I run a bunch of websites. Some of them are pretty work-intensive, particularly those that are premised on user submissions. But I’ve recently developed a simple method of reducing my workload by simply using authenticated RSS. For example, nancies.org’s Tour Reviews section invites people to submit reviews of Dave Matthews Band concerts. Dozens of reviews …
Category Archives: Tech
Mysterious ice spikes.
Several times in the past few years, I’ve opened up my freezer to find that a 1″-2″ spike has shot up out of the ice tray. At first, I thought it was from dripping from above, then I theorized that it was where still-freezing water had ruptured through the ice membrane, bubbling up to form …
Keyboards: Diswasher-safe.
I’ve put a lot of miles on my keyboard. My current one is the standard USB Powermac keyboard that came with my main system, a 1GHz G4 that I bought in March of 2003. Over the past two years, it’s become full of dirt, hair, drink spillage and cheezy poof crumbs. It got pretty gross. …
Suck.com and a WWW retrospective.
I really enjoyed this retrospective of Suck.com, not because I every really loved Suck, but because it reminds me of what I sometimes forget — that I didn’t just witness the birth of the web, I helped cut the umbilical cord. I’d forgotten that I used to read Wired on Gopher. I’d forgotten what a …
Lawrence, KS: The future of local media.
The New York Times has a fascinating look at the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, a newspaper that truly, truly gets the Internet. They have a daily and a weekly. They host blogs written by any community members who care to sign up (and feature them on the front page of their website), have a database of …
Early aggregator success.
I’m pretty happy with how my recently-established Charlottesville blog aggregator is going. Not only is it working well in a technical sense, but many of the bloggers on the list are discovering other bloggers on the list, commenting on one another’s blogs, blogging about one another, or blogging about topics that they picked up from …
Charlottesville blog aggregator.
Thanks to an Ask MetaFilter post yesterday, I’ve finally gotten a blog aggregator set up for Charlottesville bloggers. I used the excellent and simple Python-based Planet aggregator, which is substantially based on Mark Pilgrim’s Feed Parser, and took perhaps ten minutes to set up. I added a handful of blogs, slapped on a style sheet …
NAION blogging.
Inspired by Michael Buffington’s grand experiment with his Asbestos Blog, today I started a Viagra/Cialis NAION blindness blog. Rather than explain much, I encourage the curious to read Buffington’s explanation of his asbestos blog. Suffice it to say, I have no interest in the topic at all, but I have a hunch that the value …
RewriteRule, IP lookups, and site speed.
For some weeks now, my websites have been extremely slow. I was so busy with exams and then, so gone on vacation (from which I returned yesterday, facing the gaping maw of The Rest of My Life), that I have been totally unable to debug the problem. This evening, I spent several hours doing so, …
Rotate me, you sweet rotatable you.
A few months ago, I bought a beautiful 23″ 16:9 LCD panel — Dell’s repackaging of Apple’s Cinema Display. The feature about it that I really loved is that it can be rotated 19″, meaning that this movie-screen-wide monitor becomes an absurdly, wonderfully tall monitor. It’s great for spreadsheets, tall webpages, etc. I was irritated …