phil ringnalda

Looks like people got busy again last week, after several weeks of not much happening:

Amidst a busy week, Mark Paschal notes what a pain it is when you release something with a complete showstopper bug, and nobody says word one about it. Been there, hated that. Either nobody at all is using your stuff, or if it doesn’t work first try they don’t care enough to even mention it to you, or they are afraid of you. None of those is a good thing. If you download something, and it doesn’t seem to work as advertised, even after you read the instructions, be kind: tell the developer. You may or may not get results, but if you save someone the grief of releasing something, and finding weeks later that it doesn’t work at all, it’s well worth the few seconds it takes to send an email.

Shannon continued her Movable Type conversion campaign, bringing Kathleen into the fold.

Amongst various imbroglios about whether being a rude bastard at conferences is a good thing or not, and whether it’s ethical to link for cookies, Shelley‘s chapters (and all the rest, yadda yadda) of the O’Reilly weblogging book were posted for technical review. Looks like I missed the comment period, but since the ‘Bird promised to run any weblogging articles by me for comment, I figure I can still sneak my comments in directly, despite missing Nat’s aggregation phase.

From the looks of status.blogger.com, Ev’s working on some long-standing Blog*Spot annoyances: availability, quirky permalinks, unreliable behavior while changing subdomains or deleting blogs (“maybe it’s available, maybe not, maybe you can just change to someone else’s subdomain”). I don’t know about other people’s priorities, but my next choice would be the BlogThis situation: the IE context-menu version that only needs a tiny change to actually work in IE6 (last month, 458 people downloaded one of my bloated Windows installation programs, just so they wouldn’t have to edit their registry to make the change manually: that’s just not good), the various Pro bookmarklet versions, scattered on various pages, the broken versions in the new help system…. In a way it’s a minor thing, but for a lot of people BlogThis is the difference between regular posting and rare posting, and it’s all so simple to fix.

Bah. I don’t have what it takes to catch up and blog at the same time. This post has been in progress for two hours now, and could be for another two. That’s why I’ve got my blogroll: they are all brilliant, and capable of amazing, amusing, and enlightening. Pop it up and start reading the ones you don’t already read. That’s what I’ll be doing.