Solitude 

Move over, Google! I’ve recently been looking at Feedster, and realised how insanely powerful it is. It has a bewildering array of options (thesauras, regex, soundex functions and more), and a highly up-to-date index.

While it’s ranking algorithm might not be as good as PageRank, it certainly makes up for it in the amount of things you can do with it. I hope the API documentation goes up soon, I’d seriously consider using it for my site search.

I’ll also soon be loading my entire archive into their system (via RSS), which will make an interesting off-site back-up.

Anyway, good work and good luck to those at Feedster.

Another reason why web standards should be promoted: a very nice looking CSS top menu, working in all but IE based browsers. The best part is how beautifully simple the HTML is for it. I can also see CSS3 seriously simplifying the CSS.

Definitely a great tech demo, if nothing else. Via mezzoblue.

A full write-up of my weekend at T In The Park would be huge in length and largely tedious. So I’m going to do this in the shortest style possible:

The Good:

• The weather - Sunny and bright throughout the weekend,
• Some of the bands - including Hell Is For Heroes, Idlewild, Biffy Clyro, The Mars Volta, The Darkness (entertaining, if musically poor), and Funeral For A Friend,
• The blood red moon on the closing night - worrying, yet cool,
• The good people at Lipton Ice Tea - giving a way a shedload of free ice cold liquid on a boiling hot day marks them as true heroes among men,
• The copy of “Chandelier” I managed to buy after looking for it for a year or two.

The Bad:

• The weather - Far too warm for most of the day, the queues for water got to be over half an hour long,
• Some of the bands - including REM, Turbonegro, The Flaming Lips (sorry, but the lead singer was just boring), The Streets, and The Polyphonic Spree.
• The finale by Caledon - embarassing and poorly done,
• The price of food - this was always going to be high, but it was ridiculous.

There’s bound to be more that I’ve missed, so I might update this entry as I remember.

The Echo Project finally has a name: Atom. While not my favourite, it’s not as bad as it could’ve been. Some of the names on the Project Name Proposals are truly awful.

Anyway, at least that chapter is over. We can concentrate on defining the format fully.

I’m back from a good weekend at T In The Park (but the inevitable write up of that will come later - tomorrow or the next day, maybe). Doesn’t seem like I’ve missed a lot.

There’s some fighting going on over Mark Pilgrim’s Winer Watcher. I can’t be bothered going into the politics of this thing since I’m still tired, but it’s a long running mess that just keeps getting worse.

Elsewhere, Tom Gilder outlines the ::outline pseudo selector. Since CSS3 is still at the working draft stage, I’d never heard of it before. If it works as advertised, we’ll all be able to get rid of a lot redundant markup and create better looking sites. That’s a very good thing.

That’s about it. I’m off for a needed rest.

Once again, I’m leaving for a few days. This time I’ll be spending my weekend at T In The Park. Yeah the line-up is the weakest in years, but it should still be good.

Anyway, I’ll be back on monday.

In Charlies Angels 2 the action is weak, the plot laughable, the acting below par, the costumes skimpy (not necessarily a complaint), the plot devices clumsy and obvious, the comic relief inappropriate, the serious parts funny, the funny parts serious, the direction distracting, the music editing outright aggrevating (and I liked a fair few of the songs), the dialogue as weak as it comes… I could go on but I think you get the idea.

Money was thrown at this film. Marketing everywhere, and it still sucks. Thus proving that money means nothing in the world of cinema. Except that a million people will still go and see it because they’ve been told to. Shame.

Have they made upgrading PHP easier without telling anyone? Last time I attempted it, it took an hour of fiddling with ini settings and my apache config to get precisely nowhere. I did a rollback immediately.

Yesterday, however, I dropped in 4.3.1, modified 2 ini settings and was done in less than 5 minutes. Majorly impressed by how it has smoothed out.

In other news, the first beta of PHP 5 is out. Looks like a lot of improvements to the class structures (private and protected methods and values, abstract classes) and not a lot else. Still, worth watching.

First up: How do we feel about 99 bottles of beer in 571 languages? Programming languages. Yes, someone has created a list of very similar programs in pretty much every language that’s ever done anything useful (and about 550 others). Too much spare time, but interesting to compare syntax nonetheless.

We now have Necho support in the feed validator (formerly the RSS validator). It is based on the 1st of July snapshot and, although there have been changes since then, it works nicely.

Most exciting for me is the announcement of Textile 2. Textile is an integral part of my developing CMS these days (I even have written permission from Dean Allen to include it in any final public release I might make).

There were a few things I had to change about the first version: it got a bit scatty for me when dealing with del and ins tag, and refused to do the right thing with code tags without a fair amount of mucking around. I also really wanted a detextile function for editing and began work on it before giving up. At a glance in the code of Textile 2, there seems to be an experimental version in there. Nice! I look forward to being able to mess around more with it.

In lieu of actual content, I thought I’d do one of those entirely links based posts that people are so fond of. Note: there are actually a few pieces of real content waiting to be added, but I thought since I got a decent set of links today, I’d post them instead.

Pixie Theory: RSS vs. Necho: By thinking of the opposing sides as either pixies or not pixies, we can figure out what side of an argument we should be on. Necho wins, of course.

BurningBird: I remember usenet: AOL is coming for weblogs. As any right thinking individual knows, this is the first sign of the apocalypse.

Be A Grafitti Artist: A (partial) return to form for Nothing Sacred with this article about how to be a grafitti artist.

Drop Shadows With CSS: A nice little technique for adding shadows to boxes in CSS.

Blogshares: I finally became a blogshares millionairre today. To celebrate, I devalued the stock for this site by selling a shitload of it; earning myself yet more money. Capitalism is, indeed, fun.