Month: July 2003

Finally have implemented (half of) a feature I should have added ages ago: self-service for the Ecosystem!
On the details page of any weblog, you can now click a link which takes you to an ‘edit details’ page, from which you can change any information on the blog, or request that it be deleted entirely (good for hunting down those dreaded duplicates!)
The changes will not take effect immediately — I will still review them manually and only execute those that seem to make sense (to prevent abuse, and to avoid having to implement some gawdawful authentication system).
I still need to write the back-end that will make my ‘accept change’ work, but y’all can start combing the Ecosystem for data errors and submit change requests to your hearts’ content. If you’ve sent me such requests in email, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d re-submit them through the interface — I’ll still try to get to them if you don’t, but it’ll probably happen later.
Thanks!
-NZB
PS: No, this doesn’t mean Hosting Matters my shell access problem — it just happened that I was able to implement this feature without shell access. The goodies that you were going to get today were much spiffier than this — but it looks like that ain’t happening.

I’ve been quite happy with Matters since I moved TTLB here a few months back. But I’m a little less impressed with them this morning: my shell access has been disabled to TTLB’s server, which means I can’t test some new Ecosystem stuff I had planned to work on today. I have a slight suspicion that HM might be getting irked at all the routines I’m running to support TTLB’s various features — but if that’s the case, an email would have been nice.
At any rate, now we’re in support-watch mode: I logged a ticket with their support site, priority High, at 6:38am PDT. It’s now six hours later, and no response at all. Not good.
I recognize Sunday is not a business day, but for me, it’s prime development time, so this is more than a bit annoying.
Updates to follow if and when I get a response…
-NZB
Update: OK, I’m back up and running as of 6:38pm. However, it seems that HM actually implemented some security changes that broke one of the Ecosystem scripts. Ironically, it broke the very piece of code that I inserted to ensure that I don’t spawn unlimited processes while doing scans — causing the test run I just executed to go berzerk and spawn about 450 subprocesses. Sure is a good thing I was watching it, else I wouldn’t have been able to fix it. I’m still waiting to hear whether I missed an announcement on this particular change…

I’ve been using the sidebar for quite some time as my primary method of keeping track of updates to my favorite weblogs. It’s a great tool: you can define your list of favorites, and it then provides them in a list sorted by the date/time of their last update in your sidebar. (They also have a similar tool for Internet Explorer). Blo.gs aggregates update data from multiple sources, including weblogs.com and Blogger, so it’s pretty comprehensive.
Anyway, I finally realized that it wouldn’t be too hard to integrate the Ecosystem with their data feed: so I did. The Ecosystem is now polling blo.gs once every hour at the bottom of the hour, and marking updated blogs with a little red *. (Note that the actual link data is still only being collected once a day).
It seems to be working properly, but please let me know as always if you notice any odd behavior.
Also: I did some serious data cleanup today, deleting over 100 duplicate blogs. Surprisingly, this caused more shifts in the rankings that I expected. It seems legitimate, but I’ll be keeping an eye over the next few days to make sure I didn’t wonk something out of whack…

“We are not moved by the gloomy smile of a worthless king, but by the ardent glow of generous patriotism. We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in. In such a case we are sure that we are right; and we leave to you the despairing reflection of being the tool of a miserable tyrant.”

Enjoy the 4th, everyone. And remember what it meant then — and what it means now.
Image from Factory via www.theflagpole.com. Quote via Dave’s Patriotic Quotes.

I’m following the Edwards – Peoplesoft – Oracle catfight with some interest, given that it is all more or less in my professional space. For those who haven’t been following this particular mess, News.com has more coverage than you could possibly want.
What really caught my eye, though, is Oracle’s recent advertising campaign to reassure Peoplesoft customers that if it succeeds in buying Peoplesoft, it will take good care of them. The June 28th – July 4th (U.S.) edition of the Economist, for example, has a full back-cover ad from Oracle. The text of the ad is a slightly summarized version of this page on Oracle’s site, which lists the following commitments:

1. We will not shut down PeopleSoft products
We are devoting more than US$6 billion and engineers around the world to PeopleSoft products. We are committed to supporting the current PeopleSoft products for at least the next 10 years.
We want you to be a satisfied Oracle customer
2. You will not be forced to convert to Oracle E-Business Suite applications
Our interest in you as a customer is not based on you migrating to Oracle applications or database
By committing to extend your support, you will not be forced to migrate to any other version or product
3. We will provide high quality, truly global customer service for PeopleSoft products through our award-winning customer support organization, which will include PeopleSoft specialists
We will provide you with the same high level, global support that Oracle provides to its customers
We have a longer track record of offering superior customer support, and have received numerous service awards. Read more about Oracle Support (PDF, 55K)
4. We will extend the support period for PeopleSoft products beyond the timeframe PeopleSoft itself has committed to and into the next decade
Oracle support for PeopleSoft Version 7, which PeopleSoft is desupporting in December, 2003, will be extended for at least two years
Oracle will support PeopleSoft Version 8 for at least the next ten years
5. We will take no action that reduces the functionality of your PeopleSoft implementations
Oracle commits to enhancing the current PeopleSoft products for at least the next decade
In every acquisition Oracle has made, we have never reduced the functionality of the acquired products.
6. We will increase the value of your PeopleSoft investments through ongoing enhancements and maintenance delivered by one of the largest software development organizations in the world
Together with the PeopleSoft team, we will continue to enhance and maintain current PeopleSoft products
Customers will benefit from a next generation of products that incorporates the best features of both companies
7. If, and only if, you elect to do so, you may move to the Oracle E-Business Suite via FREE module-for module upgrades
You can stay on PeopleSoft applications, or upgrade to Oracle applications at your discretion. It’s entirely your choice
Utilizing PeopleSoft code and developers, we will build lower cost, automated migration scripts and tools
The interesting question to me is, do these ‘commitments’ have any actual legal force?
What happens if, for instance, Oracle decides to discontinue support for PeopleSoft Version 8 after only seven years (as opposed to ten)? Can a company which built its business strategy around Version 8 sue Oracle for damages?
And the fuzzier claims seem even more dangerous (or perhaps, more meaningless): given the complexity of software in general and Peoplesoft in particular, I find it hard to imagine that some enterprising lawyer won’t be able to make a claim sometime after a theoretical Oracle takeover that some change “reduces the functionality” of a Peoplesoft implementation.
Anybody from the legal side of the Blogosphere care to chime in here? Should Peoplesoft users consider this a strong reassurance, or is it just marketing noise?

No, it’s not one of my projects! But I kinda wish it was.
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education has a fascinating project: the NITLE Blog Census:
Despite all the recent interest in blogging, few hard numbers are available about the extent of the phenomenon, particularly in languages other than English. The NITLE Blog Census is an attempt to create and share a regularly updated database of all known weblogs.
The census has been active since early May, 2003.
Our crawlers search the Web for weblogs, and attempt to categorize them by language and authoring tool. Data gathered during the census is archived every two weeks, and is available for non-commercial use. Our software respects the usual robots.txt exclusion rules. If you do not wish your weblog to be included in our surveys, please contact the site maintainer and we will expunge your site from our records.
The NITLE team has clearly given thought to the methodology: they are combining algorithmic methods of link-crawling with feeds from sources like Weblogs.com and various weblog directory lists.
And even better: it’s an open effort! You can download their data set in various forms, or use an XML-RPC API to do targeted queries.
Spiffy stuff, indeed.

Well, I just can’t leave well enough alone. I’ve been working on a new feature / section to the site for a few weeks, and I suppose I should stop tinkering with it and just let y’all play with it and see how it works.
Blogosphere Daily News is meant to be a guide to what particular items folks are linking to in the Blogosphere. Yes, many other sites have similar tools, but I thought it appropriate that TTLB should have its own version. And, as you’ll see, I’ve tried to give it some unique features, with my own somewhat dubious flair.
I won’t go into details on how it works, but it will be updated each day in the early-morning hours based on link data collected during the Ecosystem scans. So there will be a single edition daily.
There’s still some bugs in the system, so I’m classing this as a ‘beta’ for now. But feedback and suggestions are much appreciated. Enjoy!
-NZB
PS – For all those of you who have been frustrated by the slow holiday week and lack of interesting stuff to link to: well, now you’ve got something! No extra charge…
Update: There is one rather serious bug that I know of, wherein if a blog has multiple posts displayed on an archive page, the details presented will reflect those of the first post on the page — not the actual post that got all the links. I think I know how to fix this, but it will be ugly… patience…