The Tao of Keith, a guide to success in life. Long, but worth the read.
Monthly Archives: June 2004
The Art of Questioning your Clients
How many hours?
About how many hours of productive work do you get done a day? Comment anonymously if you prefer.
WP-Amazon
Amazon WordPress plugin, looks handy.
More Friendster
I just logged into Friendster and it’s really fast. Like Orkut fast. Their markup looks good too. Russell Beattie continues the PHP discussion with Is PHP Really More Scalable Than JSP?
Calculate Pagerank
Calculate Pagerank with PHP, using some funky but cool code. Better than having to fire up IE just to use the toolbar.
Friendster goes PHP
Friendster addresses performance problems by switching from Java to PHP. Note in the comments how language zealots are flailing about pointing to benchmarks saying how much faster JSP is. The comments from the PHP guys are the only decent ones in the thread. I stand by the assertion that PHP is the top web language to use to get stuff done.
John Clinton Covey
Movable Type and WordPress Meet
Loïc Le Meur Blog: MT and WordPress meet :=) I didn’t get to see Loïc again on Friday like we originally planned, but in the short time we met I got a good impression. People assume that behind the scenes we’re all at each other’s throats, that it’s all WordPress vs. MT vs. Drupal vs. TextPattern vs. Blogger vs. whatever, but it’s actually the opposite. Though there may be some professional differences (you say po-tah-to, I say PHP) everyone is genuinely friendly. Behind the tools are normal people, not super-villians. While meeting with a large potential WordPress user I suggested they also check out Typepad and Blogware because I’ve personally used each and they seem like solid platforms worthy of investigation. I hung out with Anil half of the days I was in San Francisco. Life is too short to waste karma on blogging, and while I get as passionate about the issues as anyone, at the end of the day we’re all contributing something positive to the medium. Of course, Mingus would say “They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.”
Fluid Shadows
Michael Simmons presents fluid shadows on his attractive site.
Power
The Power of WordPress, or how to leverage a robust platform to speed development. I’ve grown so accustomed to WP functions and resources that I find myself including the WP files as a base to work from even when what I’m doing has nothing to do with blogging.
Black Feminism
Black Feminism powered by WordPress, a migration from Drupal. “If you’re interested in using WordPress, I encourage you to. It’s well documented, open source, and standards-compliant. It does help if you know PHP, but it’s not crucial. All-in-all, a wonderful web log tool.”
More on FC
Fast Company clarifies linking policy. Hat tip: Anil.
Websites
The reason we should stick to making websites. Be sure to check out the rest of Simon’s excellent SF photos.
Email Reloaded
So the long and short of it is, I’m loading all the email I receive into a database using a fun combination of Procmail, Spam Assassin, and a sprinkling of command line PHP. I’m very excited about this, more excited than I’ve been about a new project in a while. For me, email has been steadily waning in utility for the past year, and I want to breathe new life into it. I’m tired of folders. I’m tired of slow searching. I don’t want to hand my email over to someone else, even if it’s Google. I don’t want to deal with mbox or IMAP or maildir or any of that junk. Those are implementation details of various servers and clients.
Mirroring my email into a MySQL database has some interesting ramifications. Imagine instant Gmail-type searching using FULLTEXT or LIKE. Imagine instant email backup using MySQL replication. Think email RSS feeds, keyed on searches or senders or anything. Don’t forget the interesting metrics that can be extracted from this as well. Right now I’ve replaced my timely dozen with an counter running since this morning. If you send me an email, you’ll see it increment live. If it increments the spam counter you may want to resend it and reword your mortgage suggestion. This is the most basic of a hundred interesting things that can be culled from this data.
I want to hear your wildest dreams. Besides the obvious search, backup, and statistics benefits, what can you imagine this system doing? What would you like email to address? (groan…) What email metadata is interesting? (I’m currently tracking subject, date sent, date received, from, the message itself, and spam status.) What statistics would be interesting to you? Is anyone even interested in this or am I just spinning my wheels?
Today my mail lives in 400 MB of mbox folders I access using IMAP. Tomorrow I want something better.
Meryl
Use Tasks
Alex announces his new hosted service Use Tasks.
Email Experiment
Running an experiment with my email today, we’ll see how it turns out. This could be quite interesting.
evbot
Ev says “Apparently I’m a bot.” The most important question: Why in the world was he using Register.com?
RSS Traffic
This site’s bandwidth usage is approximately 4 percent from syndication feeds.