Ted Tschopp's Blog

Testing ecto

This is a test post using ecto. I am looking for a blogging tool I can use on both my new MacBook Pro and my Dell laptop. Ecto seems to be working pretty good on both the PC and Mac.

Internet Explorer 8 and posting to your Typepad Blog

I downloaded IE8 today and noticed it had a new way to post to Microsoft’s blog by highlighting some text and sending it off to their blogging service.

Here is the code that will make it work in Typepad:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
 <homepageUrl>http://www.typepad.com/t/app</homepageUrl>
 <display>
  <name>Blog in Typepad</name>
  <icon>http://www.tschopp.net/favicon.ico</icon>
       <description>Post this in my Blog</description>
 </display>
 <activity category="Blog">
  <activityAction context="selection">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle}" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{documentUrl}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="text" value="{selection}" />
    <parameter name="keywords" value="{keywords}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
  <activityAction context="document">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{documentTitle}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{documentUrl}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
  <activityAction context="link">
   <execute method="get" action="http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/post">
    <parameter name="title" value="{linkTitle}" />
    <parameter name="blog_id" value="16627" />
    <parameter name="SourceURL" value="{link}" />
   </execute>
  </activityAction>
 </activity>
</openServiceDescription>

1. Copy and paste this into a Text file.
2. Name it typepad.xml
3. Replace blog_Id with your blog ID

1. Browse to http://www.typepad.com/t/app 
2. Click on the blog you want to post to
3. Observe the URL http://www.typepad.com/t/app/weblog/manage?blog_id=16627

Replace the <icon> with your favicon

Save the document

Upload file to your Typepad account

Create a new HTML file

Name it typepad.html

Put the following code in the html file:<A href="javascript:window.external.addService('http://www.tschopp.net/typepad.xml');">Click Here</a>

Replace my URL with the URL to the XML file you created above

Save file

Upload File to Typepad

Browse to HTML file

Click on link

My files are located at http://www.tschopp.net/Typepad.html 

Let me know how it goes. I will post updates later this week to get more than just selections working. I also want to expand this to other services. Let me know how this is working for you.

Update: Proof that I'm not Dead.

It has been a while sense I have updated any of my blogs or websites.  I have been really busy at work, and I have a couple rather long blog posts in the works that are partially done.  One is on my experiences with social websites like Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, or LiveJournal.  The other was going to be a Christmas message/card.  I guess the time for that has passed.  Anyway, I thought I'd show people what I have been working on.

There are a couple images I have attached that are to the companies new Portal.  This portal is now available externally at http://portal.edisonintl.com/.  Now I don't have a username or password you can use to log in and check out all my hard work, but I will post one screen shot of what it looks like from the inside.

Enjoy the screen shots and I'll hopefully have more updates on this blog this year.

Ideas to Think About: Life and Taxes

I recently heard Alex Wright speak at the Long Now Foundation via their podcast.  It made me think of a couple things.

The talk is worth listening to, as many of their seminars are.  Alex left me with a couple ideas I want to look into further.

As a child we all use to play the 20 questions game, and we are all very familiar with the first 3 questions.  Is it an Animal?  It is an Mineral?  Is it a Plant?  Then we would proceed to ask 20 questions, each time trying to further narrow down the selection until we were able to say what the person was thinking of.  This categorization if formalized is a taxonomy. 

The first idea surrounds taxonomy.  It turns out that when sociologists and anthropologists look at different societies around the world they break their world into different taxonomies.  This isn’t all that weird.  The weird part is that universally these taxonomies are only 5 or sometimes 6 levels deep.  There really is no good answer as to why this is the case. 

There are several guesses.  One has to do with the depth of families; you, your children, Your parents, and your grandparents.  If you count up the generations, you get 5.   If you add you children’s children, then get 6.  The idea then goes that this is culturally conditioned into us and the way that we see the world.  Eventually those individuals who are predisposed genetically to accept this fact become more successful in reproducing and the “idea” is carried forward via genetics and culture.

That’s an interesting idea, but also controversial even among evolutionary biologists.  I think the idea above is interesting, but it is just as scientifically mythological as other anthropological mythologies.  As a religious person I would love to have seen Adam apply the first Taxonomy. 

Next Ideas to Think About:  The House of Memories

 

Too many feeds...

I am at a dangerous point in blogging.  I have 212 different RSS feeds / blogs that I read.  I know others manage a whole lot more but I’m not as good as they are.  At one point back in 2000 or so I had only one feed that I subscribed to via the My Netscape Portal.  It was the news feed from the site I use to run, at www.theonering.com (they no longer syndicate their news sadly).  Over the last 7 years or so, the number of feeds I read has increased.   It is now at the point where it takes an hour to read everything each day.  I am now starting to run into a barrier of having too many feeds and I need to change something.  I am running into several problems. 

The first is that I am still looking for a taxonomy to manage all my feeds.  As I scale up to this level, I am starting to run into the problem that I can’t exactly map everything into nice inboxes.  The second problem that I’m now facing is that not everything that I save maps into nice outboxes either.  The best tool to manage this so far has been FeedDemon.  Their folder structure for feeds, watches and news bins makes sense, but I am at the breaking point as the GTDesque “workflow” that I have setup is needing to be reworked.  The only way I can see reworking it is to make sub categories under each of my meta categories.  To be honest, I think that FeedDemon will work just fine doing these things, but my overall workflow will need to change.

The second problem is that I am starting to run into the problem of never being able to be caught up on my reading.  I have now gotten into the habit of scanning articles, but I have found that this misses items.  There have been two solutions to this.  I have started to subscribe to linkblogs.  I wish more people would establish linkblogs and publish them.  These linkblogs are great as they allow me to see if there is anything “important” that I missed on my trip through the other blogs.  The other way I am managing this overload is that FeedDemon supports watches which is an automated way to collect information.  I think that over the coming months I will be expanding these watches to be more detailed and specific.  As this happens, I will need to subscribe to more generic feeds to feed these specific watches.  This of course is a force feedback loop that will increase complexity.

My final problem is that I have tried many of the applications out there for reading feeds and I’m starting to approach the breaking point of these applications.  I will keep posting over the coming months regarding how I am managing this, but I suspect that I will find a couple opportunities for improvement on the RSS reader side.

Communicaitons & Technology: There must be a better way

Introduction

Today we are swimming in communications.  While many of the tools we use to moderate our way through the morass are helpful, many are starting to show signs of wear and tear.  Some of them are downright broken.  It has gotten to the point that it isn’t unusual to hear that someone has given up answering email.  But this isn’t a new phenomenon.  I know many people who refuse to answer their phone and let the voice mail pick it up. 

What is the solution to all this mess?  Is there a solution to all this mess?  That isn’t a question I’m willing to ask in earnest just yet, let alone answer.  Before we give up on answering it, let’s start by looking at the problems and see if there is a good way out of this problem.  

First we will look at the types of communication.  Then we will address the time sensitivity of the communication. Additionally, we need to look at the direction of the communication.  Finally we need to look at the security needed in the communication.

New Blogging tools test

BlogJet upgraded today to version 2.0 and now supports Google’s new Blogger API.  So I’m attempting to triple post this now:

http://www.tschopp.net/

http://tedtschopp.livejournal.com/

http://tedtschopp.blogspot.com/

Here goes nothing…

Cool "New" Tool for Blogging

Well, I’ve been using BlogJet now for a while, but today I figured out a very useful feature.  I have several different blogs around that I have in various states of use and non-use.  This cool feature that is getting me all excited is something that allows me to post to all these blogs at once.  (Well, not all, as Blogger (beta) and Vox are not using standards just yet.)  I would highly recommend this tool or one like it. 

Feed Icons

Come here for your standard icons to designate syndicated content.

Testing Performancing for Firefox

Performancing for Firefox | Performancing.com

Performancing for Firefox is a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox. Just hit F8 or click the little pencil icon at the bottom right to bring up the blog editor and easily post to your Wordpress, MovableType or Blogger blogs.