Kelake

I created Shao Kelake (that list of links on the sidebar) as sort of a mini-version of this one. A weblog like what I used to have years ago before the proliferation of tools like MoveableType which force you into adding a title to all your babbling. It creates a sense of seriousness that I don’t always appreciate nor enjoy. Shao Kelake has just started and since I have the time I will be expanding it and this blog in the near future. It’s great fun even though most of my visitors to this site tend to be interested in only one or two presentations I wrote quickly a couple years ago.
As an aside, I am amazed as to the seriousness or effort people now put into webloging. Years ago it was people like Volumeone’s Matt Owen who encouraged me to continue doing personal sites (as they were simply called) as a means to learn and push “my limits of online creativity”. These designers always like to use these types of phrases. I’ve always taken that advice to heart though and I have self-published all kinds of crazy stuff over the years – some good, most bad. I’ve lost count as to the number of redesigns, attempts at online magazines, silly flash interfaces, wacky dhtml animations, and personal story telling attempts. Most of these sites required huge amounts of production effort and in some ways that was the point. After all I’m not a writer (yet).
News pages (later called weblogs, logs, and blogs) were different though. Frequent updates required more simple production as everything was done by hand. I eventually stopped trying to do fancy things and just had fun exploring and sharing what I found on the web. Weblogs were my secret weapon at the office as I had my own personal editors scouring the web for the information I needed. It was generally all loosely designed, personal, and fun.
Now look at weblogs. I have been spending a great deal of time lately looking at different sites, hundreds and hundreds of them, in order to inform myself for a few new weblogs I am creating. I am amazed at the effort people have put into the interfaces that frame their written words. CSS files so complete and complex it boggles. Sometimes it feels more about the hidden presentation file than the writing itself. There is allot of great content out there – written ala magazine style – with complete titles, tags, hierarchies, and archives. Bye bye news media, Hello bloggers. A select few are even making a living from writing their weblog. Imagine that!
I’m going to end this quickly and with a long quote from an immensely popular and old school blogger Jason Kottke who informed me today that my desire to create Shao Kelake was not return to the roots of what publishing these kinds of sites was about but a whole new “retro movement” deserving of whole new buzzword.
“On my web travels the other day, I came across a new (to me) kind of weblog, the tumblelog.”
“A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. Robot Wisdom and Bifurcated Rivets are two older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.”
His weblog entry: Tumblelogs

I’ve spent the past week trying out various new plug-ins for Moveable Type as I go about redesigning a couple sites that use MT to manage them. One of the ideas I had, and I am a bit behind in this, was to be able to publish rss feed content within MT templates. There are quite a few services that allow you to do publish rss feeds on your site but I wanted to remove any outside dependencies. And doing it alone is just plain fun.
There used to be a neat little plug-in called rss feed written by Timothy Appnel that I thought would work just fine – it’s still listed on the MT plug-ins directory but it has been unfortunately been discontinued as Timothy Appnel has totally rewritten the plug-in and renamed it Feeds.App. I say unfortunately because despite following his directions to a ‘T’ it has yet to work. Some of the internal uri are wrong as well. It’s a shame that the older plug-in cannot be found and it’s unfortunate that MT doesn’t have a viable plug-in for this purpose. I wonder if developing for MT is slowing compared to the equivalent alternative content management systems.
If you are looking to publish syndicated content using MT you might want to give some thought to using CaRP instead. It works outside of MT but it does work and it is easy to install. As stated in Feed.app’s documentation ToDo, Feed.app is not. Your mileage may vary.
This isn’t all negative of course. I had great fun reacquainting myself with the command line as I had to install various perl modules in an attempt to get the plug-in to work. I miss using telnet and pine.
Edit:I should mention that Timothy Appnel was quite responsive to queries on problems installing the plug-in. The process just seems a bit hit and miss and far too time consuming at this point to make it worthwhile.