Thursday, March 11, 2010

BlogWare Exposed!

Here's the promised screenshot of my new post editor. (Click to embiggen.) Told ya it was oogly.

But the point is it works. And it's all mine. I own the code and I own the server.

A few more obvious points.
  • I edit in HTML mode, not in a WYSIWYG mode. It's just easier for me that way.
  • When I click the preview button it writes the html files to a temp directory on my hard drive. I then view the files in Firefox. What I see there is really what I'll get.
  • There are a lot of missing features yet. First and foremost, it's not writing to the RSS and Atom files. ZW fans who read by subscription are still dead in the water. (Saturday.)
  • I still have to upload the photos by hand. But I always did anyway. (Sunday.)
  • There's no easy way to edit posts once I publish. (Soon.)

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 10:11 AM

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

BlogWare Update

If you can read this, my blog editor can now publish new posts to this blog all by its lonesome.

Tomorrow: screenshots! It's ugly as sin, but it works.

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 9:14 PM

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Do You Miss Him Yet?

Another amazing column by Stanley Fish, last noticed here reviewing a book by Sarah Palin.

I assume he's a liberal since he writes for The New York Times, but, if so, he's that rare commodity, a liberal with a clue.

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 7:20 PM

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Nationwide Tax Day Tea Party

Join the revolt.

It's kind of cute, really. They're using Google maps to create a virtual march on Washington. You enter your name, email, zip code, choose a persona (I'm a Working Professional, portrayed as a guy in shorts and a T-shirt), and select a team (I joined the Reagan Tax Revolt Team), and click the Submit button (ooh, that's rather poorly named). Your personal appears on the map at a location corresponding to your zip code. Hover over it and your name appears: Gordon from Gold Hill, OR.

I assume the little personae will begin drifting toward Foggy Bottom along about April 15th. I hope we pick up some pitchforks or flintlocks along the way. Comin' ta gitcha, Barry!

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 7:01 PM

Monday, March 8, 2010

The BlogWare Struggle Continues

I wasted an hour this evening twiddling with the libraries from Apache Commons. FTP works fine, but my server doesn't support FTPS (FTP over SSL). Plain old FTP is dangerous because the bad guys can intercept your transmissions, steal your passwords, and load nasty stuff onto your server. You don't want to use it unless you change your password on a daily basis, which of course makes it a nuisance.

SFTP is different from FTPS but I can't find an open source for it. SCP, or Secure Copy, is what I really need.

Unfortunately I didn't come to that conclusion until 10:30 PM, so it's going to have to wait until tomorrow. This post I'll have to upload the hard way.

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 11:09 PM

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Rosemary-Skewered Shrimp

You might think of The Wall Street Journal as a business paper with a conservative editorial slant. It's more than that.

The Weekend Journal, a special section of the Saturday issue, has Arts & Entertainment, Books, Style, Sports, and even Food & Drink. I especially like the last part.

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 6:51 PM

Sunday, March 7, 2010

The Woof Is Back

As I said last month, the charming folks at Blogger informed those who keep blogs on their own servers that they had until March 27th to move their blogs to the Google server farm, or else.

I chose else.

I figured I had until mid-March to cobble together some sort of publishing system of my own, at which point I could toss Blogger over the transom. I was right about the system but wrong about the deadline.

Starting last week Blogger became increasingly reluctant to publish by FTP. It got to the point where I had to click the Publish button a dozen times over the course of a couple hours before my post ended up on my blog. Finally on Wednesday it quit working altogether.

It took from Thursday evening until Sunday afternoon, working in my spare time, to produce a basic post editor. It lacks features, but it basically works. This is the first result.

Now it's time to Keel Da Google.

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 2:20 PM

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Temple Grandin


By way of Are We Lumberjacks?, by way of Oregon Guy, an interesting TED talk by Temple Grandin, who was featured in the Weekend Interview Saturday before last. I understand HBO has also released a biopic. Wonder if it's on Netflix?

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 7:32 PM

Monday, March 01, 2010

Shot by Psychopathic Warmists

In the Daily Mail (via Lucianne).
A seven-month-old baby girl survived three days alone with a bullet in her chest beside the bodies of her parents and toddler brother.

Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming....

The youngster is recovering in hospital in the town of Goya in the northern Argentine province of Corrientes, where doctors say she is out of danger.

Her parents said they feared the effects of global warming in a suicide note
I'm not a religious man but at times like this I fervently hope that Hell exists.

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 7:12 PM

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Exempli Gratia

Edward Shorter, Why Psychiatry Needs Therapy in the Weekend Journal.

This is exactly the sort of article I never would have plowed through online, but I enjoyed it thoroughly as I carried it from room to room today, reading a bit at a time.

Now, theoretically at least, you could do that with a laptop or iPad, but not really. Eric Raymond explains why.

posted by Gordon R. Durand at 6:00 PM