Extended Pings in Weblog Pinger

RSS support was added to Weblogs.Com this morning, making it possible to send an extended ping message to the service that includes the address of a site's RSS feed.

This will make it easier for services that are built atop Weblogs.Com, such as Technorati and GigaDial, to incorporate RSS feeds.

I have extended my pinger to support this new feature.

Weblog-Pinger, an open source class library for PHP, can send update notification pings over five XML-RPC services that monitor new weblog content.

Xml-rpc · Php · 2005/04/28 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

To Dream the Impossible Dream

Lifetime to-do list:

420. Write hands-on tutorial for beginning Java programmers who want to teach self language in no more than 21 days
421. Successfully predict next pope's name
422. End TV news segment with segueway back to anchors
423. Be insulted in no less than five languages by total strangers
424. Do more to help worthy charity
425. Become a professionally ranked tennis player.

My uncle Paul wanted to become John McEnroe as a teen, and we've disagreed for years over whether I could become ranked if I devoted myself to tennis instead of web surfing and fatty foods.

I figured if the rankings went low enough -- the ATP Tour goes to 1307 -- I might have a shot.

Paul thinks I'm an idiot, but I haven't given up the dream. At the very least, I might draw a match somewhere against a ranked pro who had to withdraw due to injury or illness.

Nestor Briceno watch your back!

Sports · 2005/04/28 · Comment · Link

All-Podcast, All-the-Time Radio

A San Francisco radio station is going to start airing nothing but user-submitted podcasts beginning on May 16. The station, which calls itself KYOU Open Source Radio, will broadcast on 1550-AM/San Francisco and the Internet.

Submitted podcasts must be 60 megabytes or less in size and can be in any format. The categories on the submission form demonstrate how strange this is likely to be -- traditional fare like news, sports and politics is mixed with over-the-road trucking, sex and wiffleball.

This could be one of the great wheels-off radio experiments of all-time -- at least until earnest liberal San Franciscans fill it with local community news, activism and independent music.

The station sounds like a good opportunity for Jacksonville weblogger Todd Smith, who devotes his site to Americana music and has a Saturday morning show about the music on a local college station.

Music · 2005/04/28 · Comment · Link

I've Been X'ed

I did an interview yesterday with AVNOnline, believing the "AV" stood for audiovisual, like the A.V. Club entertainment site published by The Onion.

I liked the final piece, although I thought it was odd for the reporter to quote another papal domain registrant talking about "nipples and snatch." That kind of talk hasn't appeared much in the media since the end of the Clinton administration.

When I showed the story to my wife, she noticed that the ads around the piece were for X-rated sites and products (warning: link advertises X-rated sites and products).

As it turns out, AVN stands for Adult Video News, the leading trade publication of the adult entertainment industry.

Journalism · Domains · 2005/04/27 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Virgin Mary of the Viaduct

I received an e-mail from someone affiliated with the Virgin Mary viaduct, the Chicago highway underpass that has a life-size water stain resembling the mother of God. They wanted advice on setting up a web site.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that all religious iconography that develops naturally upon either surfaces or food should have its own site. This is exactly the kind of thing for which the Internet was invented.

Because of the visual nature of the underpass and the community that has developed, the ideal place for its web presence is Flickr.

Flickr's a terrific photo-sharing community that was recently purchased by Yahoo for 5.2 bajillion dollars. You can create an account for free, upload your photos for public viewing, and add tags that describe the subject of the shots.

Every time I find myself on Flickr, I get lost in the photos, most recently in the work of Justin Hankins. His pictures of the Bridge of Lions, Night of Lights celebration, and Intercoastal Waterway are some of the best shots I've seen of St. Augustine.

Flickr photos can be grouped into sets and viewed as slideshows. Somebody should hire Robin Jean, the photographer doing this Rockstars set, to take column mugshots for newspapers.

Jacksonville · 2005/04/26 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Master of My Domain

The owners of other Pope Benedict XVI domains are taunting me.

Jacopo Di Trani, an Italian who got Benedict16.Com, has declared that pornographers and online casinos are welcome to buy it from him:

The first time i didn't believed Cadenhead when he said "i'll never give my domain to gamble/porn site developers"!

He's a very kind guy, but, first of all, his hair CAN'T be real, and, second, although i have respect for his decision to give for free his very valuable domain (with a billion of christians in the world), it doesn't change my opinion about the human nature and i'll never do something like that with this domain!

The owner of PopeBenedictXVI.Com, who received a $150,000 bid on EBay that turned out to be a hoax, had a question-and-answer page up where he posted this:

I'll be keeping every red cent of this dough, thinking about blowing it on horse races. ... the person that you saw on tv is the owner of benedictxvi.com and not me, you will just have to take my word on the fact that I'm much younger and sexier than that guy, I've got more hair too.

I know in a higher sense I did the right thing by donating the domains to Modest Needs, a great charity that continues to get record traffic, but if my gesture turns out to have an actual market value of six figures, I think I'm going to spend the rest of the day curled up in a ball eating Chunky Monkey directly out of the container.

Update: A discussion on Real Time with Bill Maher:

Joe Scarborough: I think there's going to be a porn site. "BenedictXVI.com."

Sen Alan Simpson: [overlapping] John Waters would love it.

Scarborough: [overlapping] In fact, go to it.

Insert Charlie Brown "Auuuugh!" here.

Domains · 2005/04/26 · 20 COMMENTS · Link

You Heard It Here First

Without interviewing me, Jacksonville TV newscast First Coast News reported Thursday that I was selling the domain:

While the World Wide Web might not be a priority for Pope Benedict XVI, one local man hopes someone will think it's worth some cash to him. Roger [sic] Cadenhead of St. Augustine registered the domain name BenedictXVI.com along with other potential choices before the Pope selected his name. Cadenhead wants to sell it to the highest bidder.

This was news to me. I had been telling all reporters the exact opposite, as the original story in Tuesday's Washington Post attests:

Reached on his cell phone, Cadenhead said he hasn't made any decisions about what he'll do with the domain, but he vowed he wouldn't be pawning it off to the highest bidder.

"I never really registered it with the intent of making money, and I think to crassly auction it would be a sin of some kind. ..."

Five hours before the newscast, BenedictXVI.Com was donated to the charity Modest Needs while we wait to hear from the Vatican, as I wrote on my weblog.

A First Coast News producer e-mailed me for an interview at noon, but I was unable to call him back -- I had disconnected my phone because I couldn't say no to female TV producers.

Interestingly enough, I can see exactly what the station read on my web server, because the office computer the producer used to e-mail me requested several web pages Thursday, including these:

• 9:58 a.m.: The first papal weblog entry, which stated "I don't think there's any speculative potential in these domains"
• 10:09 a.m.: The Workbench home page, where the top entry stated "my goal was to keep it away from pornographers"
• 12:24 p.m.: The BenedictXVI.Com home page, which at the time displayed this page, where I explained that I "registered benedictxvi.com to prevent a pornographer or online casino from getting it"
• 12:24 p.m.: My favorite photo from my 10th wedding anniversary cruise
• 1:17 p.m. and 2:04 p.m.: The same BenedictXVI.Com home page

All told, that First Coast News computer made 115 web page requests before the newscast, also checking out my bio, books, and the television category of my weblog.

I don't know how the station could have reported something false that contradicted several pages they viewed on my server and so much other press coverage. My only consolation is that the story wasn't delivered by Donna Hicken.

Jacksonville · Domains · Television · 2005/04/25 · 16 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries