Gin and Milk

This Way: Off the Deep End —>

You can find stuff like this if you google for “robots for christ.”

Why would you google for such a thing?

Let me answer that with another question:

Do you know Dave?

…are not happening anytime soon

Yes, fan(s) of Gin and Milk, I have made a discovery. That discovery is that there is a balance to be struck between making changes to the blog’s design, and posts being made into the blog. I am not making this statement as a condemnation or a generalization. It is just true that, for the case of this blog, I must decide on the priorities of:

• Writing a cleaner base engine
• Writing the back-end header rendering system
• Writing the auto-linkers
• Writing the post-entry system
• Writing the comment/trackback system
• Writing the antispam system
• Writing the comment censor system [1]
• Writing posts [2]

This leads to another discovery: I don’t like to write posts while I’m working on infrastructure, or even thinking about infrastructure. Right now, you’re being served hundreds of files’ worth of tiny HTML and text snippets, cobbled together into a cohesive [5] webpage by a number of Perl scripts dancing in a sort of weird folk ritual. When I post, I do it with emacs or jed in a Cygwin uxterm or Gnome Terminal, and I have to write in the tags. The timestamp for each post is the last-modified stamp on the file it comprises. Post updates are files named a certain way to become associated with the main post. I’m pretty sure that most of the HTML that forms the “style” of this page is still in string constants in the main engine script.

What I’m trying to say is that this is a kluge. It’s functional, but it’s anything but clean.

Now, I’m more of a purist than this, deep inside. That it’s a kluge hurts me, especially when I’m trying to expand functionality, and my Software Engineer Lizard Brain Reflex broadcasts, “REWRITE! DO IT YOURSELF AND DON’T USE THIS HACKY CODEBASE!” And so I say to myself, “What if my new version does things THIS way or THAT way… well then, I will have to convert my database of posts! It will have to stop being zillions of tiny text files, and be something reasonable for pity’s sake! I should WRITE NO MORE POSTS UNTIL I KNOW HOW THEY MUST BE WRITTEN. The format must be primal! Design is law!”

But I have a job that already means a lot of hacking at computers, and when I get home, there are wars to fight and movies to make, and that’s just more fun. Or at least more variety when I’ve been in Tech Challenge Mode all day already. So the blog languishes.

And then, I have the realization that brings me full-circle. I started using this kluge of a blog system because I wanted to write blog posts [8], not wait until I had written an entire blogging system. So this site will not get a facelift, nor an infrastructure rewrite [10]. Probably, nobody cares much, as long as the RSS feed still works. There will be no comments for now [9]. I will not add in dynamic image generation code, nor will I even censor the blog automatically. (I can censor myself well enough, and with no comments, I won’t have to take the bad words out of them. If I decide I really have to say “s*******”, I should just say it. [11])

And hey, I’ll use the energy to post instead.

[1] It’s true that Blosxom modules do exist for most of these tasks, and I’m still close enough to the original code to take advantage of some of that, but let’s be serious. Even if I download some dude’s code, I’m going to have to at least review the code (since the system this blog is based on is full of modules with lots of side effects), and probably do significant modification to get it working just how I like it. And in the case of the antispam system, I have to be prepared to continually improve it as the spammers improve their execrable craft.[3]
[2] If you are not a total nerd, you are thinking, “Is there really a chance that someone would choose to just work on the infrastructure of his website when the site exists for the sake of its content? Could a man be happy in making that choice?” If you are a nerd in some significant capacity, as most of you reading this are likely to be, you probably think these are silly questions.
[3] Man. I know I get asked this all the time (as an I.T. Manager and general Tech Sherpa), but sometimes even I wonder WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? SOMEBODY is writing this crap. And they’re not (all) stupid. Is there some evil-universe Pika (who, I suppose, would be sans goatee), equal in ambition in intellect, but sinister[4], coming up with all-new ways to circumvent my antispam procedures and products? Ask me sometime, and I’ll tell you what these guys are doing to corporate networks’ Bayesian spam filtration systems, and how at least I am thinking to switch to something more annoying to end-users, because my Turing tests for spam are losing their potency.
[4] Instead of dexter? Heraldry has ruined me. [6]
[5] Ha!
[6] Google for “sinister heraldry” [7] if you must. Not only will you be reminded of the meanings of dexter and sinister, you will have made the coolest-sounding Google search of anyone you know, probably for the space of at least a week. “Oh, you were looking up ‘Chinese nutrcacker parodies’? I looked up… ‘SINISTER HERALDRY’.” I’m not even going to link it, because there’s something primally satisfying about typing “sinister heraldry” into the Google search field. Heck, you might even be Feeling Lucky by the time you finish.
[7] I’m not Dave Barry, so I’ll just leave it as an excercise to the reader to declare that “Sinister Heraldry” would be an excellent name for a Rock Band.
[8] Shocka! Look for details in tomorrow’s morning paper! Or not!
[9] Comment revelation: I don’t need them. Most of the people I would care to hear online commentary from either have their own blogs that I read in my aggregator’s RSS feed, or know how to contact me. If they want to get in a word, I’ll put in an update myself for them. Special bonus: With no comment system, I don’t have to check my site obsessively to stay in the conversation.
[10] Until my lifestyle makes it more viable, at least. It may be that I spend this fall on the couch with my wife, watching movies, and I decide to code on a laptop while doing so. Who knows? I wouldn’t count on it, though. The Movies and Sim City 4 both run just fine on this laptop.
[11] Do you know enough Flying Circus to know what I’m even censoring out up there?