I've received a couple of responses about the blogger-replacement post. Some have suggested Moveable Type, but I have my missgivings about it.
Firstly, it's written in Perl. My opinion on Perl is that it has lots of wonderful uses, but that Perl's utter unreadability is the reason that Python has been successful. Some may call this a cop out, but frankly I don't feel like auditing lots of Perl, and that's what I'd have to do if I went with MT. Security is a big deal for me, and Perl's illegibility (to this programmer) makes MT an unsafe choice.
My other concern about MT is that it's not Open Source. The license isn't stupendiously bad, but if I'm going to host an application, I'd prefer that it be Open Source.
I've started working with a couple of scripts that use ZODB as an OODBMS backend, and I think I have code to meet most of the rest of my requirements lying about (save the spellcheck thing). We'll see how far I get in the integration/rework before I give up and start reading MT source code = )
This would have really saved my butt 4 or 5 years ago when i was still learning C++.
I'm seriously mulling a move away from blogger.
I started this weblog because I needed to get some stuff out of my system (not that any of it was terribly important), but there are some things I'd like to do that blogger just isn't up to. For instance, I'd like to allow "threadable" user comments that use a netWindows widget to request content on the fly (i.e., no page referesh). So now I have to consider options for a new backend.
Web-based posting would be preferable, and I'm trying to stay away from PHP and Perl (security and maintenance nightmares, respectively). My hosting provider has both MySQL and Python 2.2 installed, so I'm thinking of rolling my own with either ZODB or MySQL (not under ZODB) as the storage medium.
Requirements for the project include:
- SPELLCHECK (will likely require custom aspell wrapper)
- really frigging short development cycle. I have almost no free time.
- ability to export to XML (RSS feeds, template engine, etc...)
- XSLT templating engine, because I'm ornery like that
- web-based editing, although a remote QT/PyQT app would be cool too. XML-RPC/SOAP interface isn't necessaray (but might be handy).
- simple user authentication. One user/blog.
- some way of importing blogger/MT entries
- entry headlines
I've fixed the menu z-index problem Konqueror 3 users were experiencing. It's a bit of a hack, as it's an emulation of the "real" fix put in place for the window widget, but it works.
Funny part is I think I'm the only one that reads my blog with Konqueror 3. There's still a strange behaviour with window.location assignments in Konq 3. Oh well.
"You see, ya can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself"
-- Rick Nelson
I applaud counting stock option grants against earnings. It's about damn time.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that I understand how forcing executives to hold large stock positions during their employment is a Good Thing.
Somehow it seems to me that instead of encouraging harmful short-term thinking among management, such a provision only encourages harmful short-term employment instead. If the goal is to make executives more responsive to the long term needs of shareholders, then this is sure to backfire.
Instead of the current modus operandi (puff the stock, cash out, then leave), we get the much more palatable permutation: puff the stock, leave, and then cash out.
Progress, sweet progress...
Older Posts
Newer Posts