Sorry for nearly two weeks of silent. Was busy catching up with day work after my Brunei trip. Anyway, tomorrow is a holiday for me so I burned some midnight oil to do some hacking and release just release Drupal 4 Bloggers v0.6.

The major change in this version is Blog APIs which means you can use your favorite blogging tool (mine are ecto and Zempt) to post your blog entries :-) And yes, the APIs have been enhanced such that it recongize extended and excerpt entries. I also fixed the bug that will allow you to change the posting time via the tool. Oh, you can even upload files and images via the Blog API now! Take a tour at my demo/dev site. :-)

Two things left before I shall make my big move to Drupal: (1) Templating (2) MT Migration scripts. For the latter, there is some work done by Morbus Iff which would really save me a lot of time. Nevertheless, I think I might still do a simplier one-click migration tool because I dont like keeping my entries in HTML as Morbus’ method will do.

There are also some activities on the Drupal-Blog mailing list which I started for the project. Thanks for all the feedback and as usual, bug reports are welcome!

Saw this incredible news yesterday! (via Joiito via Gen Kanai)

Gates described to his audience, which included Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Barry Diller and other top business executives, how blogs worked and suggested that they could be used as a tool for businesses to communicate with customers.

Who could advocate blogging better then Bill to Buffer, Bezos, Dell, Fiorina! I am speechless! According to the article, they have “more than 700 employee bloggers talking up its products and software in development, is embracing blogs and RSS technology because they are yet another potential threat and opportunity“. Well well…how true :-)

This reminded me of the conversation I have with Shin over dinner last night. Apparently, all the new estates in Korea now comes with average 50mbps Internet connection, with a switch on almost every floor! Apparently, teenagers are raging over blogging! No, not blogging like I do, but more of sharing of pictures, photos, video clips, etc. With a name and probably a birthday, you can find almost any Korean teenager blog or webpia. Hmm…

This reminded me of my previous entry where I discussed that ISPs should stop viewing users as “consumer” but producer of contents. So please provide a decent upload pipe!

I am flying to Brunei in a few hours time for the APT-ITU IDN/ENUM Workshop. The workshop is kind of perfect for me since it deals with two of my area of interests. I am giving presentation on both track, on IDN and also ENUM. And I will be catching up with old friends…and going to have our 2nd APEET face-to-face meeting.

Oh, I havent forgot about the Drupal 4 Bloggers. I intended to finish hacking blogapi.module (so it is upgraded to support some of the new features in Drupal 4 Bloggers) before next release but I better release a cut today before I leave.

So grab your V0.5 which includes some bugfixes on blog module and some enhancement on taxonomy. You will also see some patches to blogapi.module but that’s not complete yet!

I will be gone for 3-4 days. But I already setup my Mac (thanks to PHP Apache Module for Mac OS) with Druapl installation so I can do some programming on the plane. Todos on the list is Blogapi, and MT Migration tools.

Update: 18th May – Just release V0.4 which includes Simple Blog Admin, ISO 8601 bug fix for syndication, taxonomy hacks to make it easier to use.

I just release V0.3 of the Drupal for Bloggers. The major work I done over the weekend is the an upload module which allows bloggers to upload and manage files. (Entries, Comments, Trackbacks and Pings are already working as of V0.2) I think I have 4 major things on the todos before I can switch over to Drupal and start eating my own dog food – Blogger API, Simple Admin Function, MT Migration functions and Templates. But things will slow down a bit this week as I have to prepare for the APT-ITU IDN/ENUM Workshop this weekend in Brunei.

I understand there is a outcry from users about SixApart new pricing plan for MT 3.0. But for the record, I am with Dave winer (via Loic). and I couldn’t put any it better. I am not upset with SixApart and in fact, pity their predictment. (similar to ISC with their BIND). Folks, pay them if you like and use their software!

My decision to switch has nothing to do with their pricing plan. It is because i have outgrow MT and need a more powerful system, one where I dont need to constantly rebuild and ability to zap comments spams on the fly.

Another reason is their lack of empathy of people who developed plugins for them. For a company that develop social tools, their inability to bring people who develops add-on together is an irony.

Okay, I am ready to release 0.1 version of the Drupal for (MT) bloggers. You can give it a test run at my development site and you can download drupal4blog-0.2.tar.gz now :-) (Update: 16th May: 0.2 has been release :-)

I can’t claim it has all the features of MT yet but for those features I have, it is definately better then MT. For all the missing features, I am working towards it.

And yes, I need help! If you willing to help in this project, drop me an email at jseng_at_pobox.org.sg.

I love drupal. The source code is elegant and beautiful, and plugins are properly design, de-coupled and as-independent as you can get.

But as powerful as drupal. is, it is still fairly complex for a typical non-geek blogger. So instead of waiting around for it to be matured, I decided to start modifying drupal to make it suitable for bloggers to be at least good enough to replace MT.

Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful for MT as it introduces me to the world of blogging. But many little things in MT is getting on my nerves lately, like comments spams and the constant need to rebuild, makes drupal a God-sent. Above all, despite all my time and effort to write plugins for MT for comment spams, I still feel like an outsider, which makes me wonder why I even bother.

So I am going to stop working on MT from now and move over to Drupal with the focus to make Drupal “good enough” to replace MT. You can see some work in progress here and the list of todos.

Email me at jseng_at_pobox.org.sg if you interested in this project or better, interested to help out ;-)

ps: Somehow, I having a lot of trouble posting this entry. Arggh!

I wrote MT-Bayesian as a quick hack last year because of my dislike of MT-Blacklist. I still don’t like Blacklist concept (been-there, done-that in Email) but I have to admit there are serious problem with MT-Bayesian.

1. Bayesian is extremely CPU intensive.

Bayesian algorithm isn’t complex but it suck up a lot CPU resources. This is okay in a mail environment but in MT where you need to rebuild often, this is enough to crash some slower machines.

And it doesn’t help I wrote the whole thing in Perl.
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China has ordered a blogbus.com, a blogging service in China, to shutdown it service. It is the annual season that China’s Parliament held session. (via Joi Ito)

Singapore is also having our Parliament debate right now and I am glad there is no gag order on the Internet (at least none I am aware of). If nothing else, Singapore Government is seeking feedback via the Internet IRC although with pretty disappointing results. (Sorry, cant find the news article link).

I blame the lack of understanding of the tools to use then the Internet specifically. I mean, what do you expect from someone who spend a few hours online per week, was told that IRC is the best way to get feedback from public, and walk away disappointed after giving it a try? Maybe they should learn from their kids on how to use IRC…

I was reading a article by Steve Gillmor (via Dan Gillmor) where he discuss the problem of having too many updates. Oh boy, how I understand this problem…

How I wish there is an RSS reader that can filter and sort feeds into categories so I can read those interest me most. I don’t want them to be sorted just by dates and authors..I want it by categories because some are more important to me then others.

ps: And I wish people will start publishing full feeds and not just excerpt so “download” them and read them offline.

I been taking the train to work lately. Standing in the train and typing this in my Zaurus, I begin to wonder how long will it take for the Internet to be really perversive.

I mean, the technologies are already here. We have Wifi (802.11), 802.16, 3G etc. But getting companies to invest and deploy these infrastructure is still a problem. Getting such services to the consumers at an affordable price is a bigger one.
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