The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

New dasBlog feature

A week ago Sunday I mentioned that I'd forked this blog engine so I could add features. I've added the first one, and everything seems to be working just fine.

The Daily Parker has used GeoRSS for a long time. All of the entries since March 2010 are geo-coded, which you would only know by looking at the RSS feed. Well, now you can see the geographic information on the blog entries themselves.

See the little globe icon next to the time and date at the bottom of the entry? Go ahead, click on it.

For more fun, check out some other entries, too.

Resurrecting dasBlog

The blog engine running The Daily Parker, dasBlog, last got updated in March 2009. It appears moribund; no one's updating it anymore. This happens in software development all the time. As a user of the software, however, I'd like some new features and some defect corrections. For example, I complained last month that I couldn't switch from GUID permalinks to more user-friendly ones. I also found a bug in the module that lists the months, off to the side. And I want to show the posting time in the local time zone where I made the post.

All of these things require changes to the code. It's an open-source project, so getting the code is easy, and I've had it for years. Only, the dasBlog project appears moribund.

So I've decided to start my own private code branch. Not only will this allow me to make the changes I want, but also it will allow me to integrate with Inner Drive libraries, which I'll need for the time-zone update.

I don't know when I'll have time to work on it, but at least now I feel like I've got some control over the blog engine. There are lots of blog engines out there, including some open-source .NET-based engines. But this is post #2758; I really don't want to convert all those entries to a new format.

Facebook to stop importing The Daily Parker

Many people reading this blog actually see the posts a day or so later when they show up on my Facebook page. For years, Facebook has imported The Daily Parker through the blog's RSS feed.

Today, Facebook announced it will discontinue the practice before Thanksgiving:

You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you'll still be able to write individual notes. The best way to share content from your website is to post links on your Wall. Learn more about notes.

Any ideas why?

Unethical offer of the month

"Leading e-commerce development and acquisition group" KASA Capital sent me this email over the weekend:

I'd like to contribute an article to your site, thedailyparker.com - I can select a topic that matches the tone and theme of your site, or if you prefer, I can write about something of your choosing. The article will be unique and interesting to read. In return, I ask that I be able to subtly include a link to my site ____ within the article.

If you are able to put a permanent link to the article in a prominent place on your website, I may be able to make a one time Paypal donation as well.

Sure. Just a couple of things. First, the article you submit will have your byline. Second, the article will clearly state the financial relationship you have to the website you're "subtly" promoting. Third, the post containing the article will note that the article is "paid advertising." Finally, the article will end with a link to this post, to ensure that readers don't confuse your paid advertising content with anything I've ever written. If these conditions are acceptable, the fee for publishing your article will be $2,500.

Thanks for the offer, guys.

Chirp

I'm at a client site today and tomorrow, jamming on database optimization. Expect regular posts to resume Friday.

Irrevocable configuration choices

The Daily Parker uses the mostly-open-source dasBlog engine. The software has always offered two choices for how it creates permanent links (permalinks): titles and GUIDs. As you can see, we use GUIDs, so permalinks look like this: http://www.thedailyparker.com/PermaLink,guid,05976d99-b3cb-4391-9052-509832cbf5cf.aspx instead of like this: http://www.thedailyparker.com/About-This-Blog.

I've been thinking that GUIDs, while always unique, are kind of ugly. This morning I tried changing the blog's configuration settings to use titles instead. Sadly, dasBlog generates permalinks on the fly, but doesn't change permalinks within entries.

Therefore, in order to switch to title-based permalinks, I'd need to root around in all of the individual entries and change them. I could write a script to do this, I suppose, but with 2,715 entries spanning almost six years, it's still an undertaking.

So GUIDs will stay, as they have for the life of the blog. If I ever start another blog, or if I ever want to spend a day making the switch for this one, I'll use titles.

Holy traffic, Batman!

Apparently a lot of people are interested in time zones. Here's The Daily Parker's traffic this week:

Sat 2011-10-014,239
Sun 2011-10-02 3,727
Mon 2011-10-03 4,206
Tue 2011-10-04 5,497
Wed 2011-10-05 4,049
Thu 2011-10-0677,558
Fri 2011-10-07127,023

Fortunately my server seems to be keeping up. I expect that my ISP is unhappy with me, though.

About this blog (v. 4.1.6)

I'm David Braverman, this is my blog, and Parker is my 5-year-old mutt. I last updated this About... page in February, but some things have changed. In the interest of enlightened laziness I'm starting with the most powerful keystroke combination in the universe: Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V.

Twice. Thus, the "point one" in the title.

The Daily Parker is about:

  • Parker, my dog, whom I adopted on 1 September 2006.
  • Politics. I'm a moderate-lefty by international standards, which makes me a radical left-winger in today's United States.
  • Photography. I took tens of thousands of photos as a kid, then drifted away from making art until a few months ago when I got the first digital camera I've ever had that rivals a film camera. That got me reading more, practicing more, and throwing more photos on the blog. In my initial burst of enthusiasm I posted a photo every day. I've pulled back from that a bit—it takes about 30 minutes to prep and post one of those puppies—but I'm still shooting and still learning.
  • The weather. I've operated a weather website for more than ten years. That site deals with raw data and objective observations. Many weather posts also touch politics, given the political implications of addressing climate change, though happily we no longer have to do so under a president beholden to the oil industry.
  • Chicago, the greatest city in North America, and the other ones I visit whenever I can.

I've deprecated the Software category, but only because I don't post much about it here. That said, I write a lot of software. I work for 10th Magnitude, a startup software consultancy in Chicago, I've got about 20 years experience writing the stuff, and I continue to own a micro-sized software company. (I have an online resume, if you're curious.) I see a lot of code, and since I often get called in to projects in crisis, I see a lot of bad code, some of which may appear here.

I strive to write about these and other things with fluency and concision. "Fast, good, cheap: pick two" applies to writing as much as to any other creative process (cf: software). I hope to find an appropriate balance between the three, as streams of consciousness and literacy have always struggled against each other since the first blog twenty years ago.

If you like what you see here, you'll probably also like Andrew Sullivan, James Fallows, Josh Marshall, and Bruce Schneier. Even if you don't like my politics, you probably agree that everyone ought to read Strunk and White, and you probably have an opinion about the Oxford comma—punctuation de rigeur in my opinion.

Another, non-trivial point. Facebook reads the blog's RSS feed, so many people reading this may think I'm just posting notes on Facebook. Facebook's lawyers would like you to believe this, too. Now, I've reconnected with tons of old friends and classmates through Facebook, I play Scrabble on Facebook, and I eagerly read every advertisement that appears next to its relevant content. But Facebook's terms of use assert ownership of everything that appears on their site, regardless of prior claims, which contravenes four centuries of law.

Everything that shows up on my Facebook profile gets published on The Daily Paker first, and I own the copyrights to all of it (unless otherwise disclosed). I publish the blog's text under a Creative Commons attribution-nonderivative-noncommercial license; republication is usually OK for non-commercial purposes, as long as you don't change what I write and you attribute it to me. My photos, however, are published under strict copyright, with no republication license, even if I upload them to other public websites. If you want to republish one of my photos, just let me know and we'll work something out.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy The Daily Parker.

Where does my creativity go in September?

For the last three years running—including, it seems this one—my ability to find passably-interesting topics to write about plummets in September and picks up again mid-October. Any hypotheses about why? I haven't got any, except maybe that the shortening days do something.

Which is all just a longer way of saying, chirp...chirp...chirp...