Ionrock Dot Org

My Weblog

Submitting to Social Networks

The past day or so, I've take a little time here and there to add some links at the bottom of my blog for posting to social network sites. I've seen plenty of sites that have too many favicons below each article, but it always seemed like a pretty similar set. Aftering seeing more comprehensive list, it is clear there are way to many "social" networking sites accepting news. Now my guage for how many is too many is probably pretty subjective, but I don't think anyone argue that there are a ton.

In addition to widgets and icons, there is also sites like SocialPoster that make it clear participating in these communities can be made easier through automation. This kind of automation is kind of scary because it feels as though there is the potential for some incestuous relationships between computers pulling and pushing links. I'm not thinking this is the beginning of SkyNet, but it makes you wonder how "social" a site is when there is a chance most the users are actually using automated tools to help avoid the actual inconveniences associated with visiting and actually participating. I, for one, plan on submitting my stories regularly to some of these social networks in hopes of upping my traffic a bit. While I have no doubt there will be some baggage in terms of account information, you will not see me truly participating in these social networks. As more and more of these sites pop up, my guess is that the automated tools will only help people to hopefully profit from these sites without making much of an investment.

The positive side of all the options is that there is a pretty decent chance that anyone can find the right social network for their personality. I'll stick to mailing lists, IRC, and reading blogs, but for poeple who don't want to own their web identity, it should be relatively easy to find someone who will take on the responsibilty.

So, as promised, if you visit Ionrock Dot Org, you can check out my sweet icons and submit my blogs to different social sites. Next, I'll put a few links in my feed for extra convenience. When it is all said and done, I'm sure the time could have been better spent improving my writing skills. The only problem is I wouldn't have all the slick icons then!

Rails Got Racked!

Ok, that title is terrible... But as Sam mentioned, Rails has adopted Rack! I've managed to avoid Ruby in favor of a superior language (which I type with my tongue firmly in my cheek), but when I did use Ruby and Rails, Rack was of definite interest. Of course, my understanding of Rack came from direct exposure to WSGI. The big difference between the two is that Rack is effectively an API at the object level, whereas WSGI is really at the langauage level. This distinction is primarily because Python has functions as first class objects, which allows passing callables around. This should be familiar to anyone using Javascript who has passed a function to an event handler or ajax call. The WSGI pattern is effectively the same. Since I haven't used Rack outside of basic experiements, I don't know how the idea of middleware translates. My guess is that it could be somewhat optimized in a similar fashion that tools are optimized in CherryPy.

Wild and inaccurate assumptions aside, WSGI has been a huge factor in the growth and development of the Python web development landscape. I can only imagine that it might help promote similar evolution within the Ruby community.

Looking for a Better Chat

I've been using iChat for a while now and I'm rather sick of it. It keeps dropping my connection. There is Adium, but it has its problems when it comes to jabber conferences and that is something of a deal breaker. It anyone has any suggestions for a good multi-protocol chat application that works on OS X let me know. I'm open to command line apps as well, especially if I could get notifications via Growl without a huge hassle.