magpiebrain

I saw that “Jeffrey Zeldman”:http://www.zeldman.com/ had an “ISSN”:http://www.issn.org/ number a while back, and kind of considered getting one for myself but it got lost in my ever growing to-do list. Anyway, he’s reminded me by “mentioning”:http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0703b.shtml#issnforyou an old article on “ISSN Numbers For Weblogs”:http://fawny.org/issn.html by “Joe Clark”:http://fawny.org/. Joe Recently added a small update:

I should mention that I’ve been sitting on loads of new information about different nations’ ISSN policies for Weblogs. In short, every country I have heard about is doing whatever it can to refuse new ISSN applications for Weblogs, usually on trumped-up reasoning. This will be fully updated in due course.

Guess I should wait to hear what thats all about before I look too deeply into this…

I’ve just found that “FeedDemon”:http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/index.asp will synchronise with an on-line OPML file! This is very handy for me, as I use FeedMonster at home and work. I uploaded an exported OPML file using MT and it worked a treat. At the only a one-way synchronisation though.

Thanks to “Brainstorms & Raves”:http://brainstormsandraves.com/archives/2003/08/06/movable_type_tweak_for_comments_cookie.shtml for this – Adam over at “Measure Twice”:http://kalsey.com/blog/ has come up with some “fixes/improvements(Measure Twice – Remember Me, Movable Type )”:http://kalsey.com/2003/08/remember_me_movable_type/ for MovableType’s ‘remember me’ functionality on the comments page. Would of spotted this myself but forgot to add Measure Twice to FeedDemon…

Well, I liked “w.bloggar”:http://wbloggar.com/ allot at first, but now I realise I much prefer “Zempt(Zempt – Multi-platform MovableType client)”:http://www.zempt.com/. Zempt lets me handle MT specific stuff like different formatters (for example “Textile(Brad Choate: MT-Textile)”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php, keywords, multiple categoriesetc. Now if Zempt only integrated with “FeedDemon”:http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/beta/…

Macromedia has released “RSSU(RSS Untangle – RSSU)”:http://www.macromedia.com/software/drk/productinfo/product_overview/volume4/coldfusionmx.html#rssu, a Java RSS parsing library. From The Serverside:

RSSU is perfect for building Java based RSS aggregators. It parses any version of RSS (.91, .92, 1.0 and 2.0) from a stream, URL or file into an intuitive tree of Java objects. If you don’t know the version of the RSS feed (as you often don’t when aggregating feeds), just use the AutoParser, and it will figure it out for you.

RSSU supports and exposes all known tags in all RSS versions, including image tags, and will even retrieve the bytes of images referenced in feeds for you. You can also use RSSU for generating different versions of RSS. The project comes with a ColdFusion MX custom tag and component interface so it can easily be integrated into ColdFusion applications as well as J2EE.

It seems to have fuller support for more advanced RSS features compared to “Informa”:http://informa.sourceforge.net/, however it isn’t free or opensource – it has to be purchased as part of “Macromedia’s”:http://www.macromedia.com/ “DevNet Resource Kit Volume 4”:http://www.macromedia.com/software/drk/productinfo/all_volumes/#4.

The latest Atom/Echo/(N)Echo/Pie/Whatever 0.2 snapshot is out.Included are MT templates which I’ll incorporate at some point tomorrow.

That’s to a link I found whilst looking at “FeedDemon”:http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/beta/index.asp I found out about another blog client, “w.bloggar”:http://wbloggar.com/faq/. I like it a lot – although its lacking in two areas. Firstly I can’t find a bookmarklet, secondly there doesn’t seem to be a way to force a spellcheck prior to making a post. These are both things “Zempt”:http://www.zempt.com/ can do, that said the interface for w.bloggar is much nicer, and it has more in the way of formatting tools. I think I’ll try and use w.bloggar for a bit before deciding which to keep around.
_Note:_ Updated to fix a spelling mistake picked up by my pedantic first commenter – thanks for the input 🙂

Just spotted a new plugin over at the “MT Plugin Directory”:http://mt-plugins.org/. The Acronym lets you specify acronyms in a text file and automatically generates the correct HTML code.

I’ve been reading over at phil ringnalda dot com about Firebird’s next major feature – “webpanels (Ben Goodger’s webpanel overview)”:http://www.bengoodger.com/software/mb/webpanels.txt. Think a tiny webpage in your side bar, that will also of course handle an XUL interface. Ben Goodger has already “suggested (MovableType Forum posting on an XUL MT client)”:http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=12&t=25091&s=14f03ae435ab38fe528a3861e5a7526f an XUL MT client. I may be tempted to download one of the current Firebird nightlies to give it a go…