Structured Blogging is back
Written on August 22, 2006 by Conor O'Neill
The SB site and mailing-list used to be hosted by PubSub which sadly gone to the big internet archive in the sky. The guys have now moved these over to Marc Canter’s BBM site and things are back up and running. Not only that but they’ve done a new code drop which I will be installing here shortly.
Whilst SB has had a tortured existence over the past 9 months, there is still a big window of opportunity for it to gain far more interest. The halo effect from microformats should be exploited more but I see two other things that are critical for it to move from being a technical curiosity.
First, the code absolutely must move out of the root dir of Wordpress. I mentioned that aspect of the install to a Wordpress dev and he was not impressed. It is a big reason for people not installing it.
Second, agreements on getting this installed by default on hosted platforms need to happen. The Wordpress.com guys rightly will not take anything into their system that they do not have total confidence in and in any case the SB plug-in is not compatible with WPMU. And if I was them, I’d probably want full control of the codebase too. But there is nothing stopping a deal with PowWeb or GoDaddy or whoever to have the SB plug-in as part of a one-click Wordpress install.
It is interesting that I still get a reasonable amount of mail from people interested in SB. The reason is that they see it in action here and over at my personal blog and they like the idea and want to know more. But in all the time it has been released I think I have come across maybe five other blogs with it in use. It really needs to get more visibility to build that interest.
It would probably help if the main cheerleaders for it were actively using it on their blogs too!
I have to admit that our current efforts are concentrated on a straightforward microformats approach but as long as they stay uF compatible, we will always be able to work with the SB tools too.
tags: Structure+Blogging, Microformats, PubSub, Broadband+Mechanics, Wordpress
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Ideas for Structured Blogging…
I want to use SB. I need to use SB. I just can’t use SB right now  I wrote my last “Superman Returns” post using the Structured Blogging plugin, but when I created the post, it messed up my template (I think now it was probably…
Yeah, the whole PubSub collapse really killed the momentum on it.
I see Mary Hodder from Dabble wants to use it too but is running into awful problems on MT. Hopefully the developers will get motoring on it again.