Anthony Rants

When you're in my line of work, often you hear of trends in technology way before there is anything useful you can do with it. I feel like that is how it was with my sordid relationship with RSS. I heard about it years ago, and in the way-back-machine, I remember Mike Denzel asking me to make a feed of my blog. Back then my blog was that custom crap, so making an RSS feed required me to gain a familiarity with it. But even then, I really couldn't find a reader I liked and honestly didn't think it would really save me any time.

Fast forward 18 months >> Matt and I were having a discussion about RSS (I think in the context of keeping up with forums) and he mentioned Google Reader. At the time I kind of dismissed it, RSS yea yea, greatest thing ever, blah blah. Well, a couple of weeks ago, after realizing I was reading the same forum thread for the fourth time, I thought that I might as well give it a shot. So I subscribed to the forum's feed, and suddenly, a great fog was lifted. Instantly I can see new threads, mark them as read, etc. So then, I started adding in all the blogs I read, and then Slashdot, and Slickdeals, and Techbargains... but I couldn't stop there! I added our local Newspaper, Yahoo's Odd News, and of course Google's News. Google Reader is possibly the biggest improvement in my Internet habits in the last 6 months (probably 2nd biggest of all-time, most important improvement would of course be tabbed browsing ala Firefox). One of the best things about Google Reader is its centralized nature. It's like a big personalized bookmark for the Intraweb, at work, at home, everywhere!

But it doesn't stop there, I want to encourage my readers to empower themselves as well. To that end, I updated AnthonySnaps to the latest version of Gallery, broke everything, re-customized it, and enabled an RSS feed of my latest photos (was only doable with the latest version).

Improved some of the Javascript stuff going on so that now the Recent Photos link on the right sidebar actually shows a slideshow of my five most recently posted images along with a link to their respective page on Anthony Snaps (in case you want to comment there or something).

The Javascript that I am using is actually a free, Creative Commons licensed script called Lightbox.

Apparently this video was leaked onto the internet a few days ago, anyways, I saw it today because of a post on Slashdot and thought it was funny.

[youtube]-xEzGIuY7kw[/youtube]

I noticed some strange web server errors in the logs, so I hope people can actually access this new site. As far as I can tell everything seems to be working ok though. There was one particular error I noticed where someone was accessing the old RSS url, I've since setup a redirect to the new RSS url to fix that.

Welcome to Anthony Rants version 2.0! It has been a long time coming, ever since the beginning really, that I have meant to significantly update my blog (especially the part behind the curtain). Writing my own blog software really started as a fun one-upmanship with Slaughter. At the time he was running some PERL monstrosity that he had made some hacks to, so I thought I should show him how a real man does it in PHP. Needless to say, I have reached that zenith in my own programming where spending hours messing with some half-baked, homemade blog software does not appeal to me at all. So... what's running now? Why does it look so similar? How are all the old posts here? Where are my comments!?

My blog is now powered by Lightpress. Lightpress is a plugin / front-end replacement for the very, very popular Wordpress blogging software. Over the years I have researched the various blogging alternatives, but each time I was pretty disappointed. Even in the case of Wordpress, which is very powerful with tons of features and great usability, I felt that things on the backend were obscenely complicated. Writing a theme for most blogging software is far from straight forward, let alone writing a plugin that extends or adds new functionality. But with Lightpress, all of that changes. Lightpress gives me the features of Wordpress within a more easily themed and expanded framework. That leads in to the answer for question #2. The site looks very similar because I implemented the previous functionality that I had on my old Sidebar as plugins in Lightpress (it really didn't take too long either).

I imported all of my old posts from the old database via the old RSS feed. Unfortunately this has two large side effects. The first side effect is that the formatting is really screwed up in some of the old posts, sometimes images don't show up anymore, sometimes links lead to wrong places, etc. I do not intend on going back and fixing that stuff. In my opinion, having the text alone, and being able to search through the old posts is enough fun. I may go back through the posts and categorize them, but that will be the extent of edits on the past. The second, probably more unfortunate side effect, is that all of the comments from the old blog are gone :-( This was largely unavoidable.

Lastly, I want to thank everyone who continues to check in on here from time to time. I know my posting habits can be quite erratic, but its still fun to know that people still enjoy hearing from me.