Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

After thinking some more about yesterday’s post, I have some more thoughts. Sam Gentile mentioned that weblogs seem to work better for people than more direct interactions; so why not embrace this, and see if we can get more out of weblogs? It might not get Sam all the way to where he wants to be, but it would certainly be better than where we are now.

Let’s take this discussion for example. Sam made his initial post yesterday sometime, and got a couple of replies (mine and Sam Ruby’s) that I knew about quickly. But what about others? Rahul also replied, but I only found it by searching Technorati. Similarly, unless Sam decides to link to these posts, many of his readers will never know about them. Sam does, because I know he religiously scans his referrer logs :-), but no one else will know.

So how to fix this? It seems to me TrackBack or Pingback is the way to go. Automated notifications between weblogs, encouraging more widespread collaboration. As far as I know, Movable Type users already get this for free, if they enable it. For Radio folks, Google reveals a couple of people doing it, albeit with a bit more work.

So, everyone, how about implementing TrackBack and/or Pingback on your weblogs - and let’s see where it takes us?

Trackback is now enabled for individual posts. My client-side code appears to be working. If anyone has a trackback-enabled client, can you send me a trackback for this post to ensure everything works the other direction? Thanks!

I thought we could do without, but I’ve noticed it’s pretty hard to know when/where comments are posted without some kind of notification. So there’s now an RSS feed available for the comments on this site.

Cory Doctorow posted Chat as a side-channel for face-to-face meetings. This got me thinking - I’ve used MSN Messenger many times during conference calls, to discuss things real-time with certain attendees but off-line from the call. It’s proved especially useful when having a conference call with one of my clients, and one of their suppliers/customers. Kind of takes the place of the “lean over and whisper” thing, when you’re not all in the same room.

Sam Gentile says:

…it seems very difficult to get people to collaborate freely and consistently in a medium where they feel like they have an obligation. […] But I am still left with this need for collaboration that is more meaningful that web logs and people interact more directly. Thus far, in the absense of a project, it has eluded me.

I think the key there is “in the absense of a project.” I really have three types of online collaboration. First, there’s personal interactions with my friends. Second, there is the collaboration on specific projects, where the collaboration is part of my job. This would include email with coworkers, and Groove-style collaboration. The third type is the informal collaboration on those topics I have an interest in. This includes the weblog community I read, newsgroups, mailing lists, etc. I participate as I have time to do so.

Sam is talking about collaboration in the absense of a project, and I think it’s the third type he’s referring to. I think the possible cause of his frustration is that we all have our favorite communities that we participate in, even without a specific business need, because we enjoy them. However, I think many folks are just out of time, and have to make choices. When I run out of time, I first drop off of the newsgroups; next to go is the .NET mailing lists, and finally the weblog posts dwindle. Adding more collaboration mediums is great when there’s extra time - but when the crunch comes, something has to go.

Perhaps what we need is a collaboration medium which more effectively aggregates multiple sources into a single “community”. Rather than having to divide time between newsgroups, mailing lists, workspaces, etc., maybe it could be organized by topic. One could participate in the “.NET community” without having to consciously make choices as to the medium. Hmm…

He claims to be pingback enabled, but hasn’t pinged me yet. ;-) [Sam Ruby]

Sorry for the test post, all…but this post should generate an automatic pingback on Sam’s post.

Update: here’s another ping for him, to help him test his new blogging software!

Individual posts are now pingback-enabled. If you’re using a pingback-enabled client, can you try a pingback for this entry? I’ve tested it with the test blog and all seems to be well, but there’s no substitute for real clients.

I borrowed Sam Ruby’s idea and included the pingbacks with the comments. Thanks Sam!

I forgot to mention a couple of things - and since I don’t have anything in yet to edit existing posts, it’s gonna have to be a new one. :-)

Many thanks to Brad Wilson, who unknowingly gave me some ideas related to archiving and comments, and whose site provided a basis to learn CSS. My new site uses CSS for styling and most of the positioning, with the single exception of the table at the top for the graphics layout. This is my first heavy use of CSS - hopefully I didn’t screw anything up too bad!

And also thanks to Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim for their most excellent RSS validator, which has proven immensely valuable when generating my RSS feed!

Here’s the rundown on the new weblog. Although it bears a striking resemblance to the old version, it’s been completely redesigned and rewritten.

All posts are now stored in SQL Server, and pages are generated on the fly. On the main page, each post now has a title/link, along with links to comments and referrers for that particular post, with counts for each.

Comments are now allowed for each post, and are shown on the permanent link page for the post. Referrers for the particular post are also shown.

The calendar from Radio is gone, and is replaced by an archive list. Far easier to use, and much easier to find a particular post, IMHO.

All posts are searchable, using the search button in the top right corner. This will search only post data, ignoring page-template stuff (like the blogroll), which isn’t possible with Google.

To preserve existing links to old radio-generated pages (links like http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/2002/11/21.html), redirect pages are in place. These currently don’t auto-redirect, but may be changed to do so in the future. The cool part about these is that they are auto-generated on the server from the admin site, so they can be easily modified en masse.

If you notice any problems, please let me know! Also, subscribers please update the RSS location to http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/rss.aspx.

After yet another hour of screwing around with Radio trying to get it to upstream my archives, and after yet more crashes when trying to close it, I’ve finally replaced Radio with my own weblog application.

I’ll post more details soon…but for now, I just wanted to explain why your news aggregator is probably showing my last couple of weeks worth of posts (new generated RSS file). If you’re subscribed, please change the RSS location to be http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/weblog/rss.aspx. The old feed will be removed at some point in the future. Thanks!