*- title edited to unbreak my index template

Anatomy of a blog entry:

It all starts with some notes, often just a list of links, that I eventually copy to a temporary or "draft" blog entry. When enough stuff comes together, I organize all that into some kind of related sequence of thoughts, and sometimes even a gimmick, and then the actual writing begins. I usually try to introduce things with a general statement of what's going on, what's happened since the last entry (especially if it's been a while), all sprinkled with interesting links I've found or things I've done that are accessible via the web and I feel like bragging about.

So Kevin and Anna came and went, and sadly there was no bocce in the interim. However, I'm now back to being super productive, and documenting that productivity in this here blog. I added the Gearwhore and Fluke albums to Imperial Radio, as well as a really great BT track I got off the official website while adding it to a list of music bookmarks. Apparently, it's an old one that he found and decided to mix and release. I think that's really cool, but that may be because I do that all the time with TRB stuff. Sometimes, you people are basically eating the musical equivalent of hotdogs I found in the back of the freezer. Er, listening. Audio pig intestines.

Through this part, I'll try to include lots of self-deprecating jokes, and talk to the readers as if there are more than 4 of them. It's usually about here in the entry that I begin talking about hard core geeky projects, if any have come about, and this is where the link/bragging frenzy really begins.

So today (Tues) I found a server-side RSS aggregator that doesn't have a crappy UI like feeds on feeds. It takes all my happy RSS feeds (which I now found Livejournal automatically makes- woohoo, syndicating linds and the bp) and puts them in one place, where I can read the headlines and click only the articles I want to read, without having to actually go to a whole bunch of web pages. I'd done this before with this clunky-ass portal server called metadot, but this rnews is way better.

It opened the links in the same window, though, and I wasn't havin' that. And so I did the unthinkable. I (dun dun dun) modified open source software. In all seriousness, I'd done that before, but it was to customize text or change colors or something - in a single, solitary word, it was Mac-user-grade wuss-hacking, not the full-on adding of features. So this is some pretty big shit. I had never messed with PHP, or writing to databases, or anything even juggling data about multiple users, and plus I have a pretty paralyzing fear of screwing up linux apps once I get them working. And this was a thing I really liked, and it worked, so this was pretty scary.

But, after an hour or two of learning PHP by trial and error and screwing around, I had added my feature. Since Rnews supports multiple users, each with their own feed lists, I wanted the feature to allow people to pick whether stuff opened in the same or a new window (target=_self or target=_blank for the savvy), and so I had to write that preference to the database, and make the page load the preference from the database and then adhere to it.

This is all just a complicated-ass way of saying I paraphrased some of the code in the existing documents, but it was a big deal for me. Of course, once that worked, and my house didn't erupt in purple flames, I went nuts with it, and added all kinds of other stuff. Users can now customize the titlebar of the browser window for their feed list, as well as specify link behavior, and I added a needed link to the "new account signup" page from the login screen. In the out-of-box (or sourceforge mirror) config, after the first person makes a user, the only real way to get to the new account creation screen is to just magically know to add "?newaccount=1" to the URL of the login screen. Not the most newbieproof system.

The modified Rnews is up and running, though on my feed sheet I'm calling it Imperial Newswire. If you wanna make an account, you'll have to IM me or otherwise reach me to get the super secret password. You can look at the feeds I read without logging in or creating a user, but if you create a user you can rename it from Imperial Newswire, which is clearly a more important draw than the ability to aggregate news feeds. The default picture for feeds will still say Imperial Newswire, though, so nyeah.

Often, after explaining it, I'll try to ground the geekiness in something useful, or at the very least, somewhat cool, so people can see the pitiful reasons I have for wasting my life away in the various ways that I do.

After getting this up and running, I was able to check out this bizarre Wired article. This is the kind of thing my family would devise if we had state funding.

Now, I can check out all the news that's fit to absorb from slashdot to wheaton to barry in one little page that loads fast as a bat out of new jersey. Bonus.

Later today, I got sitebar up and running, which is a nice complement for rnews Imperial Newswire, in that it is a web-based set of bookmarks useful for checking up on all the web places I like to go, but which have still not seen the holy light of RSS. Like the news feeds, I can browse and edit the bookmarks from any computer, anywhere, which already has proven remarkably convienient. I haven't created a lot of bookmarks yet, but my live sitebar is up and running here. Go on, check it out, make fun of my taste in music.

Still later today, I got Mister House back up and running on Datawhore, and lo and behold, ImperialClerk lives again, magically. I thought MH was breaking stuff and cookie-monstering RAM on the linux machine, so I killed it, but I figured out it was the RvB leeches from google (see prior entry) and am just now bringing misterhouse back.

Ahh, controlling my living room lights through instant messenger, using software I got for free from some dude named Bruce that I've never met. What an age we live in.

Towards the end of an entry, I'll impart some microcosmified story or vaguely philosophical parable in a way that might be thought provoking if it oozed slightly less melodrama.

In and amongst the mounds of TV I've managed to watch now that I'm on Patrick Standard Time (EST minus Daily Obligations,) I saw the star trek TNG episode "Darmok," which is one of my favorites. It's about a race of people that speak in metaphor, using references to stories and mythology to relate the feelings of everyday situations. This is their entire language - references to other stuff that fill in the blanks. It's incomprehensible to all but the intrepid Picard, who once again proves Troi absolutely worthless, even when paired with Data.

I do this kind of speech all the time - it's not quite "Darmok on the ocean," but it's Sports Night, or hell, Sorkin in general, it's cartoons, it's music that isn't exactly well-known. Given that most of what I write in forums like this is either to tell people HEY HEY LOOK AT WHAT I DID COOL HUH or for my own later review and self-loathing/amusement, many of these things are cryptic, so I'll know what I was feeling at the time without having to spend 9 pages of goth-album-lyric text describing it. It's even better than that, though, because sometimes references like that can do a better job of jogging a memory even when compared to 9 pages of original text. A good, generally applicable story is worth a thousand words. Shaka, when the walls fell.

I think the power of references to analagous situations is that they allow us to explain things standing on the shoulders of others, or relate some concepts in a way that someone else has already done better than we could ever hope to.

I'll usually close with a semi-cryptic line in [brackets], that somehow ties the entry in with the title. Sometimes this will be a secret or subtle link that explains the title and the closing line a little better, to clear up the crypticness. Other times it will be a link to whatever the title and the closing line are referencing. And in some cases, it will go to some kind of vagely analagous page that draws a clearer picture of what the entry was trying to do.

[sounds like a pretty lame email show you got here]