Those of you who do not stray far from the weblogs.asp.net feeds may not know about the larger blogging world around us. One of the big (and innovative) players is Six Apart, creators and owners of the MovableType weblog software and the TypePad weblog service. There was a recent shakeup when SixApart decided that it was time to charge something for MovableType and the controversy seems to be around how much they are charging  – not that the software is no longer free. I have not followed it closely (not much of an as the world turns kind of person…what can I say) but I know that they are responding to the outcry…check this recent post on their site:

If free isn’t an issue for you and you’re willing to pay for a version of Movable Type (say the $69 version) and the blog/author limits won’t work for your current use, write a non-emotional post explaining how you’re using Movable Type and TrackBack this entry.

Key words here “a non-emotional post“… so far there are 159 trackbacks to that one. (This will make 160.)

Shelley Powers wrote an interesting post about this and compared the tough decision on SixApart’s part to the “bite the bullet” moments of Oracle’s major change to version 6 and Microsoft’s huge change with .NET. Shelley’s got some deep roots in the software world and this is definitely an interesting read. Go check it out.

I loaded my current opml from SharpReader up to Dave Winer’s “Share your OPML” site and it is linked under BlogRoll here on my site. You do have to log in to that site to people’s OPMLs. 

I’ve also been fiddling a bit with my site configuration and made just a few slight changes. No biggie.

Don’t be a dope like me and miss the “Templates and Macros” section on the dasBlog site for how to configure your site. Thanks to Erv Walter for pointing that out for me!

Thanks to a teaser from Scott Hanselman, and a helpful line of code he sent, I was able to add the archive feature to my dasBlog site.

The line of code Scott sent was

<%newtelligence.drawArchiveMonths()%>

which was all I got from him, so it was a good puzzle!

Here’s the rest.

dasBlog has a subfolder called THEMES which contains folders for each of the various skins.

In each of those folders there is a file called homeTemplate.blogtemplate

You can find in the patterns within this file, the area that builds the panel (on my site it is on the right….search, navigation, etc.) So I just copied and pasted one of those sections and replaced the title with “Archives” and the innerhtmll with the above macro.

   <div class=”sidetitle”>Archives</div>
   <div class=”side”><%newtelligence.drawArchiveMonths()%> </div>

I placed in between two other sections (Navigation and BlogRoll).

Once I uploaded the modified file, I had to go to config and reselect my theme so that this template file would get pulled into the main site.

Thanks to Omar Shahine and all of the others who have worked so hard on this project. It’s what I use for this blog. Read more here on Omar’s weblog, which points to the release notes, new features and bug fixes as well as the many “flavors“ of the new version that can be used. As of now I have not updated quite yet, but will find some time in the next day or two.

Not that I thought I was the first person to think about this or anything 🙂 … I just had to get it off my chest! But Scott Watermasysk assures us that they are way ahead of us and we’ll see some really great changes this summer.

When there were only 200 people on dotNetWeblogs, there were already some problems with too much content and a good chunk of it was personal, when I believe the original mission of the blogs was to be about .Net. I learned quickly to stick to the .net focus after a few weeks of totally random “here I am“ posts. The biggest problem was in the main feed. People who subscribed to the main feed looking for .NET info were having to filter through a lot of stuff. Enter personal categories. The categories are for individual bloggers. So you can subscribe to a particualr blogger’s own feed separately from the main feed and choose only to subscribe to a particular category. But that does not stop stuff from still going onto the main feed. Everything goes to the main feed. Then Scott implemented a great feature: “Include on Main Feed”/”Do not include on Main Feed”. But does it get used? Do the bloggers who start up new blogs know that it exists? Is anyone ever told something like – “so it’s a good idea to try to keep main feed posts .net related, but we trust you to use your judgement. Sometimes a post that is not about .NET is still very relevant. You can post as much about anything on your blog as you want, but think about the main feed/main website page when you are selecting to include it there or not“ or is it just “here’s your blog. Have fun!“

There are now 950 (today’s count) bloggers on this site. Many people, many wonderful ideas, many interesting personalites. Many posts on the main feed. Too many to read. Too many to filter through – do you go by person’s name? by post title? By MS blogger? Non-MS Blogger? Bloggers can specifiy posts to either go the main feed or not. However, if readers are not subscribed to that person’s particular blog, then these posts will never be seen.

I keep thinking about unsubscribing to the main feed and just doing individual subscriptions. But then I’ll miss soooooo much.

I know that solutions have been tossed around for a long time now and it is hard to come up with an idea that seemed to solve all of the problems.

But I think that having some general group categories might not be a bad idea at this point.

.net related
Microsoft inside scoop related
community related
personal

even those 4 might help a lot. I would be happier to subscribe to those 4 feeds individually and have some kind of organization. Then when I’m just looking for random entertainment from my fellow geeks, I’ll go to personal. Yes, it means it is still up to the bloggers to specifiy a group category , but that’s can become habitual. And even if someone doesn’t remember to do it all of the time, it could still be a huge help. Implementation is a completely different story of course. Here I am making a suggestion that I can’t help to do the work of implementing. However, I just wanted to put it out there for the next time changes are being made to the way .Text works or at least so that people can talk about and fine-tune the idea.

Unbelievable! Well, no, actually, the sad truth is that it IS believable.

http://www.brianstorms.com/archives/000276.html

I am a little saddened by this “conversation” between two people who have wonderful and intriguing, voices, similar in some ways, different in others … Liz Lawley and Shelley Powers.

I can subscribe to some dasBlos rss feeds in Sharpreader but not to my own (for testing purposes) and not to a few others (eg. Damir Tomicic). Is anyone subscribing to my feed in SharpReader successfully? The rss looks fine in a plain old browser.

Geeze – first it’s someone on www.Geekswithblogs.net experimenting with a p_rn (don’t want google) rss feed yesterday. Now this afternoon, just coincidentally I get this in my aggregator. I’m not offended or anything, it just seemed kinda funny. I didn’t circle Patch your…. on purpose…