A carnival of technology

Huh. Blogs.

I think I’ll kick off this entry with a couple of format-change traditions that I just made up: link forward but never back, and turn the first entry into a tirade on the society of the World Wide Web.

I suppose that the world “blog” has been around since 1999 or so, around the time that blogger.com came to be. Wikipedia (caution, unauthoritative) lists a couple people as claiming to have coined the term, but I don’t really care what some bullshit web consultant or a Joyce fanatic have to say on the topic. The point is that someone made up the word around 1999, but no one cared until about 2001. 2001 saw the creation of Movable Type, making this new-fangled blog thing available to anyone able to install mysql. Not much has changed since then, except that every single person on the face of the planet keeps a blog now, and blogs have been hitched to the Web 2.0 wagon.

What is Web 2.0, you might ask? It’s nothing, is what it is. It’s a tool invented by the starry-eyed dreamers of the www-dawn, now jaded from losing all their money in 2000, as a vehicle to further their flimflammery. They’ve learned their lesson—this time the web won’t be about Razor scooters and Aeron chairs and fußball in the break room—no, this time around the web will be about conferences and design and a mountain of incoherent essays so deep that no one will ever figure that they’re continuing to deliver no product that enhances the value of the human experience. Paul Graham made an attempt to sum up the Web 2.0 experience [1], but even he was pulled in a little by the hype. His article could be summarized to say that Web 2.0 didn’t mean a damn thing at first, but now it means doing whatever Google’s doing.

Somethingawful, a site I respect for being able to convince a special sort of person that it’s worthwhile to pay for what everyone else on the web gets for free, had their own, more cynical take [2] on what Web 2.0 means. The most depressing aspect of that article for me was that it finally distilled into its most nonsensical base just what Tim O’Reilly wrote in that manifesto [3] that I was too impatient to read on my own. I’m not ashamed to admit that I own a few O’Reilly books ranging from the pretty alright (that XSLT book, the Perl book) to the nearly useless (Lex and Yacc), but I find it unnerving that the man who may be able to exert final editorial control over these volumes is able to utter a phrase like “Data is the next Intel Inside.”

That’s why I don’t like the idea of using a blog.

Concerning this blog, I’m using nanoblogger with nbcom shoehorned in. I think I was supposed to create another database user, so nbcom thought that everyone was an admin. Solution: remove the admin link. There also seems to be a bit of a disagreement among the nanoblogger files on whether “$permalink_file” should actually resolve to anything. Solution: use the entry ID to index comments and remove the now-broken link from the comments back to the entry. It’s a big pile of crap, but that’s how the web runs, and it’s probably good enough. In case I do become motivated to care more than I already have about this thing, here’s a TODO list that I’ll never get to:

1) Replace the local authentication with Typekey (I have some code to authenticate TypeKey logins, but I don’t feel like trying to get that into the nbcom code).

2) Replace mysql usage in nbcom with PEAR’s (mostly) generic db functions. Or at least postgres functions so I can remove mysql.

3) Figure out the nbcom plugin system so I can generate HTML from text files instead of having to write it on my own (this is probably the only one likely to get done)

4) Replace that favicon file.

5) Make nbcom PHP code suck less. (heh)

So there you have it: a blog. Comments might work. You can signup for an account or, I think, post anonymously. Have at it.

References:
[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html
[2] http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=3594
[3] http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/6228