...more recent posts
Procmail is a seriously powerful tool for managing mail on a unix server. I've been playing around with it for the last two days. My initial goal was to make it so that I could post to my page here by sending an email to a special mail address at this domain. It's a little rough around the edges still, but it works.
Procmail looks at every piece of incoming mail. If the mail is to autopost@digitalmediatree.com it moves it to a special folder, and then initiates a perl script. The perl script looks to see if anything is in the special folder, and if so it grabs the to:, from:, and subject: lines plus the body of the message. It creates an HTTP useragent (using HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST) and LWP::UserAgent) which calls a variation of the php posting script that already controls posting to these web pages. The PHP script grabs a password from the first line of the body, checks for permissions, and then posts the message to the appropriate page (specified in the subject line.) Pretty cool. I hadn't used Perl in some time. It's powerful, but the syntax seems a little weird to me now after using PHP for so long. I think PHP is more straightforward (although I wouldn't want to do system stuff with it.)
Anyway, today I was working on extending this. I made a mail web page for myself here (it's private, so you can't see it.) Then I had procmail forward a copy of any incoming mail to my address here (jimb at digitalmediatree.com) to that special folder, and initiate the process above. But this time it doesn't look for a password, it just posts it to my mail web page, making the username ('posted by username') be the return address of the mail.
My idea next is to use the new framed archive view to act as the front end to this new mail system. I think that might work well. Not sure exactly where I'm going with this, but the general idea is to close the gap between weblogs, discussion groups, mailing lists, and mail. They are sort of the same, but they are not integrated together well. Hopefully I can make some small progress.
I finally filled in all the post summaries for the archive. But I was too lazy to go back and actually decide on a summary for that year and a half of posts so I just wrote a little script to grab all posts without post summaries (from my page) out of the database, strip out any tags, take the first seven words, and insert them (followed by '...') back in as the post summary. Maybe I'll run that on some of the group pages as well.
Anyway, a funny thing happend. I was testing it before I actually let it loose on the real database, and it's a good thing because of course I had the script wrong at first. I wasn't unsetting a variable at the bottom of a loop, so the first seven words were accmulating from post to post. This is the resulting post summary for the final post of that particular misguided round. But words are funny. This is like the Brian Gysin cut up stuff. It can be really interesting. So now I have lots of ideas for cut up style tools you can apply to your page. Weblogs might be really great fuel for that sort of strategy.
It was pointed out to me that the new archive I wrote about the other day was not working for some browsers (notably 4.x Navigator.) I believe this problem has been corrected.
Hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving. We did. Thanks to everyone on Long Island.
"This utility strips proprietary Microsoft tags and artefacts from Word HTML documents..."
That could be useful someday.
"...Fancypants tags and client-side scripts are stripped."
Bill posted this great link to thirteen beautiful screenprints by Buckminster Fuller. "Each of the thirteen prints consists of two 30" x 40" screenprinted sheets, one of which illustrates drawings for a patent invention by Fuller, and the second sheet illustrates the realization of the concept."
I made a new archive view for the pages on this site. It's on option for page owners (in [editpage].) The old style is the default.
Every time I make something with either frames or javascript it turns out to not be a good idea. This uses frames so I have to figure I won't like it eventually. But it uses frames in an anti-frame way. Almost anything you do will pop you out of the frames and back to a full page view. So there shouldn't be any way to get stuck in there (framed?)
Like everything else this has no instructions. Probably a few words in the two initially blank frames would be enough, but even without you can probably figure it out. Click a month to get that months summaries, and then click on the summary text to bring up that post. Clicking on the post number (in the top window) or 'posted by' (in the bottom window) brings you to a full screen view of the post on the normal page.
[Note that I didn't start including the summaries for each post until fairly recently. This reduces the value of the archive. Some day I'll go back and add them in for the early days.]
Mozilla 0.96 is out. So far so good.
HTP pointed me to this interview with Dave Winer (Userland CEO and blogging bigshot) titled the case for personal publishing. Nothing ground breaking here, but Dave does manage to get in this really great explanation:
There are three different structures you can hang information off. One of them is time, another one is searching, and the third is categorization (or "taxonomy" or "hierarchies"). You see the search engine space is doing great and you've got various attempts to try and do the taxonomy stuff.I think he should keep using this explanation. Very clear.
But the idea of hanging content off of time works extremely well in an environment where the goal is to keep people coming back. You want to refresh your homepage every day? That's what blogging is. It is a site structure that uses time to create a framework of organization that both creates immediacy and is easy to understand.