it’s gone on long enough. looking through the logs for this site, i can see that a lot of you are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer as your web browser.
stop it.
(if you’re not, pat yourself on the back and feel free to skip the rest of this)
i could talk about its poor support of web standards and how that makes life hard on web designers and programmers and threatens the wonderful openness of the web and probably none of you care. i don’t blame you. i could talk about how microsoft has stopped IE development (aside from the constant stream of security patches) and there hasn’t been a new release since IE 6 (which was only a minor improvement over 5.5) came out around 3 years ago (a lifetime in software).
anyone who’s been paying attention for the last few years should know that IE is horribly insecure. new major vulnerabilities seem to come out every couple months that expose IE users to worms, viruses, and spyware that damage and slows down their computers.
finally, there at least seem to be some journalists who are putting two and two together. maybe a good scare about having your bank account broken into will get everyone’s attention. or how about going to jail?
now that i’ve got your attention, perhaps i may be able to persuade you to try out an alternative.
firefox is my strongest recommendation. it’s small, fast, FREE, blocks popup windows by default, has a nice google search box right on the taskbar, and has a bunch of other nifty features like tabbed browsing and browser extensions. firefox is a better browser than IE for pretty much every value of “better”. it also has the best standards support of any browser out there and is open source, but you probably don’t care about that kind of thing (though you should).
if firefox is too “open-source commie” for you, maybe you’d prefer opera, which is $39 or free with ads. it’s got more features than any one person could ever use and is ridiculously fast.
if you’re on a Mac and you aren’t using Safari or firefox yet, you get no sympathy from me.
please. it’s time to switch to a better browser. if you’re using IE, go download firefox or opera now and at least try them out. if you’ve already switched go find any of your friends who haven’t switched yet and help them out. if you care about them, you owe it to them.
the weather in new york was so beautiful this weekend that i really should be punished for not taking advantage of it.
my excuse is that i had a new toy to play with.
my primary machine at home has been quite flakey for a long time. hardware issues. it’s also big and loud. so a few weeks ago i broke down and ordered a new system. it’s a Shuttle SN41G2 based system. smaller than a breadbox, quiet, reasonably powerful. i ordered it from Los Alamos Computers, who ship it with Debian GNU/Linux pre-installed.
of course, once i’d spent a few hours failing to get mplayer working on Debian, i decided to wipe it and install Gentoo instead, which is the only linux distro that i’ve ever actually managed to get mplayer and all the video codecs properly installed on.
installing gentoo involves a lot of waiting for things to compile though, so i watched a few movies while it chugged away:
at the Web Standards Project, we’ve been in the process of reinventing ourselves. originally formed to pressure browser makers into supporting web standards, lately, we’ve been changing our focus to developer education. all the browser support in the world will mean nothing if 99% of the pages on the web use invalid markup. to help shape this new mission, we’ve put up a survey to find out a little more about the web developer community. if you are a web developer, please go fill it out and send us your comments.
lani finally made it up for a visit this weekend. just in time for new york to be cold and wet. coming from texas, it hadn’t even occurred to her to bring anything warmer than a t-shirt, so she had to spend the weekend wearing my sweater, which is practically a dress on her.
met up with jP and tamara for dim sum saturday morning followed by gooey sweets from the chinese bakery and music shopping. on our way back to the subway, we took some side streets to avoid the crazy throngs of tourists clogging canal street. on one of them, we stumbled across what must have been a DJ’s wet dream. there is a music library, which gets two copies of every piece of vinyl that is released plus lots of radio stations donate their extras. twice a year, apparently, they go through their inventory and sell off their thirds. most of what they were selling had probably never even been played but it was all cheap. i think jP could have easily spent the rest of the day there (and all of his money) if we’d let him.
back at my place, we watched Bubba Ho-Tep, and a few hours of VH1’s “100 Most Metal Moments of All Time”, which was remarkably entertaining.
sometime around 10, i was tricked into going out to williamsburg. i could have sworn that lani asked if i wanted to go to brooklyn “tomorrow” and i agreed. next thing i knew, she was dragging me to the subway. it was a fun time though. we met up with jP, tamara, and julia at blair and daphne’s, ate some falafel and zaater, drank some PBR and played Barbie, the board game. then we watched Blood Diner, which was absolutely hilarious.
on sunday, i dutifully followed lani around while she went clothes shopping and unsuccessfully shoe shopping. then we had some pastries with Sky and Masha and finally watched The Dead Zone (Sky and Masha have been attempting to watch every movie Christopher Walken has been in).
thraxil now has an atom feed in addition to RSS. the urls are http://thraxil.org/feeds/atom.xml and http://thraxil.org/feeds/index.rss respectively. (there are also individual user feeds in thraxil.org/_your username_/feeds/ if you don’t want to read everyone’s posts).
you may have noticed that the RSS feed is at a different location than it used to be. i’ve got a permanent redirect setup, so this should highlight all the aggregators out there that don’t properly support HTTP response codes.
you may also notice the lack of the ugly little orange ‘XML’ buttons”. the feed urls are in the HTML head so they can be autodetected. i will also eventually put up a sitemap that will link to them. i think that RSS/Atom feeds are the kind of thing that should be totally transparent to the user. it should be good enough to just point your aggregator at thraxil.org and let it auto-detect the feeds. if your aggregator doesn’t work that way, you should think about finding a better one, or requesting that functionality from whoever maintains it. news aggregation will have a hard time escaping beyond the hardcore web geeks if end users have to understand the mechanisms.
here it is. the new version of the thraxil code. sorry it took so long. i was plagued with cable modem and hardware problems.
it’s not much right now. i have lots of ideas for new stuff, but first i just wanted to duplicate most of the already existing functionality. so this initial release is just with a basic feature set.
there are some major architectural changes here:
the backend is now written in python instead of perl. that’s the biggest one.
when you post, it publishes everything to static HTML files which apache can serve real quickly. the old version served everything up dynamically (with some caching, but every request would still incur a relatively large amount of processing). so when you post now, expect it to take a minute or two (while it writes out new index files, etc. and i have plans on making this even faster.) but requesting other pages should be very fast.
no more reliance on postgresql. i couldn’t get away from databases entirely, so i’m now using SQLite, which is small, light, fast, simple, and doesn’t require a complex installation.
comments are now open. ie, you don’t have to create an account before you can post comments.
there is no more distinction between diaries and front-page. my intention is really to decrease the emphasis on the front-page; it’s just a listing of what’s going on with a bunch of different users’ individual weblogs. i may even change it so only post titles show up on the front page.
you can’t edit your templates anymore. instead, you can edit the CSS files for your weblog. i’ve gone out of my way to make the markup exceptionally semantically rich so it’s easy to style. if you don’t think you can do a lot with just the CSS files, go check out the CSS Zen Garden for inspiration. you might not want to get too crazy with the custom CSS in the next week though since i haven’t really finalized the templates.
the new data model for the backend will allow me to add features like versioning and other cool stuff.