Goodbye /Message, Hello Stowe Boyd

Maybe it’s a midlife crisis, maybe I’m bored with old school blogging, maybe the petty annoyances of Squarespace have gotten to me; but whatever the cause, I am moving my blogging from the old /Message (located at www.stoweboyd.com/message) to Stowe Boyd (which is temporarily located at stoweboyd.tumblr.com).

I guess am dropping the more or less superfluous /Message, and making my blog eponymous since it has long been a solo effort, and the /Message overhead isn’t worth the confusion.

via Paul Robinson

For some period of time I plan to keep the old site up, and to slowly move the most important posts over here, and to leave behind a manual pointer and a javascript redirect at each moved post. After some (brief) period, I will redirect the domain here, and take down the old website altogether.

I am forced to these gyrations since a/ Tumblr has no import support whatsoever, and b/ Squarespace will let me export into  Moveable Type format, but will not let me redirect posts outside the domain name I am using there.

I had considered Posterous, but the themes seem very scanty there, and the only mechanism for importing is reading one of the existing services they know how to spider, which doesn’t include Squarespace. And at any rate, they don’t conserve the old URLs anyway.

In the next few days I will port over the most active and popular posts, and I will hire a teenager to start working on the archives.

I am forced to leave around 5000 comments behind; I will try to figure out some way to do something about that. Even using Disqus wouldn’t have helped, since all the URLs are screwed up.

Please update your RSS if you are subscribed:

http://stoweboyd.tumblr.com/rss

Attensa Meets Performancing: Something Has To Go

I got a demo of the brand spanking new Attensa RSS products — one integrated into Outlook (which I don’t have, being a Machead), and an online version — and immediately after trying some of the apparently cool features, ran into some stumbling blocks.

Here’s a screenshot of the Outlook version (click for fullsize):

Here’s a screenshot of the Online version (click for fullsize):

The problems I had?

1. First, the Firefox plugin that would allow me to automagically discover RSS feeds on pages I am viewing doesn’t come with the free Online version. Apparently you have to have/buy the Outlook version. So I guess you have to manually find and insert the RSS feeds. I have learned that Attensa plans to unbundle this, but at the moment, you’re stuck.
   
   
2. So, I did add some feeds manually, including importing an OPML file. Seems to work, but creating folders (“categories”) is very counter-intuitive. Apparently the only way to do this is to move feeds to a new “category”?
   
   
3. And then, the headaches started. I was using the neato web view, which displays the post being looked at in the native HTML, not the RSS stream. I saw a piece I wanted to post about, selected some text, and cnrl-clicked on it — this brings up the Performancing blog editor (which despite its bugs and flaws, I still use all the time). However, the link pasted into the new post in Performancing was to the Attensa Online Reader, not the post being displayed in Web view.

Here’s that screenshot (click for fullsize):

I am a bad test subject, though, since I really don’t want a reader, anyway. That’s a rude approximation of what I really do, which is wandering around, as a forager. But if new tools don’t play nice with the ones I am already comfortable with, they never find a place in my world. I will suspend judgment on Attensa’a attempts, here, until I can see what the toolbar for Firefox holds.

RSS Menu, Firefox, Safari

The screwy behavior of RSS Menu — where it resets all my RSS feeds to some redirect proxy page — happened again yesterday. This time it was the TMobile redirect page at Starbucks, instead of Logan airport (see I Hate Logan Airport). So I threw it away.

I also got sick and tired of the spinning little ball at Firefox: can’t they ever fix that memory leak? So I decided to give Safari another try, since it has built in RSS feed management.

Interesting side effect of the switch to Safari: apparently the browser can’t display WYSIWYG editing in Typepad, so a little switch I didn’t know existed has been flipped, and now I am editing in text mode, much like what I was used to with Moveable Type. So I have been delivered from that hellish setup where I had to switch back and forth from WYSIWYG to HTML modes in order to get anything done.

Steve Rubel Crushes Wrickr

Steve Rubel referenced new startup Wrickr, which I guess (it’s hard to tell) will be yet-another-personalized-RSS-page thingie. It’s another example of a start-up’s server getting crushed when an A-lister points to your domain, because when I went to the blog, and attempted to click through on the demo (like 25,000 others) I got the interesting error message: “XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 25” — I bet the server’s sideways.

Also, another indicator of undue haste in launching — typos and grammatical errors:

[from Welcome to Wrickr! ( Beta; 2006-01-06 )]

Have you ever try to find good and easy example of start websites which could be easy to manage. We decided to start small project called my personal star homepage. Now you can try the demo. It looks like Google Personalized but it’s going to be much better.

RSS Readering, Redux

Paul Kedrosky (RSS Sucks) and Scott Karp (How to Fix RSS) are tapping into the inadequacies of RSS, but they are off target.

Karp carps about the terminology, as if using ‘subscribing’ instead of ‘syndicating’ would solve the real broken parts of the whole RSS mess. Paul does a better job enumerating real problems, which can be summarized as feed overload.

But the real problem is that the entire user experience offered up by RSS newsreaders is wrong. I wrote about this at some length last year in a post called RSS Readering: Why RSS Readers Are No Good For Me (And You Too, I Bet). In particular, I made the core point:

I tried them for a time, and then dropped out. These annoy me for similar reasons: I don’t like the Pez dispenser feel, where all posts are like another, and you assume the role of a pigeon in a Skinner box, hitting the button to make the pellets roll out.

I have been lusting for something, a new solution, that actually parallels my most rewarding reading experiences. The way this generally works is like so:

I stumble across some link, or reference — perhaps in an email, or in the midst of reading a post in a browser — and I decide that I would like to invest some attention to this concept, or meme. Note: I am not just deciding to click a link and go to a specific page — which is all typical browsers do. I am deciding to investigate the theme, thread, meme, or whatever, and assimilate and collate information about it.

I then use a variety of techniques to uncover what I am interested in:

• I might click on tags embedded in the post, that take me to Technorati, or I might simply decide to search at Technorati or Del.icio.us for references to the piece or for tags to the topic or the names of individuals writing about it.
• I might follow backlinks, from the post back to earlier sources: other posts, or articles.
• I might ask specific contacts of mine what they know about the object of my interest.
• I might write a post, summarizing what I have uncovered, and offering some thoughts on the subject

But what I seldom do is just sit there reading a stream of posts, based on their chronology, or other intrinsic factors. No, I am on a hunt, skipping from place to place, and these tools constrain me more than they free me.

So the problem is not RSS, which should be just a low-level protocol that tools rely on. The problem is the amazingly static and non-innovative way we are using RSS.

The basic metaphor of having all RSS streams converge into an app like NewsGator or Bloglines is too limiting.

I want RSS threaded into other social aspects of the web, like the Nerdvana concept I have been hawking for a long time: an integration of RSS feeds into the instant message buddylist, so that I can be notified when someone I am interested in has posted something recently, just like I can about their online presence, except in this case it is their onblog presence.

At any rate, Scott and Paul are attracting attention to a real problem, although the problem is the RSS reader model we have adopted.