Now Using OpenID

September 22, 2008 | etbe

When this post goes live I will have had OpenID running on my blog for 24 hours.

My first attempt to do so was not successful. The theme I use does not support the option of displaying that the website URL is checked for OpenID (a feature of the WordPress OpenID Plugin [1]. Someone who’s comments I desire complained that the unexpected prompt for an OpenID password when they entered a comment caused them to abort the submission process and I therefore lost their comment – so I immediately disabled the plugin. I think that person was being a little unreasonable, it seems to me that when you add OpenID to your web site you should be expecting it to be checked for such things! But in spite that I felt obliged to do what was necessary to avoid confusion.

Yesterday I reenabled OpenID, my first effort was to hack my theme to have a separate entry field for the OpenID URL which appears to work (this is documented in the OpenID plugin). The next step was to enable the URL to be used for OpenID and hack the theme to make it note how it’s being used. This appears to work well and should avoid the objections.

One factor that gave me an incentive to work on this is this post about Taking a Stand to Promote OpenID [2]. That’s the type of person who I would like to have commenting on my blog.

I’m also working on my own OpenID authentication solution and I may consider taking the same stand.

RSS Aggregation Software

September 16, 2008 | etbe

The most commonly installed software for aggregating RSS feeds seems to be Planet and Venus (two forks of the same code base). The operation is that a cron job runs the Python program which syndicates a list of RSS feeds and generates a static web page. Of course the problems start if you have many feeds as polling each of them (even the ones that typically get updated at most once a week) can take a while. My experience with adding moderate numbers of feeds (such as all the feeds used by Planet Debian [1]) is that it can take as much as 30 minutes to poll them all – which will be a problem if you want frequent updates.

Frequent polling is not always desired, it means more network load and a greater incidence of transient failures. Any error in updating a feed is (in a default configuration) going to result in an error message being displayed by Planet, which in a default configuration will result in cron sending an email to the sysadmin. Even with an RSS feed being checked every four hours (which is what I do for my personal Planet installations) it can still be annoying to get the email when someone’s feed is offline for a day.

Now while there is usually no benefit in polling every 15 minutes (the most frequent poll time that is commonly used) there is one good reason for doing it if you can only poll. The fact that some people want to click reload on the Planet web page every 10 minutes to look for new posts is not a good reason (it’s like looking in the fridge every few minutes and hoping that something tasty will appear). The good reason for polling frequently is to allow timely retraction of posts. It’s not uncommon for bloggers to fail to adequately consider the privacy implications of their posts (let’s face it – professional journalists have a written code of ethics about this, formal training, an editorial board, and they still get it wrong on occasion – it’s not easy). So when a mistake is made about what personal data should be published in a blog post it’s best for everyone if the post can be amended quickly. The design of Planet is that when a post disappears from the RSS feed then it also disappears from the Planet web page, I believe that this was deliberately done for the purpose of removing such posts.

The correct solution to the problem of amending or removing posts is to use the “Update Services” part of the blog server configuration to have it send an XML RPC to the syndication service. That can give an update rapidly (in a matter of seconds) without any polling.

I believe that a cron job is simply the wrong design for a modern RSS syndication service. This is no criticism of Planet (which has been working well for years for many people) but is due to the more recent requirements of more blogs, more frequent posting, and greater importance attached to blogs.

I believe that the first requirement for a public syndication service is that every blogger gets to specify the URL of their own feed to save the sysadmin the effort of doing routine URL changes. It should be an option to have the server act on HTTP 301 codes and record the new URL in the database. Then the sysadmin would only have to manage adding new bloggers (approving them after they have created an account through a web-based interface) and removing bloggers.

The problem of polling frequency can be mostly solved by using RPC pings to inform the server of new posts if the RPC mechanism supports removing posts. If removing posts is not supported by the RPC then every blog which has an active post would have to be polled frequently. This would reduce the amount of polling considerably, for example there are 319 blogs that are currently syndicated on Planet Debian, there are 60 posts in the feed, and those posts were written by 41 different people. So if the frequent polling to detect article removal was performed for active articles, given the fact that you poll the bloggers feed URL not the article that would only mean 41 polls instead of 319 – reducing the polling by a factor of more than 7!

Now even with support for RPC pings there is still a need to poll feeds. One issue is that feeds may experience temporary technical difficulty in sending the RPC as we don’t want to compel the authors of blog software to try and make the ping as reliable a process as sending email (if that was the requirement then a ping via email might be the best solution). The polling frequency could be implemented on a per-blog basis based on the request of the blogger and the blog availability and posting frequency. Someone who’s blog has been down for a day (which is not uncommon when considering a population of 300 bloggers) could have their blog polled on a daily basis. Apart from that the polling frequency could be based on the time since the last post. It seems to be a general pattern that hobby bloggers (who comprise the vast majority of bloggers syndicated in Planet installations) often go for weeks at a time with no posts and then release a series of posts when they feel inspired.

In terms of software which meats these requirements, the nearest option seems to be the the Advogato software mod_virgule [2]. Advogato [3] supports managing accounts with attached RSS feeds and also supports ranking blogs for a personalised view. A minor modification of that code to limit who gets to have their blog archived, and fixing it so that a modified post only has the latest version stored (not both versions as Advogato does) would satisfy some of these requirements. One problem is that Advogato’s method of syndicating blogs is to keep an entire copy of each blog (and all revisions). This goes against the demands of many bloggers who demand that Planet installations not keep copies of their content for a long period and not have any permanent archives. Among other things if there are two copies of a blog post then Google might get the wrong idea as to which is the original.

Does anyone know of a system which does better than Advogato in meeting these design criteria?

[1] http://planet.debian.org/
[2] http://www.advogato.org/proj/mod_virgule/
[3] http://www.advogato.org/

Not All Opinions Are Equal

September 13, 2008 | etbe

It seems to be a common idea by non-bloggers that the comment they enter on a blog is somehow special and should be taken seriously by the author of the blog (everyone is a legend in their own mind). In a recent discussion one anonymous commentator seemed offended that I didn’t take his comments seriously and didn’t understand why I would take little notice of an anonymous comment while taking note of a later comment on the same issue by the author of the project in question.

In most forums (and I use the term in the broadest way) an anonymous comment is taken with a weight that is close to zero. That doesn’t mean that it will be ignored, it just means that the requirement for providing supporting evidence or of having a special insight and explaining it is much greater.

One example of this is the comment weighting system used by Slashdot.org (AKA “/.”). The /. FAQ has a question “Why should I log in?” with the answer including “Posting in Discussions at Score:1 instead of Score:0 means twice as many people will see your comments” [1]. /. uses the term “Anonymous Coward” as the identification of users who are not logged in, this gives an idea of how they are regarded.

Advogato uses a rating method for blog posts which shows you only posts from blogs that you directly rank well or which match the trust metric (based on rankings of people you rank) [2].

I believe that the automated systems developed by /. and other online forums emulate to a some extent the practices that occur off-line. For any discussion in a public place a comment from someone who does not introduce themself (or gives an introduction that gives no reason to expect quality) will be treated with much less weight than one from someone who is known. When someone makes a comment their background will be considered by people who hear it. If a comment is entirely a matter of opinion and can not be substantiated by facts and logical analysis then the acceptance of the comment is solely based on the background of the author (and little things like spelling errors can count against the author).

Therefore if you want your blog comments to be considered by blog authors and readers you need to make sure that you are known. Using your full name is one way of not being as anonymous but most names are not unique on the Internet (I’ve previously described some ways of ensuring that you beat other people with the same name in Google rankings [3]). The person who owns the blog can use the email address that is associated with the comment to identify the author (if it’s a real email address and it’s known by Google). But for other readers the only option is the “Website” field. The most common practice is to use the “Website” field in the comment to store the URL of your blog (most blog comments are written by bloggers). But there is nothing stopping you from using any other URL, if you are not a blogger and want to write comments on blogs you could create a personal web page to use for the comments. If the web page you use for such purposes gives links to references as to your relevant experience then that would help. Someone who has skills in several areas could create a web page for each one and reference the appropriate page in their comment.

One problem we face is that it is very easy to lie on the net. There is no technical obstacle to impersonation on the net, while I haven’t seen any evidence of people impersonating others in an attempt to add credibility to blog comments I expect it’s only a matter of time before that happens (I expect that people do it already but the evidence of them getting caught has not been published anywhere that I’ve read). People often claim university education to add weight to their comments (usually in email but sometimes in blog comments too). One problem with this is that anyone could falsely claim to have a university degree and no-one could disprove their claim without unreasonable effort, another is that a university degree actually doesn’t mean much (lots of people remain stupid after graduating). One way in which adding a URL to a comment adds weight is that for a small web site the author will check a reasonable portion of the sites that link to them, so if someone impersonates me and has a link to my web site in the comment then there’s a good chance that I will notice this.

OpenID [4] has the potential to alleviate this by making it more difficult to forge an association with a web site. One thing that I am working on is enabling OpenID on all the web sites that are directly associated with me. I plan to use a hardware device to authenticate myself with the OpenID server (so I can securely enter blog comments from any location). I expect that it will become the standard practice that comments will not be accepted by most blogs if they are associated with a URL that is OpenID enabled unless the author of the comment authenticates themself via OpenID.

Even when we get OpenID enabled everywhere there is still the issue of domain specific expertise. While I am well enough known for my work on SE Linux that most people will accept comments about it simply because I wrote them, the same can not be said for most topics that I write about. When writing about topics where I am not likely to be accepted as an expert I try and substantiate my main points with external web pages. Comments are likely to be regarded as spam if they have too many links so it seems best to only use one link per comment – which therefore has to be on an issue that is important to the conclusion and which might be doubted if evidence was not provided. The other thing that is needed is a reasonable chain of deduction. Simply stating your opinion means little, listing a series of logical steps that led you to the opinion and are based on provable facts will hold more weight.

These issues are not only restricted to blog comments, I believe that they apply (to differing degrees) to all areas of online discussion.

Improving Blog Latency to Benefit Readers

August 31, 2008 | etbe

I just read an interesting post about latency and how it affects web sites [1]. The post has some good ideas but unfortunately mixed information on some esoteric technologies such as infiniband that are not generally applicable with material that is of wide use (such as ping times).

The post starts by describing the latency requirements of Amazon and stock broking companies. It’s obvious that stock brokers have a great desire to reduce latency, it’s also not surprising that Google and Amazon analyse the statistics of their operations and make changes to increase their results by a few percent. But it seems to be a widely held belief that personal web sites are exempt from such requirements. The purpose of creating content on a web site is to have people read it, if you can get an increase in traffic of a few percent by having a faster site and if those readers refer others then it seems likely to have the potential to significantly improve the result. Note that an increase in readership through a better experience is likely to be exponential, and an exponential increase of a few percent a year will eventually add up (an increase of 4% a year will double the traffic in 18 years).

I have been considering hosting my blog somewhere else for a while. My blog is currently doing about 3G of traffic a month which averages out to just over 1KB/s, peaks will of course be a lot greater than that and the 512Kb/s of the Internet connection would probably be a limit even if it wasn’t for the other sites onn the same link. The link in question is being used for serving about 8G of web data per month and there is some mail server use which also takes bandwidth. So performance is often unpleasantly slow.

For a small site such as mine the most relevant issues seem to be based around available bandwidth, swap space use (or the lack therof), disk IO (for when things don’t fit in cache) and available CPU power exceeding the requirements.

For hosting in Australia (as I do right now) bandwidth is a problem. Internet connectivity is not cheap in any way and bandwidth is always limited. Also the latency of connections from Australia to other parts of the world often is not as good as desired (especially if using cheap hosting as I currently do).

According to Webalizer only 3.14% of the people who access my blog are from Australia, they will get better access to my site if hosted in Australia, and maybe the 0.15% of people who access my blog from New Zealand will also benefit from the locality of sites hosted in Australia. But the 37% of readers who are described as “US Commercial” (presumably .com) and the 6% described as “United States” (presumably .us) will benefit from US hosting, as will most of the 30% who are described as “Network” (.net I guess).

For getting good network bandwidth it seems that the best option is to choose what seems to be the best ISP in the US that I can afford, where determining what is “best” is largely based on rumour.

One of the comments on my post about virtual servers and swap space [2] suggested just not using swap and referenced the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing) cloud service and the Gandi.net hosting (which is in limited beta and not generally available).

The Amazon EC2 clound service [3] has a minimum offering of 1.7G of RAM, 1EC2 Compute Unit (equivalent to a 1.0-1.2GHz 2007 Opteron or 2007 Xeon processor), 160G of “instance storage” (local disk for an instance) running 32bit software. Currently my server is using 12% of a Celeron 2.4GHz CPU on average (which includes a mail server with lots of anti-spam measures, Venus, and other things). Running just the web sites on 1EC2 Compute Unit should use significantly less than 25% of a 1.0GHz Opteron. I’m currently using 400M of RAM for my DomU (although the MySQL server is in a different DomU). 1.7G of RAM for my web sites is heaps even when including a MySQL server. Currently a MySQL dump of my blog is just under 10M of data, with 1.7G of RAM the database should stay entirely in RAM which will avoid the disk IO issues. I could probably use about 1/3 of that much RAM and still not swap.

The cost of EC2 is $US0.10 per hour of uptime (for a small server), so that’s $US74.40 per month. The cost for data transfer is 17 cents a GIG for sending and 10 cents a gig for receiving (bulk discounts are available for multiple terabytes per month).

I am not going to pay $74 per month to host my blog. But sharing that cost with other people might be a viable option. An EC2 instance provides up to 5 “Elastic IP addresses” (public addresses that can be mapped to instances) which are free when they are being used (there is a cost of one cent per hour for unused addresses – not a problem for me as I want 24*7 uptime). So it should be relatively easy to divide the costs of an EC2 instance among five people by accounting for data transfer per IP address. Hosting five web sites that use the same software (MySQL and Apache for example) should reduce memory use and allow more effective caching. A small server on EC2 costs about five times more than one of the cheap DomU systems that I have previously investigated [4] but provides ten times the RAM.

While the RAM is impressive, I have to wonder about CPU scheduling and disk IO performance. I guess I can avoid disk IO on the critical paths by relying on caching and not doing synchronous writes to log files. That just leaves CPU scheduling as a potential area where it could fall down.

Here is an interesting post describing how to use EC2 [5].

Another thing to consider is changing blog software. I currently use WordPress which is more CPU intensive than some other options (due to being written in PHP), is slightly memory hungry (PHP and MySQL), and doesn’t have the best security history. It seems that an ideal blog design would use a language such as Java or PHP for comments and use static pages for the main article (with the comments in a frame or loaded by JavaScript). Then the main article would load quickly and comments (which probably aren’t read by most users) would get loaded later.

Starting to Blog

August 13, 2008 | etbe

The best way to run a blog is to run your own blog server. This can mean running an instance on someone else’s web server (some ISPs have special hosting deals for bloggers on popular platforms such as WordPress), but usually means having shell access to your own server (I’ve previously written about my search for good cheap Xen hosting [1]).

There are platforms that allow you to host your own blog without any technical effort. Three popular ones are WordPress.com, LiveJournal.com, and Blogger.com. But they give you less control over your own data, particularly if you don’t use your own DNS name (blogger allows you to use their service with your own DNS name).

Currently it seems to me that WordPress is the best blog software by many metrics. It has a good feature set, a plugin interface with lots of modules available, and the code is free. The down-side is that it’s written in PHP and has the security issues that tend to be associated with large PHP applications.

Here is a good summary of the features of various blog server software [2]. One that interests me is Blojsom – a blog server written in Java [3]. The Java language was designed in a way that leads to less risk of security problems than most programming languages, as it seems unlikely that anyone will write a Blog server in Ada it seems that Java is the best option for such things. I am not planning to switch, but if I was starting from scratch I would seriously consider Blojsom.

But for your first effort at blogging it might be best to start with one of the free hosted options. You can always change later on and import the old posts into your new blog. If you end up not blogging seriously then using one of the free hosted services saves you the effort of ongoing maintenance.

Shared Context and Blogging

July 4, 2008 | etbe

One interesting aspect of the TED conference [1] is the fact that they only run one stream. There is one lecture hall with one presentation and everyone sees the same thing. This is considerably different to what seems to be the standard practice for Linux conferences (as implemented by LCA, OLS, and Linux Kongress) where there are three or more lecture halls with talks in progress at any time. At a Linux conference you might meet someone for lunch and start a conversation by asking “did you attend the lecture on X“, as there are more than two lecture halls the answer is most likely to be “no“, which then means that you have to describe the talk in question before talking about what you might really want to discuss (such as how a point made in the lecture in question might impact the work of the people you are talking two). In the not uncommon situation where there is an interesting implication of combining the work described in two lectures it might be necessary to summarise both lectures before describing the implication of combining the work.

Now there are very good reasons for running multiple lecture rooms at Linux conferences. The range of topics is quite large and probably very few delegates will be interested in the majority of the talks. Usually the conference organisers attempt to schedule things to minimise the incidence of people missing talks that interest them, one common way of doing so is to have conference “streams”. Of course when you have for example a “networking” stream, a “security” stream, and a “virtualisation” stream then you will have problems when people are interested in the intersection of some of those areas (virtual servers do change things when you are working on network security).

There seem some obvious comparisons between Planet installations (as aggregates of RSS feeds) and conferences (as aggregates of lectures). On Planet Debian [2] there has traditionally been a strong shared context with many blog posts referring to the same topics – where one person’s post has inspired others to write about similar topics. After some discussion (on blogs and by email) it was determined that there would be no policy for Planet Debian and that anyone who doesn’t want to read some of the content should filter the feed. Of course this means that the number of people who read (or at least skim) the entire feed will drop and therefore we lose the shared context.

Planet Linux Australia [3] currently has a discussion about the issue of what types of content to aggregate. Michael Davies has just blogged a survey about what types of content to include [4]. I think it’s unfortunate that he decided to name the post after one blogger who’s feed is aggregated on that Planet as that will encourage votes on the specific posts written by that person rather than the general issue. But I think it’s much better to tailor a Planet to the interests of the people who read it than to include everything and encourage readers to read a sub-set.

When similar issues were in discussion about Planet Debian I wrote about my ideas on the topic [5]. In summary I think that the Gentoo idea of having two Planet installations (one for the content which is most relevant and one for everything that is written by members) is a really good one. It’s also a good thing to have a semi-formal document about the type of content that is expected – this would be useful both for using a limited feed for people who go significantly off-topic and as a guideline for people who want to write posts that will be appreciated by the majority of the readers. Planet Ubuntu has a guideline, but it was not very formal last time I checked.

Finally in regard to short posts, they generally don’t interest me much. If I want to get a list of hot URLs then I could go to any social media site to find some. I write a list post at most once a month, and I generally don’t include a URL in the list unless I have a comment to make about it. I always try to describe each page that I link to in enough detail that if the reader can’t view it then they at least have some idea of what it is about (no “this is cool” or “this sucks” links).

Miro AKA DemocracyPlayer

May 10, 2008 | etbe

www.ted.com is a premier partner for the Miro player [1]. This is a free player for free online content, the site www.getmiro.com has the player for download, it has binaries for Mac OS/X, Windows, and Ubuntu as well as the source (GPL licensed), it is in Debian/Unstable. It supports downloading in a number of ways (including bittorrent) and can keep the files online indefinitely. A Debian machine connected to the net could be a cheap implementation of my watching while waiting idea for showing interesting and educational TV in waiting areas for hospitals etc [2]. When I first checked out the getmiro.com site it only seemed to have binaries for Mac OS/X and Windows. But now I realise that it’s been in Debian since 11 Sep 2007 under the name Miro and since 12 Jun 2006 under the name Democracyplayer. I have only briefly played with Miro (just checked the channel list) and it seems quite neat so far. I wish I had tried this years ago. Good work Uwe Hermann!

I hope that the Miro player will allow me to more easily search the TED archives. Currently I find the TED site painful to use, a large part of this is slow Javascript which makes each page take an unreasonable delay before it allows me to do anything. I am not planning to upgrade my laptop to a dual-core 64bit machine just to allow Firefox to render badly written web pages.

Biella recently wrote about the Miro player and gave a link to a documentary about Monsanto [3].

One thing I really like about this trend towards publishing documentaries on the net is that they can be cited as references in blog posts. I’ve seen many blog posts that reference documentaries that I can’t reasonably watch (they were shown on TV stations in other countries and even starting to try tracking them down was more trouble than it was worth). Also when writing my own posts I try and restrict myself to using primary sources that are easy to verify, this means only the most popular documentaries.

The Purpose of Planet Debian

April 21, 2008 | etbe

An issue that causes ongoing discussion is what is the purpose of a Planet installation such as Planet Debian [1]. The discussion usually seems to take the less effective form of what is “appropriate” content for the Planet or what is considered to be “abuse” of the Planet. Of course it’s impossible to get anything other than a rough idea of what is appropriate is the purpose is not defined, and abuse can only be measured on the most basic technical criteria.

My personal use of Planet Debian and Planet Linux Australia [2] is to learn technical things related to Linux (how to use new programs, tricks and techniques, etc), to learn news related to Linux, and to read personal news about friends and colleagues. I think that most people have some desire to read posts of a similar nature (I have received a complaint that my blog has too many technical posts and not enough personal posts), but some people want to have a Planet with only technical articles.

In a quick search of some planets the nearest I found to a stated purpose of a Planet installation was from the Wiki to document Planet Ubuntu [3] which says ‘Subscribed feeds ought to be at least occasionally relevant to Ubuntu, although the only hard and fast rule is “don’t annoy people”‘. Planet Perl [4] has an interesting approach, they claim to filter on Perl related keywords, I initially interpreted this to mean that if you are on their list of blogs and you write a post which seems to refer to Perl then it will appear – but a quick browse of the Planet shows some posts which don’t appear to match any Perl keywords. Gentoo has implemented a reasonable system, they have a Universe [5] configuration which has all blog posts by all Gentoo bloggers as well as a Planet installation which only has Gentoo related posts.

It seems to me that the a reasonable purpose for Planet Debian would be to have blog feeds which are occasionally specific to Debian and often relevant to Debian. Personal blog posts would be encouraged (but not required). Posts which are incomprehensible or have nothing to say (EG posts which link to another post for the sole purpose of agreeing or disagreeing) would be strongly discouraged and it would be encouraged to make links-posts rare.

Having two installations of the Planet software, one for posts which are specific to Debian (or maybe to Debian or Linux) and one for all posts by people who are involved with Debian would be the best option. Then people who only want to read the technical posts can do so, but other people can read the full list. Most blog servers support feeds based on tag or category (my blog already provides a feed of Debian-specific posts). If we were going to have a separate Planet installation for only technical posts then I expect that many bloggers would have to create a new tag for such posts (for example my posts related to Debian are in the categories Benchmark, Linux, MTA, Security, Unix-tips, and Xen) and the tag Debian is applied to only a small portion of such posts. But it would be easy to create a new tag for technical posts.

Ubuntu is also the only organisation I’ve found to specify conditions upon which blogs might be removed from the feed, they say: We reserve the right to remove any feed that is inaccessible, flooding the page, or otherwise interfering with the operation of the Planet. We also have the right to move clearly offensive content or content that could trigger legal action.

That is reasonable, although it would be good to have a definition for “flooding the page” (I suggest “having an average of more than two posts per day appear over the period of a week or having posts reappear due to changing timestamps”). Also the “could trigger legal action” part is a minor concern – product reviews are often really useful content on a Planet…

Some time ago my blog was removed from Planet Fedora for some reason. I was disappointed that the person who made that change didn’t have the courtesy to inform me of the reason for their action and by the fact that there is no apparent way of contacting the person who runs the Planet to ask them about it. Needless to say this did not encourage me to write further posts about Fedora.

If a blog has to be removed from a feed due to technical reasons then the correct thing to do is to inform the blogger of why it’s removed and what needs to be fixed before it can be added again.

If a blog is not meeting the content criteria then I expect that in most cases the blogger could be convinced to write more content that matches the criteria and tag it appropriately. Having criteria for some aspects of blog quality and encouraging the bloggers to meet the criteria can only improve the overall quality.

Currently there is a Planet installation on debian.net being recommended which is based on Planet Debian, but with some blogs removed (with no information available publicly or on debian-private as to what the criteria are for removing the blogs in question). It seems to me that if it’s worth using Debian resources to duplicate the Planet Debian then it should be done in a way that benefits readers (EG by going to the Planet vs Universe model that Ubuntu follows), and that if blogs are going to be removed from the feed then there should be criteria for the removal so that anyone who wants their blog to be syndicated can make whatever changes might be necessary.

[1] http://planet.debian.org/
[2] http://planet.linux.org.au/
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PlanetUbuntu
[4] http://planet.perl.org/
[5] http://planet.gentoo.org/universe/

Planets and Resignations

April 20, 2008 | etbe

Recently a Debian Developer resigned from a position of responsibility in the project by writing a blog post. I won’t name the DD or the position he resigned as I think that there are general issues which need discussion and specific examples will get in the way (everyone who is seriously involved will know who it is anyway – for those who don’t know, it’s not really exciting).

Also I think that the issue of the scope of a Planet installation is of wider importance than the Debian project, so it would be of benefit for outsiders who stumble upon this to see a discussion of general issues rather than some disagreements within the Debian project.

There has been some mild criticism of the DD in question for announcing his resignation via a blog post. I don’t think that this is appropriate. In the absence of evidence to the contrary I’ll assume that the DD in question announced his resignation to the relevant people (probably the team he worked with and the Debian Project Leader) via private email which was GPG signed (if he indeed intended to formally resign).

The resignation of one DD from one of the many positions of authority and responsibility in the project is not going to have a great affect on the work of most DDs. Therefore I don’t think that it was necessarily a requirement to post to the debian-private mailing list (the main list for communication between all developers regarding issues within the project) about this. It was however an issue that was bound to get discussed on debian-private (given that the circumstances of the resignation might be considered to be controversial) so it seems to me that sending an email of the form “here is a blog post I’ve written about my resignation” would have saved some pointless discussion (allowing us to skip the “why didn’t you send email” and get right on to the main discussion).

A resignation letter from a public position of responsibility is a significant document. Having such documents stored on publicly accessible places is good for the community. Having a record of all such documents that you have written stored on your own server for reference (by yourself and by other people you work with) is a good thing. Therefore it seems to me that a blog is an ideal place for a resignation letter. It used to be regarded that there was a certain formality in such things, and that a letter of resignation was required to be delivered in the most direct way possible (by hand if convenient) to the person who receives it. If such conventions were followed then a blog post would occur after the receipt of the letter of resignation had been confirmed (possibly in this case a confirmation email from the DPL). But in recent times things have become less formal and the free software community is particularly informal. So it seems quite appropriate to me to have the blog post come first and the email notification merely contain the URL.

Now a letter of resignation is expected to contain certain specific details. It should say specifically what duties are being resigned (particularly important when a person performs many tasks), it should have a date from which it will take effect, and it might be appropriate to mention issues related to the hand-over of tasks (whether the person resigning is willing to work with their replacements).

The “resignation” (if we should call it that) in question did not contain any of the specific details that I would expect to see in a formal resignation. This indicates to me that it could be interpreted as not being a formal and official resignation, but instead being a post (possibly written in haste while angry) about a situation which may not end up being an official resignation. Until we get some more information we won’t know for sure either way.

This demonstrates one problem with blogs, people usually have a mixture of serious documents and trivial things on the one blog. It can be difficult to determine how seriously to take blog posts. I’m not sure that there can be a good solution to this.

At the moment some people are suggesting that every DD should read Planet Debian [1]. I disagree with that. If there is an issue which is significant and affects the entire project then it should be announced on one of the mailing lists such as debian-private, debian-announce, or debian-devel-announce (and will be announced on one of them eventually even if not by the person closest to the events). Forcing every DD to read a lot of blog posts is not in the best interests of the project. Now we could create a separate Planet installation for such things, there is already Debian Times [2] and Debian Administration [3] which serve as a proof of concept. If there was a Planet installation for important stuff related to Debian which had it’s content syndicated in various ways (including an email gateway – Feedburner.com provides a quite useful one) then requesting that everyone read it’s content in some way (either by web browsing, an RSS feed reader, syndication in another Planet, email, or something else) would not be unreasonable. The volume of posts on such a Planet would be quite small (similar to the current announcement mailing lists) so if received by email it wouldn’t fill anyone’s mailbox and if people visited the web site they would only need to do so every second month if that suited them.

The issue of what types of posts are suitable for Planet Debian is probably going to get raised again soon as a result of this.

[1] http://planet.debian.org/
[2] http://times.debian.net/
[3] http://www.debian-administration.org/

Friends and Adverts

April 14, 2008 | etbe

For some time I have been running Google Adsense adverts on my blog. Not long after I started running the adverts the revenue exceeded the amount of money I pay for net access, so it’s worth having.

I recently increased the amount of advertising by including an advert in the middle of the post and received one negative comment from a reader who doesn’t like reading content with adverts in the middle. I have just changed my advertising to have that advert spot in question be before the start of the content rather than in the middle (I’m not sure if that will make them more or less happy). It seems expected nowadays that there will be a moderate amount of advertising on all web sites which have good content and don’t charge membership fees, many of my blog posts cite as references pages on web servers run by media companies that have significant amounts of advertising.

Chris Samuel is considering implementing advertising [1] and is planning to not display adverts to “friends” (which means people who have commented or who are referred by social media sites).

One significant problem with this idea is that sometimes the adverts become part of the blog conversation. Google adverts give an idea of which of the things that people are prepared to pay money for are considered by the Google algorithm to be related to the post in question. In my experience it’s not uncommon for people who comment on blog posts (both through the blog interface and through private correspondence) to reference the contents of adverts. Also while writing this post I updated my post about car sharing because I discovered a third car-share company through the adverts on my own blog [2]. I know one professional journalist who blocks the adverts on his own site so that his writing will not be biased (or be perceived to be biased) by his advertisers (which makes sense given his situation), but for my situation it clearly makes sense to review the advertised offerings of all three companies that compete in this space in Melbourne and there is no potential for bias (incidentally all three of them are advertising on my blog post).

A problem with giving a different version of the content for friends (in the more traditional meaning of the word – as opposed to using the word to mean people who have visited your blog in a certain way) is that they will not be able to correctly review your web site. I regularly notify friends and people who do worthy things of deficiencies that I discover in their web sites and occasionally receive such notifications from other people. I don’t want to have bugs in my site concealed from friendly people who would like to help me out and displayed to random people who don’t care and will respond by visiting another site.

When such things are discussed one topic that is mentioned is putting advertising in an RSS feed. I have no plans to do this, such RSS advertising would not be acceptable to Planet installations, but it would not be technically challenging to give an advert free feed to Planets but give adverts to everyone else. I think that most people who read my blog through RSS feeds will see adverts when they want to comment on my posts or when they want to forward the URLs or reference them in their own blog posts (always click on the permalink before forwarding – when a blogger messes up their permalinks it’s embarrassing if you forward them without checking).

So I encourage Chris to put adverts on his blog and to show them to me.

etbe – Russell Coker

Linux, politics, and other interesting things

Category Archives: Blogging