Navel Gazing

I have happily validated (original) my RSS feeds; sing hooray! Yeah, pretty geeky. Movable Type users should note that the instructions for fixing old Movable Type feeds assume that you want to replace your RSS .9x feed with an RSS 2.0 feed, which may or may not be the case — some aggregators will still choke on RSS 2.0 and there are no perl modules to handle RSS 2.0 feeds as far as I know. So you may want to proceed with a bit more caution there. If anyone wants to know how I fixed my .91 feed, drop me a comment.

Now that my MT -> LJ bridge is finally working the way I want it to, I’ll take the time to do a little documentation. The basic architecture is as follows. I have an MT template containing a verbose RSS .91 feed, which is an index template, so the page it produces is rebuilt every time I post. I added a CGI script residing on my server to the list of URLs to ping when my blog is updated. The CGI runs blagg (an RSS aggregator) with the LiveJournal (original) plugin, which pushes the post to my LiveJournal. ...

Apologies to my LiveJournal readers for the unkempt apostrophes; the problem is now fixed. For the curious: the MovableType RSS feed templates escape the posts as if they were XML, and XML includes this ' entity which is not supported by most HTML browsers. So I switched the encoding to HTML style, and nothing seems to be suffering.

I’ve upgraded MovableType to the just released 2.5. Looks good. Perceptive people will note the search box on the left (for the fancy-pants version of the blog) or below the main title (if you’re reading the plain version). Edit: I have also made a couple of small tweaks to the alternate view section of the sidebar. You don’t care about those but I wanted to point them out so that I could say “There’s one additional change I made; prize to the first person to notice it,” and not have people say “You added another syndication option.”

After much twiddling around, www.innocence.com has moved and is now served off my shiny semi-new OpenBSD box in Somerville. Making new entries just got a lot faster; at some point I’ll try mod_perl again and see if that doesn’t speed up as well. DNS hasn’t propagated as I write this, but it will in a few hours. And I suppose if you’re reading this, you know it’s propagated. Let’s see. The new server is now my primary nameserver, and I’ll be letting the registrars know that next. The last piece is email (also probably the most nervewracking piece). Woot!

My DSL is up and running, a day early (and less than a week after I ordered it). Even happier, the speed is up to snuff — a quick test suggests that I’m getting 1280/585Kbps speeds, which is darned close to the 1500/786Kbps I was promised. Since the test server is in LA, I’m not going to worry about the lossage. It’s certainly much faster than my Pacifica PacBell speeds. ...

Major geeking out, here. This is a test of my hacked up Movable Type to LiveJournal bridge. I’m using blagg (a good RSS aggregator) with an LJ plugin to do the dirty work; the hacked up part is a) a modification of the default MT RSS .91 template so that the description field includes the entire entry, and b) a modification of the LJ plugin so that it sends the entry to LJ as pre-formatted text. ...

Landed in Boston successfully, and currently tapping away at the keys of my iBook in my brand-new apartment. Well. New to me, anyhow. Earthlink came to my aid in time of need, thus the connection. Later I expect pizza. Could be worse! Pictures of the new place may come at some later date. Updates will continue to be sporadic until I get the real network in here, mmm mmm good.

Almost all packed, which is a darned good thing considering that the movers are showing up in about 12 hours. It’ll be down to the wire, yep. Posts will be very sparse for the next little while.

Giving into temptation, Popone now has a stats page. I mention this because it led to an important Weblog discovery: you aren’t a real weblog until you’re getting more hits from Googlebot than from Netscape browsers.