B. Mann Consulting

Love your blog - especially the VoIP stuff.  Not sure how I came across your blog when trying to solve my MTGoogleSearch issue, but I did!  Thought maybe you knew the answer...I’ve been using MTGoogleSearch to return the "titles" of Related Entries on my VoIP Blog and unfortunately some of the related entries have UTF-8 characters in the titles returned by MTGoogleSearch, which changes my webpage’s default iso-8859-1 encoding to UTF-8. If at least 1 of the Related Entries titles has a UTF-8 character, this causes funky characters to display in the entire blog body. That is, all of my em-dashes, quotes, apostrophes, etc. in the blog body are messed up. Even though I explicitly specify the encoding (using MTPublishCharset) in the template to be iso-8859-1, I guess MT actually encodes and saves the file in UTF-8 format, which overrides this code in the HTML file:<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />In fact, when I click View Source (opens in Notepad) and then do a Save As, it displays UTF-8 in the filetype instead of the usual ANSI when I View Source on a blog entry without the funky characters. Compare this page: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/testblog/main-test.asp (has MTGoogleSearch/Related Entries)with http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/testblog/main-test2.asp (deleted MTGoogleSearch/Related Entries from template) Same page – I just deleted MTGoogleSearch code from the template. Notice the funky characters in the first one? I could probably re-encode all my posts (ISO-8859-1) to UTF-8, but that’s a huge hassle. At least, I think it is. I tried changing MT’s default encoding to UTF-8 and rebuilt my site, but then my posts had even more funky characters, which would require me to go through and Edit all my blog posts and fix them. There should be a way of forcing MTGoogleSearch to strip UTF-8 characters or just ignore them without changing my blog's default iso-8859-1 encoding, no? Maybe I can "force" MTGoogleSearch to iso-8859-1? Sorry for the long post. Any suggestions?

Anil Dash February 24 2003
If you're using a Google API with your weblog system, like the MTGoogleSearch tags for Movable Type or google.macros.box for Radio Userland, you might wish to re-read this section of the Google Web APIs Terms of Service:
"...And you may not use the search results provided by the Google Web APIs service with an existing product or service that competes with products or services offered by Google."
It's probably worth considering whether you're in danger of violating the terms. Most likely, you're not, as you'd have to offer weblogging services of your own that used the Google API to compete with Blogger, but it's certainly something that seems like it could raise an issue for how these APIs are implemented.

I confess I've enjoyed watching the self-absorbed and righteous Dave Winer squirm these last few days as he finds himself left in the Googledust. I'm glad he'll matter less to the blogging world from now on.

For the most links ever in one single BLOG.

Hey - there's the newest domain for Guiness Book - Internet records. Longest continuous download, longest blog entry, most links in a blog, most pages on a site, most domains in a company, longest MUD session, longest continuous EverCrack session, etc.

1) Join the Fray, a 'storyblog'.
2)...

This comment from Kevin Lynch of Macromedia
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There will likely be more blogs from folks at Macromedia as we're finding this is another great channel to stay in touch with what really matters to folks and get feedback on the work we do.
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and lots of thoughts on good methods of providing "customer service" have triggered the thought (and I'm sure it's occured to everyone already) that blogging would be a great way for companies to provide tech service (some companies already do this sort of thing with usenet, either formally or informally). I also think IM would be as well... - much similar to a 1-800 method I guess. Combining the two you get a great way to provide "transcripts" (likely edited...) to help lots of people through lots of different problems... Combine that with a method of indexing and searching the blog (maybe this exists) and you've got a great combination.

(As an aside.. Greg.. you're sounding a wee bit paranoid about the whole Google thing... afraid they'll take over the world?)