New Blog

As you may have noticed, this blog hasn't been updated in a long time. I'm moving my blog to Vox. Check it out and if you're reading this blog via RSS, update your feed .

Carnegie Library RSS Feed Generator

Carnegie Library 's email notification system leaves much to be desired. It only notifies you after an item is overdue, giving you no chance to return the item on time. Also, when you request an item, you don't receive an email notification that the item is available until a few days after it is ready. However, your account information web page updates immediately after the item is ready.

To solve these problems, I've been working on a Carnegie Library RSS Feed Generator for the past few months. It works by screen-scraping your account information web page. By doing this, it can add entries to your feed a few days before a checked out item is due and immediately after a requested item is available.

This feed generator was mainly written for my personal use, but since some other people might also useful, I'm pleased to make it publicly available. If you decide to use it, please send me feedback and suggestions, so that I can improve it in the future.

(Sidenote: The feed generator was also an excuse to learn Ruby on Rails . Ruby and Rails are both fun to work with. As a desktop application developer, I used to loathe web apps due to the prevalence of spaghetti code. Rails makes it very easy to create a cleanly factored Model-View-Controller application, so I plan to use it for all of my future web development needs.)

3rd Birthday

Today's the 3rd birthday of this blog. This is post number 384.

I'd write more, but I'm too busy rocking out to Generic Crunk Rap .

Pittsburgh Blogfest 4

I went to the Pittsburgh Blogfest 4 meetup last Wednesday night. I was fun, and, to be honest, a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. I met quite a few engaging people, including some geeks my age with similar interests. Here's the blogroll of the people I talked to:

• Ales Rarus
• ddancer @ blogspot
• Challenge Impossible
• Sneek Peaks
• Grabass (Mike Woycheck)
• Venky's Musings

Hopefully I'll be able to attend Pittsburgh Blogfest 5 - with special guest Robert Scoble!

AdSense Revenues Reported

Google recently changed its AdSense Terms of Service to allow users to report how much they are making by placing ads on their sites. It seems that Sam Ruby makes about $1/day and Mark Pilgrim makes about $9/day . Learning this has made me ponder placing AdSense on my blog to help cover the cost of my hosting. Don't worry though - if I do decide to sign up for AdSense, I'm only going to place ads on archive pages that are more than 30 days old. I don't want to annoy my regular readers, but I am curious as to how much I could make.

Trackback Spam

The past month or so, I've been receiving a shit ton of trackback spam on this blog. I have trackbacks disabled, so they don't show up on any of my pages, but MovableType still accepts the trackbacks, which results in an email being sent to me. Based on a recommendation from Josh , I've installed MT-TrackbackAntiSpam , and the amount of trackback spam has fallen to zero. Now maybe I can turn trackback display back on...

Second Anniversary

Yesterday was the second anniversary of this blog. I've been busy learning the ropes at my new job, but you can expect to see more frequent postings in the coming week.

Also, due to some asshat spammers, trackbacks have been disabled on this blog.

Blog@Case

The Blog@Case blogging service is now in open beta . I'm really glad to see the university providing this portal; hopefully it will foster the creation of a community of student and faculty bloggers. I see that professor Vincenzo Liberatore has already started a weblog.

The service is running Movable Type and has integration with Flickr and del.icio.us.

Pittsburgh Blogs

While searching Google for Pittsburgh weblogs, I found PghBloggers.org , which provides a directory of blogs written by Pittsburghers. Looks like they are having a blogger meetup on January 19th.

Disclaimer

Now that I've announced that I'm going to work for Apple, I want to make sure that expectations for this blog are clear:

This is my personal blog. Things I say here are my thoughts and opinions, not those of Apple. Links I post here are items I found personally interesting, and do not necessarily represent Apple's interests. Please do not link to or quote this blog as as evidence of any action or future action on Apple's part, since nothing on this blog is written as part of my position at Apple.

To quote Eric Albert :

What, explicitly, does all of this mean? It means that if I say something here, it isn't Apple's viewpoint, nor is it the viewpoint of my team at Apple, nor does it mean that Apple is engaged in an internal debate on the issue, nor does it mean that I don't have a completely different perspective on the issue when I'm at work.

For further reading, I refer you to the disclaimers written by Eric Albert and Chuq von Rospach , which I agree with whole-heartedly.

MovableType Upgrade

After wasting too much time de-spamming my blog, I've upgraded to MovableType 3.11 . This allows me to use MT-Blacklist 2.0 , which is much more powerful than older versions. Hopefully that will keep this blog spam free. If not, then I will have to require TypeKey registration for comments, but I'm hoping to avoid that.

Photos Feed Updated

Seems that Flickr changed the URL for my photostream's RSS feed without telling me. The link in the sidebar has been updated. The new RSS feed is here .

Blogging Talk Photos

My talk on blogging went fairly well. There were about 15 people there, and we had plenty of pizza. :-) My friend Brendan took some photos of the event .

Blogging Talk

I'll be giving a talk entitled "Blog Technology and Sociology" for the Case ACM tomorrow at 6:00pm in Clapp 108 . This talk will be a whirlwind tour of the blogosphere, with something for beginners and experts alike. I will cover various blog technologies, social phenomenon, and how to set up your own weblog. Hope to see you there!

Photoblog

Thanks to some messing around with Flickr , I have a fairly functional photoblog, complete with RSS feed . You can see my most recent photos in the sidebar. Flickr accepts photos via email, so with my new Treo I can upload photos from just about anywhere.

Movable Type 3.0 Furor

There have been quite a few rants about Movable Type 3.0 today (just take a look at the trackbacks on the official announcement ). The new pricing scheme doesn't really affect me, since it's still free for 1 author and 3 or fewer blogs. However, I've been thinking about ditching Movable Type for some time, due to general frustrations with its architecture (i.e., needing to rebuild for all changes). Movable Type 3.0 doesn't look like a huge step forward, so I'm going to start investigating alternatives in earnest. An early contender is Textpattern , which I've installed and been playing around with. Another system I'd like to investigate is Wordpress .

Feedster

Feedster is a great way to find RSS feeds for sites that don't have their own feeds, or don't display them prominently. Just today I found feeds for maddox.xmission.com and Inc. Magazine through Feedster.

New Technorati

Technorati has released a new version of their site. The most noticeable new feature is that you don't have to pay to create a watchlist. Watchlists allow you to be notified when someone links to your blog. If you have a blog and haven't yet signed up for Technorati, now might be a good time to do so.

My Subscriptions

A recent commenter asked me to post a list of my subscriptions. I've chosen to do this via feeds.scripting.com . You can view my subscriptions here (requires account).

feeds.scripting.com allows you to upload an OPML outline containing your subscriptions. You can view the subscriptions of other people, find out who is subscribed to a particular feed, look at the most popular feeds, and more.

One Year Anniversary

Today is the one year anniversary of this blog. My first post was an entry about my new license plate. Since then, I've made a total of 201 entries (including this one). Last year at this time, I was subscribed to around 20 feeds. Now I'm subscribed to 99.

Maintaining this blog has been fun, and I think the blog community (and social software in general) has a lot of growth and innovation left in it. Here's to another year of exploring.

Comments Working

It was pointed out to me that all comments on this weblog were being rejected by MT-Blacklist. I've fixed the configuration problem, and comments should be working again.

ACM and IEEE Publications

It would really rock if ACM and IEEE provided RSS feeds for their publications. Unfortunately, I can't find any feeds, even third-party feeds. IEEE at least has an option to receive email notification of new articles. Still, it seems like someone must have written a scraper to produce RSS feeds for ACM and IEEE publications. Anyone have a lead?

New Banner Picture

I've changed the banner image for this blog. It's a photo I took this afternoon outside of the library. On the left, you can see the funky-shaped Peter B. Lewis Building . That's where my ECON class is tomorrow.

David's New Blog

David has started his first blog , over on LiveJournal.

iCal RSS Feeds

Tonight I was setting up my calendar for the upcoming semester, making sure that all my classes were entered, holidays noted, and special events recorded. I started thinking that it would be nice to have an RSS feed of my calendar, so I could quickly glance at my schedule during my morning aggregator pass. Then I noticed that PHP iCalendar has RSS support. I created a password-protected directory on my web server (since my calendar contains some events that I don't want to broadcast to the world), uploaded PHP iCalendar, and set iCal to publish my calendars using WebDAV. NetNewsWire supports HTTP authentication using URLs of the form http://user:pass@site.com, so I've now got my calendar in my aggregator. Cool.

Ecto

The first public beta of Ecto is now available. Ecto is the successor to Kung-Log, which is the tool I use to add new entries to this weblog.

New Design

This blog has a new design, prompted by my reading of Designing with Web Standards . I've never been very interested in web design, but I realize that it's a skill that a literate person must have in this era. I found Designing with Web Standards very enlightening, not only for it's discussion of modern web design with XHTML and CSS, but also for the historical background which it provides (I now understand the Mac vs. PC font size debacle of the late 90s that made the text on many pages incredibly small in Macintosh browsers). I'm still not a fan of web design, since it seems to be mostly a bunch of memorization about bugs in browsers and CSS quirks, but at least I feel more comfortable with it now.

The new design for this weblog still needs work, but if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment.

MT-Blacklist

I installed MT-Blacklist because I've been getting a lot of comment spam recently. Let me know if you have any problems posting comments/trackbacks.

My URIs Are Cool

Thanks to a timely pointer from Jason , all of my old "permalinks" will continue working, even though I've changed my archive path. w00t!

Archive Paths

I modified my blog archive paths to make them more meaningful, as suggested by Erik. Yes, this has broken everyone who linked to one of my posts. Yes, I know that cool URIs don't change , but I don't think it's worth the effort to try to make all the old links to my site work. At around 90 entries, this site is still in its infancy, and hopefully this will be the last time I change archive paths.

Wiki Integration

After my recent post about wanting a combination blog and wiki, I spent a few hours Googling for a suitable solution. I think I have come upon a good solution for me. In CPAN , there is a module named Text::WikiFormat . This module takes some wiki-formatted text and returns the corresponding HTML. You can pass several options to the module, such as the URL to use as the prefix for wiki word links.

Using Text::WikiFormat, you can write a MovableType plugin that formats your posts. There are some details on how to do this at SixLog . I have written a formatter that simply passes my entry text to Text::WikiFormat, with a prefix URL of http://www.uncledirtae.com/wiki/index.cgi? . Now, any use of wiki words on my blog will autolink to the corresponding wiki node.

Two problems remain. First, my hosting provider has an old version of the Text::WikiFormat installed, which seems to have some bugs. I have asked them to upgrade the module, which I expect to happen in short order. Also, Kung-Log doesn't seem to support custom MovableType formatters very well, so I am still trying to figure out how I can continue to use Kung-Log with my new formatter.

I'm Blogging This

While reading an article on O'Reilly's MacDevCenter.net, I saw an ad for a new official O'Reilly t-shirt . It reads "I'm blogging this". Haha, I might have to get one of those.

Blog + Wiki

In light of some recent experiences with WikiWikiWebs , I'm beginning to wonder if MovableType is really what I want in a weblog tool. I think I'd actually prefer a hybrid wiki. The wiki would identify each node as either a regular wiki entry or a weblog post (essentially a wiki entry tagged as being a "journal entry" and with an associated timestamp). The front page would still list weblog posts in reverse chronological order, and there would still be a weblog post archive, but other than that, it would be a regular wiki.

There are certainly people playing with this idea already, for example, Martin Fowler's Bliki . However, I haven't seen any packaged solutions a la MovableType. Has anyone seen such a thing, or would I have to roll my own?

XHTML and CSS

OK, I have something to admit: I am woefully ignorant of XHTML, CSS, and other modern web standards. Being unable to author elegant web pages today makes you practically illiterate. Realizing this, I have decided to bring myself up to speed. I'm currently reading HTML and XHTML: The Definitive Guide and Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide on O'Reilly Safari . I've also been experimenting with the design for this weblog, so if anything looks messed up or makes your eyes bleed in the next few days, I apologize. One thing I've completed is making this site validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, thanks to some help from Brad Choate .

If any of you web design gurus have book or site recommendations to help me along, leave a comment.

BerkeleyDB

The BerkeleyDB database powering this blog got corrupted. I'm now using MySQL for the database backend. Unfortunately, in the process of moving from the corrupted BerkeleyDB to MySQL, I lost some customizations that I had made to this weblog. Please excuse the dust.