Hosting Unlimited Blogs with TypePad Premium
Matt Haughey, the founder of MetaFilter and one of the pioneers of blogging, recently moved his self-hosted personal blog to TypePad: I really like Typepad and though I'm giving up things like custom .htaccess redirects for old posts and my old permalink URLs, I'm gaining things like the easiest to use posting UI available and most importantly, I'll never need to update any software by hand ever again. It's been a long, frustrating week with several days spent trying to move off Wordpress (I was tired of my ... read more
How to Deal With Obnoxious Blog Comments
Matt Asay, an executive who writes CNET's Open Road open source blog, got so mad at commenters on his site yesterday that he began hunting them down: ... most people are not jerks. They just become losers when cloaked in anonymity. They say things they'd never say if confronted with the people they flame on discussion boards, in comments sections, etc. They're probably nice people "in real life." It's just on the web that they let it all hang out, to the detriment of the web and intelligent discussion. Take the ... read more
Importing a Multiple-Author Blog to TypePad
I'm paying Six Apart $300 a year for a premium subscription to TypePad, which gives me an unlimited number of multiple-author weblogs that can be hosted on my own domains. I recently decided to move Watching the Watchers to TypePad, because I'd like the site's writers to have a more friendly user interface, but I've run into a dealbreaker -- the software doesn't import the authors of blog entries. All 1,400 articles on the site are stored in my name. TypePad supports multiple authors and Six Apart's weblog import ... read more
Hugh MacLeod Ages Like Fine South African Wine
It's funny what people reveal about themselves online. Read my blog for any length of time and you can probably figure out my uneasy Michael Corleone-like relationship with journalism, the field I majored in and subsequently escaped. I can't decide what to think about my long absence from the profession or the fact that I don't seem to be missed. Read online marketing guru Hugh MacLeod, the guy who plies bloggers with a South African wine in the expectation they'll sing its praises, and you discover he's got a ... read more
Techmeme: We Find the Sites You Already Visit
Tim Bray on Techmeme: I go there and see the same stories about the RIAA and Paul Graham's latest essay and what Apple might be doing, the same stories that are on Slashdot and Ars Technica and boring old ZDnet too. Plus a smattering of whatever Scoble & Winer & Arrington & Calcanis and their posses are up to. For all of the attention paid to the Techmeme leaderboard this week, the latest popularity contest for self-fascinated, high-traffic techbloggers, there hasn't been much scrutiny of the manner in which ... read more
BlogRush Offers Link Sharing Service for Blogs
As an experiment, I added a BlogRush widget to the sidebar of Workbench and several other sites this morning. BlogRush is a new JavaScript-based blog headline exchange driven by RSS. Here's how it works: Headlines that might be of interest to readers appear in a box like this one, headlines from my site appear on other member sites, and we all get an enormous boost in traffic, a slobbery cover story in Wired and obscene wealth we can lord over others. Or at least the BlogRush founders do. BlogRush is viral -- ... read more
Five of My Favorite Blogs
Bored with what his RSS reader has been feeding him, Kent Newsome is rebuilding his reading list from scratch using the recommendations of others. He's asked me to suggest five blogs, which is a good excuse to pimp some sites I follow that deserve a bigger audience. Retrospectacle, a blog by neuroscience postgraduate student Shelley Batts, consistently finds great stories in science before the mainstream media. She won a blogging scholarship last year and answers questions I didn't realize I wanted to know, like ... read more
