Wed, 02 Jul 2008
21:04: My site is (slowly) moving
I've decided to give my website a spring-clean. One of the things that is overdue a change is my domain name.
You can find out more about the history of the "alcopop" name at /about/ if you are so inclined. I've been using it for a long time and haven't really thought about what people might presume about me from the name.
Over the next few months, the site will be moving to the more neutral jmtd.net (my initials). From this point forward, any new content will go there only. This log will probably stay where it is for a while, however.
I'm taking this opportunity to migrate to ikiwiki which is a really useful bit of software and has managed to scratch an itch that I thought nothing would quite manage.
Category: /meta
Thu, 20 Apr 2006
18:07: newsdot explodes
So a change I made today exploded newsdot. Its for the best, though: the aggregator should now handle atom feeds like cph's properly.
Category: /meta
Tue, 22 Mar 2005
17:11: Agreements
It occured to me a while ago that with the increasing number of planetplanet blog aggregators and similar things springing up, people who wish for their XHTML to be displayed in an aggregator are going to have to come to some kind of agreement about the meaning or style of certain things.
Take newsdot, for example. Recently I published an entry with some images in it. The images are wrapped up inside <div> tags, with a class of image. Cph recently published a transcript of a computer session, which he did as a <ul> tag with a style attribute.
In the former case, the <div> tags were preserved but bereft of their meaning without my stylesheet. In the latter, the style attribute was stripped out.
We should decide on a set of div/span classes and ids which mean certain things, to be sure what we write appears properly on the aggregator.
Category: /meta
Wed, 16 Mar 2005
23:13: Welcome cph
Welcome to newsdot, cph - if you can think of a better icon for yourself, please feel free to suggest.
Also added: linguica/failmath. Mental note: do an icon.
Category: /meta
Sun, 13 Mar 2005
23:01: Newsdot
A long time ago, Tom stuck together some neato-code which determined when a website was updated using clever methods, and aggregated a bunch of sites together into a table. We used this for our little social-circle's personal web sites.
Nowerdays you'd say 'pffft, blogging, RSS, newsreaders' but none of these terms were around back then. Well, they are now, and with the help of planetplanet, we've got a similar thing running now.
Ladies and gentlemen may I announce http://news.alkali.org/, which is (probably) version 3.0., or thereabouts. Design just knocked together this evening, needs a bit of touching up for IE.
(closing note: the technique tom used is now referred to as 'screen scraping', and looked down apon. I had to hack planetplanet a bit: it rejects an entire feed if a single entry is more than 2 years old (an arbitrary sanity check). This dropped Jon Rimmer's blog. here's the patch I wrote to fix that).
Category: /meta