Blog Technology

Avoiding Wifi-Session Termination Saturday 4/29/2006 12:08:42 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    Being that MichaelWells.com is a custom-designed blog, I get to experience all of those fun discoveries that status quo blog products have probably already dealt with. My recent passion has been blogging from the local cafe's, now that they're finally all getting unwired in my region.  This is... great, but I've already been nailed by router timeouts.  Most wifi services require you to login on first use, and the router then remembers your MAC address (I'm guessing here), and keeps your wifi session alive as long as it sees some regular traffic. Unfortunately for me, "regular traffic" seems to mean an HTTP request at least every 120 seconds or so.  If it doesn't see that traffic, the router in effect cancels your session by forgetting your MAC address. When blogging, you sit there for easily 5 minutes or more working on an entry, editing it, fixing typos, slurping a nice columbian roast... in any case, it's easy for the wifi router to think you've taken off for some lunch at the sushi place down the street. So, one blog entry vaporized.  Can't remember what I was writing about anyway... Solution?  The right solution is to build a little keep-alive mechanism into my blog.  But a cheesy and functional hack is to open another browser tab, and point it at some kind of auto-refreshing page.  I discovered this one, and it seems to be working nicely.  [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

Tagging and Meme Formation Tuesday 7/5/2005 4:19:38 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    One of the more interesting aspects of tagging is its potential to evolve language.  I'm fairly certain that all of the elements for language evolution are there... a [very large] group of people, who are attempting to communicate about topics, and who need to describe them concisely. Technophiles are also, as a group, of above-average brainwattage, with a penchant for witty creations and a deep love for nuking the status quo.  Just take a look at language evolution in the halls of MIT. All of that suggests that we'll be seeing a number of language changes, specifically changes that introduce terms that are easy to remember, concise, descriptive, and unique.  Most of these will be single-word terms, with spaces and punctuation removed (think "hitech"), and many will spill over into regular spoken and written forms. [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

The Art and Science of Tagging Tuesday 7/5/2005 3:42:05 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    Tagging has been discussed lately as one of the first forms of "social organization", or "folksonomy".  I can't say whether tagging will be effective--or more to the point, within which user communities tagging will demonstrate value.  But I think some interesting aspects of tagging have been overlooked... [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

My Beef with Blogging Formats Friday 7/25/2003 11:50:51 PM (CST) - Michael Wells    I realized today why I'm fundamentally dissatisfied with the traditional blogging format--it's too linear.  My thought processes tend towards a "drill-down" refinement of multiple topics, switching from one to the next as new thoughts arrive (often triggered by research in a completely unreleated area). 1 comment(s) - [ Read Comments ] - [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

What Makes a Blog Special? Saturday 5/24/2003 12:25:29 AM (CST) - Michael Wells    There is nothing magical about a blog.  Like any good technology, it is very, very simple... and therefore easy to understand, adopt and extend.  Nevertheless, it is a special technology.  [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

The Technical Aspects of a Blog Saturday 5/24/2003 12:16:00 AM (CST) - Michael Wells    A blog is nothing more than a series of HTML chunks, displayed in a webpage, often in reverse chronological order--that is, the newest entries appear at the top for the convenience of the reader. Blog entries consist of a title, one or more paragraphs of text, and often display the date authored for reference.  Simple formatting such as bolding, underlining, and hyperlinks are common, and images can also be embedded. Blogger and other popular blogging tools today work by providing the user with a program to write and manage entries.  As the blog is updated, the tool creates the HTML, embeds it into a webpage, and uploads the new webpage to the author's server.  While simple, this approach is also very limited... the purpose of this blog is to explore the capabilities of new tools, discuss how tools could be designed for greater power and flexibility, and to consider the future potential of blogging. [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]

What is a Blog? Saturday 5/24/2003 12:04:04 AM (CST) - Michael Wells    Weblogs or "blogs" have been around for some time... but the popularization of the technology is a fairly recent event.  Simply, a blog is a written journal of thoughts, commentaries, ideas, news, or other content that someone publishes to the web for others to read and comment on. Currently, blogs are most heavily used by technology professionals and technology news companies to rapidly (and conveniently) push new content onto their websites.  And with a companion technology like RSS (Really Simply Syndication), other website owners and individual readers can choose to subscribe to those news feeds, and receive regular updates. What is particularly interesting about blogs is that with the right set of tools, it takes virtually no effort for a non-technical user to become and Internet-based publisher.  And the tools revolution has just begun. [ Comment on this Entry ] [ Email this Entry ]