Ruminations, Haunts, and Errors

What’s this?  A post?  Two even??

Well, at long last I’ve started to whittle down that TODO list that seemed to grow ever longer after moving into the house.   More importantly, I think I’ve managed to piece together a method for taming the even longer list of links that I’ve bookmarked in various ways in the hope of making some pithy commentary.  Trying to pull something to write about from a huge list (300+ by the time I got around to it over the weekend) of potential ideas was daunting enough, made even worse by the challenge of easily pulling all that HTML together.  I have hope that things should be easier, both for quick swipes at the world’s goings-on and for broader musings…at least for a while.  Maybe putting it in words and slapping it on the internets will make it true.

Those readers who just tune in to see what news and thoughts cross my consciousness can stop reading now.  Techie stuff below.

No, really.  You’ve been warned.

Actually, my solution is fairly straightforward (and perhaps almost obvious) for a good chunk of blogistan.  To wit:

1. Use Flock to a) tag pages, b) save newsfeed articles, and c) save Web Snippets
2. Cron up a perl script to pull the last day’s bookmarked feeds from del.icio.us and append them to an open, unpublished entry in Flock’s blog directory
3. Review entries, decide upon amazing commentary
4. Post!
5. Wrangle too-long lists of links by tagging them appropriately in del.icio.us and simply appending a link to that tag in the post
6. Shove off too-long lists of intriguing quotes into WordPress pages, again linked back to the main post

It took me a while to figure out the best way to handle (2) and (3) because they seem to fall into a gaping holes in the technology.  That the del.icio.us API has a crappy way to pull down a list of links by date range & filter, while having a modicum of control over the formatting, was understandable when it was just one guy–but c’mon, they’ve been part of the Yahoo! behemoth for months now, I think they can spare a couple days of developer time to fix that.  Moreover, the blogging protocols still seem to have trouble with the concept that someone might want to post something from a remote tool but not actually release said post to the world without a little more time to review and edit.  Fix those two little gaps, and the blogging toolkit is much more to the liking of people like me who prefer to not only age my words but filter out some of the more mundane links that end up in my bookmarks (truly, many of them really are only going to be interesting to me).

Of course, this is all theoretical since I have yet to actually post anything according to this finely crafted formula.  But at least I have a documented plan…

Via Eric I found the nifty Plogress site that allows one to keep tabs on what official business each member of Congress has a hand in. Forget the ballyhoo of recent months about blogospheric sophistry as the vanguard against the excesses of the political/business/media Establishment, I think simpler applications like Progress show the real value of web logs and RSS: the ability to easily collect and keep track of the news that comes out in dribs and drabs, items that can be easily overlooked yet are often more important in toto than individually. Unfortunately, the people most likely to take advantage of something like Plogress don’t need it–we’re already abreast of what happens in Washington, Springfield, and City Hall–while the less attentive are precisely the ones who need to be shown how often their elected officials aren’t acting in their constituents’ interests–despite soaring campaign rhetoric to the contrary.

Over the weekend I will be moving the URL for RHE to point to its new home, rhebartonia.blogsome.com. Those of you who primarily read via the web will notice little other than some formatting changes. Those using news aggregators should note that the current RSS feed will stop being updated and should pick one of the new ones for RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, or RSS 2.0.

Why am I doing this? Well, after a couple fits and starts at trying to write my own blogging software, I decided there were too many details that needed attention and I had neither the time nor the patience to follow through. The hosting over at Blogsome seems to fit my needs.

Note that now you may search my posts and, importantly, make comments! To do the latter, please register yourself if you want them to show up right away.

(Any permalinks to entries at the previous site probably won’t work any more–hell, they haven’t really ever worked properly–but I will do what I can to redirect some to the new site.)

Attention, loyal readers (all five or six of you): RHE is moving to a new url: rhe.bartonia.net. Hopefully this will be an essentially permanent addresss, as it will no longer be tied to a particular ISP or web hosting service. The RSS links are also moving to bartonwebspace.home.comcast.net/rhe/RSS; eventually I hope to get these urls into the bartonia.net domain as well. I will not be deleting any content from its existing location, so any links to particular items should remain valid for the foreseeable future. Any updates or redirections of that content will be made as transparent as possible.

In addition to the easier-to-remember URL, the updated site sports some new navigation features that should make poking around a bit easier. Enjoy!

Woohoo! Now with one script I can not only make an entry but also update the blog index files and upload them to Comcast’s server. The handy-dandy ftp sync script written by Luis Munoz was most helpful.

I’ve never been much of a diarist, but I thought it might be interesting to start jotting down my random thoughts…cyberspace might be a better place for them than cluttering up my own head! Perhaps someone might even find them interesting.

Make no mistake, I intend this as a one-way conduit of information. Don’t like it? Start your own blog. :)