Matt Croydon::Postneo

Category: Weblogs

  • SkipHours

    As I blog around the clock, I disabled Radio’s SkipHours feature for RSS, which is enabled by default.  I wonder if this is why java.blogs hasn’t hit my RSS file since a few days ago.

  • Tiki 1.4 (Mira) Released

    Tiki 1.4 (Mira) has been released.  Changes:

    Lot of new features added like quizzes, HTML pages with a dynamic option, a Shoutbox, improved spellchecking content templates, integrated search feature and many minor enhancements and additions.

    There’s also an impressive bulleted list of other major and minor changes and tweaks.

  • PyCon DC 2003 Buzz

    Lots of buzz at the PyCon DC 2003 wiki.  There’s also quite a bit going across the wire on the mailing list, but all the major info is migrating quite nicely to the wiki.

    This is shaping up to be an awesome conference.  It will hopefully cost less than $200 to register (great idea, keep it cheap!)  I’m doing my best to spread the word.  If you have any suggestions for specific tracks that you’d like to see at the con, or specific topics covered, email me or the pycon list or feel free to contribute to the wiki.

    I live just outside of DC, so attending this con is a no-brainer for me.  I know that there are lots of Python bloggers out there (you know who you are), and I’m sure that I can organize some kind of blogger-related extracurricular activities.  If you’re reading this and are planning to attend, get in touch with me so that we can start to get things together.  Steve and the guys plan to make sure the place is lit up with 802.11b, so don’t be shy.

    If you’re looking to keep hotel prices low, you can stay at a hotel out in the ‘burbs and take advantage of the metro system.  If you’re flying, Regan National Airport (DCA) is on the metro system.  If you’re taking the train, Union Station is on the metro system.

  • ‘Blogs’ Article at The Washington Post

    The Washington Post Business section this morning has a fairly large article “above the fold” on weblogging, titled, “Free Speech- Virtually: Legal Constraints on Web Jounrlas Suprise Many ‘Bloggers’”.  I’m out the door, so I’ll let you discuss it amongst yourselves.

  • Dive Into RSS

    Congrats to Mark Pilgrim:

    XML.com: What is RSS? Hey, that’s me.

    Great article, Mark.  I’ll be looking forward to your article next month.

  • Really Simple Discovery, 1.0

    Dave and Brent cover RSD 1.0.  From Dave’s post:

    For users this means word processor-like editors to write for your weblog.

    I’ll drink to that.

  • Creative Commons RSS 2.0 Module

    Dave Winer:

    The creativeCommons RSS 2.0 module is now deployable. Thanks to everyone who commented, most of them were incorporated into the spec. At this point you may use the module in RSS feeds, and thanks to the magic of namespaces, as an extra bonus, you may also include them in other XML formats that are not RSS 2.0.

  • New Web Services Security Specifications

    Werner Vogels notes that six new web services security specs have just been published:WS-Security

    You can find them at MSDN and IBM.

    Clemens Vasters and Chris Sells are also on top of it.

  • IBM’s 16-Chip Server

    CNet:

    IBM has begun shipping 16-processor x440 servers, its highest-end mainstream machines using Intel chips, the company plans to announce Wednesday.

    The system consists of two eight-processor, rack-mounted systems that are 7 inches tall and connected with high-speed cables. It’s the current flag-bearer for IBM’s sustained effort to build ever more powerful Intel servers. The system uses the first version of Intel’s Xeon MP processor, code-named Foster MP.

    An x440 with 16 processors and 8GB of memory costs $81,000, said Deep Advani, vice president of IBM’s xSeries servers.

  • RTP Roadtip

    Looks like I might have a roadtrip to the Research Triangle Park area in my near future.  Mapquest posts the time to beat at 4 hours, 51 minutes.  I won’t compare Mapquest vs. actual time for DC->Atlantic City or DC->New York City trips just in case a law enforcement officer happens to be reading this.  🙂

  • Uncle Bill’s Helicopter

    Michael Taht:

    The light turned from red to green. And from green to red. And from red to green. And from green to red. I thought about how many lives that little traffic light had saved, of the engineer who made it work that good, and of the people that had worked so hard to keep it working… the light turned from red to green, and I said thanks, and drove on.

    And if you’ve heard from Josh Taht lately, read this.

  • *Nuke Related

    Scott Johnson has some more reading related to my PHP CMS entry from last night:

    I see from Keith that John talks about the PHP-Nuke forks. As someone who uses Drupal this is helping me understand the whole Nuke* thing. I had no idea there were so many forks. How many ways can you make a CMS with PHP anyway?

  • PHP CMSen: X-oops, E-Xoops, PHP-Nuke, and PostNuke

    RootPrompt.Org points to a LinuxWorld article about X-oops and E-Xoops, two PHP-based object-oriented portal packages.  It looks like both of their websites try really hard to look like *Nukes, which is unfortunate, but varlinux uses E-Xoops to look a little more unique.

    Back in June I installed both PHP-Nuke and PostNuke on my Westhost (I’m quite happy with them) account while trying to find my geekblog voice.  I liked the administration interface and it was set up great for a community weblog/news site, but it was missing something.  Perhaps it was because it looked like every other *Nuke site out there.  I tried a few non-default themes, as I was too lazy to create my own from scratch, but it still looked stock *Nuke to me.  I downloaded Radio Userland in early July and fell in love with Aggregation and the more personal approach that the software allowed me to take to geekblogging.

  • My J2ME Hello World Experience

    Yep.  I followed Colin Fahey’s guide and got his “Hello World” app to run on an emulator.  That emulator is officially the ugliest phone on earth, don’t you think?  Everything was really easy to do, and pretty much just worked.  I set up a file called “j2me.bat” which sets the environment variables that I need, and when compiling, I had to substitute “-classpath” for “-bootclasspath.”  Overall it was an extremely pleasant experience.  Maybe it’s time to take PocketBlog to the next level. 

    I want to state for the record that I glanced at Kablog the other day, though I did not look at it in depth.  I feel that this is a neccesary statement because I might end up with something similar in one way or another to Kablog, and I want to come up with something from scratch.  What I end up with will be released with source (license TBD), and I don’t want to be ripping off a well done commercial product, I want to end up with my own thing.

    Of course, I’ll keep you updated with my findings.

  • RSD

    Ben Hammersly implements RSD in MovableType.  Dave implemented RSD in Radio on Friday.  File this under “A Good Thing.”

  • BrainSplatPHP

    BrainSplatPHP 0.7.1:

    BrainSplat was originally conceived to scratch my itch for a journal program that I could use to replace LiveJournal.It is a simple blogging program that has support for comments. The recent additions is a client interface and a forum like code for formatting BSPHPCode. The reason I made my own was simply because all the scripts I found were generally made for multiple users. And thus, I made my own. I started originally in Perl, but I found that PHP makes a much better interface for these type of programs.

    Changes:

    Some more themes were added to the distribution, and the BSThemes Web site was created.

  • Traffic

    Whoa.  This weblog has generated over a gigabyte of traffic so far this week, and it’s not over yet.  I’ll try to post some stats tomorrow, and if this keeps up I’ll probably have to start paying more a month for web hosting.  Dave’s link and my javablog channel have both contributed to the rise in traffic.

    Welcome to my weblog if you’ve just started reading.

  • Blogconference

    Sam Ruby:

    Imagine a caravan full of RTP bloggers descending on Washington DC in June…

    Yes.  I’d like that.

  • Newswire

    Werner Vogels:

    I worked this week on getting the website set up for the Newswire project. Newswire is a system for collaborative real-time news delivery. It uses peer-to-peer techniques (epidemics, small worlds clustering, etc.) to construct a collaborative infrastructure that can guarantee delivery of essential news even in the presence of overload such as on 9/11/2001, or large scale internet failures. The screenshots are now also available. Below is my high-level summary of what the Newswire tries to accomplish.

    Wow.  The screenshots look impressive.  This could be the collaborative killer app, kids.

  • Really Simple Discovery

    Rogers Cadenhead:

    Radio Userland has been upgraded to support Really Simple Discovery (RSD), an XML-based protocol that enables weblog editing tools to easily find the Web services they can use to read and write a weblog.

    That’s probably what caused a nasty 500 Internal Server Error when I booted up the weblog this morning.  I have a feeling that the mail aggregator root update got hosed at some point, as I had to comment out mailAggregator.init() or something in order to get Radio to work this morning.  I need to wipe the system that Radio is on and restore, but I’m afraid.  I’m subconciously putting it off as long as possible.