Tuesday, November 21, 2000
First use of Blogger. Helpful. But worthwhile?
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Wednesday, November 29, 2000
Ok. Blogger is now the main page. bits: Audiogalaxy Satellite. Why you should use it. Links. If you're really bored.
After much futzing and fooling, here's a layout that... Well, a conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking.
Monday, March 05, 2001
An effective weblog must become a way of life. Otherwise you just don't have the dedication for it. Any decent personal weblog gets updated daily. But to put something meaningful up daily (I flatter myself) takes effort. Writing something down is harder than telling someone in conversation. For one thing, you feel compelled to be more complete. For another, you don't have another person to stimulate you to explore avenues you wouldn't otherwise think of. Still, you can kill two birds with one stone. If you write it down and post it, you'll have expended effort and gotten it out of your system. So you'll be less likely to blab about your boring and lame life and listen to someone for a change (you selfish jerk).
Thursday, April 19, 2001
This has got to be one of the coolest things I've seen all year. Action stick figure fighting in Flash.
¶ 122 Posted at 03.43 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | site | cool ) Sunday, September 29, 2002
this is the new website, hosted at the Gentleman's Server Collective (thanks to mute), where previously I was at pair. While Pair is an excellent host, I just wanted more from them than I could afford. The present ugliness is a transitional thing. I promise. Jothan's on the hook for prettifying this. I would link him, but he has no site.
Tuesday, October 01, 2002
New site feature. If you look over on the left there, you will see a new menu called "Site." New items will (slowly) be added to that. Currently the only item there is for pictures. I got a new digital camera a couple weeks back and used it on my trip to San Francisco. As I take interesting pictures, they will appear in the gallery.
I put up a tiny "about" thing, set up a feedback form, and put back up those tiny useless code examples. See the site menu on the left.
Tuesday, November 12, 2002
I've tweaked the site a bit more. There's more of a gap at the top so that text won't overlay the background and thus be illegible. I've also moved the menus to be higher up on the page. Then there have been the big, tough changes to get most of the table-based layout out of the way. I haven't gotten all of it done because I simply cannot figure out how to get the grids in the gallery indices to look right with CSS. If you have suggestions; I am all ears. The image view within the galleries got tweaked as well, most notably with the elimination of the prev/up/next links and the addition of a top-level menu listing all the images in the gallery. I have still to come up with a better way to select image sizes; that select drop-down irritates me.
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
After having a job for a month and making almost no progress on the site, I now have this almost overpowering urge to get things done. Strike one more thing from the list: I have added a half-assed Amazon Wishlist integration. Click the "buy me stuff" link to see. I say "half-assed" because the SOAP code that I used to build my fetcher was only able to fetch on item at a time. This was SOAP code that came in the SDK they provided, but as far as I could tell, it was a problem with the Amazon SOAP server, as the SOAP request looked legitimate to me. So I implemented this really bad curl + homegrown XML DOM to do the job. Hopefully I'll find out what the problem is with the real SOAP client so I don't have to rely on my bad, bad, bad version.
Thursday, February 06, 2003
I admit it. "Righteous Fury" is a stupid name. Stupid stupid stupid. Coming up with a good, short name is hard. The only remotely decent one I've come up with so far is "30 degrees north" (.com available) which happens to be roughly the latitude of Austin. Suggestions are welcome.
Monday, April 14, 2003
I've reached the conclusion that the most interesting weblogs (ignoring webloggers that cheat by being your friends) are the ones that exude personality through their writing (bang brooklyn ¶, for example). I've been too fixated on the name and the visual design, when what I need to work on is writing style. This is more than a weblog thing; whenever I need to write anything I clutter it up with too many useless words. Qualifiers, quantifiers, etc. I also rarely make strong emotional statements, and when I do, they're limited to using words like "hate," "cool," or "neat." Boo. Then there's not so much personal stuff either. There are a whole lot of reasons for that. The end result is that my writing is stuffy and tedious. My writing is a reflection of me. Hopefully only one of the two preceding statements is true. So. More personality. Fewer, better-chosen words. Not just because it makes for a better weblog, but it's no fun to be writing something badly and know you're doing it as you do it. Plus I'll have to write a bunch of stuff for my job from time to time, and I'd rather it didn't suck.
¶ 526 Posted at 12.19 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | site ) Also, in order to return some semblance of meaning and utility to the categories, I should probably have less than 64 of them. "Only" 59 of them actually have posts in them, but still... I'm think 15 is probably a better target.
So, the big deal with weblogs is that the posts are in reverse chronological order, but that really sucks for archives. If someone wants to read your whole backlog, they have to read one entry down, then scroll up two entries, read one entry down, etc. That's just lame. Archives should be in ascending chronological order. Maybe I'll even implement that here.
Thursday, June 19, 2003
See CSS Zen Garden for a cool and useful demonstration of the power of CSS. I'm going to have to remember that for when I jump.
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
Something that I find truly fascinating is that Jessica has no interest in this site at all. Zero. Zip. Zilch. It just boggles my mind. I cannot relate to that at all. If she had a site, I'd read it. That is pretty unlikely, though. And by "pretty unlikely," I mean, "not gonna happen."
¶ 618 Posted at 03.36 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | site ) Wednesday, November 05, 2003
I just enabled web logs on this site a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't bothered before because, well, there was nothing here. Anyway, I'm looking over them, and it's just weird. THERE ARE STRANGERS READING MY SITE. Who the hell are you people? I mean, the usual suspects are there; if I know you, I can pretty easily tell when it's you just by geographical location. But then I have people from Oracle and McGraw-Hill visiting regularly. Someone from Chicago. Who the hell are you? Then someone appears to have picked up the hurricane image and mailed it around; I got a few people going straight to that (i.e., not from any of the web pages). I could tell it was mailed around because the Thai visitor came from a message accessed through Hotmail. There was a Chinese person and a couple of Brits, as well as many more. A bunch of people came because of that picture, actually, mainly through MSN search for Hurricane Isabella. That's fine. Don't link straight to the pictures, though. See down there where it says "Posted at...?" That's a direct link to that post. So for the Hurricane Isabella post, which includes the picture, you would link to http://ketan.org/post/607. I'm not big on self-promotion, at least web-wise, but I'd rather people knew there was an actual site here instead of it being a dumping ground for interesting pictures to send their friends. Anyway, back to my main point. If you're someone who visits off and on and you don't know that I know who you are or that you're doing so, well, drop me a line. The curiosity is killing me. I don't get many hits, but I get far more than I thought I would, even ignoring the seemingly hourly visits from MSN's search bot. On another note, you guys really seem to like the Seattle pictures. That's good. I like them too. I still feel a pang of regret about the almost perfect picture being ruined by my clumsiness.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Weird/funny searches to this guy's weblog. Weird funny searches to this guy's weblog (mine aren't as much of either):
Monday, February 16, 2004
Back again with the search query referrals, a.k.a. "filler". Gotta beef up my word count now that mute is using sentences and jothan has a site. I get competitive.
Sunday, March 21, 2004
So, as you may have noticed, I have changed the way the site works. In a frenzied bit of coding Friday evening and Saturday morning, I wrote a simple Java app that does just about everything I outlined in my previous post. It's pretty raw right now, but that's fine. I get into trouble when I try to anticipate my needs too much, so I'm going to do things as they are needed, not as they occur to me. I've taken the picture galleries offline until I do the same thing for those. Should be pretty easy.
Monday, March 22, 2004
I'm close to being done with the image galleries. Since there aren't any new images to see, you shouldn't care. I'm pretty pleased with how this is all working out. It's much better than before even if it is kind of lame. Keeping it simple is excellent. Sometimes I overthink things, so I write code as I think of things to do, not as I need to, so I end up with lots of unused code that clutters up the project and makes it harder to dive in and redo parts of it. What I have right now is no smarter and no dumber than it needs to be, which is just about perfect.
Tuesday, March 23, 2004
I have the photo galleries up. Again, there are no new pictures. I changed the layout a bit while I was at it. I also fixed up my code so that I use velocity templates instead of just embedding everything in the Java. I was going to do something like that eventually, and since I was working on the galleries, it seemed like a good time since the general site look overlaps with the weblog.
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
I've switched from Velocity templates to Freemarker. Velocity's offerings were austere to the point of excess, making it difficult to do simple things like formatting a date or string operations without a lot of hassle. I like this way better. I've also been told in no uncertain terms by the only person with leverage to stop talking about all this boring programming stuff a ll the time. So, ahem. Yes ma'am.
Tuesday, May 18, 2004
I don't have a fancy-schmancy stats readout from Blogger like some people, but I can get (almost all of) the same info out of my homebrew whirly-gig:
Saturday, July 17, 2004
What, did you think I'd spend my honeymoon posting to my weblog*? How big of a geek do you think I... oh. Right. I see. * Illicitly on the Internet again, incidentally. Orbitz lost our reservation; I'm sticking with Travelocity. I thought I'd encourage some competition in the online travel bookings market by using multiple agents; now I'm going to encourage competition by not using the crappy ones. Anyway, we got a bottom-of-the-barrel room at the hotel (i.e., no Interweb on this floor) upon our return to Vancouver. Luckily, yet again have access through some poor sap's unsecured wireless access point, although I have to practically dangle out the window. Just another advantage of living in a densely populated city, I guess.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
That was not actually the 1000th post; it just looked like it. I skipped a couple numbers. This post, for example, is not actually #1002 but actually #972.
Saturday, April 16, 2005
Much to my surprise, someone from Kenya has decided my old, lame domain is worthy of being squatted (on?).
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
I have spun off Uma-related things to her own web site. I'm using Blogger + Picasa + Hello, which is working well enough. There's even an Atom feed. Like you weren't expecting this...
¶ 1064 Posted at 12.22 AM ⇒ No Comments ( site | us ) Thursday, December 29, 2005
With the end of the year upon us, I thought it might be worth looking back on the important events and milestones in my life that happened in 2005: Well, that wraps up the round-up for 2005. Join me again next year when we recap 2006.
¶ 1196 Posted at 02.38 PM ⇒ No Comments ( site | us ) Thursday, May 11, 2006
Then moving this site from ye olde server kollektive to Dreamhost succeeded. Let's hope I don't need to use that 97-day money back guarantee, because I have a metric assload of things I keep on these servers.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Supposedly, my domain is worth $31,538. I am skeptical. After all, asdfkaslhiuahsdf.biz is worth $6338.
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
This site should look exactly the same as it used to. But... I've rewritten my crappy site software in Python. It's still kind of crappy, but it's a much smaller and more deal-withable crappy than before. Dreamhost didn't like the piggishness of Java, so it would often kill my publisher process. Using Java also made it a pain to update the software (meaning I didn't do it). Python is a lot friendlier, both to Dreamhost and to me. Please let me know if you see anything broken.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
I am trying out Disqus for comments. Anyone have any, um, comments (besides that it screws up the layout)? I'm curious how it looks in feed readers; for various (not necessarily good) reasons I don't have a separate post template for RSS.
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