Actually, the biggest incentive for me to leave radio is because I can’t post to it or access my RSS feeds through the web.

Another leaves radio land. It’s looks as if more people are leaving Radio behind. The Desktop Fishbowl has left its old Radio shanty to… [<big>kev’s</big> catalogue of this and that.]

I’m not sure what the incentive is (even though I’m now feeling it myself) to leave Radio. Maybe its developer masochism, that ‘not invented here’ feeling that because I didn’t write it / its not in my pet language, it must be bad for me. Maybe we feel vaguely guilty about using a ‘consumer’ product. We’re geeks, we’re supposed to use two or three arcane command line utilities and a dodgy perl script to achieve the same thing as a normal person using a pointy-clicky GUI app. Or something.

Maybe once the blogging addiction bites then you start wanting to add your own features, which is far easier to do when you have the source in front of you, in a programming language you’re comfortable with.

While waiting for Roller to download from sourceforge I grabbed Miniblog, unzipped it and had a browse through several of the JSP pages. It’s so tiny! Bijou. I know the goals of Roller and Miniblog are very different, but even so, I didn’t think they’d be quite that different.

Okay, first hurdle. It appears that Radio will let you upstream either to their servers OR via ftp to a server of your choice, but not both. That’s no good. I’m not ready yet to join the ranks of the blogging rollers either. Time for a rethink…

Woohoo, www.darrenhobbs.com is up and running. I can feel my ego expanding. Currently its just a static copy of my radio blog, and there may be some to-ing and fro-ing, but now I’ve got Orion running almost anything could happen. First plan is to put all my Lucene studies to work and get some of that full-text search action going on.

As soon as I get my head out of this door.

Been unsubscribing from mailing lists this week. I have a tendency to subscribe to the dev-lists of any OSS project that looks interesting, and get so swamped I end up reading nothing. There’re just too many good projects going on to follow them all. Time for a clear out.

NBML – Not Bunk Markup Language (Okay the name might change.)

How long have we been staring at screens full of XML and not complaining? Have a look at a typical chunk of XML – it’s all noise.

[Joe’s Jelly]

I thought the whole point of XML was that it allowed machine-parseable data to remain human readable. Don’t tell me they could have achieved that goal without all the angular decoration? Could they? That would be like a technically superior video format being beaten by a lesser one that was just better marketed. Oh wait, that happened…

Lots of bloggers are suffering from spam it seems. One of the ahem, benefits of having a visible web presence I suppose. I recommend SpamAssassin to anyone who’s:

• Using a linux/BSD/etc. system
• Can insert the aforementioned into their email path

There is also a windows outlook plugin version that costs money, plus several other methods of integrating it (perl scripts and the like – details on the site).

With regard to my second point, one option that occurs (and I haven’t tried this yet as I’ve just thought of it) is to have a ‘public/private’ email pair. Publish the public one freely on the web, subscribe to mailing lists etc, and have all the mail retrieved using a FreeBSD / Linux machine running fetchmail -> procmail -> spamassassin. Save the other one for sending messages to individuals. Procmail can be made to forward messages after they’ve been filtered, so you can still have all your email delivered to the same place. It does require that you have a reasonable degree of access to a connected unix box though.

I did start to write about a sort of interface-implementation separation for email, but I realised it would only be one-way: while it would be fine to have a public email you told everyone to use to contact you that was then bounced to your ‘real’ address, there is no easy way to make this work in reverse. Any mail you sent would have your private address in it. There are ways to work around this, using anonymous remailers or services like anonymizer.com or you could run your own mail server. None of which are entirely transparent unfortunately (you can’t just hit ‘reply’ from your favourite mail client).

While idly clicking through my blog stats, it quickly became obvious that I have a rather specific type of readership. Can you guess what it is yet?

Browsers

1. Netscape 6.x: 50.0%
2. Internet Explorer 6.x: 28.6%
3. Internet Explorer 5.x: 18.6%
4. Netscape 7.x: 1.4%
5. Opera 6.x: 1.4%

Operating systems

1. Windows 2000: 33.3%
2. Windows XP: 23.2%
3. Linux: 17.4%
4. Windows 98: 13.0%
5. Windows NT: 11.6%
6. Mac OS: 1.4%

57.1% of browsers report a resolution of more than 1024×768, and exactly 50% report True Colour.

It seems I’m generally viewed on high end systems running the ‘IT professionals’ choice of browser, Mozilla. And nearly a fifth of readers are using Linux. Cool.

Yes, its official. I’m a tech-head, and so is my readership. Greetings.

One question. Netscape 7? Did someone release Mozilla 2 when I wasn’t looking?

Just checked out Erik’s
weblog. I like the groovy icons. Very nice. Oh, and the content is good
too 🙂