Web
I use Drupal to run this site. While Drupal looks like a bit of an overkill for running just a personal blog, I don't want to switch to any other blogging engine now (No, not even to trendy WordPress, thank you).
And of course Drupal has its long-standing annoying quirks. One of them is a deletion of a comment spam - you have to hit a delete button for each comment individually - which results in a horrible user experience when you have Web-based interface. Fortunately there is a workaround.
One piece of advice though - change URL from the article to something which cannot be guessed or, better yet, add authentication. I hope Drupal maintainers will get the message and turn this workaround into feature.
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Submitted by frolov on Sat, 2006-02-11 22:01.
Probably the most interesting part of web log statistics for my site is a page with keywords that people use in search engines to come to my pages. The most popular search is for information about C++ string streams. Ironically, this blog does not provide much help here, though I put some useful links on my front page.
Over the course of my career I bumped into many different technical problems. Often these problems required a lot of time or mental effort to investigate. Needless to say, web search engine made that task way easier, but sill there were problems I had to spend considerable time on. Once I had this blog I have started to put some results of my troubleshooting sessions, primarily as a sign of gratitude to all the people who do the same.
So, when I look at search term statistics, I am always glad to find that people came to the solution at my site, using search keywords describing their problems, like the problem of putting spaces to LD_PRELOAD environment variable or Coloured bash prompt screwing multiline input in a terminal.
Maybe separate articles or pages instead of blog entries is more appropriate for that kind of texts, but I am pretty happy with the present format now.
In near future I am going to post a couple of entries explaining problems related to GNU C library application binary interface (ABI) revisions and incompatibilities and problems with C++ language ABI.
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Submitted by frolov on Wed, 2006-02-08 23:30.
Having used a lot of different software tools for a long time, I know how important data exchange is. As Wikis become increasingly important collaboration and knowledge management tools, the need of having standard wiki syntax and interchange format will be more and more acute.
The problem is that different wikis cannot agree neither on wiki markup language, nor on common storage format. Some people believe that there should be no standard Wiki syntax at all
There is little consistency across WikiEngines for a variety of reasons. One, there should be no standard syntax. The WikiSyntax is the UserInterface, it is not the data encoding. This point gets lost on many people (e.g. the TikiWiki RFC for standard syntax), but wikis aren't really a medium unto themselves. They are more like pure expressions of CyberText. To get away from philosophy, many wikis have to change their local syntax to fit their local users' needs, such as adding LatexInWiki or conforming to pre-existing documentation markup or pre-existing text formatting conventions in that community. This is as it should be. By now, given the proliferation of syntaxes, it should be clear that it is not reasonable to standardize the syntax.
I agree that decoupling of wiki syntax from interchange format is extremely important. However I do not agree that syntax should not be standard. Granted, some specific Wiki uses may require special syntactic extensions, but syntax base must be the same for all Wikis. I use three or four different wiki engines on a daily basis and every now and then I find myself typing "!!" instead of "==" for headers, or word between quotes when I should really put it between asterisks. This is irritating to say the least. Besides, user interface standartization is even more important than standard things behind the scenes. While we can perform a lot of different transformations on user-invisible parts, we cannot do the same for UI. The truth is, users hate even slightest difference in the interface, that drives them mad. Every good programmer should think about users first and only after that about his or her own convenience. Just put Windows-only user before the Linux desktop and watch...
While common wiki syntax is really really nice to have, common interchange format is an absolute "must have". Open wiki interchange standard will help to avoid vendor lock-in and simplify data retention One would easily transfer wiki data from one application to another, just because new wiki engine has more features or old one is not supported anymore.
Many people recognize the importance of standard wiki syntax and standard wiki interchange format. Take, for example, TikiWiki standartization effort or wiki markup standard and wiki interchange formatpages at Meatball wiki.
I favour the idea of microformats. Microformat is a lightweight format based on XHTML. Folks behind microformats discuss non-XHTML wiki format, but in fact they are talking about standard wiki syntax, not wiki interchange format. In my opinion XHTML would be very good choice of interchange format - at the end of the day all wiki texts are translated into HTML or XHTML.
And I would really like to see standard interchange format developed for blogs too. That would simplify transition to other blogging systems, even to newer versions of the same blogging system.
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Submitted by frolov on Fri, 2005-08-12 19:28.
Today I moved this site from my previous provider - Rusonyx to my new provider - WestHost. Actually, Rusonyx is a very good hosting provider, and I would readily recommend it to anyone in Russia. The only problem is that time lag is too big for me, so I moved to US hosting. Now site feels much more snappy.
At the same time I upgraded Drupal (CMS used for this site) to version 4.6.2.
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Submitted by frolov on Thu, 2005-08-11 22:28.
Hans van Deum writes on his blog about my comparison of online bookmark managers:
I found this blog which has an interesting comparison between different bookmarking services. This guy is obviously sold on furl. Perhaps I should check it out.
The problem with these sites is that they are only useful for market research when they are the de facto standard, because e-businesses will never pay each site separately to do the same research.
If Hans wants to do market research he is probably better with del.icio.us. It seems to be trendier and user base appears to be bigger. I use Furl, because I need a place to store my bookmarks and easily find them afterwards. It has features that I need, and del.ici.ous does not have them. It is that simple.
Spurl.net has pretty much the same functionality as Furl (at least with regard to functionality I am interested in). If I knew about Spurl before, I would probably have chosen it. So far, I have not seen a "killer feature" that will make me switch.
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Submitted by frolov on Tue, 2005-06-07 21:44.
Recently, Google introduced introduced its new product: Webaccelerator. Webaccelerator is a local web proxy that fetches web pages from Google cache instead of website itself, it also does prefetching (i.e. tries to preventively download pages that you are likely to jump to).
That made me think: why G00gle would release yet another "Web accelerator" while there are literally hords of free and commercial products that do more or less the same, but in a different way? I guess the reason behind this may be a little bit scary for web site owners.
read more
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Submitted by frolov on Wed, 2005-05-04 17:49.
Lenn Pryor, former Director of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft, is leaving his current job to move on to Skype (I found that via Mini-Microsoft).
Well, I knew there is something wrong, long before.
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Submitted by frolov on Thu, 2005-04-21 09:24.
Thanks to Jeremy Wright I got an invite to much-buzzed Yahoo! 360 service beta. Frankly, I was not impressed. Right now there are just three applications: blog, photo sharing, and social networking platform. None of these is of interest for me. I host my own blog (that one you are reading). I also have my own photo site on my home computer which gives me unlimited storage space, unrestricted image sizes, lightspeed uploads.
And I have never been a big fan of social networking. These friends-of-friends and accessible-via-chain-of-four things sound too complicated. It's not that I am stupid, just do not want to dive into that. For now, my social networking is my address book and list of IM contacts. Not too far from good old Rolodex.
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Submitted by frolov on Sun, 2005-04-03 18:30.
Scoble's boss, Lenn Pryor, Microsoft Employee, has a title "Director, Platform Evangelism". Funny though, he has a homepage at mac.com. That implies he is an owner of a Mac with OS X, I guess. Now that's interesting.
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Submitted by frolov on Sun, 2005-03-27 18:24.
I am a big fan of Wikimedia foundation and its wikis. I also always liked sites like Lonely planet. One day I thought: wiki for travellers by travellers would be a great thing!
Quick search revealed that a couple in Montreal started a Wikitravel project almost two years ago. You may also wnat to checkout another project of a smaller scale.
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Submitted by frolov on Fri, 2005-03-18 13:59.
