A Sincere and Honest Thank You to Simon from Incutio

Man I have to hand it to Simon.  I don't think there's a time I don't stop by his blog and learn something.  Often several somethings.  He's starting a new series of blog articles on CSS and here's an excerpt:

One of the aims of this course is to show how relatively simple CSS can be used to make dramatic improvements to existing sites. Today, I'll show how CSS can be used to reduce the amount of code needed for a small part of the design of Scripting.com.

Scripting.com presents the main blog entries as a series of paragraphs under a single header for each day. Here is a screenshot from today's edition of the site: 

More...

Now that's both a ballsy approach and a damn good one -- its something that we can all relate to and it spikes an anti-css advocate where he lives (like I should talk given some of my recent postings although I do have a "why css is hard" analogy soon to come).

Now if I was an editor at a book publishing company, I'd strongly look towards signing Simon up.  Damn but he's good.  Thanks once again Simon, you done good.  Very good.

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Sh... Don't Tell Anyone

Note: I'm not sure if anyone else has made these observations or not.  If its blindingly obvious to everyone then I'm clearly just a little slow today.

-- Scott

I am what would generally be considered a "Tech Blogger".  I mean look at the bulk of my posts which talk about things like:

• How windows crashes
• Web development
• PHP
• Linux

Sure I'll tackle other topics from time to time ranging from Politics to Martha Stewart's clear stock fraud to even "The Men's Dresser".  But overall I don't think there would be too much dissent that I'm a tech blogger.  And I'll let you in on a little secret:

I'm soon to be irrelevant.

That's right.  And you know what?  That's actually fantastic.  Here's what I'm seeing:

1. Blogging is fundamentally important. 
   
2. Blogging, despite the naysayers and detractors, will continue to grow.  It will have ups and downs but next year there will be more bloggers than this year.  Just as each year there are more users of email and IM.
   
3. For blogging to continue, there needs to be more diversity of content -- and that content isn't going to be from Tech Bloggers.  We're just not that interesting to the bulk of the new folks who are coming into blogging.

So that's how I see it -- I and other tech bloggers will be come largely irrelevant.  Sure we'll still be read but by the same people who read us today.  The vast bulk of new blog readers will flow to other, less geeky blogs. 

Show What's a Tech Blogger to Do ?

Now how does a tech blogger stay relevant?  Well by introducing more non-tech topics.  Just as we've seen coverage of politics and media by more than one tech blogger, this will continue to grow.  It'll be interesting to see if tech bloggers will fork their blogs into "geeky" (tech) and "less geeky" (real world).  I actually did this six or seven months ago with "Less Geeky Scott" so that people like my family* have something to look at from time to time.  And I'm seeing others do this as well.  Look at Tim Bishop's SarsWatch which is brilliant and non-geeky but comes from someone I'd expect to be a Tech Blogger.  So just get ready for:

The Coming Irrelevance of Tech Bloggers

*I come from a profoundly non-digital family.  Yes I was the one who programmed the VCR growing up and still perform that service from time to time.

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And the "Helpful Guru of the Day" Award goes to ...

Mr. Kalsey of the Kalsey Group.  He's done a most excellent job of smacking my CVS related issues right in the head and helping out.  Much appreciated.  Thanks man.

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Congrats to Luke & Laura !

Luke & Laura who wrote the very, very wonderful PHP & MySQL Web Development now have a sequel out.  Here's the Slashdot review:

The new edition has been updated extensively. All scripts work now perfectly in PHP 4.3

I like this book a great deal. Even after a fair amount of time with the previous edition I still find it useful. It is well structured for finding what you need, well written, and has few typos.   More...

I read through it at PHPCON and I think they did a great job on the update.  Highly recommended.

Note: I've met both Luke & Laura and spent quite a night at PHP-CON 2003 late into the night with them in a New York bar.  And you really get to respect an author when you watch their imbibing practices.  Needless to say they kept the honor of Australians everywhere (they're Australian).  So I am so hugely biased towards this book it isn't funny.  I read the first edition and used it extensively.  I also am a Technical Editor for Sams who is the publisher of this book (but that doesn't affect it at all).

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Rage

Someone emailed this to me with the subject "That's why they call it windows".  Thanks to Guy K. Haas.  No idea where this came from originally.

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RSS Bandwidth Usage

We're all starting to see the inevitable issues with RSS bandwidth usage.  Something that occurred to me in the shower that I haven't heard anyone talk about (although I am a veritable newbie compared to people like Dave Winer, Ben Hammersley, Bill Kearney and others) was can the feed itself specify the allowed polling interval ?  I.e. if you're me and you update your blog constantly then I'd want to allow a fast polling interval but a lot of us don't update as frequently and they could set a daily interval.

Or has this been hashed out, discussed and I'm just clue free ?

And yeah I know that some aggregators would ignore it but it could be implemented as a default setting that the user manually forced if they needed to.  The same way you can force a browser to refresh.

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CVS Help Requested

As part of my ongoing "make the Feedster directory structures less like a man's dresser", I need to redo how I'm doing CVS and here's the question

Is there an easy way with the initial CVS import to completely ignore whole directories ?

I saw the wildcard ignore stuff but that didn't feel right on quick read and trips to the Ceder* and FAQ have left me wondering.  It seems so damn logical but I just can't figure it out.  The reason is, of course, cached binaries that don't need to be part of the version control but for a whole bunch of permission issues I don't want to move elsewhere (since some of the binaries will end up being cached at a future point).

Help !

Oh and just a comment about the Feedster code base -- I've made it sound like its much worse than it is.  It really isn't that bad but the analogy is apt and I've done an awful lot of things right if I do say so myself.  I always believe that a true test of any software system is its ability to adapt to:

"arbitrary user input in a quick and timely fashion; bonus points are awarded to being able to update the system with new features when the requesting user is still online via the same IM session in which they asked for the feature". 

Now there are all kinds of issues with this as well but still ...

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Go Apple!

Found via Feedster Images.  Nice job Chris!

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Where to Download Firebird

Since I forgot to link to it in the last past, here you go.

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Linx Means Never Having to Stop Working

Yup.  The absolute joy of an evironment where things don't crash often and those that do are recoverable from.

Note: If you run GAIM on Redhat 9, I'd love to know if the new Mozilla Firebird 0.6 crashes Gaim for you as well.  Given how much I rely on IM for, well, everything, this puts me out of the Firebird loop.  Too bad since it is pretty darn awesome.

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