Category: Media

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Live Publishing in MT 3.1

Beyond all the talk about big-picture, tectonic vectors of social media that came out of last week’s BlogOn conference, there were a few intriguing technical highlights. Most interesting to me was Ben and Mena’s preview of some of the new features in MT 3.1 (Mena’s entry there doesn’t include details yet, but stay tuned).

MT is database-driven, but generates static HTML pages, on the theory that this method reduces overall server load. With high-traffic sites, this is undoubtedly true — build a page once and serve it a million times without having to make repeated database requests. But the penalty for this model is that rebuild times can be annoying, depending on factors like CPU speed and current load, and the number of index templates set to auto-update. I’ve seen page builds take anywhere from 3 to 60 seconds, depending on circumstances. This becomes a real problem when you have multiple popular MT installations on a single machine. If one user updates a page while people are commenting on other blogs at the same time, CPU contention can get hairy for a while (especially when the comment spam bots are hitting multiple blogs simultaneously). Not to mention the fact that simple comment posting really should be as immediate as it is on any discussion board (it’s one thing to force a rebuild on the site author, quite another to make your readers sit through it).

But wait, there’s a database sitting behind MT — what in the architecture forces this static build model? Nothing at all. As Mena demonstrated last Friday, in MT 3.1 you’ll be able to check a “Live build” checkbox, modify a couple of MT tags in your templates, and switch your site to live/dynamic page generation.

The “WordPress” exodus is basically about two things: 1) Philosophical licensing differences (i.e. open source religion) and 2) Live page generation. There goes half the argument for moving to WP.

The interesting twist is that MT has always been a perl-based engine, while the live updating is PHP-based. So MT 3.1 will support inline PHP — write your own, download modules, drop them in place…. this is going to open up the universe of 3rd party MT plugin development immensely. Many of us have been using inline PHP with MT for years, but now we’ll have actual MT tags that make PHP calls.

I’d love to see some metrics comparing the build models: total distributed CPU load for one static build plus a million static requests, vs. a million dynamic requests. Then see how that compares with just a thousand pages, or 10. Deciding just how much traffic best justifies one publishing method or the other should generate some interesting case studies.

Music: José Feliciano :: Just a Little Bit of Rain
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Tivo, RSS, Gluttony

We recently purchased Tivo for the house.* Like many users, we got Tivo not because we’re TV junkies, but because we don’t have time for TV. When we do sit down to watch, we want to spend less time, and we want to watch better TV. For the most part, the formula is working – we’re no longer spending a third of our time watching (or trying to navigate around) commercials, and we’re not watching whatever crap happens to be on once the boy is down and the dishes done, just to enjoy some well-earned veg time.

But there’s an unanticipated consequence: Suddenly we have a library of shows we like at our fingertips, always ready to watch. As a result, there’s suddenly the desire to watch more TV, not less. Oooo! All in the Family re-runs! Let’s stay up! That’s not how it was supposed to work.

It struck me that this phenomenon is exactly like the backlash against RSS that some people are experiencing. At first, RSS feels like a great time saver — I can skim 10 sites in the time it used to take to skim one. But RSS readers make it so easy to harvest lots of great content that you have this tendency not to save time, i.e. to move on and go do something else after your daily news gulp, but to spend more time overwhelming yourself with information.

Who can eat just three M&Ms? The tantalizing aggregation of desirable content that Tivo and RSS readers provide only gives you the illusion of saving time; in truth, most of us are seduced by the overabundance that accompanies aggregation, and merely dig ourselves deeper into the content hole. Aggregation lends itself to gluttony.

The key to dealing with content overload is not just in finding better tools to manage the flow, it’s knowing when to get up and walk away.

* We’re feeding the Tivo via antenna, still not willing to pay $50+/month for cable** when we would only want a couple of extra channels; the inability to purchase cable channels on an a la carte basis should be a case for the feds. While there are some good arguments explaining why you can’t just buy the channels you want, it’s still an abuse of monopoly, as I see it).

** Basic cable is only $14/month, but we already get 90% of what we’d get with basic via antenna. We do have a reception issue with the antenna that we’d like to improve upon (most local stations are transmitted from San Francisco, to the west, except for NBC, which comes from San Jose, to the south; it’s tough to make one antenna receive from both directions happily without an antenna rotator, so we might end up doing basic cable for the duration of the Olympics at least).

Music: Stevie Wonder :: All Day Sucker
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Printed

Wired printed my letter to the editor on the ridiculousness of calling RSS a “push” technology. July 2004 issue (12.07).

Update: I have come up with what I think is a fair definition of “push” :

A) The content provider initiates the transmission

B) In order to do that, the content provider knows
1) That you want the transmission
2) Something about you – at least your address

RSS satisfies neither of these criteria.

Music: Yo La Tengo :: Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House
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MT3

Spent much of the day upgrading the J-School’s MT installation to 3.0d, and experimenting with comment moderation + TypeKey. Since my bitter MT3 Sting post a few weeks ago, Six Apart has released an educational pricing model that turned out to be perfect for us. We ended up purchasing a site license that will cover as many blogs as we need (the previous pricing model looked prohibitive for our 17 blogs and 270 users).

My first attempt to get up and running with MT3’s comment control features on birdhouse was a bust, but I know realize that A) I needed deeper changes to comment templates than I had made and B) TypeKey was having indigestion that night, causing authentication to fail. Today’s experiments were smooth as glass, and I was once again impressed at how clean Six Apart’s code and methodologies are. No, we didn’t get the raft of features we were looking forward to, but they’ve done an amazing job on what they did release.

I’m flip-flopping re: questions of true open source (WordPad, etc.) vs. “free enough.” The diveintomark piece makes an excellent case for why hitching your wagon to a commercial entity leaves you vulnerable to tectonic licensing shifts. But yesterday I read Jay Allen’s Collective Deep Breath, which makes the counter-argument just as convincingly — exceptional software is worth paying for. Great developers are hard to find, their efforts deserve reward, and users benefit by supporting them.

The parallel for me of course is to how BeOS users saw the world when both BeOS and Linux looked like universes of equal potential. Those of us who used both systems knew that Linux on the desktop was a miserable joke compared to BeOS. But that was an impossible point to make to the open source advocates. In the end, they were right in one sense — we hitched our horses to a commercial wagon, and eventually all the wheels fell off. But in another sense, we were right — we were using a system that was in many ways better on the desktop than Linux is even today. Be’s commercial backing brought BeOS a level of cohesion and vision the open source community just hasn’t been able to muster (and of course the excellence of Mac OS X on the desktop compared to Linux reinforces this point).

That’s how some of my WordPress experiments felt – Hey, wow, this is cool, and free to boot. But some of the edges were so rough that I was put off (for example, the image upload + thumbnailing + popup window) features were just pathetic compared to Movable Type’s. Part of me wants to rewrite WP’s image upload functions and give my changes to the community. The other part of me is saying, “With what time? Just pay Six Apart their small bounty and get on with your life.”

At this point I’m leaning more toward sticking with MT on birdhouse as well (though I am still interested in WP to eliminate rebuilds, though that question is separate from licensing and philosophical aspects).

Music: David Thomas and Wooden Birds :: My Town
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MovableType 3 Sting

Completely sick of the comment spammers. MT-Blacklist is great at what it does, but only works after a string has been blacklisted, so every morning brings a heap of new garbage, “flies buzzing around my eyes, blood on my saddle.” Is the only viable long-term solution comment registration? To get that, you have to move to MovableType 3.0.

The J-School has been looking forward to MT3 for a long time, hoping for new features that would make it easier to manage the 17 blogs and 260 authors (with ~50 new authors added per semester) we currently support. What we didn’t anticipate was the new licensing scheme that could not only become prohibitively expensive, but a logistical nightmare as we try to track and pay for licenses for each new author, semester to semester. diveintomark has an excellent piece on why the “free enough” approach MT takes isn’t enough. Even if there’s a free version, tie yourself to a corporation and you’re subject to all their whims, prat falls, and unfortunate licensing decisions. Unless SixApart responds soon to my query on custom licensing, we’ll either be moving on to WordPress, a homebrew PHP/MySQL solution, or all of our blogs will be integrated into whatever CMS I choose for the rest of the J-School site this summer.

The licensing issue doesn’t apply to birdhouse — SixApart still offers a free version for non-commercial purposes. Disappointingly, MT3 offers almost no new features beyond comment registration. That’s okay – I’ve seen software revved to major numbers for minor changes plenty of times, and I wanted some real solution to the comment spam problem. So I ran the upgrade tonight. A few technical misfires (apparently not uncommon) — finally succeeded by installing the full version rather than the upgrade and then running the database upgrade script. Signed up for TypeKey, and received a token to drop into the new and improved back-end. Added the new DynamicComments directive to mt.cfg. But wait — after integrating the new comment registration tag into my templates, things fell apart. Not only were existing comments hidden from view, but when users clicked on the “Sign up to comment” link, they were told that birdhouse was not registered with TypeKey (it was). Screw it. Backpedal. Restore the original MT directory; fortunately it still worked, even though the upgrade script had modified some database structures.

MT3 is almost certainly a no-go for the J-School, and I’m increasingly skeptical about using it for birdhouse. There seems to be an MT –> WordPress exodus afoot, and I’ll probably join it. Lots of content out there on migration strategies.

Music: The Mekons :: Funeral
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Big Bird Flies Right

The common take is that NPR is the only bastion of left-leaning media in a field of right-dominated network and cable corporate conglomerates. But that view doesn’t stand up to the facts, according to a new report by FAIR, which found more right-wing sources and airtime than left on the network. In a time when it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find balanced coverage anywhere on TV, even PBS is becoming toxic.

“Republicans not only had a substantial partisan edge,” according to a report accompanying the survey, “individual Republicans were NPR’s most popular sources overall, taking the top seven spots in frequency of appearance. ” In addition, representatives of right-of-center think tanks outnumbered their leftist counterparts by more than 4-to-1, FAIR reported.

And PBS’ legendary editorial independence is now being threatened by the fact that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – whose job it is to shield public broadcasting from ideological prssure — is now becoming subject to just that via right-wing appointees

CPB’s primary mission has always been to serve as a “heat shield” between government and public broadcasting, protecting programming from government interference.  But instead of serving as a “heat shield,” CPB now is the agent of ideological interference.  And public broadcasting’s news and public affairs programs in particular will be harmed if conservative members of the CPB have their way. The New Yorker’s expose, “Big Bird Flies Right,” documents several disturbing trends.

For example, CPB’s recent decision to fund two conservative-driven shows and cut Bill Moyer’s program from 60 to 30 minutes.

Music: Tom Verlaine :: The Deep Dark Clouds
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RSS Is Push?

Remember the famous Wired Magazine feature declaring “Push” the next big thing? (March 1997). Push was going to be so significant it would kill the browser:

“The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance. In its place…”

The feature is famous both for exemplifying Wired’s tendency to make huge, sweeping declarations and for being so painfully wrong (the public ignored push, PointCast died a painful death, and Wired scraped egg from face).

Now, seven years later (Wired 12.05, not online), the magazine has the cojones to run a story “The Return of Push,” asserting that the idea’s time has finally come. Author Gary Wolf makes the case that the rapid rise of RSS has finally proved Wired right. There’s only one problem: RSS is a pull technology. Just sent this letter to rants@wiredmag.com:

”
Gary Wolf is right about one thing (“The Return of Push,” Wired 12.05): RSS is fulfilling some of the original promise of push. But that doesn’t mean RSS is an example of a push technology. If I leave a plate of cookies on my doorstep and invite you to come take one every hour, would you then say that I brought you cookies?

In order to call something “push,” the publisher has to willfully send it to the user (and, ipso facto, to know something about that user). Thus, an email newsletter is an example of a push technology. In contrast, RSS “feeds” sit on a plain vanilla web server waiting for an anonymous client to come pick them up. This is plain old http and apache we’re talking about – no magic “push” protocol makes RSS delivery different from the rest of the Web. I request a web page; I pull it toward me. RSS works exactly the same way. If RSS is a push technology, then so is Tim-Berner’s Lee’s original web.

RSS probably is the Net’s next big thing. But it sure isn’t push.
”

Music: The Cramps :: Muleskinner Blues
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Deconstructing Echo Chambers

Apparently I missed the supposedly rampant “echo chamber” meme that was going around at the height of the Dean campaign — the notion that bloggers only pal around with people who feel and see the same way they do, thus reinforcing — rather than challenging — their own world views. David Weinberger does a brilliant job tearing down the myth of the echo chamber as either A) real or B) as necessarily a bad thing. What some people call the echo chamber, Weinberger calls bedrock: the “planks of conversation.”

Besides, we humans — echo chamber participants or echo chamber castigators — rarely engage in deep, meaningful and truly open conversation with people who fundamentally disagree with us. I have never debated a neo-Nazi, and if I did, I wouldn’t do so with an open mind: No way is that son of a bitch going to convince me that he’s right. No apologies. Being grounded in some beliefs is a condition for having any beliefs. And that has nothing to do with echo chambers.

Thanks Pam.

Music: Butthole Surfers :: Edgar
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World in the Balance

Amazing NOVA: World in the Balance, on global forces of population, affluence and poverty, consumption and production, disease, etc. Casts a very wide net, but somehow manages not to treat subjects superficially; instead looking at the interplay of these forces, e.g. the rise of China as a nation of SUV-driving affluent polluters just like Americans: We export our culture to them, generating demand for a lifestyle that never existed there, they respond by exporting toxic pollution back across the sea to us in volumes that will soon dwarf our own export of same to the rest of the world. Well worth catching, look for reruns.

Music: David Bowie :: I’m Afraid Of Americans