Last week I attended the local vigil in support of Cindy Sheehan organized by moveon.org at the behest of my neighbor. About 100 people showed up here in Raleigh, which was more than I would have expected. Even though I sympathize with Cindy Sheehan, who is trying to deal with the fact that her son died for a cause that she doesn’t beliieve in, I was a bit ambivalent about the vigil, because I’m not a committed member of the “leave Iraq now” camp. ...
The editors of BoingBoing are offering $250,000 to anyone who can provide empirical evidence that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Good luck!
The current bit of nonsense floating around among people who think in Manichean terms about programming languages is that Ruby is going to kill Java. Like many other Java developers, I’m not buying it. I think Ruby will be quite successful, but it’s silly to say that Ruby will kill Java. Obviously, Ruby isn’t going to kill Java in the enterprise. Java is legacy at this point, it’s carved out a place in the family of languages that will live forever among Fortran, Cobol, and Visual Basic. There’s just too much code out there behind too many crucial systems for Java to ever go away. ...
I just noticed on Slashdot that Jonathan Avidan has announced RSS version 3. I’m just going to sit back and watch the fireworks on this one. Update: There’s a different proposal for RSS 3.0 from 2002.
The New Yorker has a little article about how a message board posting about loneliness on an unrelated message board turned into sizable community thanks to Google’s indexing. I’ve been fascinated with the way communities take on lives of their own in surprising ways on the Internet, and that’s one of the reasons I had been so reluctant to support comments on this site. At some point, if things go well (or poorly, depending on your point of view), the comments sections of weblogs become less about discussing the posts and more about people with a shared interest in the site talking about whatever they want. ...
This morning I had an idea for what I thought was a novel use of Flickr – documenting my thoughts on wines that I purchase. I’m not a wine connoisseur by any stretch of the imagination, but I do head out to the wine store sometimes. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to remember the differences between various bottles of wine or even what I liked or didn’t like. Many wine drinkers keep a notebook to log the wines they’ve tried, but dead trees solutions almost never work for me. ...
Now that I’ve got Movable Type up and running, and have things more or less under control, it’s time to think about the next steps for this site. Obviously the biggest task is redesigning my templates to add some content that got dropped and generally make things work like I want them to. I’m feeling pretty emboldened in that task by my template that generates an RSS feed of recent comments. It was pretty easy to learn what the hype was about when it comes to Movable Type templating. ...
The comment feed I created yesterday looks like it should work correctly, but doesn’t seem to be playing nicely with Bloglines. It does validate, so it seems like it should work. The feed does appear to work in another aggregator, so I’m a bit stuck. (Bloglines help doesn’t have anything to offer publishers.)
Tonight I did a bit of work on creating a comment feed for the site. It was my first foray into Movable Type templates, and I give Six Apart huge credit here – hacking on Movable Type templates is dirt simple. Unfortunately, I’ve run into a bit of a problem. When I created my comment feed template, which looks something like this one, I discovered that for my installation the MTCommentEntry tag just doesn’t work. (The tag indicates that you want access to the properties of the entry to which the comment you’re currently processing belongs, triggering a database lookup I assume.) When I add it to a template, processing just stops at that point. Once I have that kink ironed out, though, I’ll post the source to the template I created. ...
I hate to criticize TextDrive since we hardly know each other, but given that I’m giving them money to host my content, I feel like I can speak freely. The server that I’m assigned to has issues. From what I’ve read in the past, TextDrive’s servers were built from spare parts by the notoriously incompetent theplanet.com. Sometimes the servers crash due to hardware issues. Anyway, these things happen, especially when you’re in the startup phase, so I’m not particularly irritated. What does irritate me is responses like this from the people responsible for fixing the problem. Obviously feeling a bit defensive about the downtime being characterized as a “long-term outage,” a staffer responds: ...