I spent the weekend in Seattle, sort of a special event for Paul's birthday. Paul, Andi, myself, and both of Paul and Andi's cats traveled Friday night to Lindsay Brown's apartment in Lynnwood.
Read the whole story, and check out the photos.
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April Fool's is a recognized holiday here at PolyServe. It would appear that Bob Miller's disinterest in decorating his office has finally caught up with him. Someone took it upon themselves to remedy the situation. Hope he likes romance novels!
This prank gets 4.5/5. On the plus side, It demonstrates clear thoughtfulness on the part of whoever instigated it. It also appears to have been inexpensive to implement, and should be easy to clean up after. That is, as long as the wallpaper border didn't get moist and permanently bond with the drywall. :-D On the minus side, it doesn't have the overwhelming character common of office decor pranks, and could have done with a few more props.
Update: Bob arrived, and appears to be quite amused.
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I got some comment spam this morning! Try googling for a site called makec.net. It has the basic appearance of a blog site, but the nonsensical content looks like a concatenation of random well-formed sentences, just like the comment that was posted to my site. It seems to have lots of results on public search engines, clearly an attempt to affect search results. The whois result points to a company called domainsbyproxy.com, which appears to specialize in concealing the identity of the real registrant.
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I tried installing a really simple, stupid photo gallery application, Simple PHP Gallery. It works. It even appears to be "integrated" with Word Press. For now at least, it's accessible through the "Photos" link at the top of this page. I have a limited set of photos up now. Check it out and let me know!
In terms of implementation, this app is lousy. Its metadata consists of an arbitrary filesystem directory structure, and some icky .ini files that it maintains. It doesn't use the database. It doesn't offer any interface for uploading, editing metadata, or any form customization. It doesn't support any standard blog features like comments or RSS. It had to be hacked to work with Word Press 1.5. It had to be hacked to avoid displaying the Word Press sidebar when also displaying an image wider than the main column. I had to rename a bunch of files to get rid of %-symbols and &-symbols, because they aren't handled correctly. It seems likely to be full of security holes.
This app seems great for cases where one wishes to post a large unsorted collection of photos on to their home page, wants a reasonable-looking frontend, and doesn't care about descriptions or comments.
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This is my home page now, and I'm trying it on for size. It has a really generic title, "Least Significant Bits." Last night Andi suggested "Sam's Lamp" which has stuck with me as a distinct possibility. The current title has won out for the time being, however.
This format is only being tried on for size. Its genericness is its least comfortable trait. If it feels wrong after a few days, it'll change.
Built with Word Press, a popular commodity blogging package, and a slightly customized but otherwise commodity theme, I'm hoping that it adheres to some formula for a semi-stylish home page / blog. I also installed and toyed with b2evolution, which apparently derives from the same "b2" code base as Word Press, and appears to be a greatly cleaned up implementation. However, its features over Word Press aren't that compelling, and its user base and availability of themes is lacking. Nathan suggested some Perl-based blogware yesterday, like Movable Type and Blosxom, which I'll eventually have to try, but first need to become comfortable with mod_perl. There is also a fairly comprehensive list of blogware packages.
Andi and Paul also gave some great ideas for normal home page material, some things they want to try, some that I want to try at some point too:
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Despite the fact that blogs are rarely more than a personal diary, names like "The personal diary of John Doe" just don't work. Your blog is individual, unique, and worthy of attention, so damnit, pick a name that shows it! Most wind up sounding very pretentious, but maybe I just haven't figured out how to selectively interpret blog titles vs. the rest of the internet.
So what are blogs really useful for?
The ALA president misses the point in his rant too, but someone like that has got to be more perceptive than what he expresses in the article, and is just trying to be provocative.
I haven't given up yet!
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This is my first shot at creating a blog. I know a handful of other people who actually participate in such, and haven't previously felt attracted to diaries/blogs/etc. I never really saw a clear purpose before in maintaining such a thing. Personal reasons, and proof of my own existence haven't really struck me as legitimate reasons. Anyway, some sort of blog is the social norm these days, particularly among the tech geek crowd with which I usually associate, and has been for quite some time.
I can't bring myself to use a public blogging service, because I don't have a solid purpose or line of reasoning behind creating something of this sort, and therefore feel at risk of publishing embarassing content.
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