I recently started reading Chris Pratley blog. Chris is the Microsoft OneNote Group Program Manager and it appears he has been publicly blogging for only a weeks. Yet in just a few entries, Chris not only provides unique insight into MSFT’s product development practices and techniques, but I also feel that the blog broadens the user community’s perspective of the product.

Specifically, you can also see how this type of public communication about a product (and an excellent one I might add) can spawn user feedback that will undoubtedly influence the product’s direction.

Of course, user feedback in a public forum is noting new, mailing lists, newsgroups et al, have been the venue for this fodder for many years.

However, I think the blog format enables a contextual history and candidness that seem to get lost in any of the aforementioned formats. Perhaps it’s merely the signal-to-noise ratio or the initial monolog-ish nature that a blog entry carries, but whatever ‘it’ is, I think more people in Chris’ position should follow suit.

As an aside, product blogging from the inside is nothing particularly new, Macromedia has been doing it for over a year as well as many-many smaller shops, but I think seeing Microsoft do it so well seems to legitimize the format to the point where Product Blogging or Service Blogging for that matter should be a requirement of any successful management team.

Prognosticator Dave Pell of Davenetics and NextDraft fame is at it again, this time with Electablog (RSS feed too), which Dave describes as…

“electablog provides a daily (and sometimes nightly) slicing and dicing of the mad dash that is America’s election cycle. Think of it as C-Span meets the Daily Show meets the little girl from Whale Rider meets Dennis Miller before he lost his mind.”

Dude! When do you sleep?

The other day I was browsing through the Wayback Machine and discovered a number of four-year-old weblog entries I posted to my then homegrown blog tool. They weren’t earth shattering entries, but I figured I’d bring them back home.

So, after a few quick regular expression hacks I managed to format them for import into MovableType (complete way links to archived pages on the Wayback Machine)

Brewster Kahle, you rock!

Bob Mould of Sugar and of course Hüsker Dü now has a weblog.

Welcome Bob! I certainly do remember with many of your songs still cycling through my playlists.

Matt Berther has released version 2.0.0.1 of his MovableType posting client/plugin MovablePoster, which integrates nicely with NewsGator in addition to being a stand-alone Windows client. (of course I’m testing MovablePoster via this post :-)

Wow! Greg has been busy! In addition to announcing NewsGator 2.0, there will also be NewsGator Online Services, which includes three [new] content reader editions:

• “Web Edition — NewsGator Online Services provides a web-based content reader, which allows users to read content they have subscribed to from any web browser.”
• “POP Edition — NewsGator Online Services allows users to read their subscribed feeds in any email client. This includes Outlook Express and Eudora on Windows, Apple Mail and Entourage on the Mac, and any other email client that supports POP3. “
• “Mobile Edition — NewsGator Online Services allows users to read their subscribed feeds on any mobile device that supports HTML, including mobile wireless phones and PDA’s. This is a powerful feature for road warriors who use mobile devices to access information while away from home or the office. “

Congratulations Greg! I can’t wait to use the new tools!

Last night I hacked together a bit of JavaScript to add a right-click context menu posting option to Joshua Schachter’s Social Bookmarks Manager.

It works in a similar fashion to the bookmarklet, but is accessible via the right-click context menu in IE. It also adds the feature of pulling in any text selected on the page into the “extended” description field and remembers your del.icio.us/user path after the first invocation by storing it in a cookie.

Installation should be easy…

I’ve created a windows registry script to add the necessary registry key as well as a removal script to delete the key if you would like to remove the context menu option.

• Simply click on the following link: post-to-del-icio-us.reg
• When prompted, click save to download it to your local system (desktop is fine)
• Close your browser (important step)
• Double-click on the post-to-del-icio-us.reg registry script and then click ‘Ok’ on the two message boxes
• Start-up your browser, select some text on a page, right-click the text and select “Post to del.icio.us”
• When first run, you will be prompted for your del.icio.us/user path, which is in the format: http://del.icio.us/[your-user-name] (e.g. mine is http://del.icio.us/hatch)

Some other notes:

As for as I know, this only works in IE (or derivatives like MyIE2) and it’s definitely specific to Windows.

There is a way to delete the cookie that contains your del.icio.us/user path. You can do so by using this link

As I mentioned above I also have a removal registry script, which you can use to delete the context menu from IE.

• Simply click on the following link to remove the menu and follow a similar procedure to what was mentioned above: remove-post-to-del-icio-us.reg

If you would like to run the script locally from your system, I have provided a zip archive containing all the necessary files.

To customize the script for your local system, drop the post-to-del-icio-us.html into your Windows directory and edit the post-to-del-icio-us.reg file to point to the local path instead of my server.

• Post to del.icio.us zip

That’s it.

Enjoy.

Update: 2004/09/17
Dan Grigsby has created a Windows Installer for this script. Do check it out!

Thanks Dan!

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Best of all, there’s no learning required!

I’m again using jpcache with my blog. This time however, I’ve integrated the PHP-based gzip and caching capabilities of jpcache with Movable Type.

You should see a significant speed improvement through out the site — especially on some of the longer category pages.

It was fairly easy to incorporate into MT since I’m already outputting PHP files from my MT templates. Basically, after following the uncomplicated install guide for jpcache and running a few sample test pages, all I needed to do was “prepend” the jpcache script to the end of my PHP files.

You can do this by adding a require(’/path/to/jpcache.php’) to your MT templates and rebuilding them as PHP scripts.

Or simply create an “.htaccess” file at the root of your blog directory and add the php directive “auto_prepend_file”, which will append the specified file to the end of every PHP script within your blog directory (this includes sub-directories).

For example:

php_value auto_prepend_file /path/to/jpcache/jpcache.php

So far, I’ve found only a few downsides however…

Since files are cached for 15 minutes by default you will not see updates reflected on the site until the cached file expires. Of course the cache expiration is configurable and in fact you can turn it off entirely, so it’s not a show-stopper for me and I’m happy with the outcome.

Ultimately however, I like to be using the Smarty Template Engine, which Brad Chocate integrated with Movable Type, but for basic file caching and gzip compression, jpcache suited me well.

The file ‘mt-send-entry.cgi’ in a default MovableType installation can be used to relay spam. If you’re not using the script to allow your users to “Send this Entry by Email”, you can safely remove the file from your MT install or change the permissions so that the script cannot execute.

However, if you need the functionality Ben Trott has posted a fix, but IMHO, you’d be safer pushing this function client-side using a mailto with some JavaScript

Jacques Distler has some more insight and there’s an active discussion on the MovableType Support Forums