Regardless, I upgraded WordPress, and changed the theme. I also switched it over to Google Analytics, as I am doing with all my sites. Being unemployed for the moment, I have time to do maintenance tasks like this. WordPress had failed me for purposes of podcasting, which is why frontrowcrew.com is a custom site built on Django. But the newest version of WordPress very much impressed me as a publishing platform. I was inspired to use it again.

But before I started writing more blog posts, I decided to take a trip back and re-categorize and tag all the existing blog posts. This resulted in the blog being nice and clean, but it also gave me a new perspective. By looking through all of my old posts, I learned a great deal about blogs and myself.

The first thing I noticed is how out of place so many of the posts are. Some of the posts that were new seemed as if they were old, and some old ones seemed as if they were new. I got MechWarrior 2 to work in Linux in 2004. That was five years ago. I wrote an article about figuring out Twitter almost a year ago. Has it really been that long? My perception of time and events doesn’t really match reality, and looking back on a blog has helped reset my outlook.

Also, I’m really shocked at how ahead of the curve I am. I always sort of felt that I’m one step behind the game. I thought of the idea to have Slashdot with voting, but Digg made it first. I posted an “audio blog” in 2004, but podcasting beat me by a hair. What I completely forgot about, before reading the blog, was a small project I made once called “glues”. It parsed instant message log files for URLs, and created an RSS feed out of them, or posted them to del.icio.us automatically. That’s entering Twitter territory a little bit there.

Another thing that amazed me was what topics I discussed the most. I was very surprised by how many meta-posts I made, that is to say blog posts about the blog itself. There’s really no point in having them at all unless readership is very large. Also amazing was how many posts I made about Linux, distros, etc. and how many of the things discussed are now non-issues. Yet, many things like audio support in Linux are still just as much a problem now as they were then. 

Even if you already express yourself in other ways, I recommend having a blog. Even with the very small number of posts I have made, looking back at it has been extremely valuable. I have added a “blog this” button to my browser, and I hope to use this space more often to express any ideas I have which are bigger than 140 characters. Even if nobody is reading, bein able to have this experience again five years from now is valuable enough to be worth the investment.

My plan was to post here using the Digg blog feature instead of posting comments on Digg. Guess what? There hasn’t been a single story on Digg that has solicited more than a few sentences of response from me. Not one story on Digg all week has provoked anything more than a very short response from me.

My plan is still the same. I’m still going to blog anything if I see it. There just hasn’t been anything worthwhile to write about.

So I figure there is one thing I can do to pass a lot of time on the computer at work. That thing, if you haven’t guessed, is to start blogging again. The intarwebs favorite pastime. I just have to be careful to avoid being redundant with GeekNights. I slowed blogging down to nothing because I felt it was draining my mental energies from the show. I have to do this in such a way that blogging and podcasting do not take away from each other, but add.

To get some traffic, and some stuff to blog about initially, I’m going to use the Digg blogging feature. All this week, I’m going to try it. Whenever I would normally post a comment on Digg, I will instead click the blog button. Let’s see how this goes.

You see, not all feeds are created equally. There are so many different formats and optional tags with true or false meta information that it quickly becomes very difficult to write software to manage every feed 100% perfectly. But with sufficient hacking we can get close enough. The problem here is that every feed is at its core a list of links, hopefully in chronological order. No matter what aggregator or feed reader you use it treats all lists of links the same way. It doesn’t know any better, and it can’t.

This poses a problem because as a person I don’t treat all RSS feeds in the same manner and my software does. This mismatch causes me a lot of wasted clicking. Some of the feeds I read are things like slashdot or digg. They update so frequently that I don’t need to be notified of new updates. I just visit them at my leisure, and I know there will be new content. So what I want is to get all of that new content in an efficient manner. A reader like rawdog is well suited to this task. It creates a single web page with all the items from subscribed feeds in a compact and easy to read manner with newest items on top. Everything is color coded to let you know which site it came from.

But there are other sites which only update a few times a week. For these sites I need an effortless way to determine if there is new content available or not. Looking inside a Firefox bookmarks folder once or twice every day is not so good. Perhaps if Firefox simply monitored the feeds and knew which items I had read. Then it could automatically open and blink a new tab with the appropriate content already in it when it becomes available. That would be a pretty slick extension.

There is yet another kind of feed, feeds like del.icio.us/popular and google news. These are feeds with a large variety of rapidly changing links in no particular order. For these feeds there needs to be some sort of filter and ranking algorithm. Items I am more interested in would be filtered to the top and others not even displayed. These aren’t feeds I constantly monitor for news, but ones I visit during downtime just to get an overview of what’s happening. So an aggregator that generates a custom page putting hot headlines in a more prominent position while still displaying others in less detail would be best. Then I could click on headlines that looked interesting and the aggregator could learn more about what I wanted to see.

The worst problem is when it comes to something other than articles. Webcomics are a particular problem. Some comics have news articles, and others do not. I think what would be best would be a single page, like the comics page in the newspaper. This page could arrange the comics in a custom layout determined by me. That way, like the newspaper, I could always locate comics in familiar positions. If a comic had a related news article I could click the related comic to have the news open in a new tab. Also, the ability to browse the archives of each comic with first, back, forward and latest buttons would be very useful. At best they would change the comic on the page in an AJAX fashion without reloading.

For podcasts I have an even worse problem since I need to manage not only the checking and looking at feeds, but also the downloading and deleting of audio files. So far, no feed reader lets you set different options for different podcast feeds. The whole thing really bites. Most pocasts come out with an episode every day or week, so I configure my podcatcher for those. But it means there are other podcasts I completely ignore because it is too much trouble to read them. For normal podcasts I set iTunes to get every episode and delete them after I have listened to them.

There are two types of podcasts that give me trouble. The first is news podcasts. NPR 10am news in particular is the trouble. I don’t care about yesterday’s news. So if I didn’t listen to it yesterday I want it deleted when a new news report comes out. Only the newest podcast should be kept and all others deleted. Music podcasts like the hype machine pose an even worse problem. For a podcast like that I want every mp3 in the list to be downloaded and to remain downloaded. But songs that fall of the bottom of the feed should be automatically deleted unless I specify otherwise. There is currently no podcatcher that gives this sort of option.

So what to do? I can resort to using a plethora of different aggregators to manage all the different feeds of information coming in. But that becomes tedious to have to have so many tabs open for web based aggregators. It’s even worse for applications because they are much harder to switch than tabs. What I need is a Firefox/Flock extension that takes care of all of these things in a graceful way with an intuitive interface. I can try to do it on my own, but it will be quite shitty. Here’s hoping someone like Google or Apple can do it right. Because that is what we will need to upgrade from web 2.0 to web 2.1.

I got into podcasting recently when I purchased the iPod nano. Come to think of it, I should probably keep an OPML online of all the podcasts I listen to. I’ll do that sometime this week. Anyway, this sudden realization that podcasts are actually awesome and people listen got me to rethink about my audioblog idea. Before you knew it, my roommate and I had started a podcast.

You see, when I get home from work, we talk about all kinds of things. And our friends often remark about how entertaining our conversations are. I don’t understand what they’re talking about, but apparently standard conversational fare for us has been called “pure sex” by others. Who are we to deny the world its need for pure sex?

The problem we had with the podcast was coming up with a name. We came up with some good names like “renaissance geeks” and such, but that didn’t pan out. Rym thought “teh show” was a good name, but I felt it implied some sort of connection to l33t kiddies. But then, I rememberd a previous Idea of mine. You know those late night TV shows hosted by guys who have last names beginning with the letter “L”? I always felt there should be a show like that just for geeks. So we settled on “GeekNights with Rym + Scott”.

The website for the podcast is www.frontrowcrew.com. In college our group of friends was known as the front row crew because we sat in the front row of anime club ever week. That site is shaping up to be sort of a community blog that ties us all together on the Internet. The podcast is just the first, and primary, thing that will be hosted there. However, because of iTunes and such, we had to seperate and reformat our podcast feed using feedburner. So the GeekNights podcast feed is at a different URL.

I hope you enjoy the podcast, but if you don’t I wont force you to listen to it. And I doubt that the podcast will diminish the content posted to this blog. If anything it will be quite the opposite.

I was writing opinion essays on the web as long ago as the late 1990s. I know for a fact that the stuff I wrote when I was in high school was completely crazy stupid. If you looked at things you said or wrote in high school you would also think the same thing. What’s really scary is that stuff I’m reading from as recently as 2004 is looking like total crap. I’m having a tough time deciding if I should edit it or leave it be.

One major post that stood out as garbage was the one on habit and routine. I was reading this book, “The Fourth Way”, on the suggestion of a friend. The book had a few good ideas which I expanded upon in the blog, but now I realize that 90% of that book was complete batshit. I remember a quote in there about the moon wanting to eat my soul because it was hungry, literally.

Not only is the content of my old posts terrible, but so is the grammar and formatting. The paragraphs are so incredibly long. My word choices were so incredibly painful. No wonder there weren’t very many readers. I can’t blame anyone for not reading a website that was so painful just to look at.

From now on I promise to spell check, grammar check and doubly edit all of my blog posts. In the past I have noticed that heavily edited posts often get more comments than other posts. It’s not that I’m incapable of writing well, it’s just that I didn’t put in the full effort all the time. I have felt the pain of my own unedited prose, and the world will suffer it no more.

Physical changes to the blog include a nicer sidebar on the right, full of actual useful links. No more fickle tabs across the top. The about page as well as other static pages will return and be linked on the side as well, I just have to do some work on them. The about page in particular will probably get a full rewrite.

And perhaps my favorite change are the excerpts displayed at the top of each post. I feel they give the blog a more professional tone while helping give readers a better understanding of what a post is really about.

I haven’t yet put all of my old posts into the new database yet. I will do that over the course of the next week or so. I’m going to start with the posts I think are the best or the most popular and work my way down. I will not edit anything for content or remove anything, no matter how bad I think it is now. I will, however edit posts for obvious mistakes and formatting. Small grammatical errors like missing commas will be fixed. Anything that requires the rewording of a sentence will not be done.

Oh yeah, I’m afraid that comments from the old blog might be lost forever. I’ve still got them, but I don’t know if I can find a pratical way of porting them over.

Stay tuned for a podcast and other goodies to come very soon.

I am going to say it right now. I am a shit-talker. Awhile back I posted about my quest to develop custom blog software. I can seriously say that I have been working on it. I also signed up for CSS Reboot in order to set a project deadline of November first. Today I decided to abandon the project.

This decision did not come easily. Dropping it made me realize that over the years I have never finished a project that was not for school or work. It’s pretty upsetting to look back and see every attempt to implement your own ideas was a failure. At least I think I know why it happens.

Take the blog project as an example. I was simultaneously the sole customer and the sole developer. Because I will not push myself into discomfort, it becomes much more difficult to force myself to work. That is a nice filter to weed out waste of time projects, but it also means I am unable to make anything for myself unless it is very easy, badly needed or greatly desired. I have a solution. Henceforth, I will only work on projects with a team and/or for people other than myself. Hopefully this will cure my shit-talking related to software development.

What will happen to my blog? After a great deal of deliberation I have decided on switching to WordPress. A great deal of thought went into this decision. It comes down to the fact that the custom blog project was a cork in my bottle of creativity. I wasn’t making blog posts, I wasn’t working on other projects, I wasn’t properly maintaining my computer(s) and I was losing rare and valuable free time. WordPress is free and it does 90% of the things I was going to implement in my software. I think I can manage without that remaining 10%. I might even be able to add that 10% in the future. Not having a unique snowflake for a blog is a tough pill I will have to swallow. Though, it will finally be a beautiful blog. Most WordPress themes are nicer than any CSS I can produce.

Sometime soon there might be some downtime on this site. This time it will be intentional, unlike the great Gentoo Apache configuration change. After the switch this blog will be like Lenin, a corpse on public display. Keep checking here for the full details of how this site will be changing. It is likely that I will probably purchase a new domain for a podcast being created by me and my roommate. Yesterday we actually did a test recording, and we have a dry run scheduled for today. The end of my shit-talking days could be just around the corner.

My issue is that I’ve pretty much locked my blog into an essay blog. I make big infrequent posts. A lot of times I write posts and never put them up because they are large and hard to edit. Mostly that’s my fault for being heavily redundant. I keep saying the same thing in many different ways to be sure I get my point across. Like right now. And while this format allows me to express myself in a way I like, it is really something I need to limit.

I had a SlashJournal and it had limits. I worked within those limits for a time. But eventually I found them too constricting, so I switched to this format which has no limits. Now that I’ve experimented with no limits for a time I find that I still can’t do everything I want. So I’m going to write myself a new blog software. One that imposes heavy limits to allow me to do more. Not making sense? Let me explain.

Presently all I can do to post on my blog is make a bunch of HTML and stick it in a box. But with so much freedom to move around I really lack direction. So I always end up blabbing away about something crazy. I never post a cool link I’ve found. I never post a short little blurb about a book or a game. I always wait for something really good and then write a huge thing about it.

So here’s my idea for a new blog software that encompasses all types of blogging. The multi-blog if you will. Instead of just one type of post there will be many. There will be simple “link” posts where I just put up a URL. That will most likely mirror to my del.icio.us. There will be blurb posts where I limit myself to 50 words or such. These will be used for anything which doesn’t require much explanation. Things like “I went to the beach today, yay!” or “I got this thing, you totally should buy it.” I’ll still keep the essay posts, but from then on I will be sure to limit myself to 1000 words or so. Maybe even less. That will force me to edit more heavily and only post an essay when I really write it well. I’ll probably make additional types of posts for photos (Flickr mirror), video and audio.

I think with all these different types of posts I will be more inclined to put up more content. And that content will be more useful to myself and others. Especially since I will also do the following. First, implement track-backs which I have never had working. Next mirror on sites like del.icio.us and Flickr for awesome and for bandwidth relief. RSS everything. Feeds of different types of posts, feeds of different combinations of types of posts, feeds of date. And of course, absolutely everything will be categorized by tag, not hierarchy. Oh yeah, feeds for flags too. Feeds for combinations of flags. The whole shebang.

What I’m going to basically do is create a single information collation point which will allow me to store, get and share all the digital information in my life. I’ve wanted such a thing for quite awhile, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized the web was the place for it to be. But don’t expect it anytime soon. I’m going to be working on using the Puzzle Pirates engine to make some multiplayer games first.

Anyway, when I got to college I stopped web-siting a lot and moved to slashdot journalizing. It was much easier and provided a pretty steady readership flowing from my list of fans on slashdot. But I only wrote in it when I had something to say.

Later I found that journal to be too restrictive. I couldn’t put pictures or music or sounds inside the blog posts, and I couldn’t change the way it looked. So I started this blog with blosxom. It started out as just a replacement for the slashdot journal, but with more freedom. I still only wrote in it when I had something to say. To my surprise I never really took much advantage of the added freedom I got by hosting the blog myself instead of using the slashjournal. Maybe when I figure out how to get pictures off my phone without selling my soul to verizon and I do some interesting stuff I can do something like that.

But today, something strange happened. I found myself trying to think of something to write in the blog. This is very unusual, since I only write in it when I have something to say. This can be quite often, but usually it’s only when events and discussions cause an idea to swim in my head for an extended period of time and I have to let it loose. And of course, the result is the post you see here. I was trying to think of something to say, recognized that I don’t want to get into that situation, then all of a sudden had something to say.

So anyway, soon I’m going to update the technology of this blog. First I want to make sure that trackbacks are really working. Then I’m going to set up the technorati tags and the anti-spam rel=nofollow tags. Then I think I’ll exchange my current anti-spam filter for something higher quality like the mtblacklist. Then I think I might slightly change the format of the blog. I make frequents posts to place like /., kur05hin, etc. And some of them are quality enough to be blog posts. I might just cross-post them in the blog in their own categories, but I don’t know if this is useful or not. I think of all the stuff I’ve written on /. and most of it is disappeared or deep in the depths where it will never be seen again. Maybe somehow if I saved it in my blog too it would be safe. I guess that’s more for me than for anyone who actually reads this. But I think that is a fundamental aspect of blogging that is necessary and makes it separate from journalism. Journalism is writing specifically for others. You publish it because you want other people to read it, you made it for them. With blogging you make it for yourself, and if anyone else happens to want to read it you make it available to them. I think that is what makes it special.

Anyway, blog spammers are kind of easy to get rid of. You can set up all kinds of stuff like making the user look at an image and then type the number into a box in order to post a message. Or you can do it Engadget style and make users confirm by e-mail. But this blog is powered by a small perl script called blosxom. And the posting of comments is done via a smaller plugin perl script called “comments”. So instead of re-doing my entire blog in a different system I modified the comments plugin to not accept any comment in which the checkbox isn’t checked. My friend Steve came up with this temporary hacky fix. Originally I thought it was a hacky fix, but I eventually caved in and used it because the blog spam was getting exponentially worse. When I figure out a better solution I’ll do it.

You also might have noticed I upgraded the site in a few ways. I added a way to go through archives at the top there. I didn’t realize before there was no way to go back in my blog, so I got a blosxom extension for archiving that is extremely simple. It’s fairly obvious. Also, I moved the RSS link to the top from the bottom where it previously resided. With Firefox 1 RSS is become more popular, so I figure I should put it in a more prominent spot. I also added the appropriate tag in the header of my pages so the RSS feed will appear in the bottom right of firefox and other things that pay attention to that will see it.

Lastly I upgraded the creative commons license to version 2.0 instead of 1.0. I also corrected a few issues to make sure I still validate at XHTML1.0 Strict and the CSS still validates also. Oh yeah, reading my blog in Internet Explorer, which is perfectly standard XHTML and CSS, is worse than ever. Get Firefox, what is wrong with you?! Lastly, I’m considering adding a new rectangle thingy at the bottom to proclaim the blog is powered by Blosxom. In fact, I’m doing that this second, so anyone reading this will probably see it.

That should take care of the web design tasks of this blog for quite awhile. I have a predicament though, that in just a little over 10 weeks I graduate college. After that I’m on co-op. And unless I find a co-op in the Rochester area, I’m blowing this popsicle stand for good. That means the server isn’t going to stay in the apartment much longer. So I have to find hosting or get a new place with a domain and a net connection. Hopefully I’ll be paid enough money and I can co-locate the server cheaply. Maybe I’ll get www.apreche.net or www.gourmetgeek.com or something. Yeah… Anyway, watch out for that in the future. I still don’t know what I’ll do about my e-mail address.

To listen to the audioblog click here.