One of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much lately is because I’ve decided to bifurcate my blog into a professional/technical blog (which will continue here on lojic.com/blog) and a personal blog, and until I’ve decided on the technology to use for my personal blog I’ve been reluctant to blog much.

The motivation for the split is the feeling that a lot of my non-technical family & friends grow weary of weeding through a lot of techno-geek material to find anything interesting, and folks who read my blog for technical info probably don’t want to weed through the silly videos, etc.

Wordpress has worked fine for my blog thus far, but I want to take the opportunity to develop my personal blog in a new technology more for the learning experience than necessity. I haven’t had time to select the appropriate technology, so I have a bit of analysis paralysis.

The candidates are:

• Ruby on Rails: I currently develop primarily in Ruby on Rails, so in that respect it would be the logical choice and easiest way to get started; however, it wouldn’t have the benefit of learning a new technology.
• Arc: I had high hopes for Arc when Paul Graham first released it. I still think it has potential, but that potential is limited by Paul’s interest level and available time. It’s been over 3 months since the last release and that was only a small incremental improvement. The forum seems dead, and the fact that Arc went through a 5 year blackout period makes me wonder whether it will be a dead-end language and a waste of valuable time.
• Common Lisp: I am leaning toward a Lisp, so if Arc doesn’t pan out, Common Lisp would be a good fallback language. It’s much more mature with robust implementations. It doesn’t provide a nice batteries included experience though, and I’ve been reluctant to collect the necessary libraries from various sources to allow anything remotely similar to Ruby on Rails with respect to ease of development. I think it may have a greater long term potential though, so it may be worth the effort.
• Scheme: The PLT web server may give me a head start on a Lisp based web site, and Arc is based on MZScheme, so it’s on the short list.
• Haskell: I know very little Haskell (even less than Lisp which is not much), but I’m intrigued by many aspects of the language. GHC seems to be a great compiler that produces well performing programs. My initial impression is that it will take more effort to learn than a Lisp, but in terms of brain stretching, it has a lot to offer. There is a Haskell based web server available, but like a lot of fringe languages, it appears to be pretty rough around the edges.

I have a vacation coming up, so I think I’ll use some of the down time to do some research and make a decision. Look for the blog bifurcation to happen in the latter half of June. If you have any opinions on the matter, please add a comment

Aaron tagged me

brian@airstream:~$ history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' |
  sort -rn | head

182 cd
141 ls
55 vim
52 ssh
44 timeclock.rb
29 ruby
28 irb
26 fr
26 cat
24 rake

1. I’ve made a definite switch to emacs, but vim is still handy for the quick view of a file, and I start emacs in the morning via an icon, and it stays up all day - otherwise, it would be way up on the list.
2. timeclock.rb is a handly little script to parse/format an emacs timelog file - incredibly nice way to track time on various tasks.
3. fr is an alias for: find . -regextype posix-extended -regex ‘\”.*.r(b|html)’\” | xargs grep

Tag. You’re it

I created Lojic Technologies in 1998. Over the years I have occasionally worked full time at the company while consulting, and at other times I just kept it active to be available in the future. Since I’ve never needed to market myself, I simply threw a web site together as a placeholder.

Now that I’ve been full time with Lojic Technologies since October ‘06 working on several web applications, I’m getting to the point of needing a better web presence, so last Saturday, with some help from my right brained wife, I gave the old site a face lift. It’s still small, and simple, but I think it looks a bit better now.

Besides the cosmetic changes, I also moved from a static site to Ruby on Rails and switched to XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Old Version

New Version www.lojic.com

I’ve also added a link in the sidebar now that the site isn’t an embarrassment. I’m quite pleased with how easy it was to get a Rails app running on Bluehost. I already host this wordpress blog there, so I thought it might be difficult adding a Rails app into the mix without clobbering each other, but it was quite simple (after spending hours researching it )

The site is almost entirely static except for the contact form. I finally arrived at a nice way to host a (mostly) static site with Rails, but I’ll have to blog about that in a later entry.

I hate to promote Google given their trajectory to take over the world, but I just switched over to Google Reader for reading RSS feeds. I had accumulated over 60 RSS feeds, and it was becoming difficult for me to determine which feeds I should keep and which I should delete.

I was hoping for an automated tool that would keep track of which feeds are beneficial and Google Reader has exactly what I was looking for!

The trends feature will keep track of which articles I read from each feed and report on the total number and the percent. So, over time, I’ll be able to easily delete the feeds that have a low number and/or low percentage of read articles. If you decide to use Google Reader, you should be aware of some idiosyncrasies. When viewing in “Expanded view”, the default is to mark articles as read when you scroll past them which totally defeats the trends feature. You can turn that off in the settings.

settings | preferences | scroll tracking

I like using the “list view” instead which allows me to quickly view the titles. After I’ve read the articles I want to from a feed, I click “mark all as read” and Google Reader is smart enough to not count those in the “read” statistics.

If you’re already using a different RSS reader, you can easily import all your feeds via an opml file. I was using Liferea and had folders of feeds, and I had also renamed the feeds - the import to Google Reader kept track of all of that - nice.

Google Reader has a lot of other nice features such as keyboard shortcuts, tags, folders, etc., but once I discovered the trends feature, that was all I needed to see

I suppose the trends feature can be “unfair” though. Consider the following scenario:

1. You have two feeds A and B
2. Each day each feed publishes 10 articles
3. The feeds overlap on 5 articles that are worth reading
4. Feed A has 1 unique article that you read
5. Feed B has 3 unique articles that you read

If the feeds are read in alphabetical order, then you’ll read the 5 overlapped articles from Feed A along with the 1 unique article -> total = 6, or 60%. Then you’ll read the 3 unique articles from Feed B -> total = 3, or 30%. The stats will show Feed A as being twice as valuable when clearly Feed B is more valuable. I suppose to get good stats, I should read the feeds in random order, but that seems difficult to manage.

UPDATE: ah, never mind. Simply view the folder that contains A & B and you’ll see the union of their articles in chronological order - whoever gets the overlapped story first wins

I just read an article discussing whether truncated RSS feeds are good or bad. I’m currently using truncated feeds (of course this post may be short enough to not get truncated), but if any of you have an opinion on the matter, I’d love to hear it.

Facebook.com just ran an ad that was quite offensive to me. I should’ve taken Scott Moonen’s advice from his blog earlier, but better late than never. He has simple instructions for installing Adblock on his blog. Check it out and get rid of ads!

I just discovered that if you take the average of the following locations:

Bermuda
Grand Rapids, MI (my mom & step-dad)
Columbus, OH (Andrea’s parents)
Orlando, FL (my dad & step-mom)

it results in a point roughly 15 miles from my house - cool huh?

Well, I had to cheat a little to get it that close. I used Grand Rapids instead of Rockford, Columbus instead of Centerburg, and Orlando instead of Altamonte Springs; otherwise the point would be a little north of Wake Forest, but that’s still pretty darn close. So, if we end up visiting our parents and Bermuda equally, then we live in a mathematically optimal location. I guess I should check on travel arrangements to Bermuda…

I read on Scoble’s blog that this site (I can has cheezburger?) is the #1 Wordpress site with 500,000 visitors per day! I don’t get it, but I did think the bunnies were cute

I don’t know if you’ve caught the buzz, or even heard of, Twitter or Jaiku, but a few hundred thousand people seem to be addicted to it. I think I first heard about it from Robert Scoble. I guess Leo Laporte of TWiT fame talked it up and boosted the subscribership. Then Leo thought the Twitter name was too similar to his TWiT (”this week in tech”) and was worried about trademark issues, so he made a big deal about leaving Twitter for Jaiku and a bunch of folks followed him (and brought the jaiku servers to their knees).

My initial assessment is that there is a lot of over-hype, but I do think they can provide some value in ways that email, IM and blogging can’t. In some ways, Twitter/Jaiku is to blogging as IM is to email - with some overlap.

It reminds me a little of the LinkedIn buzz a few years ago. I tried it out and got bored, so I thought I’d see how big I could grow my network for the fun of it. I linked up with a few networkers who had huge networks and I soon had over a million people in my network which basically defeated the whole purpose of LinkedIn, although I have to admit it was fun getting the reactions from people with tiny networks who linked to me and suddenly got an incredible boost. Likewise, Robert Scoble has 2,700+ “friends” on Twitter with pages of updates scrolling by at a ridiculous rate.

On the other hand, if you use LinkedIn as it’s intended and only link to people you know well, it can be really useful. I do use it that way by dealing with referrals from trusted sources and ignoring the ones from strangers. Unlike twitter/jaiku, LinkedIn doesn’t (or at least didn’t) make it easy to delete folks from your networks, so I’m stuck with the strangers. Similarly, if you only add people you actually know and interact with regularly to your twitter/jaiku account (unlike Scoble), it might have some use.

On the other hand (?), Kathy Sierra has some really good points on the matter

I can’t tell if twitter or jaiku will take the lead, or if they’ll both flop. I’ll post both of my accounts and see what happens.

My twitter account

My jaiku account

Feel free to add me on either one. I should warn you that everyone’s first impression of twitter and/or jaiku seems to be that they’re lame; for some that impression changes. I’m still on the fence.

UPDATE forgot a few twitter related sites:

Twittervision

Twitterific

TwitterCamp

Twitterholic

Granted, these may not be that useful, but I do think it’s cool that Twitter has published an API that allows the development of applications to produce and consume “tweets”.

Update 2: I just added a twitter badge to this blog page - you can check it out in the sidebar to the right. Is that cool, or what? I’m referring to the technology, not the content of my updates which by nature will be boring

Since I’m about to let a bunch of people know about my blog, I thought I’d help out anyone who might not be using RSS. You really should be using RSS. If you don’t believe me, check out the video below; I have no idea who that guy is, but he’s right (well, at least about RSS). Here it is in a nutshell. Instead of going out to a bunch of web sites for news, information, etc., let your RSS reader do that for you and compile a list of new articles in one place that you can scan through and read only the articles that interest you. It will save you a lot of time - even if you only read one news or blog site.

Take this blog for instance. You’d be crazy to keep coming back here to see if there’s new content that interests you. Just add the RSS feed (it’s at the bottom of the page and says Entries (RSS) ) to your RSS reader and it will let you know when a new article is posted, and if the title interests you, check it out, otherwise, ignore it.

I have a favor to ask of those who are reading this and are already using RSS. Post a comment with the name of the RSS reader you’re using, and if you have any links to helpful RSS tutorials, post them too. If you’re not using RSS, you may want to check back in a few days and read the comments. You could add the comments for this article to your RSS reader so you’ll be automatically notified when a new comment is posted, but that’s a bit of a catch-22

UPDATE: definitely check out Eric Holter’s article on RSS in the comments below.

I’ve had ‘create a blog’ on my todo list for quite a while. Well, I just signed up for a hosting account with Bluehost.com and they have an autoinstaller for wordpress, so within a few minutes, I had a blog.