“first there was a three-legged monkey...”
Today I finally made the first feature addition to this blog since its launch. I’ve been having some instabilities with Eclipse / RDT and my Subversion repository, and updated my Typo installation so I haven’t been able to work for a while. The feature is nothing spectacular but just a tag cloud which I’ve been wanting for a while.
Yeah I know. It’s a weird name. But I’ve been trying to come up with a good name for months, and have come up with hundereds of potential ones. Most of them were crap, some of them I even liked—but they were already taken or ungoogable. And for some reason andthennothing.net stuck, I can’t tell you why. So one day I said to myself, enough of this, and went for it. And the decision is revertable, I could get a new domain name anytime :-).
And what about “first there was a three-legged monkey…”? I think some of the inspiration comes from Real Live Preacher’s “I had this funny picture in my head of a freak-show barker shouting, ‘Come, See a Real Live Preacher’”. But basically it’s the same story as with the domain name. It’s just something that popped into my head and stuck.
I’m generally bad at making up names for things that don’t have a specific function or purpose. I wonder how other people do it…
This is just a small notice to let you know that this blog is now live. It’s been a few hectic days to sift through large amounts of documentation to get a grip of how to host a Ruby on Rails app (this blog is based on Typo), with issues like how to configure Apache, lighttpd etc. But I’ll talk more about those kinds of things and why I’ve migrated from # blog and so forth tomorrow (or “tomorrow”).
There are probably a few things that are not working as they should and there are lot of things I have left to do. So please let me know if you notice anything that isn’t working as you expect or if there are anything I can do to enhance the usability of this site. Thanks in advance :-)
Today I signed up for lifetime hosting over at TextDrive. That was quite a leap for me – to go from a free/ad-based HMTL only host to a paid account at a host with excellent support for web development. I could have tried it out for a year or so, but the offer was to good to refuse (I hope) :-)
Hopefully I will be able to migrate to my new blog in a few days, just some grunt work left. Stay tuned :-)
More and more people are starting to use Technorati tags and that’s a good thing. I would like to use them myself as well, but unfortunately I use Blogger (will probably switch solution as soon I can come up with a hostname for this blog), which doesn’t have any support for tags. Of course I could just add links to Technorati in each post, but that’s not the way I want it to work (and you don’t necessary have to link to Technorati at all in order to get listed since they just look for rel=”tag”). When I click on a tag on someone’s blog I want to come to a page with all the posts of that blog with the tag. Perhaps from that tag page I want to check what others have to say about the issue.
But that’s just my €0.02.
In my previous post you can see the result of my recent lack of sleep. It is something vaguely (understatement alert) inspired by Tesugen.
It is a Python script that gets the latest links I’ve posted to del.icio.us, and then post all the new links to this blog using the Atom API.
At first I thought I should just post the links that I’ve added during the same day, but that wouldn’t work since I don’t have any server that is running all the time. In some cases I might not be able to run the script for a couple of days. So now I keep a local history of which links I’ve blogged, and only blog unblogged links.
It was yesterday I started working on it. I was really tired at work, and my head was aching, so my plan was to go to bed early. Somehow I ended up starting with this and all of a sudden it was 4.30 a.m (and I had to be at work 10 a.m. today). I really enjoy hacking away for fun once in a while.
The main problem was to get the posting to Blogger to work. I used this example as a starting point, but there was something wrong with the login. After remembering reading about Blogger changing the authorization model, I tried using HTTP Basic Authorization over HTTPS. After a while I tried with another password, and it worked, go figure. So I spent a couple of hours trying to fix a problem that wasn’t there. That proves that it was a wise choice to go home early from work. But it was quite interesting learning a bit about WSSE authorization. Getting del.icio.us to work was really easy as soon as I got libxml2 installed and found this example.
There might be some changes to the format of my link blog posts…
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