Articles

I’m down with a case of the CMS Blues. I’ve got them so bad. A Little Background> A Little Background # So, I’ve been using my own custom [Django][2]-powered CMS for several years now.

Happy Halloween!> Happy Halloween! # For my favorite holiday this year, I joined the fine folks at KoPoint for their first annual Halloween Spooktacular. During the show, I spoke with a couple of my dearest friends, archaeologist Quentin Lewis and KoPoint’s own Dan Patterson, about the things we love about Halloween and the stories that make our collective skin crawl.

Great piece from Lev Grossman on the radical changes that the codex introduced into reading, specifically the ability to interact with the text in a non-linear manner. He makes a valid point that e-readers make similar interaction a clumsy affair.

One downside about social media is that it’s easier to get caught up in other people’s drama just from tangential contact. In most cases, it’s just the narcissism of small differences at work, and it isn’t worth your time and energy to get upset about it.

This Is Not A Review> This Is Not A Review # I have been using Google+ for a little over a week now, and over the course of that time, I have written several versions of this post you are reading right now.

If you had asked me a year ago what kinds of podcasts I was listening to, you would have seen a clear theme: technology. I would have listed off a lot of TWiT shows, a couple CNET shows and miscellaneous other shows featuring the same hosts.

General Updates For the Month of June 2011> General Updates For the Month of June 2011 # I have been traveling virtually non-stop for work the last couple of months, so I have not had much time to devote to this site.

"Shut up, crime!" I just finished watching the film Super, written and directed by James Gunn. I’m having a hard time characterizing how I feel about it. Normally, if I were going to write something about a film, I would spend some time trying to develop the best way to get across my opinion of the movie.

There’s a well known theory that keeping a journal, or at least writing daily, improves your day-to-day life. My anecdotal experience has shown that to be the case for me as well.

Macieg Ceglowski breaks down what happened during the mass exodus from Delicious and how the Pinboard team dealt with the huge influx of users that resulted from that event. It’s a great analysis of how they coped the traffic increase, and what kinds of measures they needed to take in order to scale to meet the new demand.

Google is dropping H.264 support in Chrome, in favor of WebM and Theora. Considering the tide of sites that are doing H.264 streaming these days, this seems like a bad move.

Bleach is a rather clever Python module for sanitizing HTML input and auto-linking URLs. It uses a whitelist for the allowed elements and attributes (thank God), and will avoid trying to “linkify” URLs that are already within an anchor element.

My friend, Quentin Lewis has put together a fun examination of of how Christmas has been celebrated in the western world – with particular emphasis on how it has been celebrated in the United States and England – over the last few centuries.

Well, after many years of posting my nonsense on the internets, I have finally made the transition from shared hosting to a VPS. This last week, I migrated this site over to a Linode VPS, and I must say that the whole experience has been pretty painless.

After lots of hard work, some swearing, and lots of patience on the part of my wife, Version 3.0 of this site is now live. It’s been a long journey, but getting it done has been very satisfying.

My wife gave me Chew: Taster’s Choice as a gift, and having never heard of either the comic or the creative team before, I had no idea what to expect. I was intrigued by the description on the back though, and eagerly sat down to read it the next morning.

My web host has just introduced a new Q&A site based on the Stack Exchange model. Looks like a slick way to get help that’s a major improvement over the old forums.

I recently read The Strain by the creative team of Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan on a recommendation from a friend. I didn’t know anything about Chuck Hogan but I was of course familiar with the films of Del Toro, which I had enjoyed.

A review double-feature! Excitement abounds! I just recently finished reading the second book in Dan Wells’ clever and compelling John Cleaver series, and since I’ve had an unfinished review of the first book sitting in my draft folder for the last few months, it seems like a fine idea to merge the two together into one post.

There’s something about Halloween that always draws me back to H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. I’m not alone in this, of course. My good friend Quentin Lewis has taken to releasing recordings of himself reading stories from Lovecraft each Halloween as a podcast, which I highly recommend you check out.