Category: Website

Frontier updates

Those wacky guys at Userland have gone and updated Frontier to 9.0. For those of us on Manila websites, the best thing about this update is that Lawrence collected all the change notes in one place (many of these things were released quietly in the past few months).

One of the cooler features that I hadn’t played with until today is the viewNewsItems macro. I was able to use it to finally give a more unified view of my old stories and my newer writing on my site navigation pages (the ones listed by name under “Navigation”). Now, on each page in addition to a link to the list of all news items there are the five most recent news items for that topic.

I may take advantage of this feature to add a “recent news” box on pages other than the home page. It allows use of custom templates, so I could run just headlines, change the typeface, etc. Maybe a project after I finish messing with OmniOutliner2OPML.

An apology

An irate reader left a message on my discussion board (registration required) to complain about a news item from January on the Argentinian crisis. He writes:

“Sorry, but what fun can you find in ?Quiere Ser Presidente de Argentina?…People is passing a very hard time here, some (not few) are hungry and eating from the garbage.

When you suffered the terrorist attack (in which people from Argentina also died) we showd our pain and demonstrated in massive meetngs with all religions and personalities here. We know how it is to be a target for terrorists, we had two mayor blastings in Buenos Aires.

A few points:

  1. Antonio is right on: the posting was insensitive. It showed no sympathy for the very real sufferings of the Argentinian people.
  2. The post was also, until I figured out how to use the inverted question mark (¿), badly punctuated; I will note that Fortune magazine, the original source, never did figure out the latter.
  3. However, Antonio completely missed the point.

The post was written following the series of nominations and withdrawals for the presidency of Argentina, after the collapse of Fernando de la Rúa’s presidency in December 2001. It did not seek to mock the Argentinian people. It sought only to call attention to the severity of their political situation. It did so by pointing to a humor article in a US magazine.

I acknowledge that using humor may create misunderstandings, particularly on topics so sensitive as this–and particularly when this blog’s visibility in Google may surface my writing to a larger audience. However, I refuse to relinquish humor. It is frequently the only defense available against the absurdity of the cosmos.

That said, I still feel the need to become more deeply engaged in understanding Argentina’s situation. Look for more posts about Argentina in the future as I find out more.

Blogtree: the lineage of blogs…

The newest addition to the nav bar on the left side of this site is my Blogtree link. You can see the blogs that inspired me to start blogging; blogs that were inspired by the same “parents”; and blogs that I’ve inspired there. Kind of a cool idea—and when I checked about 1100 blogs had registered.
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Speaking of which (again)…

…someone’s playing tricks with my referers. I have an entry with no link, consisting of XXXX: followed by 160 plus characters (+). It pushed the right column of the table out past the page border and made me think there was something wrong with my site (which, in fact, there may be). Is something like this supposed to be able to appear on the referer page?

Update: Now this is interesting. There are a few discussions at places like DECAFBAD and philringnalda.com around this topic. There’s no consensus. The cause is either

  • someone faking the referers manually
  • a tool like Outpost is blocking the referral

It’s a little surprising that it hasn’t happened before now, I suppose.
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A year ago today

July 19, 2001: Apple: How to Bury an Important Announcement. A year ago today I was blown away that Steve Jobs announced baked in support for SOAP and XML-RPC in Mac OS X and tried to explain why. I think it’s still the most read story on my page ever, though that statistic is hard to measure now that I’ve switched to shorter news items rather than one update a day.

A few months later Mac OS X 10.1 came out, and the next Monday I had released my first script to use SOAP, which tied together Manila and the text editing app in Mac OS X. Since then I’ve glued iTunes and Manila together, written an entire front end app for Manila posting, and diversified into output formatting for OmniOutliner. Today I announced glue for Amazon web services. It’s fun to think about how a lot of the last year has turned on that one “wow” moment watching the MacWorld keynote.

What the heck, here’s my blogchalk

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Kirkland, Norkirk, Tim, Male, 26-30!

What’s that all about? Well, as explained on the site:

I miss … a region-sensible blog-search engine, [which] would make easier for me to know blogs owned by people that live near my home, and then, increase the possibility of real meetings. What would probably end in new and great friendships.

After seeing this kind of hard mapping implemented by people at NYCBloggers.com and watch to the rise of WarChalking (in my opinion, an idea that best express, today, the beauty of large public networks), I noticed a possible way: if all bloggers mark their sites with a special sign and geographic information, maybe it would be possible to improvise such searching system.

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Blogaversary

Hard to believe that it was a year ago today that I started this weblog in earnest. At the time I certainly didn’t think I’d stick to it; the title (“Quarterly Update (i)”) indicated a certain… lack of optimism.

I hadn’t counted on the power of writing to overcome some of the loneliness of separation from my family and friends on a new coast, in a new job, in a new industry. Nor on the power of habit to keep me writing, and how practice would improve my prose. Nor on my sister jumping on board. Nor on the blog jumpstarting my programming, nor on my becoming an award nominee. Nor on becoming a realtime blogger.

This weblog continues to be a way for me to stretch in directions that I can’t predict and never imagined. I trust it will continue to be so as I move to Seattle at the end of the month.

Two columns it is!

I’m reverting the page to a two column CSS layout. I hope this helps some of the issues that people had with the three column layout. While I think one day it would be nice to have the three column version, as long as I don’t have fine control over the formatting of every element of the page (fixed width form elements, the calendar, etc.) it will have to be set up this way.

On the plus side, this makes the calendar much more prominent, which I think is a good thing. On the minus side, I think it’s broken again on NS 4.x. Sorry folks. But if you want to read the page, you can either click the print friendly link at the bottom of the page or subscribe to my RSS feed (XML icon in the navigation bar).

Yeah, I’m updating my design too

So everyone seems to be junking their tables these days and going to CSS-based layouts. I’m working on it … right now I’m getting close on the basic CSS layout and am going looking for pictures. Maybe I’ll launch the new look soon… we’ll see.