The trouble with online conversations

Twitter, Facebook, G+, blog comments, web forums, &c. None of them seem able to handle one very important thing that NNTP clients did since the 1980s: Keep track of what I’ve read & what I haven’t.

The Twitter iOS client does a decent job of remembering my position in its time stream. That position doesn’t sync between my iPhone, my iPad, & the web site, though. Twitter is also not a great medium for conversation in many other ways, though.

Some web forums make an attempt at it, but I haven’t seen one that does it well. Although it has been a while since I was keeping up with forums.

Browser/OS stats for this blog

I was looking through the blog’s stats, and the browser and OS stats seemed kind of interesting.

• 63% Firefox
• 15% Chrome
• 10% Safari
• 8% Internet Explorer

• 40% Macintosh
• 37% Windows
• 16% Linux
• 2% iPad
• 2% iPhone
• < 1% Android
• < 1% Other Unix

Based on what I’ve been seeing from more generic reports, that seems atypical. I’m surprised that Chrome isn’t closer to or a bigger percentage than Firefox. I’d expect Safari and IE to be reversed, but they are pretty close. It seems that fewer of my visitors who use Macs use Safari than I would’ve thought.

For this blog, that’s pretty much just trivia. If you are someone who has to make decisions based off this kind of data, though, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to collect your own data rather than relying on what others report. e.g. When I was in the shrink-wrapped software business, Macs made up a lot more of my company’s market than the general marketshare they held at the time.

Blogger

I was going to post about the D&D Next playtest packet, but...well...let me ’splain...

One of the things I liked about Blogger was that I could get their editor to produce clean HTML without writing too much raw HTML “by hand”. Well, it still was probably too much, but I made it work for me.

Oh, and it never worked on iOS. A big part of that was that mobile Safari—at least in the beginning—didn’t support features they relied upon, but that didn’t change the fact that it kept me from blogging from my iPhone or iPad. I had hopes the Blogger app would address this, but it didn’t. Again, Apple didn’t make it easy to create a good HTML editor on iOS. Though the Essay app came pretty close while it lasted.

But back to the more immediate issue. They’ve discarded the old editor. I am not happy with this new editor so far.

By the way, this is exactly the same reason why I stopped using Google Docs.

But, I am unusual. I’m picky about the HTML—which to most people is an implementation detail that should be hidden behind the scenes—that is used for my text. I’m picky about how my text looks.

I’ve been trying to go the Markdown route to address the iOS issue. Though I really don’t like working in “plain text” in this day & age. But it did work for my Infogami site. And it honestly is easier than the hoops the old Blogger editor made me jump through to get the results I wanted. The posting part is more complicated, though. The drafts are backing up even faster than they did before because of the extra effort to get a Markdown draft converted, posted, and looking good on Blogger.

I’ve been considering my options for a while now. There’s lots of them, and—as usual—I’m indecisive.

(Interestingly, it looks like the Infogami source code is now available. So that’s another option I didn’t know about until writing this: To run my own copy of Infogami...)

Hyperlinks

So, I’m sitting here polishing up some blog posts. I’m grabbing URLs to create hyperlinks. And it strikes me...

It’s taking me longer to create these hyperlinks than it will take you to select some text, search Google, and get to the same page. Not only that, the hyperlinks might grow stale, but a Google search won’t. Heck, Google might turn up more relevant results than what I choose to link to the moment I post. Even after Google, some other even better search engine will be available. For all I know, what you’ll really be interested in following up on won’t even be anything I create a hyperlink for.

Google is making hyperlinks obsolete. But Google is built on hyperlinks. It’s only by analyzing hyperlinks that Google can come up with such good results.

Weird.

...but what exactly do you mean by “blog”?

Matt Gemmell explains why blogs should have comments turned off.

I don’t know how many bloggers I’ve seen make a comment to the effect of: As usual, the comments contain greater wisdom than my post. It has been a bunch. There is perhaps something of a difference between most bloggers I read and Gemmell, Marco, and Gruber. Indeed, “blog” has become about as meaningless as “anime”.

“Anime” certainly has meaning—animated films/video from Japan. The trouble is that most statements about anime are really about a subset of anime.

Likewise, most of the comments I see made about blogs and blogging are really about some unspecified subset of blogs and bloggers.

Blogger RSS feeds by label

Turns out that Blogger can generate an RSS feed for a label. This means that—e.g.—those of you only interested in my gaming related posts, e.g., could subscribe to this feed and only see those. (Provided I remember to tag them.)

Discovered in Blogger Buzz: Thanks for the feedback so far!

Zen and the Internet

Google’s putting a lot of thought into how to help people find the information they want. So, why not concentrate on our content and stop worrying about gaming the system?

Why can’t a blog just be a way to share our thoughts?

Why can’t we just use twitter to say what we’re doing?

A separate RPG blog?

For various reasons, I’ve choosen to keep a single blog for all my thinkings aloud. I’ve been considering starting a separate blog for my role-playing game related musings.

Any thoughts about that from my score or so readers?

13 blog questions

I came across this list of 13 Questions to Ask Before Publishing a Post On Your Blog

It’s a really good list, but almost all rules I intentionally don’t follow for this blog. (^_^)

“No, there is no time. Let me sum up.”

I’m often unsure about how much to explain my blog entries. On the one hand, I could be brief and assume that anyone who doesn’t understand—but wants to—can investigate the topic themselves. Perhaps I’ll even include links with more information. On the other hand, I can try to write everything for a general audience, which is no easy feat. Exactly how far do I need to explain? Is anyone who is not familiar with the topic going to get anything out of that entry anyway? I seem to be headed more in the latter direction...unless I’m rushed. (...and I’m forming a backlog of drafts because I’m tending to save ideas to flesh out later rather than posting in a rush.)

Robert's blog 3.0

First I used my own Perl script to manage a blog on my own web site. Then I used the blog on my infogami site, because it was easier to use. Then I decided that since its creator had abandoned it, I should probably abandon infogami too. So, I finally just broke down & created a blog on blogger.com. Welcome to my blog 3.0.