This morning I had an idea for what I thought was a novel use of Flickr — documenting my thoughts on wines that I purchase. I’m not a wine connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, but I do head out to the wine store sometimes. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to remember the differences between various bottles of wine or even what I liked or didn’t like. Many wine drinkers keep a notebook to log the wines they’ve tried, but dead trees solutions almost never work for me.

I thought that it would make sense to photograph the labels of wines when I open them, upload them to Flickr, and then describe the wine in the notes. Not only do you have an organized history of your wine purchasing experiences, but you have a visual reminder of what the bottles looked like when you want to purchase them again in the future. Needless to say, someone else already had this idea, and created the Wine Memory Jogger group. I’ve joined.

Now that I’ve got Movable Type up and running, and have things more or less under control, it’s time to think about the next steps for this site. Obviously the biggest task is redesigning my templates to add some content that got dropped and generally make things work like I want them to. I’m feeling pretty emboldened in that task by my template that generates an RSS feed of recent comments. It was pretty easy to learn what the hype was about when it comes to Movable Type templating.

The other thing I have to do is decide how I want to go about publishing my del.icio.us links on this site, or whether I want to maintain a separate weblog in Movable Type with the links that I’m putting in del.icio.us right now. I’ve been using del.icio.us for most of the links that I used to add here for my own future reference, and I’d like to integrate that functionality back into the site. I just have to figure out the best approach.

Overall, I’m very happy with the move to Movable Type and somewhat satisfied with the move to TextDrive, which has been fraught with some difficulties.

One thing that has surprised me has been the volume of TrackBack spam. I had always heard how annoying it is, but it’s still surprising to see first hand. I have moderation turned on for all trackbacks, so at least none of it gets published.

The comment feed I created yesterday looks like it should work correctly, but doesn’t seem to be playing nicely with Bloglines. It does validate, so it seems like it should work. The feed does appear to work in another aggregator, so I’m a bit stuck. (Bloglines help doesn’t have anything to offer publishers.)

Tonight I did a bit of work on creating a comment feed for the site. It was my first foray into Movable Type templates, and I give Six Apart huge credit here — hacking on Movable Type templates is dirt simple. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a bit of a problem.

When I created my comment feed template, which looks something like this one, I discovered that for my installation the MTCommentEntry tag just doesn’t work. (The tag indicates that you want access to the properties of the entry to which the comment you’re currently processing belongs, triggering a database lookup I assume.) When I add it to a template, processing just stops at that point. Once I have that kink ironed out, though, I’ll post the source to the template I created.

Update: From the release notes of Movable Type 3.2 beta 4:

Fixed a bug which caused MTCommentEntry to malfunction in dynamic category archives (Case 12356)

Bingo. Upgrading now.

Another update: Everything is working as expected post-upgrade. Here’s a link to the feed, and a link to the template that I use to generate the feed.

I hate to criticize TextDrive since we hardly know each other, but given that I’m giving them money to host my content, I feel like I can speak freely. The server that I’m assigned to has issues. From what I’ve read in the past, TextDrive’s servers were built from spare parts by the notoriously incompetent theplanet.com. Sometimes the servers crash due to hardware issues.

Anyway, these things happen, especially when you’re in the startup phase, so I’m not particularly irritated. What does irritate me is responses like this from the people responsible for fixing the problem. Obviously feeling a bit defensive about the downtime being characterized as a “long-term outage,” a staffer responds:

Long-term outages? Ask anyone that was hosted at cee-kay what long-term outages are. They went down and disappeared. Gone. Done. No “here’s your backup, sorry about this” – they just turned eveything off one day.

In my opinion, this is poor customer service. Yes it sucks to have customers breathing down your neck, but trying to deflect the criticism by pointing out how bad things could be just isn’t professional. My first reaction upon reading that was to remind myself to back everything up regularly in case I get the same treatment from TextDrive. I doubt that’s what he intended.

If you read Jim Kunstler’s Web site, you’ll probably find his comment on Harry Shearer as humorous as I do:

So Shearer was on the radio and I’m not crazy about his show because he puts across a self-congratulatory air of moral superiority that, after a while, gets on my nerves.

Tim O’Reilly has published excerpts of a debate he and Lauren Weinstein have been having over whether it’s ethical for Google to scan copyrighted works and let people search the contents without compensating the owners of the copyright.

There’s one angle that is not brought up in the debate. Google already scans billions of copyrighted works and provides access to them via search — I refer of course to works published on the Internet. Newspaper and magazine articles, software documentation, weblog entries, academic pieces; all of these are works protected by copyright and yet Google and other search engines index them to enable the rest of us to access them easily.

The books in question are already available for free public access via libraries. Why then should Google be barred from scanning them and enabling people to search them? Maybe there’s a difference here that I’m not seeing.

Update: Count Karl Auerbach among the people who take the opposite side as me, which is that search engines should stop indexing Web content without permission in addition to not indexing books.

Anybody know where I can download a Movable Type template that provides an RSS 2.0 feed of the comments that are posted to a weblog?

I was planning on creating such a template myself, but hopefully someone else has already done so.

Mark Schmitt has a post explaining why factcheck.org is unreliable. I’ve referred to that site on a number of occasions, and will probably stop doing so in the future. The site promotes itself as in impartial arbiter of the truth of various political claims, and seems to fail in that role. I’m glad someone is calling them out on it.

Derek Powazek has advance notice of some really cool features coming down the pike from Flickr.