brentashley

Blogchatting with J|G from Munich, I learn that “web developer” in German is Webentwickler.

Ok, now I’ve gotta go, can’t you see I’ve got webs to entwickle!

My “third time, automate” rule came in handy again recently. I’m doing all sorts of PHP/mySQL work and I found myself hacking together the same SQL queries over and over with just some different filter or sort order. Being used to stored procedures, I was missing the easier syntax.

Here’s what I came up with….
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We’re getting the first few BlogChat beta users up to speed. You can see a list of who’s online and not on the right there. If you see someone online, drop in and say Hi.

If you want to get involved in the beta, send us email at beta@blogchat.com. All you’ll have to do is put a blogchat popup link on your page or an embedded iframe like I have. You go to the host page, sign in, and then anyone who visits your web page can chat with you. Takes about 2 minutes to get it going.

via Keith Devens: Regular Expression Library

Martin Spernau alludes to a gem of an idea whereby you block adware sites by giving them bogus hosts file entries. lovely and simple. (unfortunately, the site he links to for a hosts list seems to redirect to some really bogus adware popups, so avoid it)

It’s apparently verboten at most gas stations to use your cellphone while filling your car. I’ve had it explained to me that it’s because when you receive a call there could be some static charge thing happen. I looked up some various stuff on the net, but it’s all inconclusive from what I can see.

If static is such a threat, maybe they should make it illegal to fill up a car while wearing pantyhose and a silk slip.

Papa Scott’s migration from Manila to MT took a different but similar course to mine. I had downloaded my manila root and loaded it up in Radio, but couldn’t really get my head around manipulating the object db or playing with tools to xml-ify it. So, I found a piece of VB code from Simon Fell that uses PocketSOAP to query manilasites for manila weblog info. I quickly modified it to iterate from 1 to the current weblog entry number, call manilasites.com via SOAP for each entry, and spit out the text format MT expects as input, very much like Scott did with his perl script that parses the XML files.

Worked great. Was such a quick hack that I didn’t even save the code changes on exit from VB.

One of life’s truisms from LimitedPie:

…at each of my life junctures the hard thing is and was the right thing.

It’s been just over a month now since the original implementation of BlogChat was released. A few people have installed it and have been running their own BlogChats. Many others have visited me at my blog and commented that they like the idea and would like to have one on their site, but that they don’t have the ability, knowledge, or control over their server to host it themselves.

In answer to those people, I’ve spent a significant amount of energy developing a multi-user implementation of BlogChat which will allow us to provide hosted BlogChats on a subscription basis. I say “us” because I’ve entered into a partnership with a long-time friend and colleague named Tim Aiello, whom many of you may know as TechnoMagician.

We’re going to be ready soon to invite interested parties to participate in a limited Beta of the BlogChat service. We will initally have to limit participation until we are able to analyse server load distribution needs. In addition to the many people who have been supporting us to date, we’re looking also for people who are not technically oriented, who are not part of the design and programming community, to bring their perspective to the beta process.

We still have some issues to deal with before we are ready to fly with this beta, but we’ll start collecting requests to be included at beta@blogchat.com.

For now, I’m going to spend Easter with the family and spin down from the extended flurry of activity. Seeya next week.