I was just listening to Mitch Joel’s Six Pixels of Separation #97 (I’m catching up, what can I say… at least it’s quick) when a few thoughts collided which I’ll hereby attempt to reconstitute.
Mitch was saying how podcasting is different from radio. Earlier, he was saying how we’re differienting less and less between a blog and a website. Personnally, I have a hard time appreciating these differences. I see communication, with humans at each end (preferably), be it through a blog, rss, twitter, cellphone, radio or sandwich suit.
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As a developer, I’ve always been a little shy of depending on 3rd party services other then for a few experiments but on the other hand, I truly believe (or at the very least, I really want to believe) in the small bits loosely joined, semantic web, microformats and all that jazz. For me, they’re a natural expansion of the free software I’ve been working with and developping for the last 15 year or so. Yet running software you don’t control, well… that’s a departure from free software but it obviously has its merits.
So the paradox, or dilemna, if you prefer, is should I find a service that does what I want or should I code it myself, releasing it as free software for others to deploy as well? And what of the data? There’s this little thing called traceability which is an important factor in trust…
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A long long time ago I wrote a utility for del.icio.us to get the history of posts in RSS, provide a little trend graphic and link to a bunch of other utilities for URLs. Durl was born, it even got slashdotted (I might even add, when slashdot jumped the shark) but a few months later del.icio.us itself was providing an RDF feed of the posts history. Then sometime last year my tools server went down, taking with it the wall of music, sparktags, hot off the wiki and a bunch more stuff.
Honestly, I don’t have real plans to resuscitate that box and last week, I got a request for Durl. Turns out, people missed my del.icio.us graphics. While I didn’t want to rewrite Durl, I thought a little bit of code that could turn the del.icio.us RDF feed into a sparkline would be all I needed. But I didn’t want to worry about hosting…
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The Universal Redirector Revealer is up, albeit humble. It’s a simple tool to find out what a short URL leads to without visiting the site. Tinyurl, snurl, ln-s, petiturl, decenturl are all supported, as well as many more similar services.
It’s using a bit of Ajax to show the destination URL and its title, storing the results in a database for instant results on the second and later requests.
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Not feeling a lot like posting these days. Sometimes you can catch a glimpse on millette @ twitter but it probably won’t make much sense. I’m hoping to clear up a few recents comments I made and what’s going on in my life in general. Yeah, snore :P
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I just dumped a few links about Rawdon in case you’re interested in knowing what else is out there about my town :)
Maybe you were looking for the Rawdon affair?
UPDATE: 2008-02-12
Post Also version 0.1.7 is out. It now keeps a history of your remote posts, logs messages to the watchdog and notifies the user. Remote account management has also been improved in this latest release. Post Also now also comes with a french translation and a template file for those of you out there who would like to translate this module to your language.
Post Also is a module for Drupal 5.x that lets you post simultaneously to multiple sites. For example, I often post content on my blog but since I’m too lazy to just copy/paste it to other sites, generally for an association where it would belong, the content lives solely on my site. Or it might eventually get sniffed up through RSS, but sometimes, that’s not fast or good enough.
Post Also uses xmlrpc to talk to various web engines using so-called blog APIs. Currently, only metaWeblog is supported (allowing to post to other Drupal or WordPress sites for example) but other APIs should soon follow (blogger, moveble type, atom) as well as autodiscovery. That means you will soon be able to post simultaneously to other Drupal, Wordpress, TikiWiki, Plone, Xoops, Typo3 and many more supported web engines like CMSes, calendars and blogs.
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After seeing Mark Jaquith’s post on presidential candidates websites using WordPress (one in each camp), I figured I could do a quick analysis for Drupal.
Looking at 17 websites, I found two were using Drupal, both Democrats:
I saw a lot of PHP and Apache in the headers. A couple of Zope sites, some IIS, at least one CakePHP. When I have more time I’ll do a proper analysis. Well, if I still care at that point.
Diving in the second week of my new life, the dust is finally settling as I am catching up with clients and tying a few loose ends. If you live in Québec, you know how great the weather has been. It’s been incredible in Rawdon! I just wish it would keep up like this, since we’re not going to be isolating the place yet, because we have to jack it first, but for that we must solidify the structure. So we’re just going to fix the chimney and wood stove (maybe change it for a more efficient one) and use that to heat our water. In spring, we’ll be installing a thin outdoor reservoir to hold and heat the water efficiently and cheaply. I put up a few pictures of my Rawdon home online.
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Heri does a great job again, interviewing the famous Robin Millette on free software and sustainable development (second part). Although he’s left the Montreal scene for a few months now, I still suggest you go ahead and read the first part that’s up. Robin apologizes for the length of his responses and since Free Software Week is starting, I think we should give him a pass this time.
Nic asked what’s the point with wmii and dwm in a comment on that Jyte claim. I figured I could reproduce my response here.
For me, it’s not really about faster or better productivity, but thinking less. The layout is predefined, there’s really not much to theme, most actions work on hotkeys, the screen real estate is available for programs and it takes less ressources.
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A few words about the GPL, Free Software (Free as in free market), Open Source Software (as in, well, it depends…):
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