ReadingEd.com [v2] has some really cool use of RSS, using his own RSS parser written in PHP, Onyx.
I’m looking for ways to extend Feed my quick RSS hack thingie, which uses this I notice there’s also an RSS parser in Pear, the PHP library.
I had a problem with Word crashing, preventing me from, well, doing anything, really, except for wasting time on the Internet….
So I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Office, removing fonts (fonts caused problems back in NT4), I tried to disable templates, autorecovery, and background pagination. Then I saw that even Wordpad was crashing.
Suspecting some evil DLL installed by something, I fished around for some debugging thingie, and found the most excellent Microsoft Debugging Tools, which told me it was some evil HP printer network driver that was killing Word.
Turns out I had previously set up a network printer, so I could print to the color printer on Suzie’s computer. And since I have no working printer on my computer, I had set it up as the default printer: This was what was making Word crash. Once I set something else as the default printer, Word stayed up.
This experience also gave me a chance to check out OpenOffice, which looks good (but still has a problem with reversed parentheses).
Where do a weblog’s entries live, when they’re not being poured into HTML templates? Movable Type lets you keep weblog entries in DBM files, MySQL or some other database; Radio keeps them in it’s own internal database; PHP -based blogging tools are naturally fixated on MySQL
I can use PHP on my server and I can use CGIs, but the man is leery of users mucking about in his MySQL database (and with good reason and after a few mishaps with DBM module incompatibilities, I’d really prefer to store my blog’s data in text files.
The most popular file-system-based weblogging tool I know is Blosxom , which runs as a CGI and renders a bunch of text files as a bunch of blog entries, sorted by date (using the file system’s date of modification) or by category (based on directories). It can also output RSS flavours, statically render the HTML (like Movable Type and Radio do), etc. It’s a cool, simple script that has been ported to both Python and PHP and while it’s been called ugly I actually think that it demonstrates very nicely the expressiveness of Perl and the Unix philosophy.
The main drawback I saw to it was the need to muck about with FTP to upload entries, as opposed to the simplicity of using a web based form (oh, and the fragility of depending on the file’s modification date for ordering the entries). And the reason I’m rambling about this is that I ran across something called PHPetal.
PHPetal is a PHP script for adding entries through a web-based form; Looking around, I also found a blosxom plug-in that does something similar.
And if I ever become serious about doing this, here’s
Mt2blosxom, a conversion script for moving Movable Type entires over to Blosxom.
Mozilla: Blogging’s Killer App tries to explain, at length, why Mozilla is cool. Summary: ad blocking and tabs. Again. However, whenever I get to do a little browsing with IE, I realize that those two reasons are reason enough.