Blog: Meta

I've just added a section at the top of the right sidebar listing public events I'll be attending in the near future. I encourage all of you to come join me!

This is an idea I've wanted to add to the Cosmopolity calendar for a while. You can already RSVP for events on there, so we could create a page that outputs the next few events in a compact form which people could then include on their sites using an IFRAME. But since you can't add your own events to Cosmopolity, it's not as useful.

I built this using Trumba, a new personal calendar service. It's pretty neat; my brother created a calendar too which I can now see, and we created a shared family calendar to track who is on the Vineyard which weekend. Trumba would be well advised to make it easy for people to embed their personal calendars on sites, but they don't yet have an easy way to do this, so I had to write a script to download the RSS, parse it, and generate HTML.

Apologies for the mysterious disappearance of Alpie.net. It was just as mysterious to me. I shouldn't complain because I was getting free hosting, but that server was like a phoenix - every so often (once or twice a year) it would mysteriously disappear, with no word for a few days, then suddenly appear once more as a completely different machine, different IP, new Linux distribution, paths to important binaries changed, but all the files and data there intact. But Palmer & co were being wonderful just to let me mooch their bandwidth (or, often, Harvard's).

But I'd been meaning to move Alpie.net off that server, so this provided a good kick in the pants, so now it's on the same server as Cosmopolity, Drinking Liberally, IPac, CopyNight, Jailed For A Song, and others.

For a diversion from all the geekery, there's this recent exchange overheard in New York:

Dumb teen: Hey, look at this! It says "Train for jobs in beeyotch."

Smarter teen: Fool! That word is biotech. Why you gotta be ignorant all your life?

--1 train

Overheard by: Manhattman

Last week I spent a few days in Washington, DC, meeting with Congressman Rick Boucher (D-VA) for IPac, Gigi Sohn of Public Knowledge, and Tom Manatos in Nancy Pelosi's office for Drinking Liberally. I also got to see RFD, site of the DC Drinking Liberally, even though I wasn't able to stay for Drinking Liberally itself - unable because that Thursday night, Simon Rosenberg spoke at The Tank about his candidacy for DNC chair, followed by a panel about the race the next day. All in all, between visiting the capital and the Capitol, and the gaggle of Democrats gathered in New York for the DNC meeting, it was a politician-filled week.

P.S. I've added a few new themes, like this and this, plus these strange signs as a tribute to Mike's Satan's Laundromat.

Over the last week I've spent an inordinate amount of time installing and managing myriad software packages to faciliate communication among many groups of different sizes and needs.

For Cosmopolity (not just the calendar but an umbrella of many activities), we have the two main leaders (Justin and myself), a small local steering committee of activity leaders, and a larger national group of supporters and advisors. For Drinking Liberally, there are the 3 national organizers (founders Justin and Matt O'Neill, plus me as the Webmaster), the city leaders across the country (17 cities as of this writing), and the general public who visits the Web site and comes to a local Drinking Liberally. And for IPac, there's the official board, a national crew of volunteer supporters, and then the general public.

Each is using different methods to communicate, from simply emailing each other manually or using an email alias I set up, to packages like Mailman, PHPlist, blogs, or in the case of IPac a mass mailer I coded myself. Many also are collaborating, whether offline through meetings or conference calls, online using tools like phpBB, a discussion forum system or TWiki, a wiki package.

And lately I've been setting up and administering all of these. Here's a handy chart outlining which groups use what:

Group	Communication					Collaboration
	Alias	Mailman	PHPlist	Blog	Custom	Mtgs	Conf call	phpBB	Wiki
Cosmo leaders						x			x
Cosmo steering	x					x			x
Cosmo supporters		x							x
DL leaders	x
DL city leaders		x					x
DL public			x		x	x		x
IPac board	x						x		x
IPac volunteers		x					x		x
IPac public				x	x

It may seem ridiculous, but this site is running on my own homegrown blog software. Alpie.net had no blog at all for years until I added a Blogger blog. For a while it was just linked from somewhere, but then I decided to make the home page center more around the blog. I still wanted to have pictures prominently displayed, especially when I post new ones. It seemed pretty easy at the time to just make the blog run off the same MySQL database the photo album used, and so I migrated the posts, wrote a quick and dirty script to let me make new posts and edit old ones, and off we go.

But there's so much a blog can have, and over time as I started posting more I wanted it. Over time I added more and more. I spent most of today adding yet more to the blog code.

Added today:

• Closer association of pictures and posts - now new pictures attach to a post, rather than just appearing without context
  
• Comments!
  
• Combined some code that was duplicated in a few places into a single function, making maintenance easier

Next up: A commonly requested but daunting feature, Atom and RSS feeds.

Update: both Atom and RSS are now done!

Next maybe I'll look into adding text like I have for the new images inside the album itself. But not today.

As you can see, Alpie.net has undergone a few changes. I originally built the site entirely as a photo album, which was evident in the way almost all of the home page related to the album with only a single buried link to the blog. Now the blog has leapfrogged the album in prominence, though photos do retain significant exposure.

The most significant changes are on the backend. First, I've been meaning to change the album to use stylesheets properly for a long time. It was using CSS, but most style information wa*s in style tags on the content itself, and therefore replicated many times. Since all the HTML is automatically generated, it wasn't so much extra work, but formatting code was still copied between various scripts. Now almost everything is on one stylesheet, except for certain things like colors which change from page to page.

I've also stopped using Blogger. I had no complaints and it was working great (and even if it wasn't, I could personally go talk to the programmers behind it), but I wanted to build a more complex site interweaving images and blog posts, which requires doing my own programming. I would still recommend Blogger to anyone who wants to set up a nice blog with minimal work.

There may be broken links on this site, or links to dynamic CGI pages (which are recognizable either by the URL or by not having navigational arrows at the top). Please do let me know about any you might find.

Enjoy!