Metapost: So close, yet so far…

25 September 2006

I was so close to having the next installment of the free culture publication series ready to post for you tonight, but it needs some work, and I need to go to bed and get up early for work tomorrow. Too many people know about this thing for me to call in sick on its account. :-)

Meanwhile, I have a new entry at Free Software Magazine. I’m much happier with this one over last week’s and hope you’ll check it out.

Thanks for visiting!

(And while you’re here, why not subscribe through RSS or email if you haven’t already? I’d love to proudly display my FeedBurner subscriber count, but may need more than a dozen subscribers before I can do that. Then again, maybe I’ll display it from the start. I’m interested in quality more than quantity, and I’ll be proud to brag about the dozen or so fine people that are currently subscribed. That’s if I decide I want more gewgaws on the site. I’d like to keep the blog bling–blong?–to a minimum.)

(Warning! There is a problem with WordPress blogs and the FeedBurner email service. In plain text messages all of the quotes and apostrophes and en and em dashes get stripped out because of the way WordPress encodes them. They’ll probably have a workaround for this eventually, although I would sooner come up with some other way to get the news out for email if many people sign up. Would hate for you to suffer on my behalf. HTML email works much better, although I’m not a big fan of it myself. You’d lose a lot with plain text so I’d only receive it as a last resort.)

Vote! Do you want to see the FeedBurner count?

Here’s your chance to have a say in movingtofreedom.org policy. You can’t complain if you don’t vote! Vote “yes” to satisfy your curiosity about my paltry subscription base, or just say “no” to blong proliferation.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 25 September 2006 at 12:37 am
filed under meta

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Comments

I vote “no” to “blong”. Avoiding clutter helped catapult Google to glory, which should tell you something.

I also recommend dumping the link to Copyfight. It’s really gone to pot of late. For months the rate of addition of new material has been declining, to the point that it’s now abysmal (maybe one new post in a given week), and there have been technical problems that developed, but were not fixed (even when pointed out) — the “remember me” feature (which I note is lacking here) quit working (but wasn’t removed, either) and their “blinks” started to always show as having zero comments, however many they actually had.

But the final straw is censorship(!) — they changed something recently so all comments go through moderation, rather than appearing immediately, and to make matters worse, began to reject the vast majority of (non-link-spam) comments, including all from anonymizer IPs (such as The Cloak). They also seem to have blackholed at least one large Canadian ISP, without explanation or even acknowledgement, and which from what I’ve been able to determine is the broadband monopoly in the capital city(!) and large chunks of the surrounding area.

Whether this is Copyfight or their host, Corante, misbehaving, I don’t know; but it probably doesn’t matter. (Corante has a feedback form, and messages with valid return emails sent using it are consistently ignored, so I’m guessing it’s Corante.) But Corante can’t explain why the number of contributors has dropped to one rather infrequent poster, or why Copyfight won’t move to a new host even given the growing evidence that its current one is past its sell-by date…

Posted by Nemo on 25 September 2006 at 6:14 am

Maybe I need to follow Stephen Colbert’s lead and have “on notice” and “dead to me” link sections. :-)

Posting frequency isn’t critical to me, I think I’d keep linking to Question Copyright even if new posts dried up completely, as long as they host The Promise of a Post-Copyright World, for which I’m very grateful.

I appreciate your feedback. I’d like to keep my links section somewhat dynamic and plan on adding and removing links regularly.

Posted by Scott Carpenter on 25 September 2006 at 10:18 pm

Seems that comment posting works again. Thanks.

Also, that “remember me” is actually always on, rather than missing, here. :)

I am saddened by the recent decline on Copyfight. Reluctantly deleted my own bookmark recently. It’s not just the current state but the trend, steadily downwards; Question Copyright seems to be nearly new and with (at least right now) only one author, whereas Copyfight is (or was) coblogged by several.

I notice the link lists (at least the Alpha one) seems to rearrange randomly on every page load — interesting.

Any idea if a standard-issue generic PC PSU will fit in a somewhat dated Compaq Presario 6000, by the way? I hear those (and HP, now merged; also Dell) don’t always have standard-sized parts. If I can revive the dead box it would make a serviceable Ubuntu test-bed…

Posted by Nemo on 26 September 2006 at 2:51 pm

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