Blog
A blog engine that supports the creative process
I have already talked about designing personal web publishing sofware. After Drupal and MovableType, like everybody I have been trying out Wordpress. Here are my ideal blog software features. Obvious features These are provided out of the box by popular blogging systems or else are available with common plugins. comments tags scheduling sitemap related posts integration with identity systems (Twitter, Facebook, OpenID) math output By related posts, I mean suggestions for further reading at the bottom of a post right next to the comment area.
Genshi templates basics
Genshiis a Python templating system which guarantees correct XML output, and escapes all strings by default. In exchange, you need to write more code and it is a bit of a pain to work with Unicode characters. Also, there is an extra step in case you do not want your strings to be escaped (i.e. you are passing good XML to the rendering mechanism). Here are some notes on the programming API, covering Genshi 0.
The biggest blog software mistake is…
…storing the main content and comments the same way in a relational database. I have been secretly bemoaning the transition from static sites such as the Linux Documentation Projectto blogs. Static sites were very effective, because you could shape the text any way needed, without relying on a complex content type system such as Drupal’s. You just wrote in the way that best suited your content each time. In blogs, you are constrained by the post format.
Installing PHP 5 from source
PHP 5.3 offers performance improvements and somewhat saner defaults. Unfortunately, neither Debian Lenny nor Centos ship it. If you want to install it you will need to compile it. The process is not totally straightforward, especially if you desire to install php as an Apache module. Choosing php extensions After downloading and unpacking php, run ./configure –help to examine the different extensions that you can build. Be careful when compiling you have to select the appropriate extensions.
Revenue and social networks
Facebook ads often hang in the awkward place between dating sites and online lotteries. At South by Southwest 2010, Danah Boydexplained how the web mashes up social networks which rarely intersect offline. They mix up people who just ended up in your email address book, family, colleagues, friends from different situations and stages of life. Conclusion? Maybe Facebook-like social graphs are a mediocre indicator of tastes, or more to the point, of the kind of content a person is willing to accept at that precise moment in her online activities.
Monetizing the data flood and the future of culture at SXSW 2010
Data on the web proliferates faster than anywhere else, ever; at the same time it has ever been so easy to access.Three challenges have arised. How can we help people put to use this army of tweets, Youtube videos, blog posts? How do we make money in the process? How will cultural authorities (academics, film critics, publishers) grapple with fundamental changes in their work as mathematical tools become indispensable to recognize and present noteworthy content?
Configure Nginx to proxy virtual hosts to Apache
You want to take advantage of nginx's speed serving static files, while making use of the .htaccess files bundled with applications such as Wordpress or Drupal, which contain Apache-specific configuration directives. Fastcgi is too unstable for you. Fastcgi sometimes requires careful tuning to avoid things such as processes unexpectedly dying. Apache is quite good at managing processes. but you want to avoid the overhead of running the PHP (or or Ruby, or Python) interpreter to only serve static files.
Installing Arch Linux on a Dell Inspiron 1564
The Inspiron 1564 is a new laptop from Dell, sporting an Intel Arrandale cpu. The install goes smooth except for the following:
Education to Free Software
While I was volunteering at the Info desk at Fosdem,I was approached by a visitor looking for information on how to get started with Linux. The man had already installed various distros, and his daytime job was as a mainframe programmer. He knew COBOL and assembly. Initially, I was a bit surprised that he felt he needed help. He was looking for courses, starting with the command line, through programming linux applications.
CSS minifiers vs Brotli
What’s the point of css minifiers when you have brotli? What if a generic tool was more efficient than a specialized one? An interesting point is that swithing from gzip to brotli decreases size far more than adding rules. That means using information about the structure of CSS does not offer as much improvement as handling the input as text in general. extracting improvements in the CSS minification phase does not look very good.