I've been messing around with three very different programs recently, looking to possibly move my weblog from Radio Userland to something more "friendly." Not that Radio isn't powerful; it certainly is. But I'm getting tired of it and it seems so "geeky," so cumbersome to change things. Still, a lot of the complexity is hidden away yet accessible. I'm just tired of it.

So I've been playing around with iWeb, Sandvox and Tinderbox. Of the three, iWeb is the simplest, friendliest and perhaps the least powerful. Sandvox resembles iWeb, but packs more flexibility in the range of things it does for a web log. Still in beta and still pretty buggy, though. Tinderbox packs more power than I've seen in almost any program I've used in the past. But it's also a lot more complex, a somewhat cousin of the late Lotus Agenda. Minus the MS DOS prompt, of course.

I'm not sure what the outcome of these explorations will be. It's fun trying new stuff; really fun comparing programs that are so different in what they can do and how they do it. Perhaps I'll post this to all three and see how they look. (Make that four -- Working in Movement, my radio, too.)

Sometimes blogging software is like potato chips - hard to stop once you've started. The new bag of chips is Wordpress, and the resulting blog is here.

The Wordpress blog is my first dabble with server-side blog software. So far I like the convenience of it, being able to post from anywhere or any machine. And it does seems powerful and flexible.

On the other hand, this blog is based on Tinderbox, and seems to have almost unlimited flexibility. It is more difficult to get the stuff on the server, although Transmit 3 makes it pretty easy, at least for now. Tinderbox seems to export the whole blog every time; a Transmit option limits uploads to recently changed files. This is fine now, but what happens when there's a year or more of posts? Not sure how to continue.

Been experimenting again with designs for this blog. The old style looked like this. The new one you see here results from lots of reading and trying things out, and from trying out the demo version of StyleMaster CSS editor.

If you're ever looking for way to fill up lots of time, give coding up style sheets and html documents a try.

I've moved this blog to a new server, which seems to be working OK so far. There's also a new design using CSS stuff I've learned, mainly from the clearly written books of Dan Cederholm. And there's a new content management system behind it all in Tinderbox: hard to learn, but man is it ever flexible.

This blog continues in the spirit of the original Working in Movement blog based on the Radio Userland software. Time to move on.

Blog Design Solutions is the book I've been hoping to find. As a recent convert to Wordpress, I'd been looking for a manual that could reveal it's workings and how to change them if I wanted. To be sure, there's lots of Wordpress stuff online, but I've been finding myself working pretty hard to dig out the useful bits. It's probably because I'm not versed in PHP, mySql, or really much on anything on the server side.

Enter Blogging Design Solutions. There's a chapter on Wordpress that takes a lot of the mystery out of playing around with themes, markup and exactly how the damn thing works. Very useful and that alone is worth the price of the book.

But the real value for me was the clearly written explanation of how to get Apache, mySql, PHP and even myPHPadmin running on my local machine. That's allowed me to put a copy of Wordpress locally so that I hack with it to my heart's content and not screw up the blog running on the server.

There are other chapters on Moveable Type, Expression Engine or Textpattern. And there's even a chapter on how to cobble together your own content management system.

Consensus Web Filters made a big impression on me. And it's not just me; there are lots and lots of links to that post all over the place. So when I stumbled across Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War, I was hungry for the information.

This article focuses on whether future collaborative-style news sites will depend more on human-edited or algorithmic sources. It pretty much picks algorithms over meat. Sites like Digg and its ilk depend heavily on submissions from web surfers.

But it seems the filtering services offered by these sort of sites are both too broadly and too narrowly focused at the same time. Mary Hodder of Attention Trust (a fascinating topic on its own) like the current sites, but thinks they're too narrowly focused:

"Digg and Memeorandum are definitely an order of magnitude better than anything we got from any top-down news organization, but when I look at them, I see all the things that are missing," said Hodder, CEO of the video aggregation startup Dabble. "Digg and Memeorandum are catching one slice, and it’s fantastic and a total breath of fresh air, because it's not The New York Times or the L.A. Times. But it's still only one slice. If you are really going to nail this, you have to have thousands of slices."

The gist of her argument is the limitation imposed by submissions from a limited group, and suggests than many more perspectives need to be taken into consideration for the filters to be really useful.

Almost to support the algorithmic approach, I checked out a new filter mentioned in the article, Tailrank. When you join Tailrank, you submit a list of feeds you've been reading. The sites secret recipe shakes and bakes though them to make a constantly-updated customized list of recommendations. Though the algorithm isn't revealed, it obviously depends on links to blogs; the more links, the higher the rank, probably.

A drop down menu on the user's page lets you select the number of links to use for a filter (this is after you've signed up for a free membership). When I selected 2 links, Tailrank returned 136 blog posts, 8 links 28 articles and so forth. So it was a little ironic that when I set the filter to use the maximum number of links (35), it turned up just one article: Consensus Web Filters.

The developer of AppZapper for the Mac is running a promo today. Mention the app on your blog, post it to the comment section on their site, and they take 5 cents off the price. The idea is to get 259 mentions today so the software will be free.

I've been using the demo version that gives you 5 free zaps before you have to pony up the US $12.95 price. It's pretty useful; a real time saver. And the cool icon alone is worth having.