Martin Pool's blog

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Blosxom was ill

My blog was down for a while because I thought blosxom had broken — permalinks to articles didn't seem to work.

In fact, the only problem was that some of my articles about linux.conf.au had paths like /weblog/conf/lca/2005. It looks like paths with numeric components kick off Blosxom's heuristic for searching by date rather than by name.

This is some kind of lesson about not giving inputs too many magic meanings, I suppose.

posted Wed 1 Sep 2004 in /meta/blosxom | link

Blogs holding updated documents

Nick Moffit made the wise observation that "blog" is usually just a word for a website that is regularly updated, rather than left to stagnate with an animated GIF of a council worker bludging.

I'd also add that the other feature is that they allow some kind of chronological view of the information, so that people who revisit the site can see what's new since last time. This is a substantial improvement on those corny little new.gif icons we used to use: things are not "new" or "not-new", they occur over a stream of time. What is new to one person might not be new to another. You can approximate "new to you" using cookies, but I just don't think they work as well.

And then you can extend this by exporting it as an RSS or similar feed, so that people can discover what if anything is new without needing to actually visit the site.

So why would any site not want to have all these features? Almost all sites, even if they're not explicitly news or journal sites, are going to be updated over time. People will revisit them and want to know what's new, or they might like to have an RSS overview of changes. Every site ought to have some attributes of what we currently think of as a blog.

At the same time current blogs that I am aware of are a bit unsatisfying in several ways. They seem too tightly coupled to chronology. There's also a limited representation of updates — if I have second thoughts on a topic I want to be able to update it, have people be able to see that it's updated, but not make it pop to the top in the way it does in Blosxom.

Wikis do a little better here: you can view recent changes or history of a page, but you can also navigate without worrying about chronology.

Maybe some other software handles these better than Blosxom does?

posted Thu 27 May 2004 in /meta | link

Referers: An easy question

Someone from telkom.net.id asked Google about L.O.T.R. Arwen Sex. That's easy. She was female.

posted Mon 24 May 2004 in /meta/referer | link

referers

Google: windows software for unixy access is denied

You'd better believe it.

posted Thu 13 May 2004 in /meta/referer | link

Various blog changes

Brad Marshall kindly pointed out how to fix RSS in my Blosxom installation. It seems to work for me now on liferea and planet humbug. (Cue German laughter.)

I also updated the visual style a little. I think using <table>s for layout is not politically correct anymore, but it just works so well. In the venerable tradition of the web, there is now a picture of a cat on my homepage.

posted Mon 26 Apr 2004 in /meta | link

iaea?

Referer fields would have you believe that the International Atomic Energy Agency is linking to my humble blog, but I don't believe it.

Reminds me of the idea that Debian is a good place to look for dueling banjos sheet music.

Blogs are the web dreaming.

posted Mon 26 Jan 2004 in /meta | link

Offline Blosxom-style blogging

A strength of systems like Blosxom and PyBlosxom is that they record all your entries as a tree of unix files, stored on the server.

So how do you record or edit entries when you're offline? One way is to store little files on a laptop, and then remember to upload them later. But this is a bit gross.

A better way is to use Unison to keep a mirror of your Blosxom document tree on your laptop. You can edit either end. When you're connected, resynchronize and it will help you resolve changes made to either end.

posted Fri 16 Jan 2004 in /meta/blosxom | link

Microsoft blog complaining about IIS is down...

I see that gazitt.com is currently not responding. This was the site that mentioned the way IIS is intentionally crippled to drive demand for more expensive systems. I don't know that IIS is the problem — it could be some kind of hardware failure, or perhaps Windows crashed — but it is poetic.

posted Mon 22 Sep 2003 in /meta | link

Microsoft Blogs

A few people have commented on the recent emergence of blogs written by Microsoft people. I think this one is a particularly nice example. He's talking about somebody filing a bug complaining about the milk in the cafeteria, which is something that might happen in many development teams. But there's something about the style of writing that is particularly Microsoftie. The explanation could have come straight from The Road Ahead:

This is a particularly software-oriented joke, because it highlights how hard it is to make bugfixes in software - by applying the software testing regimen to something that isn't software. You can't assume that a simple, local change like adjusting the amount of glue applied to the carton will result in a simple, local change in the final product (a more acceptable seal strength). Software is nonlinear. A simple change can have effects (some catastrophic, some subtle) far, far away from the point of change.

Further exhibits: simplegeek.com, winethirty.com.

Following on from there, autocode writes about syntax highlighting and related editor things in Visual Studio. I was just writing about emacs, so it's kind of interesting. And in a neat circularity, prolific Microsoft/XML author Don Box knows emacs is the finest editor.

Yet further on, somebody is complaining about performance problems with his blog. Certainly a common enough topic, since blogging is probably bringing more people into running little active web applications than ever before. But here it turns out that the problem is in fact that Windows XP's web server is limited to only 10 HTTP connections, even on hardware that could probably serve thousands. This is for "business model reasons" — Microsoft wants people to run a more expensive system for web servers. There may be a time and a place for proprietary licensing, but intentionally crippling software so that your customer's customers see error messages just seems very poor.

posted Sun 21 Sep 2003 in /meta | link

Coming soon

• Review of Artespresso, Canberra
• ZX12-R pr0n
• Notes on Unison and screen and C-x z
• ...

posted Mon 15 Sep 2003 in /meta | link

Sourcefrog moved

Sourcefrog is moving machines to a new host at OzLabs, because it's previous host is starting to get disk errors... remain in your seats.

posted Mon 11 Aug 2003 in /meta | link

Blosxom Emacs Joy

Doug Alcorn had an emacs save-buffer-same-timestamp function, useful for editing Blosxom posts.

posted Wed 4 Jun 2003 in /meta/blosxom | link

Backdating entries in Blosxom

Blosxom stores everything in Unix files, which is a nice simple system and makes it easy to edit. The date for each entry is just taken from the file's modification time.

The only catch is that any edited entries are moved forward to the current day.

Fortunately there is a good fix for this in the GNU touch -d command, which can set the file's time to any arbitrary point in the past or future.

The other thing I did was just put this line into the Blosxom configuration, because the noisehavoc host is not in Canberra (by a long way.)

$ENV{'TZ'} = 'Australia/Canberra';

posted Wed 4 Jun 2003 in /meta/blosxom | link

first Blosxom post

This is my first Blosxom post.

posted Tue 3 Jun 2003 in /meta/blosxom | link

Copyright (C) 1999-2007 Martin Pool.