with 'meta' tag
now i’ve done it
i noodled around a little more, and came up with an ugly way to supply and extract tags in my postings via email. the next step will be extracting attachments so i can post images again.
progress
yes, this is still on. and now it is on a new server with new code, even though it looks the same.
i still need to knock together the "writing a post" bit of code so that i can post without using manual SQL queries. details.
stirrings
it turns out that this thing is still on. it is kind of funny to me that it still just chugs along, but such is the joy of writing your own software running on your own (virtual) server. it is long past time to rebuild the infrastructure here, which may or may not happen. but it is something that i am thinking about again.
comments closed
i get tired of dealing with spam on very old entries here, so the comments now automatically close on posts after one week. you know, on the off chance that i ever post anything of interest again.
500 of my closest friends
for the first time in a very long time, i shoved all the logs from this site through a web stats package, and have come to learn that this site averages about 500 visits per day.
hi.
you got to have a membership card to get inside
i signed up for google analytics, and it refused to recognize that the tracking code had been installed. i’m just taking that as a sign that i should continue to not care about traffic to my site.
five years and two days ago, i wrote my first blog entry. i started out using blogger. four days later, i made my first entry with my own blog software.
i guess it would have been smart to remove the little bit of code that prevented everyone but me from accessing the site when i flipped the switch on the design.
new design
in the spirit of just getting it done, i kicked out the new design. as usual, it is best viewed from my desk. (second to that, using safari to get the ever-changing color effect. or possibly the latest firefox beta releases.)
i also “upgraded” the feeds to almost-valid atom 1.0, and got rid of the rss feeds. it is almost-valid atom 1.0 because apparently the atom 1.0 standard requires a non-empty titles. i wrote what i think about that three years ago.
atom 1.0 is even worse than other formats in this regard, if the complaints of the feed validator are to believed. not only is the <title> element required on each entry, but it can’t even be empty. nuts to that.
other things are undoubtedly broken. some day i may fix them.
i felt like i’ve been posting a lot lately — here’s a graph of posts per month since i started (way back in october 2000).
for the 1792 days i’ve been blogging, i have averaged 1.38 posts per day. my longest entry was my notes from the vsda home entertainment conference, the shortest entry was the percentage chance i gave to moving out of my then-current apartment.
trying to read through my archives can be a bit of a chore. it’s one of the things i’m looking to fix with the redesign that i’m slowly working on. so far, it’s not really too radical of a change — but i’ve just been focused on removing things.
pingback client
to kill time (see previous entry), i’ve implemented pingback 1.0 client code for when i post. if it works, this entry will ping the spec and ian hickson’s initial announcement of pingback. what are the odds it will work on the first try? answer: not good. it took two tries.
next time i need to kill a few moments, i’ll do the server side.
rss throttling
i don’t think i mentioned this when i implemented it last weekend, but ip addresses that now poll one of my scraped rss feeds more than once an hour will find themselves blocked from polling for the next hour. (the limit isn’t really quite an hour, but in that neighborhood.)
the fun part is that it is a rolling block — the second attempt before the required time has passed results in the timer resetting. when i decide to be truly evil, it will start returning an rss feed with something other than the content being requested. (right now it gives a 403 response with a simple text message.)
monkeyhead
i made the giant monkey head in my latest design iteration by taking a picture (with my camera phone) of one of my stuffed monkeys (a tchotchke for monkey madness) and using it as the model in illustrator. it’s not a very fancy giant monkey head, but it’s my not very fancy giant monkey head. (except, well, it’s in the public domain. so it’s also your not very fancy giant monkey head.)
here’s the eps version of the giant monkey head.
as always, the design looks best on my computer. (although it should pretty reasonable on any mac os x machine using safari.)
i’ve added an about page. my rss feed also moved, but there’s a redirect in place for the old location. there’s an atom feed now, too.
autoexpanding links to the isbn: psuedo-scheme
i just added a tiny little feature to my weblog software to auto-expand links created using an isbn: scheme (such as <a href="isbn:1584790830">i'm just here for the food</a>) to an affiliate link to an online retailer (b&n right now, easy enough to change in the future).
just something for those thinking about ways to play with moveable type's upcoming text formatting features. mix with the amazon web services, and you could pretty easily have a page that listed information about all of the books you've mentioned.
i do actually cheat a bit right now, and the conversion happens when stuffing the entry into the database. but they end up in a regular format, so it will be easy enough to change the old entries when i work up the initiative to make the filtering happen on the output side.
if only the music and film businesses had universal identifiers for their products that worked like isbns.
i've got something similar that turns ampersands (&) into the correct entity, even when i don't type them that way (or there are ampersands in urls that i cut&paste into place). just part of keeping my site validating as xhtml 1.0 strict.
