RSS to Email
Rogers Cadenhead wrote that NBC has acquired R-Mail. I've heard of Randy's project before and it seemed like a strange idea; totally counter to the way I (and, I think, most people) look at syndication. I use the aggregator as a replacement for email, but apparently not everyone thinks like that. Congratulations to Randy, for seeing what a lot of people didn't, and for doing it on his own - at least from what I can tell, he was self funded and pretty much a one man shop. I have a lot of admiration for those types of companies. Maybe someday he'll reveal how close dnScoop's estimate was.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
Hacking John McCain
Item: Political Candidate's MySpace page caught hotlinking images and templates. Next time, make sure you're hotlinking an ardent supporter.
My boss had a similar set of incidents with his site, though political candidates don't find model rocketry as appealing.
— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link
Nothing 266 Lines of Ruby Can't Fix
I discontinued my Radio weblog back in late 2003, now the archives are back online. Not that they were ever offline, but they're online on a server I control, in a format consistent with the rest of the site. I made a feeble attempt in Python, but eventually I did the job in Ruby, as a way of writing something real enough to really get a feel for the language. This turned out to be enough incentive to get me to push through some of the trouble spots. Ruby has its maddening things (next time a Ruby enthusiast makes fun of Python's syntactic whitespace, you can retort with [].push (1)), but damn, you can get things done quickly. Every language should have first class arrays and hashtables. And closures. I love the way I was able to evolve a simple templating system for all my pages simply by using yield and giving my write_template method a block to execute to fill in the content for each page.
Next up, the old eighty-twenty archives, which are stored as individual files in Atom 0.3 format. I'm missing a number of posts, and I think I'll be cursing myself for the goofy permalink style I came up with back then (and probably learning about mod_rewrite to fix that), but I'd like to have the old archives up, maybe even in time for the 2 year anniversary of dropping that system.