njr 3.0

As you may have noticed, I’m moving from PyCS/PyDS to WordPress. While there’s a certain amount of cachet to a weblog engine which likely numbers its users in the double digits, PyDS development is essentially dead, even the PyDS author is using WordPress for one of his weblogs, and I’d appreciate not having to manually deal with comment spam (and trackback spam, which I haven’t even explored).

All the posts from my PyDS and Radio weblogs have been imported, and are now searchable. Many thanks to Georg Bauer for his friendly help and migration scripts. The import process didn’t interpret macros (quoted strings) in the Radio posts, and there’s various other things I’ll have to fix up going forward, but it’s great to have a solid, supported, widely-used foundation on which to build.

8:32 PM | Administrivia
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In honor of subscribing to my 250th RSS/Atom feed today, I sorted my feeds into groups in NetNewsWire. The flat scrolling list was breaking down pretty badly at this size.

Sorting the feeds was a lot more effort than I expected, so I just finished submitting a bunch of bugs and feature requests (1 2 3 4 5 6, and some for the bug tracker itself: 7 8). Phew. Certainly, I hope 2.1 (or 2.5, or 3.0…) improves the process, but thankfully I won’t be having to sort everything from scratch ever again.

Some interesting tradeoffs in grouping feeds, which I hadn’t thought about before:

Only unread posts are shown for grouped feeds. This is rather nice, because normally you don’t care about the read posts.

There are several feeds (Wired News, RSS Weather, the New York Times, and some Trac feeds of fast-changing apps like Adium) which I hardly ever read; I typically scan the article titles, click something if it looks good, and otherwise hit “k” to mark everything as read and continue on my merry way. I’ve kept the weather feed ungrouped for this reason. You can’t do this when you’re reading an entire group of feeds; “k” will mark the entire group worth of articles as read.

My group titles are shorter than typical feed titles, so I can narrow the subscriptions list, and finally have more room for multiple columns in the news items table (to, among other things, display the selected source). However, with the “+” and gear buttons at the bottom of the list, many of the status messages which live at the bottom right get cut off.

2:25 AM | PyCS
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It’s time for another of those “I’m not dead” weblog posts; I’ve just been really busy writing papers.

However, I should have some time starting next week to get back to my other job, finishing some long-overdue Web work for the College of Medicine. I’m anxiously awaiting the release of Django, without a doubt the most exciting software I’ve seen all year. Yes, it’s “just” a Web framework, but it is astonishing in its simplicity, power and elegance. I stumbled upon the site today and it appears they’re shooting for a release this week.

Update: there’s mostly a site there now, and you can check out the BSD-licensed code from a Subversion repository, or of course there’s a Trac site. The code for the website is there, including what looks like a fully functional weblog engine. Must… resist…

12:08 PM | PyCS
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