Staticfree Blog

I haven't been updating this blog all too often, but I have been updating my website! Perhaps I should unify the two at some point, but for now, here's a list of some new stuff:

• Dots! - a graphical way of representing large numbers, in order to better visualize and compare them. How big is 45986 anyhow?
• n770 hacks - I finally got my n770 back from repairs and will be posting various hacks that I do there.
• Infrared Photography - some more IR photos, such as the one above from my recent hike in the White Mountains.

I've got a new site theme. I got tired of the old clashing blue-and-brown and decided to make it a bit lighter. I think this better represents me as I am now: bolder, a bit more refined, and a bit more cheerful. It's still lacking a certain something, but I don't know what just yet. Perhaps another color to compliment all the blue.

Additionally, I wanted to try out a new technique for theming the site: I have basic XHTML documents that live on the server and are transformed using AXKit and an XSLT stylesheet to add in the necessary content for navigation bars and hooks for the CSS. Then I've got CSS for all the actual themey bits. This should give me much more flexibility in content creation. I don't need any hooks whatsoever in the XHTML documents now (before, I used server-side includes to add in navigation) and can mungle/merge content. This makes things like my new javascript color clock work in the theme, as well as stand-alone without any extra effort.

If you haven't seen it yet, Feedster is an interesting website that attempts to be the Google of RSS feeds. You can search, use it as an aggregator, and even create a RSS feed of searches. Nifty note: it's based out of Newton, MA - my hometown.

Grr. I keep getting comment spam on these posts. I'm going to disable commenting on them until I can find a better way of preventing it. Until then, you can contact me through other means and I'll update posts if you care to add to what I said. I simply don't have time to manually delete all the spam before it actually wins by increasing various search engine link ranks.

I have hope that a good system will be found. I've seen some nice ideas out there, some wacky ones, and some ones that would require action on the part of the user that parallels switching from English to Metric (GPG-signed FOAF authentication? Riiiight).

I just added a nifty set of geographic tags to my blog. Now there's a keen little G and M on geo-enhanced posts, representing GeoURL and ACME Mapper respectively. I don't quite know what I'll do with the data, but it seems like a nifty thing to have. The coordinates are also included in my RSS feed for completeness and potential post-granularity Localfeeds posting.

Technical details: I used the meta Blosxom plugin to tag individual blog posts with geo coords and the interpolate conditional plugins to then optionally add them into my feed/page. The RSS feed, being a well-behaved RDF, has the wgs_84 namespace in it and accompanying geo:lat, geo:lon tags describing the various RSS items.

Hello dear readers. I've recently set up my cellcam such that it'll upload straight to my photo gallery and post an entry to my blog. I've so far heard one negative comment on this and one neutral one. What do you think?

The options I've considered are:

1. Leave it as-is, posting a set of 320x240 occasionally.
2. Smaller thumbnails, leave as-is.
3. Post one image from a set as a "teaser" and put all inline in the comments page.
4. Post a link to the comments page (and/or the images) in the "summary".
5. ...

Please leave me your compliments, suggestions, flames, etc. I want to be able to share these things with people, but I don't want to annoy my audience in such a way that they get up and leave. Tell me, dear readers, what you want to see.

I just upgraded this blog's RSS feed from RSS 0.91 to RSS 1.0. I'm hoping this means smoother syndication, as all the entries are now timestamped. I just implemented an RSS story count limiter, so only 5 stories should exist on the RSS feed. Sorry 'bout the aggregator spammage if any occurs; this should be the last time.

Additionally, I updated the code over at my blog such that it avoids a number of bugs in Internet Explorer 6. Of course, it's uglier now if you're using IE6. If you don't like how it looks, note that I'm using standards-compliant code and that you can simply get a better browser. It's also been improved a bit to work better with Lynx, screenreaders, and other non-graphical browsers.

I moved my blog to a new engine, Blosxom. As much as I loved all the XML of my engine, it got quite out of hand dealing with a single large unicode XML document. Editing it in Emacs would periodically cause Emacs to not want to save it at all. I figured I'd have better success finding someone who has already done most of the dirty work for me, so I don't have to re-invent the blog-shaped wheel.

Blosxom is nice as it's very simple: each .txt file is a blog post; the first line is the title, the rest is the body. Categories are created by making sub directories (the one downside to this is that something can't be in multiple categories easily).

It'll take a bit to make everything work smoothly. I've so far put all the posts into categories (check out /blog/tech/bots/ for example) and set up the comment system. I've yet to move old comments to the new engine, but will as soon as I write a conversion program.

Sorry to those viewing the RSS feed that I've spammed. I decided it was silly to abbreviate my posts to only the first paragraph, so I got rid of that. I also forcibly escaped the HTML in the posts instead of wrapping it in a CDATA to try and make it more universal across RSS parsers. I'll eventually redo the entire thing as an RSS-encoded RDF, but that'll be when I have free time.

Thanks to the help of a certain magical friend and with some coding on my part, I now have an RSS feed available. There's already a Livejournal syndication user for it, so you can just click here to add it if you desire.

I just did a bit of hacking and got my blog engine to spit out the whole shebang. So, If you're interested in reading all the way back to March, 2002, it's there.

On an unrelated note, I've started writing poetry again. I think 6-7 months is a big enough break. Hopefully it'll help me write better and perhaps more openly here (perhaps even more interestingly!). Some of the latest (I lied: the only latest):

• April Rising
• Black Skies, Black Water
• Following Sweetness

An an even less related note: never ever let your / partition fill up entirely. I've discovered this a few times so far in working with Linux, but this time was particularly painful. Both Gaim and Mozilla decided they should overwrite their config files, despite having no free space to do so. So, as they overwrote, they also erased. Strangely only some parts of Mozilla's config file was corrupt/erased. I'm not so sure I know what happened there.

I have given up the color black and other such dark colors. From now on, I will dress in all-white, with perhaps a hint of black and other colors here and there. I have been impure long enough; now I shall take back the light.

Hopefully, Blogml will come up with a good XML DTD for storing of blogging data fairly soon. At present, I'm using a heavily stripped down version of one of the proposals until something better comes along.