Author: Peter

I’ve neglected to mention until now Emerald Austerberry’s December post about being blogged about after interviewing bloggers, and how her feature article wasn’t a solo effort. In my post I didn’t mention the detailed followup call I received from one of the other RRJ staffers (whose name I can’t remember, sorry!) and I didn’t know about the involvement of so many others. Now that I’m editing and doing (light) fact-checking for a book on local history, I’m coming to understand just how hard those other jobs are.

Emerald obviously deserves a lot of credit for her research and writing, but I’m particularly glad to see the generous public acknowledgment she’s given her team.

Just wanted to say that… plus I couldn’t resist blogging about her blogging about me blogging about her writing about me blogging. 🙂

About three and a half years ago I published a first cut at what I called an XMDP-style Robot Profile. XMDP forms the basis of what are now known as microformats, so a few months after that post I created an example and a page on the Technorati developers wiki. Shortly after that the wiki was moved to its own domain and my robots-exclusion page with it.

Since then I’ve been sort of an absentee landlord; several people, including microformat maven Tantek Çelik, have contributed comments, but the profile itself hasn’t changed, or really garnered much attention. Regardless of that—and perhaps because of it—I recently released the document and all of my (few) contributions to the wiki in general into the public domain (it was previously under CC-BY), prompted by this post.

I hope that the proviso that any content added to the microformats wiki from here forward is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse means there will be more of a look at this pseudo-microformat. I haven’t seen other ideas (vendor-specific ones aside) take off, so I think it’s still an itch that needs to be scratched.

I’m currently involved, in one form or another, with the development or redevelopment of four websites. Every one of them is stalled in some way.

One, a simple reworking of an existing site, has received an exorbitant quote that’s in danger of being accepted.

One I’ve created myself from scratch, and I’m actually sort of proud of it. It’s completely live except for the home page, which redirects to one of the “social networking” sites, so in effect it doesn’t exist either… and still it’s the very first link for the subject out of the almost 2000 results that Google returns. That one’s been ready to go since Christmas, it’s just proven to be impossible to get the necessary people to review it, let alone approve of its publication; the way things have gone recently I’m wondering if I’ll ever be able to turn it on. Got an answer: nope.

I’ve offered to redevelop another—the live version of which has been dormant for two months—and I’ve even started building it “on spec” so it wouldn’t take as long to ramp up, but it’s been six weeks since I’ve heard anything about it. Movement today.

Worst of all, one is supposedly “live” but has been broken for over a month: links to the new functionality—which were the entire reason for the redevelopment—are pointing to an application that’s completely missing, a big step down from the incomplete version that was present the last time I was able to see it.

If I had more hair, I’d have less of it today.