Writing is difficult. Anyone who tells you differently is either lying or has no sense of their own inadequate writing.

Take that last sentence for example. The first section (before “or”) is ok, the second poor.

Now look at that last sentence: it is better, with a much shorter, snappier second clause.

Finally, look back. The previous is weaker; using lazy words.

Ten Mistakes Writers Make.

Having recently read Why I Don’t Like Databases, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Stuart.

Further to his second point on a databases good points (the power of SQL), I don’t think that is necessarily a clear advantage now that XPath is available. Given that XPath can run across any XML file, it’s easy to imagine XML files in a filesystem that can be queried with as much power as SQL.

As time goes on, I hope to see the differences between database backends and filesystem backends become more transparent. There’s little reason for it not to happen, and plenty to gain from it.

Another random links post:

• Campaign Against Renaming Products – As all right thinking people know, Snickers should always be referred to as a Marathon. These guys aim to correct the mistakes made by various companies who renamed products.
• ISO hunt – Find ISOs and Bit Torrent feeds fast.
• Speed card game – I’m sure I played this under a different name, but it’s still a good and fast paced card game.
• iTunes DRM cracked – The crackers have made the security on iTunes files disappear. Maybe one day the companies will save money by just not bothering.
• Central Limit Theory demo – A very rough demonstration of the central limit theory. Keep rolling dice to see the bell shape emerge quickly.
• What’s Your Law? – A bunch of laws (not the legal kind).
• Fact Of The Day – An interesting fact for every day of the year.
• Media Player Classic – Tired of the slow, bloated modern Windows Media Player? Then download this and relive those media player 6 days.
• Bugmenot – A site that provides passwords for sites that usually require registration, such as the NY times.
• 100 Most Mispelled Words – The 100 most… I think you get the picture.
• Cartoon Feeds – A present from God himself, surely. A bunch of RSS feeds for various web comics, including Dilbert. Subscribed!

And I’m done.

After recently deciding that my own BMS (a subset of the much more powerful CMS) wasn’t up to scratch, I began thinking about the main features that a future BMS should have.

The basic starting point should be the ultimate Weblogging system. It is slightly out of date, but most of those features are the building blocks we need for a solid foundation.

There are, however, plently of features that can be added to that list to take it much further. Most are features for users, some are for developers:

• Storage: Potential for multiple storage systems (we’ll refer to them as Archives) of arbitrary type. That means the Archives can be databases, structures in the filesystem, ram drives, or any other bizarre contraption you can imagine. We want multiple storage systems so logically separate entries can be left separate. For example, the main blog entries and sidebar reading list entries are almost always unconnected.

• Extensible Text Formatter: Whatever method is used to add an entry, the processing that goes on behind the scenes to turn it into the stored format should be extensible and liberal. The bare minimum should be accepting plain text, markup, textile-formatted text, or a mixture of those. Additionally, modules could be dropped in to allow parsing of TeX, mathML or any other format.

  It would include validation processes to check that character encodings were correct, the final output was correct (i.e. it validates as the stored output format), and any other functions that the user wanted (spell checking, anyone?).

• Advanced Recall: As many ways to recall entries as possible. Current methods (permalinks and viewable archives) are fine for the moment, but throw in search and XPath queries and we start to build systems that can be viewed in ways the developers can’t imagine.

• Dynamic Categories: A sibling to Advanced Recall, Jon Udell discusses the possibilities of dynamic categories.

• Syndication: All formats should be supported natively. Let the market forces fight over which one is adopted widely while allowing users to choose the format they prefer, whether it be RSS, Atom, ESF or some other format.

• Auto-Updating: New features should be added automatically where possible. New text formatters, and formats should be downloaded and set-up transparently. End users rarely need to know how this is done.

All of this is achievable today. In the future, I may write more about how several of the features are possible. Feel free to add more suggestions (or, indeed, question the current batch) in comments.

Apparently, the web is grey. After averaging the colours of 3000 or more sites using the temporary url2png service, the output colour is #9c9c9c; a pretty bog-standard grey.

It’s not really that surprising. The majority of the web uses black text on a white background, with the various other colours pulling the colour average up towards the black end of the scale (the red, green and blue averaging out to a grey).

Still, an odd piece of trivia that we’re bound to remember.