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.

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.

No time to blog? Try Drunk Men Work Here’s free weblog service and utilize their Zero-Click posting technology

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.

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