Category: On the Web

Losing my edge?

So I haven’t really been actively involved in the Microsoft/Windows development crowd in years (ever?). I have gone spelunking through the KB and the MSDN site on occasion and come back scarred and generally unhelped. It’s kind of a running gag with some folks in my circle that the difference between Linux and Microsoft forums is that one is a MMORPG with lots of flaming and camping and the other is more of a FPS set in a post-apocalyptic world with you as the sole living survivor.

But because I’m actually interested in using the Microsoft Edge browser and because I am becoming quite attached to my Surface 3, I’ve joined up with the Windows Insider program. I trade my skills as a beta tester and bug writer for early access to Windows 10 and related ecosystem updates. Maybe because Microsoft is actually engaging in proselytizing instead of assimilation or maybe because it’s comprised mostly of devs feeling out the work of other devs, the community forum is a rather enjoyable place to be.

Witness threads like this one. In a Linux distro forum reading a thread that started off with a generic out-loud bellyaching would require flame retardant long johns. But in the Insider community we see a well-positioned Insider (read: guessing a Microsoft employee or contractor) walk someone off a ledge and then engage in a fruitful dialog resulting in a serviceable solution for the OP.

I don’t know that this sort of bonhomie survives the masses–if it ever gets opened to them–but for the time being this is a help forum that is actually quite helpful. I’m also jonesing for updates because they’re near to having the browser plugin framework together…and the WWW without ad blocking is seriously painful.

The perfect golf club name

The “Some rich asshole” to “Some rich asshole” browser plugin makes this caption funnier than it should be:

Some rich asshole speaks about the results of the Michigan, Mississippi, and other GOP primaries at his rich asshole National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida, March 8, 2016.

Heh. …his rich asshole National Golf Club…

Shortie Digits

My contribution to the continuing decline of political discourse in this country: Short Fingers. A Tumblr featuring manipulated[?] images of Donald Trump’s tiny hands.

It’s small. It’s petty. It’s a thing that has gotten under Trump’s skin since the heyday of Spy magazine. And, damn, if it isn’t funny.

Permanence

An interesting discussion on making the Web [more] permanent. Digital-to-physical publishing.

Ever since my work with EVIA Digital Archive I’ve been a fan of these sorts of concerns. So much so, I’ve been toying with ideas for making this blog have some degree of resiliency. It has existed in four and a half basic forms over the last fifteen (?!!!?!) years.

First it was a collection of static pages that I spent hours mucking with to set up archives and inter-page linking and “dynamic” site navigation. After tiring of that, and also learning of Blogger, I moved onto that platform. In the midst of grad school I began toying with ideas of permanence and syndication. Ultimately I developed a platform that used static files marked up in XML/RSS with a little Python to glue together the presentation. It was totes file-system intensive but maybe my most favorite implementation.

At the end of that process I decided to re-implement that platform into something more performant and also wrap the administration with a GUI. To make this happen I developed a rudimentary Python web framework for RESTful services. I made it most of the way there but got distracted by life for a few years. The blog was dormant during that time so I’m counting it as ‘a half’.

Finally the desire to publish online outweighed the desire to use a self-rolled CMS and I ported everything over to WordPress. While living in the WordPress framework is comfortable, easy even, it isn’t a close to the metal as I like to be. It’s also PHP, which I have little time for. Sure, it’s fine and in widespread use, but it is so far removed from the sorts of languages I employ on a day-to-day basis that it may as well be written in OOK.

So I’ve begun developing again. I think the advent of widespread browser support for XSL and CSS make this an incredible opportunity to create a web presence that consists of static artifacts tied together with just a modicum of dynamic glue. Artifacts will have URIs that point to “physical” instead of encoding a recipe for a page generator. The artifacts will be stand-alone objects. They will be tied together, however, with a thin veneer of dynamic navigation.

I’d love to return to RSS as the base markup language. That will be augmented with RDF/OWL markup for metadata. The metadata will either have sensible defaults or be primarily generated so as to minimize the busywork around publishing. Because that’s been the unbeatable opponent to maintaining this blog consistently. It’s easier to send crap out to Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or what-have-you. But then there is no control and no permanence. So push-button publishing is a must.

At any rate, that’s kind of what I’ve been working on as a project that feeds my other project of creating a full-on ESM / SDLC environment at home. Killing my Facebook profile has been a further motivator to work on this.