Weblogs

This blog is powered by Movable Type, and on the whole, I’m very happy with it. It’s a huge step above Blogger, for a good number of reasons. The main problem with Blogger was that the application and all your data was stored on their server (I didn’t use blogspot, so I had a local copy of dirty data, but blogspot users are not so lucky) and thus when Blogger was down, so were you. And when Blogger became so popular, outages became common. I’ve never particularly liked the idea of being at the mercy of their server, so when I got the opportunity to upgrade, I did.

Movable Type is feature-rich, reliable, and easy to use, which is about all you could ask from a good software package. But even Movable Type has it’s limitations. Most of these things I can live with. As always, many are simply tradeoffs. MT’s interface is simple and easy, but relatively sparse. It would be nice to have some sort of WYSIWYG option, but because MT is portable, meaning that all you need to access MT is a browser and an internet connection, you are somewhat limited in what can be done. Since I do post (or edit) from mulitple locations, portability is a must but the advantage of portability cuts into usability because browsers aren’t robust enough to support WYSIWYG features. Steven Den Beste uses CityDesk, which is much more usable and includes a WYSIWYG editor (among other features not included in the online packages), but requires that software be installed on your local machine. It lacks portability.

I recently upgraded to Movable Type 2.64. The chief reason for doing so was to start taking advantage of various TrackBack and pinging sorts of features, but the more I learn of these technologies, the more they seem forced. They’re difficult to initially grasp, and take some time to implement, for very little gain. Once they’re set up, they’re easy enough to use, but other technologies such as referrals do this much better. More on this in a bit.

I’ve also recently come across JoeUser.com, which is another blogging software package that (unfortunately) seems to resemble Blogger a bit, in that everything is hosted on their server, but that also has some really wonderful features that other software doesn’t seem to have.

• Native Referral Tracking: A very convenient feature of JoeUser is that it automatically tracks referrals (per entry and for the blog itself). This is sooo much better than TrackBack! Some sites make use of this, but they are rare, which is a shame. JoeUser supports this, which is a great feature and allows you to see who is linking to you and to automatically link back (something other bloggers will certainly appreciate – if they’re willing to jump through hoops to use TrackBack, they’d love this feature). If such a feature were more common in the blogosphere, it would encourage people to link more, if only to get a link back in return (and it’s also nice to see how many referrals you’re giving out too!)
• Next Articles Link: At the bottom of the page is a link that says “Next Articles” and clicking on it takes you to their archives, starting with the next entry. To do the same here, you would need to go to the archives and click on a month and scroll down until you don’t recognize a post. It’s a painful user experience. Not so at JoeUser. It is a brilliant feature, and it’s not on any other blogging software.
• Rating: JoeUser allows visitors to rate posts, and then allows you to view highest rated posts. The categories for evaluation are limited, but the idea is correct. I also believe other factors contribute to a post’s “value” but I’m not sure exactly how the system works. What’s more, if a post on your blog gets rated high enough, the entire post show’s up on JoeUser’s main page.
• Community: Because of features like the one where a highly rated post ends up on the main page, you have a better chance of getting people to notice what you wrote. It’s difficult to get noticed in the blogging world, and there are a few nice features on JoeUser that will help in that respect (as long as the user base stays relatively low – see scaleability below).
• Setting a Viewing Audience: You have the ability to restrict access to a certain post to specific members or groups of members within the JoeUser community. Not something I would use, but an interesting feature nonetheless…

Unfortunately, it also seems to have a great deal of drawbacks too, which is a shame… but it is still a relatively young application, so I’m sure at least some of them will be improved upon in the near future…

• Centralized Hosting: Like Blogger, you are at the mercy of JoeUser’s server. And note that part of the reason that the good features listed above are not available in other blogging packages is because JoeUser runs on dynamic .asp pages (not necessarily a bad thing, but just something to note)
• Not Customizeable: It doesn’t look like you can customize the look and feel of the blog at all – not even with a set of predetermined layouts. In a way, this isn’t so bad for visitors as every JoeUser blog has the same layout so you know where to find whatever features or links you want, but as a blogger, this is a major problem!
• Drafts: Most of the time, it takes me a while to write a post and I continually save the post as a “draft” until I finish, and then I “publish” the post. You can do this on JoeUser too, but you need to use their “Audience” feature and set it to “Just Me,” which is hardly intuitive.
• Archives: While the “Next Page” feature is fantastic, it appears to be the only way you can browse the archives. You can view entries by subject in the “Channels” section, but there doesn’t appear to be any time-based archives… A search feature for a specific user would also be nice…
• Scaleability: Many of the good community features of JoeUser, such as the ability to have a highly rated post on the main page, will diminish in value as the site grows more popular. All of your public posts show up in the “Recent JoeUser Articles” section of the sidenav, but you’ve got a much better chance at getting noticed now because there are only a few hundred other users, and so you’re posts aren’t immediately shoved off of like they were on blogger.

Some of these are killer problems for me, so I won’t be switching from MT any time soon, but I think some of these features, particularly the auto-referral system and the “Next Articles” link, are great and need to be used more often… I’ll be looking to implement something similar here if I can find the time to figure it out…

Update: Check out Kaedrin’s JoeUser page to see an example of a specific user’s page…

Update 12.1.03: Brad Wardell/Draginol comments (he owns Stardock, the company that created JoeUser) And it looks like that post made it to the front page too!

A senior member of the Kaedrin Weblog Oversight Committee has pointed out that it has been about 6 months since I vowed to begin posting more frequently and with higher quality content.

I’m not usually one to pat myself on the back, but I think I’ve done well. My main strategy was to introduce a regular schedule (i.e. update every Sunday) and with one exception I have kept to that schedule (I only missed one update, and that was because I was out of the country without access to the internet.) Indeed, as I suspected, this regular schedule has not only forced me to consistently churn out worthwhile material, but it has also caused me to increase the frequency of posting. Time is sparse these days, but I have grown into posting 2 or 3 times a week. This pales in comparison to the more prolific bloggers, but it’s not bad considering my time constraints. One other thing I sought to accomplish was to start creating more original high-quality content, as opposed to just linking to it. Again, as I suspected, this is a rather slow process. Most of what I post are still links or summaries, but I have made the occasional foray into original writing. Expect this slow progress to continue.

Anyway, I thought it might be nice to share some of my observations about the way I blog and some things I grapple with, since I often wonder what process other bloggers go through (feel free to share):

• Writing: It often takes me a very long time to write a post, which is part of the reason I don’t post every day. When reading other blogs, I get the impression that people are able to do this a lot quicker than I. Is this true? How does everyone decide what to write about? Where do you find your subjects or links?
• Post Titles: Conceiving of a clever title for a post is one of my major pet peeves and often results in lame titles (i.e. this post’s title), a resigned reliance on simple pragmatic post titles (i.e. Horror), and/or chain-smoking monkey gags (i.e. Mr. Teeny).
• Post lifetimes: This is another old pet peeve, one that I figure annoys a lot of people. Every once in a while I’ll have a series of posts which I think are very high quality and am really proud of. But then some time passes and they get pushed off the front page into the obscurity of the archives. Even more frustrating is that I don’t even know if anyone saw it! (see below for more about visitors) Does anyone read the archives? Fortunately, since I have certain interests that keep coming up here, I get to link back to them myself, but I doubt many people go perusing the archives and one can hardly blame them. It’s just the natural way of the blog.
• Visitors: One of the more infuriating things about running a weblog is not knowing if or who is reading your posts. Referrer logs only tell you so much, and Sitemeter sometimes misses important information. One of my goals was (natch) to gain a modest set of new readers, and it is difficult to tell. I will occasionally get links from kind bloggers; I’ve even made it into a few blogrolls… but even with all of that it is difficult to tell who is reading. 95% of my refers still come from google/yahoo, and about 80% of those are for pages other than the blog. A lot of popular bloggers have given advice on how to get noticed and how to get people to link to you, but I’ll be honest: Sending an email to a blogger begging to be linked makes me feel dirty and I feel like I’m really intruding. I guess that’s why the call it “link whoring”. I prefer to be noticed in referrer logs or comments sections. I’ve achieved modest success with that, and I’m truly grateful for the attention thrown my way by certain bloggers, so I’ll continue along that vein. In any case, if you are a new regular reader, show yourself! Why not post a comment and let me know what you like or dislike about this here blog.
• Feedback: Along the same lines as not knowing if people are visiting is not knowing what people like or dislike about the blog. Feel free to leave a comment below or send an email with comments, suggestions, corrections, flames, whatever tickles your fancy…

Well, there you have it. Here’s to another six months…

Update 11.7.03 – Jeeze, this sounds a lot more whiney than I wanted it too. I’m not unhappy or anything…

Its hard to believe, but today marks the third anniversary of this here blog. In taking a look over the past year, it seems to be… well… lame. Not in the sense that what I was posting was crap, but, rather, that I wasn’t posting much. There was a brief resurgence of posting in July of last year, when I first switched to Movable Type, but that only lasted a few months (and there wasn’t much there anyway). I stumbled through the winter months, mostly posting at a rate of about once a month. Things sped up around March and April, as I became more comfortable posting about politics and, in particular, the military and the intelligence community. Thanks to an indirect but swift kick to the butt from Steven Den Beste, I came to the conclusion that my totally irregular posting schedule was a really bad thing. I started slow, resolving to post every Sunday, in the hopes that such a loose schedule would help me stick to it. So far it has, and its actually caused me to increase my posting in general. The last few months have been really good, IMHBCO.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite posts from the last year:

• Footnotes from Beyond the Zero, part II (one of the weirder posts of the year)
• Spy Games
• Living in Historic Times
• To hit or not to hit, that is the question
• Security & Technology
• Oshkosh b’ Gosh
• Dezinformatsiya (The Power of Disinformation)

There are others, but I always have difficulty compiling these sort of lists… If you have any favorites of your own, feel free to post them in the comments below (along with any other bitter criticism, astute observations, or death threats…)

Recently, Steven den Beste updated his blogroll, then commented on the negative economy of scale and inverse network effect that allows his blogroll to be very valuable to those who are included. Naturally, given the value of those links, he gets a lot of mail from people asking to be put on the list. The reason he doesn’t do so is that the list would get very long and unwieldy (and thus the value of said link would go down), and also because “Sturgeon’s Law is in full force in the blogosphere: 90% of blogs are crap, if not an even higher proportion than that. (Not yours, of course.)”

I thought about that for a moment, and I realized that my blog is crap, part of that 90%. Not (I hope) because the content is low quality, but because it is so infrequently and inconsistently updated. At which point, I began examining what I’m doing here, why I’m doing it, and how I should proceed. I have not been very productive over the last year. There are many reasons for this, most of which contribute to my lack of motivation to produce more posts. One major factor in my lack of motivation is the fact that only a handful of people (if that) will ever actually see them, thus making the decision to blow off the blog that much easier.

I’ve been doing this for close to 3 years, and it has never really caught on. For a long time, I posted nearly every day. I didn’t worry about my lack of readership because I enjoyed what I was doing. And whatever feedback I did get was gratifying. Then things began to slow down, and now I’m stuck in a negative feedback loop where I don’t even want to be linked anymore because I don’t create enough high-quality content. But I don’t create enough high-quality content because I don’t have enough people visiting!

It’s more complicated than that, of course, but that is the general idea. I still enjoy doing the weblog, I just don’t do it enough. Even when I do, I’m terribly inconsistent. However, I think this is something I can correct. What I’m going to try to do is post at least once a week, on Sundays (anything beyond that is just gravy). Hopefully, being on a regular schedule will force me to consistently churn out worthwhile material. I also need to start creating more original high-quality content, as opposed to just linking to it (as I mostly do now). This will probably be a gradual thing, as I begin to comment more on what I link to. And thus I hope to bootstrap myself into superstardom. Or maybe just a few additional readers.

Today marks the two year anniversary of the Kaedrin Weblog. Its damn hard to believe it has been this long. In porting this thing over to Movable Type, I had the opportunity to read through almost every post I ever made. Some of the first are almost embarrassing. I started slow, mostly as a consequence of my host banning FTP, thus not allowing me to use Blogger (and I had only just discovered it!). Eventually, I figured out a manually intensive workaround, and got to posting full force. I think October of 2000 is really when the blog really began to resemble what it does today. By February 2001, I had purposely stopped linking to all the regular sources, and started searching, in earnest, for things a bit off the beaten path. I really kicked it into high gear in May and somehow kept it up until July. These were the months where I really came into my own, and they are the ones I am most proud of… I found original sources, played reporter for a few topics, linked to independant type stuff, and overall the quality was very high during those three months. One interesting aspect of them, I think, is their timeless quality. They’re just as relevant today as they ever were, though maybe I’m just being overly sentimental. You decide…

After that things petered out for a bit. All those entertaining links were difficult to come by, after all, and I began to slow down a bit. August wasn’t a bad month, but it wasn’t at the same level as the preceding months… Then came September 11… and things dropped off almost entirely, as I discussed below. I might add that at no point did the blog really find an audience beyone my loyal Kaedrin minions, and that might have played a part in my floundering. By the way, this doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate my loyal Kaedrin visitors, most of whom have been here since the beginning, when Kaedrin was little more than a place where I collected quotes and sound clips… They are what kept Kaedrin going all this time, and I truly, genuinely, appreciate their kindness and support. And so here we are, after two years, and a lot of links. Its been interesting. Heres to another two!

So, anyone have any favourite entries? Venerable praise, bitter criticism, adroit observations, astute suggestions, death threats? Lets give this new commenting system a workout, why don’t we?

I’ve finally made the switch. I’m now using Movable Type to update the weblog. Multitudes of advantages over Blogger, but my favourite is that MT is running on my webserver, so when Blogger goes down, I can still post. I had toyed with the notion of creating my own blogging system, based on the XSLT solution I use for the rest of the site, but MT is suprisingly powerful and is much better-suited for blogging than Blogger or anything I could dream up… I actually imported all of my previous entries into MT (all 235 posts!); it was suprisingly easy, though there were a few catches (all fixed). I installed MT about a month ago, and I’m only now making it public, mainly because if I wait until I’ve got all the templates ironed out and am content with the design, I’ll probably never finish it, and I am aching to get back to posting. So expect to see a lot of template changes, especially on archive type pages. In the mean time, I hope to write a few posts that you could enjoy, despite my templating woes…

Steven Den Beste made some rather inflammatory remarks the other day about Hockey, to which he’s received a tremendous amount of flak.

And I’m even sorrier that some Americans decided to moon Canada at a hockey game. All I can say is that in the spectrum of fans of various sports, hockey fans rank down about one step above pro wrestling. There are probably thoughtful, educated hockey fans, but there aren’t damned many.

It turns out that the incident he was referring to occurred during a Pistons and Knicks basketball game, not hockey. Steven then goes on to criticize the sport a bit, more specifically the fighting that goes on. As a hockey fan who read this, I was slightly irked, but I recognized it as the comments of someone who simply wasn’t a fan of the sport. Normally, I would think that most people would have a similar reaction. So why all the hate mail? I don’t think it has anything to do with hockey fans being “the worst we have to offer” – I would wager a guess that a good number of complaints he has received have come from intelligent, thoughtful hockey fans (as the above links show).

No, what is at work here is some people’s inferiority complex. Steven Den Beste is a know-it-all, and not in a derogatory sense. He is very intelligent, and usually, when he comments on something, he is quite compelling, if not correct. So when he finally made a mistake, everyone seized the opportunity to prove him wrong. Take this as a compliment captain; you wouldn’t be receiving this much criticism about your hockey comments if you weren’t so right about everything else. Oh, and next time, you might not want to comfort a country by insulting its most beloved sport (sorry, I couldn’t resist; it seems that I have an inferiority complex as well).

update 2:10 p.m. – Good Grief? Just to clarify a bit. Steven did make disparaging remarks about a group of people, and, naturally, that group of people feels slighted. The angle I was going for, though, was that some of these people saw this as a chink in the armor and capitalized on it (“I’ve finally discovered a topic that he is completely wrong in his opinion and apparently knows near to nothing about“). I actually thought this angle was funny, so I made this post.

update 10:30 p.m. – I’ve been Den Bested!

Speaking of hockey, my Flyers aren’t doing so well. They’ve been shut out for three straight games and they haven’t scored in regulation for even longer. They looked like they were playing pretty good last night until they self-destructed in the second period with bad penalties and some defensive breakdowns. The Flyers arr 0-11 when they fall behind three games to one. Things are not looking good…

James Lileks is an interesting fellow and, if nothing else, an excellent writer. If you’re one of those net-savvy people who are constantly crawling the web looking for something fun or interesting to read, chances are you’ve seen something from his site. In case you’re not too familiar with him, he recently wrote a piece on his regularly updated pseudo-journal, The Bleat, in which he gives a good overview of his site and what he likes to write about. One of the regular features of his site is called a Screed, which is where he’ll take an article he disagrees with and systematically tears it to shreds. For example, his most recent Screed takes on an article written by Nick Kristof of the Times. Kristof is of the opinion that instead of invading Iraq, the US should sue Saddam. This sequence nearly made me pee myself (italics are from the times article, followed by Lileks’ comments):

It also turns out that a British organization, Indict, is already pursuing an indictment against Saddam for war crimes.

And the Belgian organization Frown is already drafting plans to mount an international campaign of scowling, which will force his regime to divert precious resources to rubber chickens, joy-buzzers and Singing Telegram Gorillas to improve their standing abroad. Meanwhile, the French organization Surrender is drafting plans to cede Marseilles to whomever wants it, just in case.

Need I mention the plans of an American organization, Depose? They�re known informally as the Armed Services.

Funny schtuff. Also funny is Notes from the Olive Garden, in which he rips into a Guadian article. Its priceless. I would like to think that even people who don’t agree with his political views would find his work entertaining, as he really is quite talented. Read him.

Well, I’ve done it again. Not two weeks ago I apologized for not updating frequently enough and promised to keep on top of it. Of course, here I am again, apologizing for a lack of posting. My recent lack of progress has prompted me to take a look at what I’m doing here, why I’m doing it, and how I’m going to continue (or if I should continue). With this weblog, I’ve mostly concerned myself with things like film, literature, and technology. It might be time for a change. I had a good time finding and posting things I thought were under-represented in the mainstream (as well as commenting on the things in the mainstream), but I find that my interests have shifted a bit lately. This is not to say that I no longer enjoy those things which have previously occupied this space, just that there might be some new areas of interest popping up, namely, politics. In case you didn’t notice, there was a distinct drop off in the quantity of posts after the 9/11 attacks, and this is mostly due to the fact that I now find myself spending hours reading up on things like Israel and Iraq and military history. In any event, those things didn’t really fit into the scope of this weblog, so the posting here went down. Of course, there are other reasons, too (*caugh, caugh* Everything2).

So far I’ve tried to keep my weblog “timeless”, so to speak; rarely did I comment on “timely” news, and when I did, it was usually accompanied by what I thought was its relation to the bigger picture. So I don’t indend on becoming another warblog; there are plenty of those already. I don’t want to focus on the latest bullet being thrown at terrorists, and if I do, it will probably be used as a segue for something more general or, rather, more relevant (ie, focusing on the bigger picture). I argue about timely events on the message boards at 4degreez; I don’t intend to do the same thing here. Time will tell if this will be a worthwhile addition to the weblog, and I certainly don’t intend to neglect my film/literature/technology interests in the mean time. Good day, and hopefully you’ll be reading something relevant here tomorrow.

Going through my referrer logs the other day, I came across a few oddities. Apparently someone was “desperate to urinate” and they thought google could help out. The freaky thing is that the end of the referral string had “start=70”, which, in Googlespeak, means the link to kaedrin was on the 8th page of results! The page found by this desperate fellow was none other than The Rebel Fire Alarms (kaedrin’s very first Tandem Story) and there is indeed a scene in which a character is desperate to urinate. But wait! There’s more to this insanity. It seems that The Rebel Fire Alarms has the ability to attract other wierdos searching for things like: “alcohol effects on the human body,” “forced licking images” and, my personal favourite, “harem sex slave images” (apparently kaedrin is in the top ten for that search). More Disturbing Search Requests.