The Why and The What About

This section is about the motivation behind creating and keeping a weblog. I did not make up my mind a lot about having or not having a weblog — at some point it simply turned out to be useful. However, I am not the kid with the golden one-post-per-day rule. I post whenever I find the time to AND find the subject worth of being emitted into the net.

However, posting trivial nonsense might of course happen since that is of course all with the eye of the individual beholder... so, once I start posting about my defecation (and folks do that... no shit!) would somebody please order a DDoS for this IP ;-]

Why I have a Weblog

Well, as most of us consider it right — the main difference between some wiki or website compared to a weblog is, a weblog is organized along time i.e. a weblog has a chronological appearance of information within one or more permanent topics. Also, a weblog posting is mostly a lot shorter compared to some wiki article or a page on some website e.g. writing a posting for the weblog can take as little as 3 minutes whereas a page for a website might take more than a year to write.

In fact, and this is also my point of view, a weblog is the 21st journal — no pen, no paper involved.

And now the why. As I already said — I do not relay on a (this) weblog but, as with most things in life that are not essential it is nice to have one.

In the end, what we want and so utterly need in this world today is free speech

The human instinct to censor thrives, as it always will, living in
irrepressible conflict with the human instinct to speak.
Outrage, self-righteousness, and paranoia feed the maw of censorship.
Squelching speech, however, never reduces society's net paranoia
quotient — it simply redirects it, drives it underground, where it
fosters into more dangerous hysterias.
In the words of Justice Brandeis, "Man feared witches and burned women."
                — Rodney Smolla, "Free Speech in an Open Society", p. 43.

What is it About

I am eagerly trying to not just be an entertainer but to also provide some valuable information although this might be limited to the tech affine sections (Debian, GNU Emacs, etc.) of my weblog.

For the rest, I might try being self-critical or just express wonderment about something (life section) I might also write about the daily whatnot and tell about yesterdays WTF moment (miscelleanous section).

In the end the whole weblog might be a little journalism as well

Journalism is literature in a hurry.
                — Matthew Arnold

Formats

My weblog can be consumed in two formats for now. The first option is to read things as usual in XHTML with some web browser i.e. that is exactly the same as for the wiki and the schedule part (see here for more information).

The second option is to consume my weblog via popular web feed. This way, one can check quickly if there is some new post written by me or not. Web feeds are a gift — I use them all the time since it saves me a lot of time once I have subscribed to some particular feed.

One needs to install a feed reader if not already shipped with his OS (Operating System) respectively web browser. For normal folks (non-technicians) I recommend using Sage, a lightweight but yet powerful feed reader — more information on how to get it, how it looks like etc. below.

I am using Iceweasel also known as Firefox as my web browser thus I have and add-on installed called Sage. I use Sage next to Gnus as my feed reader.

XHTML

Markus's Weblog about technology in general.

Markus's Weblog about business, law, shares and all the troubles about getting filthy rich ;-]

Markus's Weblog about science.

Markus's Weblog about various places on this planet.

Markus's Weblog about miscelleanous stuff.

RSS 2.0 Feeds

Markus's Weblog about technology in general.

Markus's Weblog about business, law, shares and all the troubles about getting filthy rich ;-]

Markus's Weblog about science.

Markus's Weblog about various places on this planet.

Markus's Weblog about miscelleanous stuff.

General Information about my Weblog

This section, the wiki part and the schedule have similar ones, explains the weblog part form the point of view of its creator i.e. it tells about what I was thinking about and took into consideration before I even started looking for some solution.

It then tells a bit about common considerations and their outcome towards the way and finally tells about the chosen implementation from a conceptional and technical point of view i.e. in the end one is able to build something akin to my weblog since I provide all the information here.

Splitting into Topics

As the reader might have already noticed, I do not just have one feed where I throw in everything so anybody subscribed to that feed has to read/see any posting I write.

Instead, I have one page/feed per topic so folks can distinctively select topics based on their individual likings i.e. someone interested just in my business related postings (business.muse) just has to subscribe to this particular feed and will so not be bothered by some tech stuff I may write in technology.muse for example.

You commenting on my Postings

The only thing one might moan about muse-journal.el as of now is that it lacks the opportunity of some built-in comment feature i.e. the reader cannot comment on postings written by me.

That shortcoming however is just a drawback on first sight since, from the administrators point of view (that would be me in this case), the lack of this feature is the best possible solution — no comments equals no spam and no wasting of countless hours for this arms race.

However, as laid out in detail onto another page, I would love to have a dialog with my readership thus I am going to do something about the current lack for commenting on my postings. I tag postings with some unique ID (Identifier) (timestamp in the upper right corner) and then simply set up some ML (Mailing List) for us all to get in touch with each another and chat about stuff. This however might take until late 2008 or so — I am pretty busy doing other things right now (November 2007).

Naming Convention of the Weblog pages

I chose a pretty forward looking naming scheme for my weblog pages. It looks like that <category>.[<sequence_number>].muse which then leads to pages like the following

sa@pc1:~/.work/git/0/blog/local$ ll
total 4.0K
-rw-r--r-- 1 sa sa    0 2007-11-06 23:36 business.muse
-rw-r--r-- 1 sa sa    0 2007-11-06 23:35 technology.muse
-rw-r--r-- 1 sa sa    0 2007-11-06 23:35 misc.muse
-rw-r--r-- 1 sa sa    0 2007-11-06 23:35 science.muse
-rw-r--r-- 1 sa sa    0 2007-11-06 23:35 places.muse
sa@pc1:~/.work/git/0/blog/local$

Technology under the Hood

WRITEME

This subsection is about the technology I use to bring this weblog to the net.

muse-journal.el

I use muse-journal.el for blogging with Muse. Take a look into the Muse manual, chapter 9.6 Keeping a journal or blog for more information. For my configuration respectively setup please take a look at my .emacs since I keep all my GNU Emacs related setup there.