Archives Society of Alberta launches its blog

The Archives Society of Alberta has launched its blog through the free WordPress.com community at http://www.archivesalberta.wordpress.com/

The RSS feed URL is http://archivesalberta.wordpress.com/feed/

AuthentiCity, the City of Vancouver Archives Blog

While they've had a Twitter presence for a while now, I'm very pleased to learn that the City of Vancouver Archives recently launched a blog they call AuthentiCity. It's running on the popular WordPress platform.

Six Apart's Vox blog publishing service closing September 30, 02010

While the comment spammers who invaded the Vox blog publishing system will be disappointed and possibly helped initiate the process, Six Apart has notified its Vox blog users that the service is shutting down effective September 30, 02010. You can either migrate to Six Apart's subscription-based TypePad service or use an import tool at WordPress.com or Posterous to move your blog. I was able to migrate my one Vox blog, The Fictional World of Archives, Art Galleries and Museums, so that it too is now part of Google's Blogspot service.

Anthologize that WordPress blog, just not your WordPress.com one

Form follows feed promises Anthologize, a new open source blog publishing tool that according to its About page

is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

Please note that Anthologize cannot be installed on blogs hosted at WordPress.com.

Anthologize is a project of One Week | One Tool a project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

ArchivePress plugin for WordPress sites

Update for April 20, 02010:

The first release candidate of the ArchivePress plugin put in an appearance.

According to its front page, ArchivePress

ArchivePress is a blog-archiving project being undertaken by the University of London Computer Centre and the British Library Digital Preservation department, funded by the JISC Information Environment Programme under its Rapid Innovation Grants Call (03/09).

The project will explore practical issues around the archiving of weblog content, focusing on blogs as records of institutional activity and corporate memory. As an alternative to the web crawling/harvesting approach of the Internet Archive and the UK Web Archive, ArchivePress will test the viability of using RSS feeds and blog APIs to harvest blog content (including comments, embedded content and metadata). The archived content will be stored and managed using instances of Wordpress, thereby maintaining the blogs’ native data structures, formats and relationships.

We hope to develop tools and methodology that will enable organisations to use simple, free, open source blogging software to manage a central archive of designated institutional blog outputs, even if they are spread over different blog hosts and platforms. The benefits of this approach will include:

* targeted gathering of selected weblogs
* improved reliability and authenticity of records
* citable blog content with persistent identifiers
* automated, ongoing harvesting, via newfeeds
* accessibility of content, using native blog interfaces
* use of native web and database file formats, compatible with registry-based preservation activities.

Ten Thousand Year Blog (June 02003 to September 02008) lives again

For those of you who missed The Ten Thousand Year Blog that lived between June 02003 and September 02008 (just over five years) at http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress, I've resurrected it at http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress. This is a semi-inactive version to which I'll make changes from time to time, so for the current WordPress.com version continue to read The Ten Thousand Year Blog at http://digitalarchivist.wordpress.com. I've decided not to renew and link my domain name davidmattison.ca to the current WordPress version, but there will be a pointer to the current version on the start page of http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress.

Great new look to WordPress.com backend

So that's what happens when you don't blog for three weeks running and log in to WordPress.com and get greeted with a new backend. It's great, I like it, especially the QuickPress form. The only bad part of the QuickPress form is that it lacks my Categories. A Tags field is present, but to categorize, I have to publish the post and then go back and re-edit it. That sucks and is a time waster for sure.

Ten Thousand Year Blog Is Here

Due to a combination of what appears to be incompetence and a deliberate act of sabotage by a staff member at VPSVIlle.ca (Very Poor Service), they wiped out my sites, along with those of other customers, with no chance of restoration and can't even offer those affected space to rebuild. It's the latter issue that has upset me more than having to rebuild everything. So I'm now using WordPress.com as the new home for my Ten Thousand Year Blog. I will be importing the existing site's contents as best I can over the next few weeks following a writing assignment for the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Importing means having to resurrect the site on my local PC and creating a WordPress export file. Since the import function in WordPress.com doesn't appear to work as advertised -- I had a file well under the 15MB size limit -- I think I will simply close off the old Ten Thousand Year Blog and start fresh here. If you see posts and comments disappearing from time to time, that is why. 

Here is Google's cached version of the last iteration of The Ten Thousand Year Blog (June 2003-October 2008).