Cox Crow
Asking the Stupid Questions Since 1971
Wednesday, May 22, 2002Setting Priorities
I think I'll go home now.8:05:10 PM # Google It!
categories: Sadness, System Administration
"Yes."
"That's OK. I can hold him later."
My daughter is just adorable. :-)
A house for computers: Data Park, by Intelco on the Northern Highway in Belize
A house for people on the intersection of the Northern Highway and the Old Northern Highway.
What a Ford Aerostar looks like after it hits a bus. On our way back from Altun Ha we found this accident. In our tour group were three ER nurses. They saved the life of the Aerostar's driver while the people in the neighborhood worked to pry the dash and door off. People are incredible.
Don't forget to close your tags
Radio Userland is just way too helpful in adding graf tags as it interprets the *.txt files. I've been modifying this template to make it friendlier for Netscape 4.x readers, and having Radio add unclosed tags in the middle of my experiment is more than a little annoying. In any case, this page should now render much more readably in decrepit browsers.What was causing this? Well, inside a table you have to declare the fonts specifically or they revert to default. This is somewhat alleviated by CSS. However, Netscape Communicator 4.x doesn't reset the font after a span element closes. Jenett had used span elements to define the title and description elements. Radio Userland does its own little hamster dance within the story elements, but once the font-size was set to 24px, Netscape was perfectly happy keeping it there, unless it was explicitly specified otherwise. I changed these spans to h1 and h6, then defined h6.
6:10:10 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
1:49:46 PM #
Routing
At home, I'm experimenting with the upstreaming in Radio Userland. I'm routing posts to different sites based on their category. So, a post to the BestWeb category goes to my site at BestWeb, a post to the CoxesRoost category to my site at pair.net, and a post to the main page goes to the xmlStorageSystem at radio.weblogs.com. This is handy, but it doesn't really do what I want.I want to upstream to more than one site, using multiple protocols in the same #upstream.xml file, so that a post to the main page will go to both CoxesRoost, via FTP, and homepage.mac.com, via WebDAV, so that each site is identical.
Another thing I want is to be able to replicate my source data, so that my computers at both home and work can post to my sites. Rick Klau suggested that I might simulate this with the multiAuthorWeblogTool, which is more appropriately just an RSS routing device. That's an interesting idea, so I'm looking into that. However, I would like to maintain consistency in the source data as well as the output.
My initial attempts in this realm were using mirror (no link because they've got that annoying mirror java applet) to FTP the Radio Userland directory tree. There are some inconsistencies in the data I was pulling across, and I don't have the bandwidth to pull the entire kit and kaboodle every day. Perhaps rsync would work. I think the main stumbling block is that not all of the data is text: it's mostly in ./Data Files/weblogData.root. Basically, I want Notes' replication and Radio's usability.
12:42:53 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
Aggregator? What's an Aggregator?
Think of the Web as a world-wide pile of paper. Some of those pieces of paper have interesting writing on them, some have pictures, and some have unintelligible marks that look like words but make no sense. An aggregator is a clipping service.A clipping service sorts through journals, newspapers, and other publications; extracts the items of interest; bundles them together and drops the lot of them on your desk. You skim through the clippings. If there's something really interesting, you might save it. Often you'll run across an item that you know will interest someone else, so you pass it on to them, often with comments.
An aggregator takes a feed, generally published in the RSS format, collects it, collates it — optionally folds, spindles, and mutilates it — and presents it for your reading pleasure. Depending on the aggregator you use, some of these things will be more or less possible. But the general function is the same.
If there's something really interesting, you might save it. Often you'll run across an item that you know will interest someone else, so you pass it on to them, often with comments.
12:02:34 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online
