Offmessage

Rather liking the new LinkedIn company profiles (like Isotoma’s).  Useful quick snapshot of a company (and nice URLs by default, too).

There is a saying that if you decide to solve a problem with regular expressions what you end up with is two problems. To find, then, that Django’s URL dispatch is based entirely on those self same regexes leaves me a little grumpy; they are a right bugger to write and debug, and trying to do anything fancy with them is always a real pain.

And despite how simple I thought my first Django app was, it took me exactly 2 days to find that I was bogged down in regular expressions rather than building features.  Gah.

The news is coming out about a tie up between Getty and Flickr.  Three and a half years ago Monoman suggested this might happen.  What took ‘em so long?

This thread over at AskMeFi (Plone vs. Drupal) is surprising in its vociferous hatred of Plone.  Part of me really wants to get involved; wade in on behalf of Plone and explain exactly why Drupal is a labyrinthine mess…  But…  I can’t.  The last week I’ve been struggling to get to grips with Plone 3.x.  It’s been really tough.  Today is not the day to defend something that’s been pissing me off constantly for the last week.

Right now I’d be happy for any alternative on the Python CMS front (Exotypes, anyone?).  If this is the way Plone is going I’m not sure I want to follow any more.

They are indeed. My beta invite to Lovely Charts turned up today, and I have to say it’s about as awesome as I had hoped. Proper Visio-esque drag-and-drop chart, wireframe, and network diagram generation all within the browser. Yes it’s still beta (there’s no print, for example) but it’s really rather fine.

As a comparison to my NetVibes experience I’ve just had the loveliest thing happen with last.fm…  I finally got round to adding pyscrobbler to the list over at build.last.fm, and have just received an email a) thanking me and b) giving me a free subscription.  What lovely people.  And it turns out that I should have been a subscriber anyway – I’m currently on holiday, miles away from my stereo and my recommendations radio is proving a real god send.

There’s a lesson in this somewhere.  I’ve been a heavy NetVibes user for a long time now.  It came on the scene at just about the time that I started to rediscover the joys of RSS and so for me I’ve never really known another online RSS reader.  I’ve invested a lot in the application, not only in adding and organising feeds but also in learning to accept its shortcomings.  It was never perfect, but I’d come to love it anyway.

As you can imagine I was pretty excited to get the new version (ginger).  Finally, I thought, they will have addressed all the little niggles and all those smart alecs who use google reader will be silenced.  That’s what I thought.

Sadly what I’ve been given is a service that:

• Adds even more unused/unusable space to the screen (try using it on an eee now; it was already shocking)
• Has nasty CSS bugs
• No longer actually keeps tracks of what I’ve read
• Randomly forgets to update some feeds for days at a time
• Keeps chucking errors
• Has been offline 4 or 5 times in the week or so since I’ve been upgraded
• Breaks Coriander based bespoke Universes (that sentence may make no sense – if you are a ginger user make sure you are logged in and then visit a site like www.captaintheband.com to see what I mean)

But at least I’ve got yet another public persona to maintain. Now is the time to try Google Reader one more time, methinks.

And the morals of this story?  Stick to what you’re good at.  Listen to what your users really want. “Me too” is not a strategic decision.

I am an Internet veteran. That is all.

One of my subversion repositories broke.  Nastily.  I thought that I was going to have to rebuild it and lose the changes that came after the corrupt revision.  I googled for help, and found someone who had written a script to fix my very problem.  I ran it, it worked, I was very grateful.  I blogged about it on the Isotoma blog.

4 hours later the author of the script commented on my blog post. How awesome is that?

Well then.  We’re there.  After months and months of development Forkd is opening up to public registrations.  Feta mark 4 is released today with yet more snazzy new features, including a really rather awesome activity stream, Wordpress integration, RSS feeds, commit messages and much more.  We’ve even managed, amazingly, to bring something new to the game of tagging with the ‘tag brush’ feature.

We’re stopping development for a bit to focus on growing our user and recipe base, but the plan is to start on the next release (Gammon?) in about a month.  If you’ve not signed up, please do.  And please try out some of the tasty tasty food.