my own archives plugin

I've blogged for so many months now that the Archives listing on the side was getting pretty long. I don't really want a long list of months and years there, so I was looking for options.

Ned Batchelder lists his archives by year. For each year, there's a summary page by month which lists the dates and titles of all blog entries for that month. I really liked this idea, so I wrote my own archives plugin to use it. It's not exactly the same--the output is slightly different. It's good enough for me, though.

my pyblosxom plugin

Busy busy busy

I've been super busy over the last few weeks. Between work and moving and weddings and trying to catch up with things, I haven't had much time to ruminate on anything or work on any of my projects.

There's one exception to that... I'm a coder on DarkRifts and I've been doing some minor refactoring and overhauls of some of the pieces of their mudlib. That's coming along nicely. The other coders have been really kicking in and getting things done lately. Watching the codebase flourish has been wonderful.

I'm not entirely sure what I should do with PyBlosxom. Development has pretty much stopped--Ted, Wari, Blake and I have all moved on to other things (babies, other projects, ...). No one else has stepped up to the plate. Though we keep getting emails on the dev lists and elsewhere about how no one will use PyBlosxom unless it does feature x and feature y and how there's lots of bad code and so on so forth. I wish more people would help out.

No more calendar

I'm going to take some time to slim down my site and make bits of it easier to use. Then I'll package up the templates I use and make them available for other PyBlosxom users. I'm curious to see how long that takes and how much effort is involved.

meta-refresh for html

I keep forgetting this and forgetting where I wrote it down. Irritating.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=http://bluesock.org/~willkg/blog/">

Comment spam (part 2)

I noticed that almost all the comment spam I get has the word "casino" in it. I added some code to the comment plugin to check the comment for the word casino and if the word is there, I ditch the comment. That seems to work very nicely (in the last 24 hours, it's ditched 7 bad comments and no good ones) though it's a short-term fix.

Long-term, I have a few thoughts. I may re-write portions of the comments plugin so that it saves comments originally in an "approval" stage. Then I'll write a command-line program that allows me to approve or reject all the comments in the "approval" stage one by one. That'll be pretty easy to deal with though it introduces a time-delay between when a comment is created and when it is posted.

Alternatively, I could just write a command-line program that goes through all the comments since the last one I "approved" and allows me to go through them one by one and weed out the bad ones.

Still, given that my blogs aren't related to casinos in any way, using "casino" seems to be a good filter.

Time

I've spent the last month and a half going on vacations, moving, and trying to get some of the big issues I've been sitting on for some time out of the way.

The vacations have been nice, but they're kind of hard and here's why: when I go on vacation, the work I have to do still has to get done. Some of it is time-sensitive, so I still have to get it done by the deadline. Some of it is work that involves a lot of time and it's easier to chip away at it bit by bit, day by day than to take it on in a couple of massive chunks.

Moving is hard, too. It's compounded by the fact that I seem to find really good reasons for moving every 9-12 months. Course, that's a lot better than the period just after college where I was moving on average every 3-4 months. I dislike moving.

In terms of big issues, I finally sold my car for a song (their song--not mine, which sucked) so that's one thing out of the way. I also (during the packing process) discovered my Black Adder's Christmas Carol tape and my visor cd thingy with cd's in it that had gone missing for some time. I still haven't located my The Good, The Bad, The Ugly soundtrack cd, though, and that's irritating.

Anyhow, things are getting settled--more time for coding and projects and things. :)

Spearmint

S and I bought a spearmint plant on Sunday and I repotted the plant (it had outgrown the pot they sold it to us in) and clipped off all the leaves that were either dead or in the process of dying.

Depending on how well we do with spearmint (which is really hearty and grows like a weed [and I may join the spearmint with some mint from my grandfather's house]), we may try growing our own basil. If the basil works as well, we may move on to other herbs!

Too much data

I have data issues. I have email going back to 1996 and I have documents and other data formats for which I don't have the original program anymore.

In regards to email, every now and then I get up enough energy to start going through it and deleting email that's clearly not interesting. The problem here is that I accumulate more email than I delete and I feel like I spend a lot of energy and time organizing it.

In regards to the other data, I could keep moving it from format to format but that also takes a lot of energy and time.

I don't keep a journal or a diary, so this data is really the only records I have of past years. It's the only way I can get a glimpse of how I've grown over time.

The question is how important is this data? Is it important to keep it all, or is it good enough to just keep a few things that capture enough of the essence of that period of time? Is it better to go through things and create an "editorial" of that period of time with citations from the original pieces and then destroy all the original data?

What uses does the data have? Maybe it's better to just jettison it all and start afresh?

wbgamazon plugin fixed

Turns out it was creating garbled yucky stuff that hosed my RSS 0.91 feed. I fixed it so that if it thinks it's outputting to an RSS feed, it just returns rather than doing the transformation.

I should look into making this a postformatter--that would be better.

my pyblosxom plugins