TeleRead blog 

If you're interested in ebooks, David Rothman always has lots of news about them and sensible things to say.

Jack's are better 

I said there should be. There already are Jack Bauer jokes.

Suggestion for Ben Barren 

He's putting together an unconference that might combine with an event for women bloggers, and mentions contacting someone about use of the Blogher name.

I'd have someone else make the approach. I'm not tight with the group, just speaking for myself, and I know that if I checked Ben out on the web and saw his blog for the first time, I'd be put off by the cheesecake.

Not saying he doesn't have the right to do that on his blog or that he shouldn't do whatever he wants, but he should be aware there's a cost. It's going to close some doors for him.

Turning tables 

Hey, I think I'll decorate some of my posts with some eye candy, even if the pics don't illustrate the topic. It'll be fun! Everybody should like it!

Didn't have to tell me that 

By way of businesspundit.com, a survey of self-employed Brits shows they work harder, get paid less and enjoy their work more.

Rob asks why don't more businesses incorporate entrepreneurial type positions into their org charts. Creating positions wouldn't do it, I don't think. The key is attitude among supervisors. Do they let employees have the flexibility of self-employed people, or get all worried that they'll lose control? Are they willing to give intrapreneurs their heads (no matter where they are situated on the chart), or put everybody in the same harness because it's "fair."

I always tell my bosses I'm a like a wild horse that can be tamed to a certain extent, but I'll run faster and better for you if you don't try to completely domesticate me.

Hey! Somebody should promote reading Black Beauty as a management text!

No, even better: it's in the public domain, so I'll publish it with the original text, but decorate it with photos or illustrations of workers as the horse, bridled up with their heads forced high for show, getting whipped, being let out to run free in the pasture.

Hee! 

Dave's still thinking about that concert scene. Must have really got to him!

Maybe I'll put Humoresque in my queue to see what it's all about, though I don't care for Joan Crawford. Nothing to do with the Mommy Dearest stuff, I just never liked her looks. Forties actresses I like: Ingrid Bergman, Myrna Loy, Lauren Bacall, Gene Tierney.

1.0 site foundation 

See a post about Manila vs open source Frontier for the 1.0 site on the OPML volunteer space.

What's a scripter and what's a user? 

In the post about relating to the Frontier kernelpeople I mentioned that one kernel list leader sees scripters as their users. Speaking just for myself, I know the line between user and scripter is pretty blurry. In a Doc Searls sort of DIY IT way, I'm a developer. I couldn't write a script from scratch to save my soul, but 10 years ago, the first time I studied a guestbook script in Perl and managed to make a working survey form processing script from what I'd learned, I realized I was some kind of maker.

A real programmer might scoff at me for calling myself a developer, but by fooling around first with Perl and then PHP, taking off-the-shelf stuff and modifying and prettifying it, I can make things in my funny non-programmer way, and they work.

Somehow I'm thinking that the typical OPML user will be a non-programmer with varying degrees of geekly proficiency but a uniformly high degree of geekly proclivity.

Expression Engine templates are so flexible 

I've spent a good part of the week exposing some features of Expression Engine that we hadn't used before at work. I use EE to organize 14 different online publications using 6 different blog template groups, probably some 50 templates in all. (Nine of the newsletters are configured as a single blog, output by category for delivery in HTML e-mail.)

Here's a neat example of the template flexibility. I made this feed which is a little like a reading list, but it's straight RSS. It takes posts categorized under "fire" from three different publications: a weekly news alert for members, all nine special interest group newsletters, and a subscription newsletter for emergency responders.

You might call it a vertical topic feed.

Another neat thing I figured out this week was a way to search across all 14 periodicals, and when you click on a post on the results page, it's output in the graphics style of whichever publication it's from. Cool, huh?

There's a free version of EE now. Here's the comparison chart showing what's included in the different versions.

Just realized something about my vertical topic feed, could use some help 

Bloglines is showing full text for this feed generated by Expression Engine, but NewsRiver only shows headlines. I don't know from RSS elements -- I just let my blog software do it! Can anyone spot the problem?

Later: I'll bet it's the [content:encoded]