TheTrenchcoat Chronicles

Category: Tech

  • Net Neutrality solution

    Both proponents and opponents of net neutrality have it all wrong.

    Proponents say we need government regulation to prevent the ISP’s from staggering traffic. Opponents say we don’t need the government regulating the internet. Well, as smug as both sides are they’re both wrong.

    The problem is with local municipalities who allow cable and telephone companies to have a regional monopoly. Think about it. You probably only have 1 cable company and 1 local telephone company where you live. That’s not much competition in the marketplace, is it?

    The only way that’s going to stop is if enough people are vocal to their community leaders to put a stop to allowing these monopolies. Unfortunately, not enough people will even think about that until it’s too late.

  • Blogging, students, and the First Amendment

    Blogging, students, and the First Amendment

    Can Schools Punish Students for Posting Offensive Content on MySpace and Similar Sites? Often, the Answer Is No, Unless The Posting Materially Disrupts School Activities:

    This is a great article from FindLaw about blogging, students, and the First Amendment and whether or not schools can punish students for blog posts they make at home. And I’m not saying it’s a great article because I get a mention in it. 😀 I hear a lot of cries of “But..but..but it’s free speech and it’s protected by the First Amendment”. Well now, hopefully this article should clear a few things up…

    Cases Where Postings Violate the Law, or Provide Evidence of Its Violation

    These sites – though a boon to students in many ways – have also raised their share of problems. And some of the problems may also involve torts, or violations of the criminal law.

    In some instances, students engage in cyber-bullying — making critical remarks about other students or teachers. If these postings are factual, false, and damaging, they may count as defamation. The sites cannot be sued: Under a key provision of the Communications Decency Act, web intermediaries – those who merely allow others to post their own comments and photos – are not liable for defamation. But the authors can be.

    Sometimes postings may be evidence of law-violation: In photos, underage subjects may be shown in sexually provocative poses, or shown smoking or drinking, or holding firearms. For instance, a 16-year-old boy in Jefferson, Colorado was arrested after police — having seen pictures on his MySpace page in which he was holding handguns – found the weapons in his home. And in late April, police reportedly intercepted a Columbine-style plot in Kansas on the basis of a threatening email posted on MySpace.com.

    And sometimes postings may themselves violate the law – making criminal threats, or constituting harassment. In Costa Mesa, California, twenty students were suspended from TeWinkle Middle School for two days for participating in a MySpace group where one student allegedly threatened to kill another and made anti-Semitic remarks.

    So let this be a lesson to you that not all speech is protected under the First Amendment. And if you’re in a private school, you’re out of luck.

  • Calling all blog developers

    Calling all blog developers

    Since it’s Friday and hardly anyone reads this between Friday and Sunday, I’m doing this for my own benefit.

    This is a call to all blog software developers. You may think that your blog software is the greatest, but it’s not. What we need is some standards across all blog software platforms.

    Importing and Exporting: Stop locking people into your software. You may think that people would never stop using your software, but there’s always another software around the corner that just might be better than yours. Since most blogs will import entries from Movable Type, I think they should all export in the MT format as well. Right now, I’m stuck in WordPress. Not that there’s anything wrong with WP, but I just don’t like being tied into one software format. I’ve tried the WP to MT export scripts, but so far, I have yet to get one to import properly.

    Subscribing to comments: When I leave a comment on someone else’s blog it’s nice to receive an e-mail when someone else replies to it. A lot of blog developers think this is unnecessary and an RSS reader should be used instead. That’s all well and good, but only a small minority use RSS readers. Plus, I don’t want a line in my RSS reader for each comment I’ve subscribed to. I’ve left thousands of comments on hundreds of blogs. I don’t want a line on my RSS reader for each of those comments that I’ve left. This is a standard feature on PMachine and Serendipity. A plugin is available for WordPress. There used to be one for MT but since they went to 3.0 I don’t know.

    Permalinks: The URL’s to blog entries should be uniform so when someone moves from one platform to another, their URL’s will stay the same. Personally, I think WordPress’ URLs are the best. It goes domain/archives/date/entry-title. Seems simple enough to implement.

    Toggle options: While the developers may think something is a great option or feature, the user may not. Since I’m not a PHP or Perl guru, I would rather just click a button to turn a function on or off and not have to alter any code. For example, in WordPress, if you want a pop-up comment window you have to remove part of the code. Granted, it’s labeled real easily within the code, but I’d rather not mess with the code. In Serendipity, trackbacks are automatically pinged whether you want them to be or not. To turn it off, you have to alter the code. While I may be comfortable doing that, someone else may not be.

    Not that any of these platforms are bad, with the possible exception of MT 3.0, but I just think there should be some kind of blog industry standards. Trust me, if I had the time to learn how to write scripts I would at least try to develop my own. (Hmmmm. TrenchBlog? Trenchpress? Movable Trench?)

  • Movable Type meets the Resistable Price

    Movable Type meets the Resistable Price

    In case you haven’t heard, Movable Type has released version 3.0. The problem is, there are some catches.

    First of all, they’re now charging some steep prices. There is a free version, but it only allows one author on 3 weblogs. This sucks for some of the group blogs I read that are on MT. There’s now no way to upgrade from 2.XX to 3.0 and have multiple authors without having to pay. And there are no available versions of 2.XX left to download.

    I understand that Six Apart is a business, and they are entitled to make as much money as they want, but I think they are in the process of disillusioning what used to be a very loyal fan base.

    I used MT for two years and was very happy with it. However, I got tired of waiting for 3.0 and as my entries grew in number, it took forever to do a rebuild of my site any time I did some kind of modification to it.

    So not too long ago, I made the jump to WordPress. For once, my timing is impeccable. It’s free open-source software which could even be used for commercial use.

    No limit to users. It does not support multiple blogs, but I now believe it’s better that if you’re running multiple blogs to have them be independent of each other. Importing my MT entries took no time and was a snap. WP comes with a built-in MT entry importer.

    The documentation for WP isn’t as extensive as MT’s used to be, but you can usually find what information you need from the user forums. Be warned, though, just because you were a wiz at MT does not make you a WP expert. They are written in two entirely different codes. But as I said, you can usually find what you’re looking for in the user forum.

    MT used to be the standard. I thank them for the years of service, but the ship is sinking, and this rat jumped off a long time ago.