently passed by two runners. The attacker has attempted similar stunts at other events to promote his apocalyptic religious books.

Sports · 2004/08/29 · Comment · Link

I Kludge Therefore I Am

1608: A Roman law establishes that bakers who intend to sell vermicelli must belong to the Guild of Vermicellari.

I hacked together a FileMaker Pro 6 database application for Mac OS 9 this weekend with my wife M.C. Moewe. She began a job two weeks ago covering real estate and land development for the Florida Times-Union, and she'll be working on a weekly Pipeline feature that's better suited to a database than a word processor.

The application must output records as a word processing file with font formatting and bullet characters. I can't figure out how to accomplish this within FileMaker, so I'm looking at external solutions using AppleScript, Radio UserLand and UserTalk, or some kind of XML transformation.

I'm neither a Mac guy nor a FileMaker user, prior to today, which matches the lack of expertise I had in VBScript and Object Linking and Embedding prior to a project I did last week to print labels on a Dymo LabelWriter 330 in Internet Explorer.

Though I heart Java, I sometimes find it preferable to cobble together different technologies and programming languages in Rube Goldbergian fashion. I can verify that the programs work, through testing, but sometimes lack the expertise to understand why. Coding time is fast and ugly.

The FileMaker hack reminded me of Save the Hobbyist Programmer, a controversial essay in the February 2004 Visual Studio magazine by Kathleen Dollard. She argues that casual coders are being left behind by increasingly complicated Microsoft development tools, a problem viewed as a happy outcome by professional programmers such as Michael Flanakin:

If you get rid of all the people who aren't completely dedicated [to] software development, that would open a lot of jobs. Then, those people could focus on whatever domain their experience is from.

For job security reasons, I can understand why pros believe that software should only be created by themselves. All who sell vermicelli must belong to the Guild of Vermicellari.

On no other basis can Flanakin's position be defended. If someone with expertise outside of programming can make a task easier through a scripting hack or database kludge, isn't that exactly what computers are supposed to be for?

Programming · 2004/08/29 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Weblog Hosting Priced to Move

Sept. 18 marks the day that free hosting is scheduled to end on Buzzword.Com, the server that houses 3,000 weblogs formerly published at Weblogs.Com.

After learning about the costs required to host the sites and the amount of activity on the server, I have changed those plans: All existing weblogs will be hosted for free, as long as they've been updated at least once in 2004. Defunct sites also can stay at the request of their publishers, and I'll be allowing new sites to join the server soon.

During the Weblogs.Com outage, dozens of people on the Web had strong opinions on free weblog hosting and the expenses related to such a deal. Here's some fodder for that debate.

The costs are lower than I anticipated and UserLand Software has made an extremely generous offer to become a sponsor of the server.

Buzzword.Com runs on a dedicated Super Celeron 2.4 Windows 2000 server at ServerMatrix that has been alloted 1200 gigabytes per month in bandwidth.

So far, the server's expenses have been $400 in one-time setup charges and $79 a month for hosting and backups, a monthly price so low I get verklempt thinking about it.

Buzzword.Com consumes around 40-50 gigabytes per month in bandwidth at present, so there's no costs related to usage. A yearly Frontier Manila license costs $1,099, putting the anticipated cost at $171 per month to keep the virtual lights on, excluding the costs of my time running the server.

Each site on Buzzword.Com will have a sponsor blogroll containing four links: Workbench, Buzzword News, Scripting News, and UserLand Software. I may sell a fifth link, hoping to bring my costs down to $0.

If some users don't like the sponsor links or outgrow the free server, which may happen as it becomes more active, I'm approaching Weblogger.Com about offering a deal that would allow users to keep their Buzzword.Com address, move their weblog data automatically to one of its servers, and take advantage of its added features.

Manila · 2004/08/27 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Swift Boat Veterans for Slander

In a history of political dirty tricks, Dick Meyer of CBS News reveals something new about the infamous Willie Horton ad from the 1988 Bush/Dukakis race:

Historical footnote: Horton actually went by William, not Willie, and is referred as William in all legal documents; the ad makers thought Willie sounded scarier and blacker.

A 1992 essay by Kathleen Hall Jamieson provides additional background on the name switch:

... his given name is William, he calls himself William, court records cite him as William, a July 1988 Reader's Digest article identifies him as William J. Horton, Jr., and press reports prior to the Republican ad and speech blitz name him "William," the Bush campaign and its supporting PACs identified the furloughed convict as "Willie" Horton. Even the crusading anti-Dukakis newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize for its expose on the furlough program consistently identifies Horton as William Horton or William Horton, Jr. When the Maryland man who was stabbed by the furloughed convict contacted the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, he too referred to Horton as William Horton.

So William became Willie to feed racist white fears of black criminals, just as "I served with John Kerry" in the Swift Boat ads turns out to mean "I served with him in Vietnam, but wasn't in his boat so I'm talking out my ass about his medals."

The American public should recognize that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a fundamentally dishonest effort by the Bush re-election campaign to win this election by denying Sen. John Kerry's well-documented war heroism.

Even in the conservative Weekly Standard, senior editor Andrew Ferguson acknowledges that it's a "transparently desperate" tactic.

There are plenty of areas in which Kerry could be legitimately criticized for actions during a 30-year career in public life. The lies about his combat valor -- one of his most singularly admirable traits -- could be employed against any veteran who seeks public life at any time.

There has to come a time in this country when politicians face a backlash for engaging in win-at-any-cost, blatantly false gutter politics. Sixty seven days from now is a good place to start.

Politics · 2004/08/27 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Elegant Solution to Non-Existent Problem

An article by Mark Pilgrim in XML.Com states that "Really Simple Syndication is really only simple if you're doing it incorrectly," using the guid element as an example.

That's a bogus claim to make about guid, a globally unique string that serves a simple purpose: Making sure that an RSS reader doesn't show the same item twice.

Pilgrim's article provides a nice tutorial on how to normalize URLs for use as guid values, but he neglects to mention a salient fact: This solves a problem that no one is having.

URLs can be expressed in multiple ways and still reach the same place: Note how python.org/%7eguido and python.org/~guido both load the home page of Guido van Rossum.

I'm not aware of any RSS producing software that creates guid URLs in multiple formats -- in other words, using example.com/~rogers/111 in one item and example.com/%7erogers/112 in the next.

That's the only problem that might be solved by forcing an RSS producer to normalize a URL (text replacements to change things like "%7e" to "~"), and even then, most feed readers are unlikely to need the help.

In RSS, all you need for the guid element is a globally unique string, which could be a URL or another naming scheme such as TAG URIs. You can make up your own -- as long as feed producing software is self-consistent in how it creates unique strings, any will work fine as a guid.

One of the best reasons for the simplicity of RSS is to avoid creating unnecessary work for implementors. Any guid will be treated by feed-reading software as a string, regardless of whether it's a URL or not, so there's no benefit to the knowledge that a URL has been normalized.

I enjoy watching Pilgrim dive into this stuff, because there's no one on Earth who loves Internet specs more than he does, but I wish he'd abandon the Swift Boat Veterans for Atom approach and spend less time blasting RSS.

The simplicity of RSS has been proven by the popularity of the format, which can be bent but rarely broken. There wouldn't be 119,000 RSS feeds and counting if it was as complicated as he makes it out to be.

Though I've been working with RSS for several years and my hair is prematurely gray, I believe the two are completely unrelated.

Rss · 2004/08/23 · 35 COMMENTS · Link

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