I’ve become addicted to NetNewsWire. The first step is admitting it’s a problem. I only realized that it had become an addiction, when I hit command+L in Safari to start going to a site, when it hit me.

I have already seen all of the updates on every single website that I care about. In NetNewsWire. In a couple of minutes.

There is no reason to surf aimlessly through the several dozen of websites that I used to view daily (or at least weekly). I have 81 RSS feeds in NetNewsWire, and they cover the entire range of sites that I regularly check.

I don’t have any reason to surf any more. I should be happy for that, but for some unexplained reason, it feels kind of sad – like there’s a hole left behind, where there used to be surfing the web. Weird.

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My home Mac is an old, creaky 8600/300. It was one of the fastest machines around when it was new, but it’s too antique to properly run MacOSX. I’d actually relegated the machine to being a “media hub” a few years ago – it was acting as our basement TV through the ATI Rage Pro card with cable tuner. Worked great as that, and I have my TiBook from work for any real work at home, so it’s not a big deal.

However, Janice is getting interested in getting online, so I’ve set up Old Betsy in my home office so she can surf from home when the TiBook isn’t there. It’s been a real eye-opener for me, since I’ve been taking the software I use every day on MacOSX for granted.

Browsers on MacOS9 basically suck, mostly because there’s no real multitasking – one page loading will essentially lock up the system until it’s done. That wasn’t a big deal, until I’d tasted the fluid action of MacOSX. Regardless, IE on MacOS9 is adequate, but there’s no decent news aggregator!

I’ve resorted to installing Amphetadesk, and it’s just plain clunky compared to NetNewsWire on MacOSX. Oh, well…

Maybe this is the kick in the butt I need to pick up a MacOSX-capable machine for home… Nah, probly not. I’m too cheap.

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I just read the article on The Register about the defacing of Kevin Mitnick’s company website. I figured it must be some obscure Linux hole that was found by a hacker, but according to their own server, they run Microsoft IIS! They were hacked by a 733T script kiddie! Oh, my…

From www.defensivethinking.com :

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The Onion, that last great bastion of true reporting power left in North America, has identified a potential rogue nation which may require UN and/or Shrub action… North Dakota!

Perhaps that Canadian MP who was suggesting that the UN should send weapons inspectors into the USA may have been onto something…

Full article here.

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Wow. That was easy. (of course). Not having a digital video cam, I brought in a bunch of photos from iPhoto, and a track from iMovie, and used the famous Ken Burns Effect to make a slide show.

Went pretty easily. MUCH faster than the old way I used to do this. Several years ago I had to do a couple of slide shows, and used Director and Premier. The result was effective, but consumed about 2 weeks of my spare time. That sucked.

With iMovie, I did the same thing in about half an hour. Including the time it took to export a quicktime for use on my .mac homepage…

I didn’t take the time to fiddle with the KBE, so it’s the stock generic zoom-into-the-middle-of-the-image pan, which isn’t ideal for some of these images…

Anyway, check it out here.

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I know this is on the Blapp homepage – there’s even a screenshot of it working – but I never tried it out until now.

Dang, that Links window is cool! It scans all blog entries for hrefs, then presents a simple interface to list and search them, so you can reuse previous links. Well done. Dragging an item from the Links window into a new blog entry even generates the appropriate HTML element. Slick.

Now, wouldn’t that searchability be a nice addition to the Safari Bookmark Manager?

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I’ve been using Blapp for a while now to manage the entries for this blog. It’s pretty cool, and I just saw that Michael McCracken now has a badge for his cool software.

Anyhoo, here’s credit where it’s due:

It’s good to see that Michael plans on continuing development of Blapp, even though NetNewsWire Pro will have integrated blog edting. I like Blapp, it’s a neat little program. Could use some tweaks, but it’s not bad at all. Oh, and it’s free, which is a Good Thing.

Here’s a couple things that would be nice if added to Blapp:

• Auto-entry-filenames. NNWP has this, and it’s quite useful for when you can’t immediately think of a unique filename (what else is in the directory? Have I used this name before? …)
• Some form of WYSIWYG editing. Sure, it’s fun (fun?) to edit raw HTML, just like our grandparents did, but sometimes it’s just plain annoying. update: must be getting rusty – I had to re-edit this entry 3 times to get the HTML right. Doh.
• Option to re-wire the function of “Publish”. I have the dynamic blosxom blog script on my TiBook, and a static rendering on my .Mac account. Publishing, in my case, means calling a perl script with a couple of parameters to update the static blog rendering, rather than just copying new entry .txt files to another directory.
• Better HTML preview. I know this would be best done using the Safari SDK when available. Worth waiting for. It’s irritating seeing images go from thumbnail to image display and back again with each keystroke while editing an entry (like the Blapp badge is doing right now. stop it. no, really. stop it. grrr…) I’d even settle for a static preview that I have to manually update (like Dreamweaver has) – that would hopefully prevent the attempted rendering of incomplete HTML elements.

Anyway, Blapp is just plain good software. Thanks, Michael, and keep up the great work!

update: added the http:// prefix to the blapp href.

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I’ve just “upgraded” to Blosxom 1.0, and it was (of course) a smooth process.

Congrats, Rael, on hitting the mythical 1.0!

I finally figured out where to modify blosxom.cgi so that it doesn’t render the entire freaking blog with each static rendering of the site… Easy change in line 167, to remove the first condition (if dynamic, pay attention to the entry count limit) – after removing that condition, all pages will obey the entry count limit.

Update: Well, that didn’t work so well… Fixed the post-every-entry-to-the-.html-flavour problem, but munged the xml feed. Doh.

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Looks like it’s working properly now. Not sure why it was acting up before, but it looks like Operator Error (code ID 10 T, most likely).

Thanks to Rael for double-checking my copy of the blosxom.cgi file, to rule out any kind of serious problem.

I’ve now limited the number of entries on each page to 15, so it’s not a 50K hit each time. There’s also a category index on the left side now, as well as indices for each category (just change the index.html URL to index.index, and you’ll get a list of entries).

I also modified my xml feed to wrap the entry text in CDATA, so it parses and validates properly for entries that have HTML in them.

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