Why Habari Uses HTML
Dan, talk about walking into a minefield. I will try to distill more than a hundred messages used to come to a decision on this topic into a concise reply to your query.
Asymptomatic
There must be intelligent life down here
Narutard
Somehow I’ve become addicted to Naruto, and I can’t stop watching it. I think the only way I’m going to stop is if I run out of episodes.
Naruto is kinda of anime based on manga – It’s a cartoon. The comic books (manga) come out every so often, telling the story of Naruto Uzumaki, a ninja from the hidden leaf village, also known as Konoha. Ninjas in this story are usually helpful people, unless they are specifically evil, and Naruto is in training to become the Hokage - the leader of the village. Although he’s such an idiot sometimes, his chances at Hokage are pretty slim.
Taking the Driver's Test
I had the opportunity to visit the DMV this week to take my motorcycle driver’s test and obtain my permit. What an altogether interesting experience.
I originally had gone to the DMV License Center to take the test last Thursday when they had extended hours. I wasn’t trying to make use of the extended hours, I just got there late. Nonetheless, they stop administering tests at 4pm, which they didn’t mention on their web site anywhere. What a waste of a drive.
Another Dull Update You Won't Read
I feel sickness coming on. Thank goodness it’s now and not at the end of the month when I’ll be heading to LinuxFest. I think Riley brought home a bug from preschool, and now I’ve got that post-nasal sore throat thing going on, and am achy, and should probably be going to bed now instead of writing this.
Development on Habari continues. There’s been a ruckus in the development lists lately about the look of the admin pages and the libraries used to develop them. Thankfully, we were able to get together “in person” in IRC and hash out some of those issues. IRC isn’t great for permanency, but it sure makes the exchange faster. I think you lose something in email as you start to roll through paragraphs on your own line of thought, and others read different things into what you’re saying when they don’t get a chance to interject and clarify. So IRC has proved useful beyond a tool for hanging out and idle chatting.
Abby’s first week of first grade went well. She’s already making good impressions on the teachers, and I expect she’s going to be one of those kids that the parents are really proud of, but the other kids scoff for throwing off the curve. Soon she’ll be able to post to her own blog. That’ll be neat.
The holiday weekend was really lazy. We didn’t do anything. Actually, on Friday, we had the new carpet installed. We replaced the carpet in the living room, dining room, up the stairs, in the hall, and in three bedrooms, excluding ours. Big project. We had to move all of the furniture around. I don’t know how Berta moved some of that stuff by herself, but she did.
I was thinking to do some coding, but I didn’t. There were a few things I wanted to try, but just couldn’t be near the computer. This week is going to be interesting, since I have a lot of things to do for work in a very short amount of time. Hopefully, the new guy can help me get this done by the deadline.
Finally, I wrote this post in ScribeFire, which I don’t like because it’s one of the ugliest add-ons for Firefox that I’ve ever encountered, but it does do XMLRPC posting. This is of interest because up until a few minutes ago, Habari could only post via APP. This means that I’ll probably be able to post from Viddler, since their APP support doesn’t seem to meet our APP specs (based on rev17, which looks to be the final version).
WordPress, Commercialism, and You
There has been a good deal of tumult over a recent TechCrunch post that Mullenweg characterizes as a “hatchet job”. There are some crazy folks trolling the comments over there, and although there are many points there I find on either side of the validity line both in the comments and the post itself, I do have my own perspective.
Changing Way brings up an interesting point about anyone being able to improve WordPress’ spam prevention. After all, WordPress is GPL-licensed, and so anyone can take the source and improve it and re-release it. Skippy has offered a good argument for why a fork of WordPress would have difficulty materializing. But people seem convinced that anyone can submit code changes to the core software to have them included. While this may be generally possible, I think it’s more difficult for the common person than you would imagine, and I think it is an unrealistic belief for this specific feature.
Consider that Automattic runs Akismet, a hosted spam prevention service. Packaged with WordPress is a plugin that uses Akismet, which also requires a WordPress.com API key. If you are a pro blogger (which is one reason why most people don’t lend some credence to this) then the service that prevents spam is a commercial service, from which Automattic profits. You can also choose not to use the plugin if you aren’t worried about spam or have chosen some other route or protection. Where’s the bad here?