Is it just me or is there an entire social structure evolving around Blogshares? Links go back and forth, and every blog is given a quantative value. Gifts are given, but for what reason? Is anything truly altruistic? What’s polite? Are there vested financial interests involved? As if the social world of blogs wasn’t delicate enough.

Anyway, my dilemma is two friends I own stock in have gotten dangerously high price to earning ratios. I bought stock in them as sort of a token of my appreciation, a way of saying “Hey buddy.” Because when you buy stock in somebody, you are essentially making a value statement about that person or blog. If you think someone is smart/funny/sexy/interesting then logically that person’s audience and linkage will grow, it’s just a matter of being discovered.

Ideally I would have stock in every person on my blogroll, and I would buy it and hold it, and buy more whenever I had the means to. However, that’s a terrible way to make any money on Blogshares, so I don’t know. I’m going to have to decide whether I’m playing socially or if I’m in it for the money.

The American Megatrends website is now table free and running on compliant XHTML 1.1 and CSS. Isn’t that a beautiful thing? Glancing through there are some places where the markup could be streamlined or more semantic, but considering there is a sole “webmaster/internet strategist/designer/developer” working on this, I don’t see it as a big issue that a few things slipped by. Plus a launch with full compliance! Also refreshing is the attention paid to accessibility.

It seems logical that a hardware manufacturer would immediately see the benefits of standards-based development, as that is something that has been thankfully prevalent in that sector for years now. I hope that other similar corporations will follow their lead, as anyone searching for obscure drivers on a late night knows how terrible some hardware sites are. Once using only wget (long story) I had to find a Linux driver (tough in and of itself) for an IDE controller. There is very little that could have made that experience better, but a site with easy-to-read code such as AMI has now certainly would have been a relief. Rack another up for MACCAWS.

You can now sumbit text to Acrobot with a click of a favelet. The Amazing Ian is doing great things over there, though the tool does have a ways to come. I’m hoping he’ll let me peek at the source so perhaps I can use parts of their approach to tidy up my PHP acronym function.

The sky has fallen.

Tantek and Jeffrey have both written quite nicely about handmade sites and aggregation, respectively. I’d like to address some of Tantek’s points first; since I am writing content management system (by his definition), I found his ideas particularly relevant.

First he lists a number of hand rollers, presumably as examples of the kind of “pushing the envelope” that he posits is easier without the burden of a content management system (even one that is designed specifically for the purpose of blogging). Let’s take a look at the list:

• Jeffrey Zeldman — The epitome of doing it by hand. He has a URL scheme that doesn’t change, a novel multi-level permalink system, and damn fine structure. No complaints here.
• Derek Powazek — Derek’s site, at least in its current iteration, is powered by Movable Type. Disqualified. 😉 {Fray} would have been a much better example, but even that is moving to a database-driven backend. (The Storyblog there is also MT powered.)
• Eric Meyer — Again, no complaints. In a perfect world he could lose the class on his permalink, style it through contextual selectors, and add rel="bookmark" but that’s a nitpick and I know it. Kudos to Eric.
• Brittney Gilbert — This looks hand done. Update: Tantek was right, a little to harsh here. Sorry! My intention was to say that, looking just at the code, this site does not push the markup and style envelope the way the other sites listed do. Does that make it bad? No. Read on.
• Simon Jessey — Nice. Added to bookmarks.
• David Baron — Not a whole lot going on here, looks like there are only a few posts per month. It seems very Tantek-influenced and well done, but with the frequency of his updates, I doubt that making his pages by hand is that much of a burden. Which brings us to my next point…

For the moment let’s look at hand-coding specifically in the realm of blogging, in its most general sense. In my view, for something to be a blog it really only needs permalinks and entries arranged in reverse chronological order. Feedback mechanisms– trackback, pingback, plain vanilla comments, a nice way to browse the archives, a search— are nice, but aren’t really required. Blogging (or whatever you’d like to call it) by hand requires discipline, and honestly few outside of the Çeliks and Zeldmans have what it takes to create a document for all time. Things like permalinks and archives are a pain to do manually; I know, I’ve tried.

There are some good reasons for doing a blog by hand, but I don’t think Tantek explicitly states the most important one. Lack of support from your host is not a good reason; there are too many options out there, from free and up. Along that same vein, cost should not be a barrier, as some of the very best systems out there are free (as in beer). Difficulty setting up shouldn’t be a problem either, as there are a number of people (including myself) who are familiar with a number of blogging systems and wouldn’t mind you setting up any one of them. Tantek comes closest when he likens what he does to a craft, implying that hand-coding his website is not merely a means but an end. Whatever you do should put as little as possible between yourself and whatever it is you love about creating your little corner of the independent web. This above all other things is the driving force behind WordPress, where my chief inspiration is myself, a lazy philosophy major. Tantek is happy writing the code for his page, just as I get a buzz typing in a box and having everything else happen automagically.

The question then becomes what makes Tantek happy about coding his site, not suppositions about the relative merits of hand coding something that could be easily automated. So what makes Tantek happy? I don’t know, but I can relate a story that might shed some light on it. At SxSW I had the pleasure of spending some time with Tantek and I got to see him update his site several times. (Watching people blog is fascinating in and of itself, because I’m convinced that everyone does it just a little differently.) Anyway when he met someone new Tantek would whip out his Powerbook and add that person to a list of people he had met so far at the conference. It was surprisingly fast, he could do it offline, and overall I got the feeling I was peeking behind the curtain of his web presence and seeing a well-oiled machine at work, the happy cogs of OS 9, his editor (BBEdit?), a Wifi card, and a simple FTP program all spinning away in what could only be described as a highly evolved process. It rocked my world; a process so radically different from my own, yet if we had raced, it would have been close.

I’m sure Zeldman is the same way. I’m sure of very few things in life, but I know that he wouldn’t still be doing what he’s doing if he didn’t enjoy it. So I guess in some sense, I’m a blogging hedonist. Do what makes you happy.

Just to clarify, I’m referring to coding by hand specifically for blogging, which I think is a tad daft, and not general hand-coding web pages, which I practice because there is no tool out there to my liking. If there were a perfect tool I still might not use it, but I’d definitely give it a try. However, in any hand-coding situation, you still shouldn’t make things any harder on yourself than need be. Noel Jackson uses Texturize with PHP’s output buffer to add typographic niceties on the fly to pages he hand codes. I’ve started doing this myself and it saves a tremendous amount of time, and it’s terribly simple to use. With two lines of PHP I was able to update a 450-page site, something that would have taken hours to do manually. (Not to mention us poor PC folk don’t have access to Dean Allen’s scrumptious Preflight Cruncher.) I’ve written similar tools for acronyms, line breaks, and pretty much any other mundane task that can be easily codified.

Moving on…

I agree wholeheartedly with Jeffrey on the potential for aggregation to steal the soul of a site. Recently on my syndication page I included a quote:

Q: If you offered an RSS feed, I could read your stuff without visiting your site.

A: If you stored your groceries on the sidewalk, we could eat your food without sitting across the table from you.

That’s classic Zeldman, complete with the famous Playboy-inspired editorial “we” that we so dearly wish we could pull off too. That was then, and he’s obviously trying to be more diplomatic this time around, yet the thrust is the same. I have debated removing my feeds several times, but ultimately my ego won out. There are several people who simply wouldn’t read this site if it wasn’t available in a syndicated format, and my desire for readership—to be able to look at my stats and know I’m not speaking into a void—is greater than whatever it is inside me that wants my writing to be appreciated in the context of my site. Christine says she comments more since she started using an aggregator. Besides, I try to remind my RSS readers several times a week that they’re missing out on something. It’s “Nice. But not the same.” I haven’t seen any unbiased studies that compare the effects of RSS on readership and such, and on a personal level it’s hard because RSS stats tend to be inflated due to the automated nature of their updating.

I think a laissez-faire attitude will eventually prevail. I can primp and preen my design all I want, but when it comes down to the basics all my code is merely a suggestion, and the interpretation of that is at the whim of whatever user-agent is knocking at the door. I question whether or not RSS is the best format for this sort of thing, but it seems to be quite good at what it does. RSS boils away the fluff and leaves just the meat, but what sort of meal is that?

I just stuck a fork in Texturize and I’m ready to integrate it fully with WordPress. I’m very satisfied with the speed and functionality of this latest version. Not much in way of feature changes, except for one I think is pretty significant.

The Q tag would be great if it weren’t for Internet Explorer’s lacking in the realm of CSS generate content. (See Hixie’s scathing remarks for a critical look at IE.) Anyway this is the first automagic quote curlifier to do this (cue 15 corrections) though I’m sure Textile and SmartyPants won’t be far behind. The great thing about this technique is it lets you markup semantically meaningful quotes in your writing without losing a majority of your audience. Even better it would be trivial to put some simple browser detection and send the markup to browsers that get it. What a concept, using browser detection for good and not evil. This post is the first one where I’m using this technique. Hope the sky doesn’t fall. Update: It didn’t.