Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Scott Rosenberg

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The blog rebooted

July 20, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Almost exactly four years ago, on July 22, 2002, I started my first blog. Blogging felt natural to me since I’d been writing for the Web since 1994 and self-publishing since 1974 (originally via mimeograph).

My blog was part of a larger blogging program I’d put together at Salon, in partnership with Userland. It was the tech-downturn doldrums — an era when every time we at Salon opened the papers or fired up our browsers we knew that someone, somewhere, would be predicting our imminent demise. And there wasn’t a lot of extra cash at the company at the time, so the blogs program was chiefly a labor of love, launched in the wee hours. I did the CSS, wrangling Salon’s home-page design into Radio Userland templates, all by myself (which anyone who knows anything about CSS can probably tell with a single glance at the unruly code).

I loved Radio Userland at the time for the way it combined a blog publishing system and an RSS reader. But times change; Userland put its energy into other products; Salon Blogs produced many great blogs but not a substantial change in Salon’s business; and my blog settled down from the program’s focal point to a personal-publishing bullhorn.

Several months ago, in anticipation of Salon’s plan to build a new platform for users to contribute their own writing, we closed off new signups to the old Salon Blogs platform. Today I’m moving my own blog to a new home, here, at Wordyard.

I’ve managed to export my whole four years’ worth of archives (over 1000 posts, averaging about one per weekday for the whole timespan) to WordPress. (For those who care, I used the Radio Userland exporter, which pops out a plaintext file in Movable Type export format; edited that file to make things like titles and categories work; then imported into WordPress.) The comments, alas, will remain back at the original Salon Blogs location, where they will continue to be available.

With this move, I plan to blog somewhat more vigorously, and to provide more posts about my forthcoming book, Dreaming in Code, as its January 2007 publish date nears. I also look forward to leveraging some of the great features and plugins created by the WordPress open-source community.

If you subscribe to my RSS feed in Bloglines (the reader I’ve been using daily for years), the transition should be transparent — Bloglines will do the flip for you, you don’t need to touch anything. If you subscribe through other feed readers or services, you’ll have to resubscribe to the new feed address, which is here.

More anon!

Filed Under: Blogging, Media, Personal, Salon Blogs, Technology

An announcement about Salon Blogs — and more

February 1, 2006 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

We started the Salon Blogs program three-and-a-half years ago, in July, 2002. Salon’s business wasn’t exactly thriving at the time, but we knew that there was an explosion of energy and creativity happening in the universe of blogs, and we wanted to figure out a way for Salon to participate. We lacked the resources to build our own system, so we partnered with Userland Software, which provided the software for users and took on the work of running the back end for us.

In charging a modest fee for our product, we were rowing upstream, since free alternatives were already available and would only grow more plentiful. Nonetheless, we were delighted and proud to see a smart little community grow under the Salon Blogs banner. Writers flourished; projects emerged; more than one book contract was obtained.

Still, 2006 is a whole different universe from 2002. Salon — today, thankfully, on a firmer financial footing — is beginning to explore some new ideas and approaches to the realm that business types call “user-generated content” (or, sometimes, “social software”), visionaries call “citizen’s media,” and old-timers like me still think of as “interactivity.”

I have the good fortune, and the challenge, of leading this exploration for Salon: this is the main focus of my work here, for now. As a lot of you know, I served as managing editor from 1999 until late 2004, when I took a leave of absence to write my book. It was the best job I’ve ever had — but five years is a long time to be managing anything, particularly during the roller-coaster ride of those particular years. Since last fall, Salon has been fortunate to have Jeanne Carstensen in the managing editor’s seat — and I get to go build some new things, which has always been my favorite role.

Since, among other possibilities, our new projects may involve a new approach to blogs, we’ve decided to stop taking new sign-ups for the existing Salon Blogs program. It doesn’t make sense to keep inviting people in that door. One big issue is that the Radio Userland software that the program is built around — and that I’m still using for this blog — turned out not to be the ideal tool for this sort of project. It installs easily, but long-term maintenance can be hard, since the program and all its data sits on your own hard drive. (This post by Paolo Valdemarin explores the topic further.) Radio had some very cool features ahead of its time, including a great built-in RSS-feed reader; but for many users those don’t outweigh the essential awkwardness of hosting all your blog data on your desktop machine. That model, whatever its strengths and weaknesses, is one that the world has moved away from, and Userland is putting more muscle behind developing other products.

Current Salon bloggers should not be alarmed (though I know some will be anyway). Your blogs will continue to live at the same Web address they’ve always had. You don’t have to do anything or change anything if you don’t want to. Userland has assured us that they’ll continue to run the blogs.salon.com server for you. The updates and ranking pages will remain in place, too.

You can keep blogging as you always have — we’re not shutting anything down. I imagine some current users will decide to look at alternatives; for those who decide they want to move their blogs, we and Userland will do what we can to help you with the transition. Or you may want to wait and see what Salon has to offer as this year progresses.

While we don’t yet know exactly what it will be — that’s part of the fun — if it attracts the sort of creative spirit that Salon Blogs has, we’ll know we’re on the right track.

(For those of you interested in the discussion about these new Salon projects, there’s a letter to readers up on the site now, and also a discussion in Table Talk — world-readable, but only Salon Premium subscribers can post.)

Filed Under: Personal, Salon Blogs

What hath spam wrought?

December 29, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Things are usually quiet in mailing-list land over the holidays, but today I was distressed to find in my inbox a report from a fellow Salon blogger that the comment system for Salon Blogs, which is operated for us by our partners at Userland, seemed to have developed an odd political bias: If you tried to post a comment that included the word “Socialist” or “Socialism,” the server refused to post it. I double-checked for myself, and sure enough, this seemed to be the case.

Now, I know that no one at Salon has any interest in censoring the political slant of comments on blogs. (And even if we were that conspiratorial, this particular choice of verbiage to block would seem to go against the stereotypical grain of our hotbed of freedom-hating leftie bias.) All sorts of peculiar things are known to happen in the world of software, so I checked in with Userland, and got the explanation that, if I’d really been thinking carefully, I might have guessed at.

Like all blog software developers and service operators, Userland is doing what they can to stem the flood of comment-spam. Recently, it seems, they’d introduced a keyword-based spam filter for the comments server. Now, if you take the word “Socialism” and remove the “so-” and the “-m,” you are left with the name of a certain male-potency-enhancing drug that is among the most popular wares peddled in spam circa 2005. (I’m also regularly in receipt of offers for something called a “rash guard,” and I haven’t a clue what that is — it sounds like some sort of medical unguent for use in activities better left undescribed, but most likely it’s far more innocent, right?)

Chalk up this “censorship,” then, to fallout from a turn in the spam attack/countermeasure cycle. “Socialism,” you are an innocent bystander in the war on Cialis advertising!

Filed Under: Salon Blogs

Susannah Breslin’s project

February 15, 2005 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Susannah Breslin, who once roamed these Salon Blog parts as the Reverse Cowgirl and then rode off into the sunset, is now writing a novel (titled Porn Happy) while blogging about writing the novel. Meanwhile, she is also posting the novel as a blog. Finally, she is looking for patrons to kick in some cash and support the project.

The Salon blogspace has been lucky to be associated with an amazing series of literary experiments, from Diego Doval’s Plan B to the now-between-covers work of Real Live Preacher to the amazing saga of Julie/Julia, which we expect someday to read on paper. And no doubt many others I’m forgetting. Best of luck to Susannah.

Filed Under: Salon Blogs

Broken comments

December 8, 2004 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Comments were unusually slow here for a while and now I know why. They’re broken: you get a “403 — access forbidden” message when you try to post them. Sorry — we’ve alerted Userland, we’ll cross our fingers and hope for a fix soon. And thanks to Real Live Preacher for raising the alarm!

Postscript: We got them fixed soon after this post. Some changes Userland has been making to help control comment spam seemed to cause this problem on the Salon blogs server.

Filed Under: Salon Blogs

Down time downer

October 14, 2004 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Obviously I’m disappointed that the Salon blogs server went down during the debate last night, just as many of you were posting and I was posting and we’d even linked to my blog prominently on the Salon home page for live coverage. I’d assumed it was a traffic overload problem but the Userland folks tell me it was actually a hardware problem at their colocation center. I don’t know what the cause was but I can tell you that my own computers get very cranky in the hot weather (Bay Area is having its October heat wave). Sorry for the bad timing!

Filed Under: Salon Blogs

October 13, 2004 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Salon blogs server, alas, seems to have been brought to its knees by all this activity. I’ll keep posting, but I don’t think you guys are gonna be reading in real time…

http://www.wordyard.com/2004/10/13/724/

Filed Under: Politics, Salon Blogs

Julie on Julia

August 13, 2004 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Julie Powell of Julie/Julia revived her dormant blog for an eloquent tribute to the late demi-namesake of her site.

Filed Under: Culture, People, Salon Blogs

Site performance

April 6, 2004 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

Salon bloggers and readers of Salon blogs should be seeing much improvement in the performance of our servers, particularly the rcs.salon.com server (which does comments and updates listings) that used to get bogged down a lot. Thanks to our partners at Userland for upgrading this service last week. I’m seeing much better results both for this blog and for others that I read. Keep us posted if your mileage varies.

Filed Under: Salon Blogs

50th Virtual Occoquan

February 9, 2004 by Scott Rosenberg Leave a Comment

The 50th edition of Mark Hoback’s Virtual Occoquan (co-edited
by Paul Hinrichs) is now online — compiling good stuff from Salon Blogs
and elsewhere for years now. Pay this landmark a visit! I intend to read it
just as soon as this trip allows me…

Filed Under: Salon Blogs

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