Ionrock Dot Org

Over the past week or so I've been making some changes to my website. I've more or less completely rewritten everything with a single focus on moving my data to external services. For blogging, I'm using Posterous. It is pretty slick because you just email them and the blog gets posted. This is not really a new idea (using email as an interface), but it is really clean and simple. This simplicity is very much a requirement because I needed to be able to effectively cache the results and I didn't want to jump through hoops getting little XML details fixed. This fit the bill nicely. For commenting, I'm using Disqus. This seems to be a pretty popular option among some folks and you can export the comments, which seems helpful. I've never been a big fan of comments, but I've been thinking more about it and having a little discourse seems positive.

The way the system works is I have a script that runs and downloads feeds from various sources. It then adds the entries to a SQLite DB. The rest of the site only reads from this DB, so I shouldn't have to worry about concurrency issues. The script that downloads feeds allows filters to be applied to the feeds. The filter can do whatever it wants, so in the case of Posterous, I strip out a few links that get added to the end of my posts. I'm using feedparser which is a first. I've used it before for experimenting, but most times I'd just skip it in favor of using Amara. The nice thing about feedparser is I can use a parsed version of the content. This makes it easy to keep all my entries in xhtml (as in type="xhtml" in Atom speak), which really is just how Atom fits my brain. If I ever get into things like SVG, this seems helpful, but I don't see myself venturing into those waters anytime soon. RDF and Semantic technologies, yes, but beyond that, I'm keeping things pretty basic.

One reason for this change is that I've been making an effort to expand my horizons a bit. I've been focused on XML technologies pretty heavily for a few years now and it feels like it is time for a change. In some ways, my design changes are a sign of my focus on pragmatism. The recent iteration of my site was very easy to put together and it feels rather full featured compared to my previous site. Also, in using Bright Content on and off, it was always very difficult to pick up. I made some bad decisions along the way that added quite a bit of cruft and confusion that made it unmaintainable. This redesign is something of a reset on that to focus on better ideas that use more of the web and its services. In doing so, I've scrapped some flexibility, but that was part of the plan.

This "plan" I mentioning is really just me thinking about the work I've done in the past. XML has always been my hammer, which is not what I wanted. I've come to the conclusion as well that XML as a tool is different from the ideas behind many XML technologies. In some cases, I think the non-XML equivalents might be a little better at times. JSON is a good example of this in that it makes for much better object serialization format in the sense it is modeled after a real programming language (Javascript) while still allowing the benefits of a real document. Another good example is XPointer. HTML links work very well and in the vast majority of cases, the functionality is effectively the same. Microformats are another area where XML community ideas have been picked up by non-XML (HTML) markup.

The biggest problem I've had with XML is that it forces me to use XML as a model. I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but it does mean that the development environment is no longer the king. I'll be the first to admit this impression is largely because I still have a great deal to learn about my language of choice and XML. The problem is learning both at the same seems to mean neither become my forte. My pragmatic decision then is to try and stay in the Python (and Javascript) world as much as possible. So, far this decision has been very fruitful in that I'm not only become more proficient in Python, but it offers new ideas for how I work with XML. A win-win in my opinion.

My recent reflective trend is because I recently had a birthday. I'm officially 30 years old. I can't say I'm old, but I don't feel young anymore. This is troubling, but I'm sure it will wear off quickly. In all honesty I'm frustrated I haven't done more. I'm not complaining or anything, because life is great, but it feels like a wake up call to get a little more serious about getting things done. The changes in the site is simply a reflection of that desire, so hopefully there will be more changes to come. Wish me luck!

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