The revelation that all I wanted to do on the Long Weekend was sit on my big blue couch, turn on the laptop, and finish the bug & feature set of Movie Haikus, led me to click on my “tech” category on the right and realize, I never write about technology. Here, then, is the official Tech Post.
New Blogs
Two new blogs I’m quite excited about: 1000 Words, Kodak’s official blog, and Web Worker’s Daily, Om’s new blog. Is excitement over-rated? Well, let’s just say, I was really into getting my old company, P & G’s Reflect.com (now defunct) into blogging, and they refused, so seeing Kodak act quickly – from inception to deployment at least, not “industry” quickly – has been great. Om’s new blog: it’s funny, and it is ripe for me, as I work increasingly from home late at night, or at cafes, and a majority of my friends do as well.
Sitting around Ritual Roasters the other day, I had actually banned it as a cafe, but since it was Burning Man thought it might be hipster-free. Sure enough, met a cool guy, met some friends, and we had a little chatfest about what new camera to buy. The verdict: Canon. Nikons, though I have a trusted film, FM-2, are on the way out.
Geek news: So I could listen to Bush and his lameness re: Guantamo, or Matt M (who invented/built WordPress) gave the state of the union on WordPress… and I have to say it has opened up a world for me, WordPress.
Tech stuff: Put in a rating system on the haikus, and that has been getting some good traffic on this site. The ‘reads’ are seeded too high on some, which was a bug that has now been fixed, though I have yet to reset the read counts. I’m doing it all in PHP/MySQL and I will probably move to Ajax at one point. Setup a “poet portal” where, if you have the right access level, you can publish your own haikus. I get too much spam, unfortunately, to open that up to everyone. The rating has been interesting, and I’m going to setup a plugin for others to put “top rated haiku” on their sites. The RSS feed is available, if you are interested, for recently submitted haikus. New additions: the geekiest thing I can do right now, besides shifting it all to Ajax, is to put in a “poetry reader”- validating the haiku as a real haiku with the right syllables. That would involve some hefty lifting. I’d have to parse through and create a “syllable” morpheme, and then validate the 5-7-5 meter. Fun! Right now I’m just rollingout basic social network kind of features.
The biggest change for me, coding after a few years not doing anything, is CSS and JavaScript. I had to really struggle with that. I’m happy with how easy PHP is (coming from Perl world).
One other tech note: friends at Otivo are doing testing on Bloglines. I’m a huge fan of bloglines and gave htem some feedback, but I think it’s probably a conflict to actually participate in the testing. Good for Bloglines 1) to use Otivo and 2) to take QA seriously!
I have a lot more to say about technology, but I’m quasi-doocing.