Clubtroppo is holding a 'best of 2006' compendium , presumably to compile some of the best of the online republic of letters that may have been missed in the hustle, tussle and high-frequency of internet publishing during this year. Meta-reflection inside.

I think this is a good thing. There are many very talented writers and essayists who have innovated within the medium. Often 'blog' is presumed as being highly personal and having little public relevance, such as posting pictures of your cat, or alternatively it is assumed that a blog follows the news cycle so closely that they are little more than temporary jots and not worthy of reflection.

One of the benefits of South Sea Republic is that it doesn't follow the news cycle particularly closely, and where it does, it is only within the confines and conventions of this site's minority interest - namely social organisation and political technology, of which constitutionalism dominates.

The articles put forth for South Sea Republic were:

• avocadia: Oh won't someone think of the Statists?
• adam: Government Design Patterns - Federation
• cam: Social Organisation - Militia

There have been plenty of other good posts through out the year, for example:

• aphrael: Ding dong, the witch is dead
• yik yak: Veiled Comment

We are currently under-going a new age and growth in the republic of letters. In my opinion it is good to reflect, take a breath, and revisit some of the good posts, essays, discussions and insights we may have unintentionally over-looked.

Just a quick note to say that I am aware SSR has all sorts of speed/data/performance issues recently and that I am going to start looking at a dedicated host for the website.

I am also going to change my ISP. I don't think the host your website in your basement is quite ready for primetime yet.

Via Bill de hora:

I [Bill de hora] am moving off Movable Type. In favor of my own codebase. I've decided weblogs are to this decade as editors were to the 1970s. You have to write your own. It's a pretty thin rationale - the 1970s more or less sucked as I recall.

South Sea Republic has done the same. I have moved it from scoop to a homebrew.

It is pretty basic at the moment, and I will start adding more features once it gets established and running in a stable configuration. All the users, articles and comments have been moved over to the new schema; (apart from Damien sorry) and excepting the passwords. I have to confirm a few things in the production environment first and then I will start contacting people to reset their passwords. I didn't 'unhash' them from scoop. Currently they are garblish in the new schema and unusable. I also have registration turned off for now.

Again I will start turning these things on once I become confident of the hosting, setup and installation.

Update: Parts of the site like ass in IE. I will fix those over time, but they aren't a priority.

Update II: The index.rdf file name still works for backward compatibility, though the /rss/ is the official one. It is rss2.0, if anyone begs I can add an atom feed.

Some more changes/updates. An alternative intro could be, "what cam did on his friday night ..."

Replies: There is now a replies link which shows a registered user's comments and articles with the number of replies to them. I have yet to add scoop style 'new' comments functionality.

Register: This is now open again in the scoop style. Since SSR has anonymous commenting, as per the blog style, the only reason to register is if you want to write articles or view replies to your comments.

Comment rating: There is now comment rating, currently it is open to anonymous rating, but if there is obvious abuse or mod-bombing I may make it registration only. There is no 'mojo' involved, so there is no punishment for being rated down. It is mainly for fun and appreciation. The descriptors are currently emoticons which are synonyms for +1, 0 and -1. :) means rate up, :| means meh, and :( means rate down. First time I have used JSON in that environment, big improvement over XML.

Parent: As per Avo's suggestion a parent link on comments. A top-level comment goes to an article. When replying to an article the complete article text is displayed below the comment form.

Update: The demoroniser needs improvement, word type ' cause an error. Will fix that.

One of the supporting experiments for the Big Bang theory is the isotropic cosmic microwave background radiation. It is the residual energy for our universe existing the way it does as a system. What of the internet? It is a complex system with all sorts of network effects. Does it have an isotropic background energy or activity level? With the change over to the new software system for South Sea Republic there is some data to explore that question.

South Sea Republic went onto the new software about a month ago. The previous software, scoop, did not record page views for each article. I could have added it in, but didn't. SSRBlog does store page views, it is how the 'most popular' article is determined at the foot of each page.

The interesting thing is that only the most recent articles have page views from regular users. The rest of the page views should be a mix of google/yahoo/ask searches, spam attempts; and bots, crawlers, spiders, etc looking at pages.

Which gives these two interesting graphs. The first is page views versus articles where the articles are in numeric and creation order.

Round about 841 is where the software change over occurred so that is the normal energy of South Sea Republic's day to day activity. Prior to that should be the background or residual energy for a website on the outer rim of the blogosphere's popularity.

There appears to be some consistent activity between about 221 and 821, but before that it drops off to one and is far less consistent.

The second graph is with the views ordered largest to smallest. Ignore the x-axis labeling, that is an artefact of how I sorted the dataset.

This graph looks logarithmic in character, definitely isn't linear. This graph also shows where the activity drops off to zero which suggests if there is residual activity it is in a timeframe and doesn't include older (greater than two years) content.

Does the internet have a background activity or energy? Undoubtedly IMO. Not sure these graphs really prove it though. We would expect a base 'activity' or energy, but the graph line is more logarithmic than hitting a flat base point which is greater than zero. Maybe too much noise, or maybe just too small a sample, or maybe SSR is too far flung on the outer galaxy's rural arm.

It may mean that the (uniform) background energy only reaches back as much as one or two years, and isn't isotropic.

A rundown on some of the updates with SSR's blog software.

1. For those that comment with an account, you can now edit your own comments. Mainly for when a typo escapes you.

Originally I designed it so that a user would only need to log in when they write an article. Everything else can be done anonymously; but I break that design parameter, adam does; and I am betting others do too.

So ... bad design decision.

The issue there is that the session only lasts as long as the browser. On my laptop a logged in session will remain up to 60 hours if I leave the browser open and put the laptop to sleep. On the PC which goes up and down like a toilet seat the session doesn't persist between browser sessions.

It must be some obscure configuration setting that I am missing. I will continue to hunt for it. I increased the hours the session will remain open in the cfg file but it still appears to be limited by the browser not being closed.

2. You can now preview your comment before publishing it. You might need to shift-reload the page to update the javascript file.

This is a round trip so you may have to be patient at times but it should mirror what will display very closely as it uses the same algorithm that converts text into html.

The only difference is that javascript strips EOLs in urls, so a regexp puts in P tags before sending it up.

Have to comment on JSON here - massive improvement over XML in parsing out the return values. XML always ran the risk of null blowups and required all manner of defensive programming. JSON is much more resilient in that respect.

3. None's should no longer appear in RSS feeds if there is no body in a story (oops).

4. There is a now a recently popular articles which is the articles that have the most views over the last 60 days.

5. There is an article reply bar at the bottom of the page (if there are comments) under the comments section to stop confusion between replying to a comment and replying to an article.

6. URLs with article/id now redirect to the article without the RESTful read descriptor.

7. Rating a comment that has not yet been rated will now show the rating/rated ratio immediately after (oops).

8. There are some other under the hood updates, but nothing that affects the end user.

9. Still no cure for cancer.

From the how to blog design guide the components of a modern/standard blog are broken down. In trying to simplify the design of SSR in its current incarnation I removed the header and secondary links sections. Most blog headers are too busy or too big. For instance Design Observer's header draws the eye away from the content. I am probably going to redesign SSR again soon, once I decide on a layout. I want to integrate camriley.com and the AFC site into it. Probably through some form of tabbing or javascript switching - I am not sure yet.

I still like the current SSR design, I think it has aged well. I bought The Best of Brochure Design 07 recently. The designers that create layouts for brochures and print media have a wonderful understanding of white space and how the eye flows across a page. I will probably trawl it for ideas. Another good place to search for layout designs are in magazine adverts. They are usually exceptionally well layed out as well.

Update

A fellow I work with who specialises in user experience pointed out that sites with different designs and audiences can use an icon rather than tabs to point that out. For instance the flyted link on the united airways site.

I have a habit of bleaching them down to the white of the bones and then adding colour again after it has been bleached too much. Will see.

btw the logo to the right is me running a 400m lap in two bit colour. Not bad for a thirty-seven year old bloke.

I added an archives page that runs by year; 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004. It runs off the little series of tags under the titles. I put the amount of times the articles is viewed in the left column. It is surprising how big the ranges between the most viewed and the least viewed are.

I used the python datetime library to generate the date ranges. The python datetime library is a joy in comparison to the Java date and calendar libraries. Often Java's libraries are a linear history of software engineering fashion. Patterns become popular and boom, there are patterns up the wazoo in the next library that comes out. Often working in Java is like working in Visual Studio, once you get into the mindset you are productive, the problem with Java is you have to work out what was the software engineering fashion when this library was released? With Visual Studio, you just accept you have to work as it wants you to and you are ok.