Tag: blog-meta

As I pointed out in my previous post, I have just discovered Writely. Writely also allows you to upload documents in Word, OpenOffice, RTF and other formats, and to export to a variety of formats including Word, OpenOffice and PDF.

This post was written using Writely, a web-based word-processing application. As far as web-based WYSIWYG word-processors go, I must say I quite like it. It even supports the direct posting of documents to your blog, as long as your blog software supports an XML-RPC based API (which WordPress and many others do). But blogging is just one use of Writely. You can use it in place of your regular word processor if you so wish. Furthermore, it allows you to collaborate on a document with other Writely users. Writely is free to use. You just need a Google account (Upstartle, the company that developed Writely, was acquired by Google in March this year). I’m sure everybody must already know about Writely and that I’m just very slow. I came across a reference to Writely while reading about Web 2.0 (don’t you just love buzzwords) in case it was relevant to a project proposal I’m helping to put together.

It has come to my attention that my Shades of Grey theme does not render correctly in Internet Explorer. For the time being I’ve switched themes because I don’t have time to play around with style sheets and so forth right now.

I had always intended to reinstate the original “Shades of Grey” look for The Thin Line after moving it to WordPress from my DIY blogging solution. Well, yesterday I finally found a bit of time to create a WordPress theme that comes fairly close to the look I originally created. Some people don’t care for it much, but I have this thing for grey. There will still be some bugs here and there, and the sidebar doesn’t look all that crash hot. Hopefully I’ll resolve these issues in the near future.

It seems I’m not the only one who’s disconcerted with the moist steaming mass that Technorati has become (or always was?). Jason Kottke writes:

That’s it. I’ve had it. No more Technorati.
…
Pretty much everyone I talk to in the industry thinks the site sucks and we’ve just been waiting for it to get better because, well, it would have to at some point, wouldn’t it? Well, I’m tired of waiting. Goodbye, Technorati…your url will darken the door of my browser no longer.

Thanks to David for alerting me to Jason’s post.

For what it’s worth, at least the Technorati javascript snippet has been working as it’s supposed to for the last week or so.

In case you’re wondering why sometimes the "Blogosphere" section on the right hand side of this page often appears to be empty, I’d just like to say it’s not my fault. Or at least I don’t think it is. That section contains the little embedded Javascript thing that shows the Technorati image and a link that says "Blogs that link here". You configure what shows up here by going to your Technorati account and choosing what you would like to be displayed. Well, every so often Technorati just seems to forget my settings. To make the image and the link show up again, I have to log in to Technorati and save my settings. If it disappears again, I’m just going to remove it from my web page altogether. Technorati seems like it’s a good idea, but so far the idea has been less than brilliantly executed.

RickyRobinson.id.au and The Thin Line have been moved off the computers in my bedroom to a real webhosting service. There’s a number of reasons for this. First, my blogging software has a memory leak in it somewhere, which necessitates the restarting of Tomcat every so often. I think the problem lies in the way I’ve configured Tomcat (probably with the database connection pooling stuff) rather than in the code itself. In times past, I might have had the time and the actual desire to track down this problem; I have neither of those two things right now. I’d rather be writing blog entries than debugging my crappy blog software. :-) Second, I’ll be moving house soon. I’ll be taking my workstation with me, which has the Tomcat install on it, but leaving the firewall, which was doubling as the web server. So my blog configuration was actually distributed across two machines, and separating the computers would completely break my blog. Now you’re wondering why on Earth I had such a convoluted setup. Well, when Tomcat was running on the firewall/gateway, which is a very low end machine, my blog site loaded very, very slowly. It improved enormously when I switched it over to my workstation, which just goes to show that network communication is by no means always the bottleneck in a network/distributed application (requests for my blog were still coming through Apache on the gateway, and were forwarded to Tomcat on my workstation via the Apache JServ Protocol). I suppose I could have moved Apache to my workstation too and just done port forwarding on the firewall, but for whatever reason I didn’t go down that track. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that the process of moving would mean my website and my blog would have been offline for quite some time. Lastly, I’ve given up trying to update my blogging system with the latest cool feature. I got as far as adding an RSS feed and pinging Technorati whenever a new post is added, but where’s the commenting system and support for trackback and so on and so forth?

So, I got myself some web hosting, transfered my web site to the web host, installed WordPress and then imported my blog via RSS. For now I’m just using one of the WordPress templates. I might try to revert to the gray look later on.

Hopefully your browsers and aggregators are being automatically redirected to the appropriate URLs. Just in case the feed redirection isn’t working for you, the RSS feed can now be found here.

From RFC 1521 (the MIME RFC):

       Rule #1: (General 8-bit representation) Any octet, except those
       indicating a line break according to the newline convention of the
       canonical (standard) form of the data being encoded, may be
       represented by an "=" followed by a two digit hexadecimal
       representation of the octet's value.  The digits of the
       hexadecimal alphabet, for this purpose, are "0123456789ABCDEF".
       Uppercase letters must be used when sending hexadecimal data,
       though a robust implementation may choose to recognize lowercase
       letters on receipt.  Thus, for example, the value 12 (ASCII form
       feed) can be represented by "=0C", and the value 61 (ASCII EQUAL
       SIGN) can be represented by "=3D".  Except when the following
       rules allow an alternative encoding, this rule is mandatory.

So that explains it, then. Now how to deal with it? …

By the way, I’ve reverted to my old blog script for entering this post! :)