Blog: Meta

I spent a few hours over the weekend updating the programs that generate the RSS and Atom feeds to handle Greater Greater Washington posts correctly. I had been using a script to generate them statically and then save the files to be accessed, but switched it over so that it would generate them when someone requested them. Unfortunately, the thing that generates the static versions did so and overwrote my new scripts, so I have to start over. Grr. Anyway, if you are one of the people who reads the blog in an RSS/Atom reader, fixed feeds will be coming soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Greater Greater Washington launched a few weeks ago, and I'm excited to see its readership growing. Please check it out and add it to your RSS reader (here's the feed, or you can subscribe for email updates).

As promised, Alpie.net is now only showing links to GGW posts instead of the entire posts. There will continue to be more posts on GGW than on Alpie.net for the foreseeable future, but I plan to keep posting photos, political opinions, economics thoughts, and other various non-city stuff here. I hope you will keep reading both blogs!

As you, the readers of Alpie.net, can clearly see, I've been blogging a great deal recently about urbanism issues, especially in the Washington, DC area. I've been considering for a month or two whether to launch a new blog, one focused on these issues and not my personal site, to fill a similar niche to what Streetsblog has done in New York. After much thought, I'm excited to announce that I have decided to do this.

Read more...

When I set up this blog, which I coded myself instead of using existing blog software, I had a category for each post. Simple. But sometimes, posts seemed to belong in multiple categories, so I added a 2nd category for each post.

But two isn't always enough. Occasionally, a post would cover more than two topics. More importantly, some topics, like "Urban Design" were getting very large. Should I split this category into two or more? How to decide?

Web 2.0 applications solved this problem with tags: instead of fixed categories, a post can have any number of tags associated with it in a more free-form way. Recent applications like Flickr also popularized the "tag cloud" visualization technique, which I'd already used on the people index page.

It had been on my to-do list for some time to switch from categories to tags for posts, and now it's done. Now, you'll see a (sometimes longer) list of tags in place of categories, and tag clouds on the sidebar.

I've added the ability to post little links on my blog that will be displayed in a more compact format between posts, like Gawker-empire blogs do. (If you're seeing this post on the main page or a chronological archive page, there are two right below.)

You've seen many new pictures on Alpie.net in recent weeks since I got my new camera, but I've also made a few other improvements to the site.

The blog archives box, on the left or right sidebar, was getting very long, with one line per month for the three and a half years I've been keeping a blog (the site is much older, with photos going back farther, but I added a blog in April 2003). I trimmed the list and created a new blog archive page where you can see all the posts as well as some recent comments.

Speaking of comments, spammers have been relentlessly commenting on my blog about very important topics like halloween costumes (seriously - I'm not sure why this is such a lucrative spam topic) as well as the usual stuff, so I've set up Captchas from ReCaptcha. So far, no spam. Hopefully it will hold up.

And finally but most excitingly (for me at least), I've revamped the people index, which was also getting really long, with 1,488 different people who appear in my pictures listed on that page, many/most of whom appear only once. I set up a "tag cloud" style visualization, which is both more compact and also shows the more commonly appearing people most prominently.

Check it out, and comments welcome! But I won't reply soon - I'm off to Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia for two weeks. Bye!

In fifth grade, we did a unit on advertising. During that unit, the class learned to sing classic advertising jingles in chorus, like "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener." One I remember most clearly is the Ajax tune, which Wikipedia claims is television's oldest ad jingle dating from 1948:

Use Ajax (ba dum ba)
The foaming cleanser (ba dum ba dum bum bum)
Floats the dirt right down the drain
You'll stop paying the elbow tax
When you start cleaning with Ajax

These days, Ajax is more well known as the "Asynchronous Javascript and XML" combination of technologies that lets a Web application talk to the Web server behind the scenes without requiring the user to go to a new page after every action - a technology popularized after Paul Buchheit and his team doggedly insisted on building a Javascript interface for Gmail, ignoring many objections from superiors until he proved that you can indeed build a kick-ass interface in Javascript.

I knew all the fundamentals of Ajax but never got around to actually writing an app in it, until today. I needed to do some annotating of my images as part of a project to link them to Facebook, and I wanted to be able to flip through many images quickly. After about half a day of coding, I now have a simple application that loads images behind the scenes, captures clicks appropriately, sends them back to the server, and keeps loading more images as needed.

I actually ended up having to figure through a few less simple pieces of Ajax, like how to keep a set of separate concurrent asynchronous XMLHTTPRequests going at the same time without them bumping into each other. But once you get the hang of the basics, it's quite simple to stop paying the elbow tax and start programming with Ajax.

When I put blog categories into Alpie.net (the third box on the left sidebar from the home page, or on the right sidebar if you're looking at this post somewhere else), no category was extremely large. But now, some categories, like Politics and Photos have almost 100 posts - too many for one page.

Now, each category page only has ten posts, and if there are more, a link appears at the bottom of the page to see more. These also appear on the month archives, and at the bottom of the home page.

The other pages that have gotten too large are certain individual person pages. While most people appear in only a handful of pictures, some people appear much more often. Next on the list for Alpie.net is to paginate those as well.

I made some improvements to spam comment filtering, so that I now can review and approve every comment and more easily dump all the spam. In doing so, I also accidentally reset the posting dates on all old comments to today. I could fix most of it by hand, but it's probably not worth the effort. Oh well.

Update 11/8: I was able to write a script to do it faster, and thus comment dates have now been restored.

I've been playing with a change in the look of the front page to 3 columns, since the amount of stuff in the sidebar has grown and a lot of it is worth looking at.

Take a look and let me know what you think.