Ape::Tracks

Buscraft!

Buscraft Weaving
Originally uploaded by BinaryApe

Arteth's blog has emerged at last: Buscraft. She's mostly writing about her crafting projects, many of them worked on while commuting.

B(ack)logging

There a few things less interesting than bloggers blogging about their blogging. Stop reading now.

Well, you were warned...

I'm building up a new collection of unpublished blog entries again, although it's nowhere close to the previous queue of over 700 abandoned items. I'll often quickly write a few hundred words about something and then abandon the item.

It's hard to believe there's anything close to quality control going on here, but I only seem to publish about one eighth of the items I type into Ecto. Writing something is easy, editing something is much more time consuming. If the item is trivial then it's easy to post, but if the item's got actual content then I feel uneasy publishing it and tend to leave it in limbo until it's too late to be of use.

Most of the best things in the backlog are related to my day job and overlap with a great deal of the links I add to Del.icio.us each day. I've been toying with the idea of starting a second weblog for a while now, and I think I might as well have a go. I'll keep Apetracks as a relatively useless personal writing exercise while also posting to a blog dedicated to identity and directory tech. I'm already amassing a lot of information on this topic for my own use so sharing any gems I come across may be of use to other people. I'm not an IDM guru but I am rather active at the 'coal face'; there are plenty of blogs written by IDM consultants but few written by people who deal with real IDM issues day-to-day.

I'll have a go at actually publishing some content to the new blog before announcing it.

I'm also going to try posting some of the backlog this time rather than just deleting it.

While Apetracks isn't often updated my Flickr photostream gets updates almost every week, and my Del.icio.us feed at least once a day.

Clearing the backlog

While migrating over to Typepad I noticed that I've posted about 500 items to Apetracks since it started in 2002, but I've also started, but never posted, over 700 other items. If you think what I've posted is bad, you should see some of the stuff I never got round to finishing.

I did the sensible thing and deleted them all.

I also deleted a pile of recent, relatively decent drafts that would have been posted to the old Apetracks, had it not been playing up a bit. That wasn't quite so sensible.

Friends of Platt Fields

The Friends of Platt Fields have produced a new and rather good website of information about the park. Although many old features of the park have been lost (I miss the little zoo) it seems to be having something of a renaissance, with lots of improvements and community activities going on. Manchester doesn't have enough open spaces and Platt Fields is a very welcome expanse of green in an otherwise brown and grey city.

We enjoyed the Diwali festival that was held at Platt Fields last year, and I'm rather pleased that some of my photos have been used in the new site (they are all Creative Commons licensed).

Ecto and Wordpress 2.1

Ecto looks like a convenient way to update weblogs, so I'm giving it a try. (If you can't get Ecto working with Wordpress 2.1, try upgrading to Wordpress 2.1.1, which fixes xmlrpc problems fetching categories for entries - Ecto would hang with 2.1)

On the other hand Ecto seems unable to save any of my settings at the moment, which diminishes the convenience somewhat...  Update: It saved settings after I posted this.

Redecorating

I'm playing around with various themes and plugins at the moment, so please excuse any blog strangeness.

Fljud Update

At long last Fljud 0.5 can do at least as much as Fljud 0.4! The "three month" rewrite has now taken a year and frankly I'm looking forward to getting back to something web related for a while as a sort of holiday from messing about with XMPP/Jabber.

First I need to tidy up some of the mess, add a few missing bits, and release the beta, sometime in the middle of August if all goes well. Then the beta can sit around revealing obscure bugs while I fix them, and a final release of 0.5 should occur in mid September.

Get it while it's 'ot: File Details: fljud-0.5alpha2.1.tgz - JabberStudio

Spooky

So what did you do on your Newtonmas Holidays? Made a New Year's Resolution to foment revolution, possibly using your cool decentralised reputation-management idea, which this year you'll be writing in OCaml or maybe Ruby?

I'm a little disturbed by the 100% accuracy of that. Is this the LazyWeb at work again? Is everyone else doing this too, all at once? Should I just sit back and let the LazyWeb provide? Or will everybody think that, leaving me to save the world? I certainly hope not. All I've got is a lot of incoherent scribbles, and some Ruby books.

Link: NTK

Weblog migration and mod_rewrite madness

I've upgraded from an old version of Movable Type to WordPress. Installing Wordpress was very easy, importing my old MT data was easy, but I've added hundreds of mod_rewrite lines to stop broken links, and that wasn't easy. Most of them should only apply for connections to the old archive, and as they are permanent redirects, search engines etc should hopefully adjust themselves and make the redirections rarely used.

Next I'll update the site style, and then rebuild the other parts of www.binary-ape.org. More changes soon. Now I'm off back to BAXL/FLJUD work.

The End Of Pigwig

I've cancelled my Demon account after almost nine years. Demon took too long to provide ADSL, so a couple of years ago I signed up with Zen Internet. Since then I've only been using my Demon account for email, and it's no longer worth paying for a separate account.

Pigwig.demon.co.uk was fun - I felt like a pioneer in the early days, moving from dialing into BBSs to unreliable SLIP connections on my Amiga via Demon, often getting up at 6am to download shareware from FTP sites "before America woke up" and speeds dropped. Years later my Demon webpage got slashdotted, and Demon blocked access to it for a while. Ah, nostalgia.

On the other hand, I've discovered that over 90% of our spam is coming in on the old pigwig.demon.co.uk email addresses, and losing that is a definite silver lining.