Monkinetic Weblog

There are good reasons some designs don't make the cut... is this an example of "graphic violence"?

Now that I've got all my archives imported, I was watching the apache logs scroll by when the MSNBot requested this rant from Oct. 2000. It's got me wondering if my thoughts on the matter have changed any in 4 years. More on that later.

I added a new feature to monkinetic today: "On This Day In [year]". In the right column I've now got links to past years on monkinetic when there were posts on the current day's date. I've always liked the feature on Dave's Scripting News, and thought I'd finally implement it here. I think it adds a sense of time and history that is really cool.

I've finally got my archives imported into WordPress. It took 3 months of piddling aroud with php, and more knowledge about mysql backups and hacking than I wanted, but it's done. Now I get to do the same for Jodi's site. Fun! :-)

I'm in the process of preparing to import 1700+ weblog posts and 600+ comments from the last 4 years of the monkinetic weblog. I've had to make some archive url changes to accommodate, so please excuse the dust swirling around monkinetic today.

July and August are "monsoon" season in the desert of Arizona. I've been here almost 3 years now and I'm still not sure why it's called "monsoon", but I guess theoretically we're supposed to get more rain or something. Usually we just get a lot of wind and dust, most often looking something like this.

Well, I've almost got my import script working well enough to push the button on getting 1729 posts from my blog archives imported into WordPress. It's been hairy, parsing 2400 or so xml files, creating posts and comments from them, and creating the connections between them all. Seeing as it's past midnight and I'm pretty tired, I'm not going to run the script on the live site until I'm certain it's right, but I'm hoping that will be sometime later today. This will mean I've got all my content from June 2000 until the present. I have one more database of posts from late 1999 through June 2000 still to do.

Aaron Swartz: The Weblog: Web Development Restarts >Considering HTML's stagnation and pain, this may be hard to believe fully, but I'm serious. They talk about things like Digital Signatures, tabbed/wizard interfaces, rich text editing, spreadsheets, and drag and drop, not to mention simpler stuff like date inputs, sliders, and repeatable rows.

Google: all things to all people: > pvera: Google is my ninja

Dave Hyatt blogs about the solution he chose for the extensions Apple is making to (X)HTML to support the new features in Safari and Dashboard. I think he chose the right solution and it's fun to see the conversation played out in the public space.

Gadget Madness reviews the Green Laser Pointer from ThinkGeek: >5 out of 5 Predators agree that the green laser pointer is bad because they are usually attached to a semi-automatic weapon of some sort, which means the spillage of glowing green Predator blood. If you see a Predator, for pete's sake don't be stupid and whip out your green laser pointer and shine it at him. This really pisses them off, so don't say we didn't warn you.

Awesome.

A week ago I commented that I wasn't sure about the way Apple was extending HTML in Safari 1.3/2.0. Quite a few others brought up the same point, notably Tim Bray (author of the XML spec).

Check out this "amazing" sample of the art of stop-motion LEGO: Spiderman and the Peril of Doc Ock. Cooool!

Think Secret: Inside Tiger: A Look at Spotlight. I'm sure there are a ton of new features to go gaga over in Tiger, but I'm really excited about the new metadata and search features.

Via Creative Bits (of course I subscribed): Free stock photography from stock.xchg. There's some very nice stuff here. The cool bit is that not only is the photography free, but you can register for an account and upload your own photography. I haven't looked into it, but it would be awesome if stock.xchg supported Creative Commons licensing.

David Hyatt, Safari Master, writes about a new feature of Safari 1.3 (in development):

Jason Kottke (yes, I still read a couple of the blogger kids) has redesigned and it's pretty nice. Spartan to the extreme, but not unpleasant either.

Hmmm. Seeing as each Dashboard gadget is just a web page, I wonder if they could be delivered remotely? I can envision writing corporate intranet-based gadgets for use by employees on our LAN.

This adventurous fellow (note I did not say "suicidal fool") whipped himself up a home-made military grade flamethrower, and shows us how!