accumulated news
Most recently... I've been twiddling with a little piece of software called "pivot". I was looking at some flash animations, and getting over my prejudice against web publishing using relatively inaccessible technology. (Not really getting over it. In another project, I'm still holding out against java-script. Though I'm blithely writing away on tribe.net which has all sorts of horrible qualities in that respect. Ah... the contradictions of humankind!) Anyway, I was looking to see if there existed a free or shareware flash animation tool and discovering that there isn't (at least, not one that I'm interested in), when, along the way, I came across this tiny little application. I like tiny little applications that do something well. This qualifies. As general animation software, it sucks - it's extremely limited in it's scope. But if you want to do what it does, it's great! Fun to use - I was giggling away as I worked. I'm sure that's only partly due to the dreadful perversity of my projects. Results here!
You may have noticed the icons down at the bottom of the page. Yes, I have an RSS feed. Two, in fact. So, if you have a reader, you can subscribe and be notified of updates. Quite simply, the one marked "journal" is the journal section of the site; the other is the rest (anything published under proems, reports, images... and major updates of links). RSS publication is easy to do manually at this level. What I'd dearly love to be able do, to avoid double handling, is to republish the feeds where appropriate to the index pages. That's where I can find several snippets of java-script code to do what I want, but I'm holding out for a cgi script I can run instead (preferably Python). I may have to write it myself - at first glance the parsing doesn't look difficult, but I've been stretched for time lately and haven't been getting to sit down and write a lot of stuff I intend to. One of the others is a "comment" function on selected pages here. None of the published open source code does precisely what I want, so I'm part-way through writing and testing my own. It's a project I'd dearly like to finish, but if it drags on too long I may change tack and install a ready-made system. I'm already noticing that when I want to blurt something out in a hurry, I publish at tribe.net rather than here. btw, my blog there has an RSS feed too - clicky clicky.
There were other things I planned to say... but even our New Year's adventure (camped on an ocean-side cliff-top in 42 degree heat with dogs and rain and vehicle shenanigans - which was just fantastic) seems like ancient history already. Life falls away very rapidly these days. I guess it arrives at a brisker pace, too, though that's not something I've been especially noticing. Now that I think about it, though... hmmm... Yup!
Happy Birthday! (to me *s*)