Rolling Stone now has a number of RSS feeds for you to oogle. One thing, the linked page above says “All XML files are generated twice daily at 4:30, 10:30, 16:30, 22:30 Pacific Standard Time.” Wouldn’t that be four times daily? The headers for the feeds I looked at indicated they were last modified at 22:00 last night. Go figure.

Last Wednesday I transfered this domain to the new server, a dual Xeon with cute hard drives and RAM for days. This domain was, by far, the hardest one to transfer. I couldn’t tar it up because the previous system had a 2 gigabyte file size limit, and that mark was crossed long ago. What I ended up doing with the help of Mat is simply FTPing the albums directory (about 3 gigabytes) to the new server manually, and then packaging and transferring the rest of the account as I would normally. It was a hassle but it worked. Then another problem popped up, everyone seemed to be holding on the their outdated or cached DNS information like it was the last chocolate on earth, even though I had turned down the TTL days before. It was hairy for a few hours, but it all resolved itself, so to speak.

Except one. Mozilla 1.4 on this desktop still pulls up photomatt.net from the old server! Is it not simply a page cache, as I have cleared that and force reloaded more times than I can count. It is not a DNS issue, because Internet Explorer and Opera on the same machine seem to get to the new site just fine. I can ping, I can sing laments, I can fling books, but to no avail. So for the first times since I made the switch I am posting from IE instead of Mozilla, while I contemplate the best course of action from here. Perhaps another go at Firebird or the Mozilla 1.5 alpha is in order. That may solve it, but I’m still so confused as to why it is acting the way it does. Bizzare. Also if you don’t see this entry put your glasses on or, alternatively, contact me.

I’m dead tired, but before I go to sleep I wanted to inform you of a neat tool you might dig. Month before last at the Houston Palm Users Group (which I lead) we did a bit on creating ebooks. I covered the Palm Markup Language which is a sorry excuse for a markup language. To balance out how bad PML was, I wrote a little tool that would convert Project Gutenberg texts to a format more sutable for ebook reading. See the problem with the Gutenberg texts is that they are plain ASCII files which wrap every 76 characters or so. What this means on a PalmOS device is that you get a line and a half of text, and then a break, and it makes reading anything a major pain.

So what HPUG DocIt! does is combine paragraphs of text into one line so you don’t get funny line breaks everywhere, except where you want them between paragraphs. It’s pretty basic, but I’ve found it incredibly useful and a number of members of the group have as well. Even though the only other time it’s been mentioned was at the meeting and on the HPUG website, it converts about a dozen documents every day. Anyway I’d just like to put this out there as a service. The interface should look pretty familar to Texturize users, with the additional option of being able to upload text files. If there is interest there is definitely a lot of room for improvement in this tool, for example it could convert the ASCII faux text styling (stars for bold, underscores for underlined, etc.) to HTML equivilents, and it could also determine when the nend of a line is a hyphenated word and deal with the break accordingly. But for now, it does one thing and it does it well. Enjoy.

Partly as a personal todo list, and partly as a special bonus for Photo Matt readers, here’s what’s currently done or in development for WordPress .72, slated for release on [date]. This is in no particular order.

• Improved quicktags — create ordered and unordered lists easier, <ins> support WITH datetime attribute, possibly cursor aware.
• HTML Sanitation — Bad code checks in, but it doesn’t check out.
• MetaWeblog API support
• Multiple category support
• Completely revamped options system, never edit a configuration file ever again.
• Password-protected entries
• Movable Type import

There are going to be some under the hood changes mainly paving the way for multi-blog support. Also significant is the documentation efforts that have been ongoing. A few other changes mostly related to RSS may or may not make it in, depending on how quickly everything comes together.