In which I note a blog you can't post to isn't much of a blog.

Judging by recent activity, you might think I've abandoned this blog. While I haven't exactly been writing weekly essays, the complete lack of activity is not my fault.

Sometime in late August or early September, something seems to have happened on Blogger that now prevents them from posting updates to my website. Hopefully, this post will make it through anyway.

I'm trying to work with Blogger on the issues, but at the same time I'm starting to investigate other platforms. Perhaps something that can handle my whole website.

Here's my feature list:

• Required
  • Offline composing
  • RSS/Atom feeds
  • Fully customizable look and feel using CSS (not having to format every paragraph)
  • No unreasonable limits on size or types of media (large ZIP, PNG, MPEG).
• Preferred
  • Mobile blogging, including posting pictures from my cell. (I necessary, I may build this myself if the platform permits.)
  • Support for static (non-dated) pages for the rest of my site
  • Widely supported platform.
  • Served from my own domain on the same server as my website (FreeBSD, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python, PgSql/MySql).

Smiles

Finally caught one on camera. The onesie says I <3 Daddy but her face says Mommy is her favorite.

Good? Bad?

As long as I'm just posting to myself, I might as well post this joke.

There's an old Chinese legend about a farmer whose horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit him. "Sorry about your horse," they said, full of sympathy for his misfortune.

"How do you know it's bad luck?" the farmer asked.

Next morning, the horse returned, bringing with it three wild mares. "Oh, this is wonderful," the neighbors exclaimed.

"Wait and see," replied the farmer.

The next day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses and was thrown off, breaking his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy. "What terrible news," they said.

"Well, we're not sure it's really negative," answered the farmer.

The following afternoon, military officials visited the village to draft young men into the army, which was losing many soldiers in a drawn-out war. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

"Maybe," said the farmer...

[via The Snoozeletter]

Missing the boat

Yes, life has been just a bit busier since Eliza arrived. I'm finally starting to call her Eliza more than Emma.

What finally prompted me to post again has nothing to do with Eliza, but it really grabbed my attention. I've read before that what makes blogs work is passion. Since I'm overdue for an update, the place to begin is with something I can't get off my mind.

I've written about Joel Spolsky before... or at least I've thought about it many times. Joel is one of those shining stars in the commercial programming business. His recent book "Smart and Gets Things Done" is highly relevant these days, as I'm interviewing people for a new web developer position.

Just recently, Joel wrote a short piece about Lotus Symphony. No, not the classic failure from the DOS days, but a new package Lotus is releasing soon, and, according to Joel, with probably the same end result. Specifically, he talks about the three stages of desktop software development that arrived at where we are today with Windows, and compares this with a revolution happening on the web with technologies like AJAX.

The trouble with the second stage was that there were no clear UI standards... the programmers almost had too much flexibility, so everybody did things in different ways, which made it hard, if you knew how to use program X, to also use program Y. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 had completely different menu systems, keyboard interfaces, and command structures. And copying data between them was out of the question.

And that’s exactly where we are with Ajax development today. Sure, yeah, the usability is much better than the first generation DOS apps, because we’ve learned some things since then. But Ajax apps can be inconsistent, and have a lot of trouble working together — you can’t really cut and paste objects from one Ajax app to another, for example, so I’m not sure how you get a picture from Gmail to Flickr. Come on guys, Cut and Paste was invented 25 years ago.

Update: Problems on the server where I host my website caused this post to be even more delayed than expected.