Blog August 2008

In terms of inspiration, when the well is full to overflowing it’s tempting to draw from it at speed, lest it run dry, thus filling up your blog with exciting new posts. But what happens when the well does run dry?

I’m a big believer in transparency, especially when it comes to blogging. I try to help my clients remember that they’re not writing faceless articles but personal accounts.

Because of that I tend to blog when the idea occurs to me, so when I’m bursting with new thoughts, theories and arguments my blog flourishes but when I’m out of ideas the site suffers.

So I started to ask myself whether it was prudent to keep one or two blog posts as drafts within my CMS as reserves, saved for a rainy day, or whether this would affect my relationship with my readers.

By presenting a blog post as new when it is in fact a couple of days or even weeks old I am effectively not being truthful with my audience, but does that really matter? As bloggers we all vet our comments to make sure spammers don’t plaster their links all over the place. This is by no means transparent, but is absolutely accepted, and necessary behaviour. Can the same be said about delayed blogging?

What do you do? Do you keep one in the bag for later, or do you think you should blog honestly? Does it even matter?

Feed readers take RSS feeds and display them in a meaningful way, but if you provide only summaries of your posts you make your readers’ lives harder and reduce the likelihood of your content being read.

RSS is a technology that is most effective for blogs, giving us an easy way to read authors’ content. Before the advent of Web-based apps like Google Reader, providing summaries of blog posts via the description tag made sense: there were fewer feeds around (worth reading) in those days so you received alerts when new content was made available, much like we still do now with email.

But as the number of blogs increases, and with the advent of blogging platforms like WordPress, Blogger and all the rest of them, “really simple syndication” (which isn’t what RSS stands for*) is widely regarded as the way to read blog posts.

I very rarely visit blogs any more, unless a particular post uses script that Google Reader can’t render or that RSS doesn’t reproduce. However, there is another reason that forces me to jump out of my reading panel and disrupt my flow, and that is incomplete feeds.

As I mentioned before, you used to be able to get away with putting a summary of your content in the description tag of each post’s item tag. (Most developers use the word “node” as it’s an XML term, but it’s a similar makeup to HTML so I’m simplifying). However, bloggers - or more specifically blogging platform developers - can embed the entire content of a post into the item tag by creating a content:encoded tag and importing a namespace (basically adding a line near the top of the RSS document). Feed readers understand this tag, which allows for storing of HTML, which obviously includes images and embedded Flash movies.

This relatively small change has a massive effect on the way a reader consumes an author’s content and it is very simple to implement, however there are still a number of blogs that don’t use this and I find it infuriating.

When I’m skimming through the new articles that have been written in the last 24 hours or so, if I see a headline that catches my eye - or a new article by a writer whose posts I particularly enjoy - I want to read the whole article there and then, in a familiar setting. I don’t want to have to click, scroll, adjust to the layout and continue reading.

Imagine if you were reading a newspaper, but instead of printing the full article the publishers just printed the page number of an accompanying magazine which was full of adverts. If they did that for every section you’d be up to your knees in cheap gloss.

Bloggers: please take a look at the source code for your RSS feeds. (You can do it in your Web browser.) If you don’t see a content:encoded tag for each of your posts, download the right plugin for your blog software or contact your developer because your posts could be going unread. (Failing that you could simply be annoying your readers, and there’s never a reason for that.)

There are people who, infuriatingly enough serve incomplete RSS feeds on purpose, because they want to track the number of subscribers they have. This is fairly pointless however because, if you are writing good content you will insight people either to comment on it, link to it, forward it on or visit the site to find out more, all of which are trackable. RSS readers are lurkers, so you should focus on converting them to real visitors by providing full content rather than arrogantly assuming they will follow your predetermined conversion path.

_{* it’s RDF Site Summary incidentally}

I’ve been busy with new contracts and other commitments over the past couple of weeks, and my blogging has suffered. It’s a common side-effect of business and a mismanagement of proprieties.

Most people put blogging quite low down the list of priorities when they come up against their own personal busy season, but in the same way that you should never stop chasing new business when you’re already stacked, you shouldn’t stop blogging when you’ve got ideas in your head, just because you haven’t made the time to write.

Of course, that assumes you’re blossoming with ideas and viewpoints. What do you do when you’ve got nothing to write about? Should you blog “for the sake of it” or only when you have an original, unprompted thought? Do they have to be mutually exclusive?

That’s enough questions.

So, in the absence of another polemical argument, I thought I’d give you a heads-up as to what’s going on in Bluemilokshakeland.

Byron, my fancy content management framework is getting an overhaul to make it more scalable and increase its usability for developers. It’s already very efficient but as a developer tool it’s lacking any form of intuitive logic.

I’m currently doing some work in Henley in Arden (in the Midlands, on the way to Stratford, UK) and sharing social marketing links and ideas, which has lead me to think about getting a page of links setup on bluemilkshake.co.uk, or working with my del.icio.us list to provide a comprehensive list of my recommended reads.

Also got lots of projects on, and am thinking of getting a dedicated Linux box for all my various WordPress sites, and to host any new Ruby on Rails projects as and when they come about.

So that’s me. Thanks for your patience and I hope to be back and as divisive as ever very soon!

Twitter had the chance to change the way people used the social Internet, by making its services usable completely over SMS. Yesterday they forfeited that chance by shutting out those who don’t live in the right countries.

In a low-key blog post, the powers that were announced that, unless you lived in Canada, the US and for some reason India, Twitter’s SMS support would be shut down.

This comes after they suspended support for the “track” keyword via SMS (which allowed users to receive messages that were relevant to their username or a selection of keywords) and neglected to tell anyone.

I’ve been a big supporter of Twitter, having written my own Twitter app and numerous blog posts in sympathy with their reliability issues, but removing the mobile element renders the update system no better than Facebook’s (which only has support for BT Cellnet, or O2 as they like to be called).

Biz Stone, the author of the blog post gave a sensible reason as to why SMS was pulled. I think we were pretty naive if we thought that we could continue to receive updates from our friends for free and forever, but what I object to is this idea that it’s OK to shut out countries like the UK, who have got behind this site in bigger ways than I think many others have.

The fact that Twitter didn’t even attempt to strike up some sort of deal with a carrier is what has annoyed me. Biz’s explanation that you have to pay for texts isn’t just restricted to Europe: even in the Land of the Free you still have to pay for SMS, unless American Altruism is a new mobile carrier?

A Facebook group has inevitably sprung up to try and encourage mobile carriers to “cut Twitter a decent deal” but the simple fact is if the Twitter guys cared enough about what happened outside of the Americas, they’d have realised that you can charge people to receive texts. By adding the same limiting capability as was previously available the system would allow its users to budget, so they weren’t bankrupted by a slew of spammy texts they could not control.

Unless and until they plug this hole, I don’t know if I’ll be using Twitter. Not because I want to be an arse - although I am very good at it - but because there are just too many features being removed. Because tracking no longer works - even though the system will tell you it does - I have to read tweets via mobile Internet. I can send them via SMS, but I will now receive direct messages through email only.

I thought the point that tweets were 140 characters long was because this followed a similar convention to SMS messages, allowing the system to append their own 40-character comments to the end of each tweet, but now since this is no longer the case, Twitter is just a site that doesn’t have as many features as Facebook.

Best practises are methods and techniques for achieving a certain goal. By their very nature they set the standard for us to follow, and form a mechanism by which developers can be judged.

ASP.NET is my platform of choice when developing applications, but it gets a bum rap from developers on both sides of the open source debate, for its creators’ inherently arrogant approach to Web standards.

While working on a new project I thought I’d have to bite my tongue when I saw some of the .NET markup that was being used, but after a while it dawned on me that what was being written wasn’t incorrect, it was simply following Microsoft’s best practises rather than, for example the W3C.

Under ASP.NET, the tools that allow developers to change the styling for Webpage elements (font faces, sizes, colours, etc) are very close to hand. When adding a text box control to a form, the user can specify its border style, font size and colour aswell as the usual stuff like maximum length and validation functionality. Now as part of the XHTML and CSS methodology, which encourages the separation of content and styling, this type of customisation is abhorrent: it’s simply not the done thing. However, when developing the .NET Framework (and specifically ASP.NET), Microsoft were simply following a pattern.

Some people actually don’t realise, but the .NET Framework in and of itself has nothing to do with Web development: it is simply a software framework. Programmers can build desktop and console applications, libraries and games with it. Now in desktop application development it is very common for developers to be given the option to change how a form looks by hard-coding the window styles directly into the application. There is no CSS technology for desktop applications, and so programmers pick colours from a specific palette (which include system colours) and fonts from a dropdown list, to suit their needs.

Not only can you build both desktop and Web applications with the .NET Framework, you can also use the same software (Visual Studio) to build both types of application, so developers could make the transition from building Windows Forms apps to producing Websites. Microsoft even took care to give the Web versions of their controls (like textboxes and labels) the same or similar name as their Windows Forms counterparts, with the same abilities to change styling that programmers had grown used to.

So I think it’s unfair to rail at Microsoft for not embracing W3C, when this isn’t actually the case. As a standards-conscious developer I’m not forced to use the hard-coded styling method that I would use with Windows apps: I can apply CSS classes to my controls just like I could in HTML.

So hard-coding your “look and feel” doesn’t make you a bad Web developer: just one that’s following one set of practises. Problems only arise when developers pick and choose elements from different methodologies to create their own which makes picking up someone else’s project that bit more difficult.

This realisation has made me a more forgiving programmer: now I just have to learn to resist the urge to force my ideals onto others.