InterC@pping!

/ language

Memo to those guys out there who come up with names for high-tech widgets. You do nothing to endear yourselves to me or anyone else required to actually type the names of your products when you use intercapping, punctuation marks in the middle of the word, gratuitous exclamation points, and intellectual-property warning signs all over the place (as if anyone would want to embarrass themselves by infringing your use of names like FlabiNatör 2000!™). I am taking time out of my busy, important schedule, in the midst of a super-exciting press-release translation (which the media will hungrily gobble up and regurgitate to an equally eager public in its original form, miraculously unmolested by the editorial digestive processes) to tell all of you to cut it out already.

Mental hyperlinking

/ tidbit

It’s been said suggested that the Web caught on because hyperlinking is “how our brains work” Of course, I think this was said by a guy with attention-deficit disorder, but that’s another matter. And it just struck me how dated the term “hyperlinking” sounds. Never mind.

Anyhow, a few days ago, I was discussing with Jenny a little kerfluffle in the local blog-land that erupted as a result of that Chronicle article (for which I wrote a special blog entry a while back). In the course of which, Jenny mentioned a different issue: the supposed blogger vs journaler tension.

Aside: I wasn’t aware of “journaling” as an activity distinct from blogging until a journaler pointed it out to me. As I understand it, journaling is more writing about oneself; blogging is more writing about the rest of the world.

More specifically, Jenny mentioned that blogging apparently gets more media attention than journaling, and wondered why that might be. In male-answer syndrome mode, I speculated that the mainstream media has a certain fascination with blogs, because blogs intrude on their turf: this is the blogger vs journalist tension. A bunch of people writing about themselves is not news, perhaps unless they’re famous. Well, moby has a blog (I take it back, he calls it a journal), and he writes about not having anything to write about and cleaning his kitchen. So, ok, a journal may not be news after all, even when it is by a famous person. Where was I?

Right. Like I was saying: the media doesn’t see journalers as intruding on their turf, so they aren’t interested, meaning they don’t cover them.

Anyhow, today I see a pointer in Electrolite to “smart observations about the Laurie Garrett affair.” (which I know nothing about). Turns out Laurie Garrett is a journalist of some repute who wrote a lengthy and candid e-mail message about the WEF at Davos. This e-mail was intended only for her friends, but (obviously) wound up being distributed more widely. She was quite upset when she found out, but it’s an interesting read.

Where was I going with that? Oh yeah. As the “smart observations” post mentions, this “in a roundabout way, brings us to blogs.” When we read the unvarnished and unedited thoughts of a journalist, we realize how much the mainstream media sands off the rough edges of reality for us. Blogs provide us with those rough edges. Laurie Garrett apparently isn’t ready for blogging, but blogging is ready for her.

Naked

/ books

Just finished reading David Sedaris’ Naked. Like his other writing, it’s hilarious, and consists mostly of personal anecdotes that he’s embellished perhaps just a bit.

This one includes a more schmaltzy (but still hilarious in spots) essay on his mother when she had lung cancer.

The book’s last essay, the one from which it draws its title, is upbeat, in a disturbing sort of way. Two words: pudding toss.

Lazyweb: help me pick a CMS

/ net stuff

I’m trying to find a content-management system, mostly for running a limited-access discussion forum. I’ve already looked at Drupal, which is pretty nice, but I have not yet figured out how to make it fully support Japanese, which is a make-or-break feature.

I can get limited success writing Japanese in Drupal, but (in the best-case scenario so far) the characters wind up being escaped to numeric Unicode entities, which are not editable after being posted, and apparently are not searchable.

I also looked at the Slash engine, but A) the installation instructions assume you are root, assume you are more technically adept than I am, and are very sketchy all around, and B) has the same problems with Japanese.

I suspect the Japanese-handling problems in both Drupal and Slash could be fixed with some minor coding changes, but I don’t know where to start. Messing with the template charsets doesn’t do it.

Other desirable features:
Threaded message structure
Moderation/karma points a la Slashdot
Flexible permissions setup
Straightforward templating for admin

None of the other CMSs or web-BBSs I’ve looked at so far have forum threading,

[Later] Seems that I can almost get Japanese working right in Drupal (why do I think of towering drag-queens every time I say that?) after all: there was a configuration issue that was causing the Japanese to be escaped. I turned that off, and now everything is close to hunky-dory, except for one thing: searching on Japanese terms always returns no results.

[Still later] Turns out a Japanese drupal user has developed a patch. This helps some of the problems I was having (and was already groping towards solving). Still doesn’t enable Japanese searching, though.

Drupal

/ net stuff

Drupal is a general-purpose content-management system (CMS) for running news-and-discussion sites like (to use the most obvious example) Slashdot, though perhaps not such busy ones. I’d been considering toying with something like this for some time, and finally got around to installing it today.

The only hitch in something like this is that you need to set up a MySQL database, which can be intimidating for non-nerds, and configure a file to find that database (which took me a while to get right, mostly because of my inability to follow instructions). But for the most part, installation is a snap. After that comes configuration. Drupal, like many of its ilk, is endlessly configurable, and has numerous add-on modules available. It gets a little tricky because it is based on some rather abstract and non-obvious mental models, and the docs are not as clear as they should be. But after some messing around, I started getting it to do what I wanted it to.

I’ve been using Movable Type for some time now, and that’s become my point of reference. MT is a very sophisticated tool for one kind of task: blogging. Individual content management. MT is narrow but deep. Beyond that, it can be used for wider purposes thanks to its flexibility, but it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up the farther you get from straight blogging.

Drupal, by contrast, is relatively shallow but wide. Blogging is just one module in it, although its blogs are not as sophisticated as MT’s. And in some ways, the customization threshold is higher. MT has its own HTML-like language of tags, so if you can write HTML, you can create your own templates in MT. With Drupal, it seems that you need to know some PHP in order to do more than shuffle around pre-made modules.

Blog Day Afternoon

/ Austin

The community of Austin Bloggers agreed to have a “blog day” today, where we’d all write about the same topic, being “what would you do with four free hours in Austin?”

When I think of things to do in Austin, I think of doing things outdoors. My ideal four hours would probably consist of a bike ride on 360, a little time hanging out at Barton Springs, and something to eat–preferably seated outside (though Austin has a relative paucity of outdoor dining venues).

Curiously, today turned out to be exactly the wrong kind of day to contemplate things to do in Austin: our weather was unusually cold, with freezing rain in the evening. In fact, today’s weather is probably in the top-five bad winter weather days I’ve seen in Austin.

This winter (such as it is) has been especially gray. Austin is known for its heat, but one thing that may be as important, but less noted, is its sunshine. I think Austin averages about 300 sunny days a year, and when we are deprived of the sun for any length of time, it tells on the residents. Everyone complains about how gray things are. The weekend just past was warm, bright, and sunny, giving us a break in weather that hasn’t been downright awful, just blah and gray. Everyone was out enjoying the respite. Today the blahs returned with a vengeance.

In three months, we’ll be ramping up for a typical summer under a hammer-like sun, and we’ll be downright nostalgic for weather like this. At the moment, though, it’s just depressing.

Patriot Act, the sequel

/ current events

Read this now. This is a fairly brief and clear writeup on a bill being crafted by Ashcroft that will make the original USA Patriot act look benign by comparison. This abomination hasn’t been brought before Congress yet, but we must act so that when it does, it is shot down in flames.

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