The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, November 13, 2001

Feature or marketing?

I've been busy the past two days with some programming—for myself as well as a client, although I should probably spend more time on the client's code than my own but alas …

I spent some time yesturday trying to implement Markov Chains that wasn't successful. I know I've done this before (in Pascal of all things) years ago but I think I need to rethink how I was doing this.

Afterwards I worked on my client's project. It's not hard per se but it involves keeping track of lots of little details and much of the data I have to track can change at unpredictable times (old sources of data may go, new sources may appear) so I'm having to track that as well. Again not hard, just a bit of tedium to make sure I track everything correctly.

For today's warm-up exercise, I added functionality to mod_blog that will send notification to Weblogs.com when an entry is made. It's toggable so you can have it send notification or not. That was not hard at all since I'm using the form based API and not the XML-RPC or SOAP ones (which wouldn't be that hard to hack support for either). Why am I doing this? Would you believe “creeping featureism?”

I didn't think so.

It's marketing. Pure and simple.

Marketing marketing marketing

Well, no sooner do I get the RSS worked out (the other day) and I have the Samurai Admin pulling it in.

That, and the updates to Weblogs.com works flawlessly (yea!).

And as always, the code is available (although I should probably make it more apparent that it is).

IE is starndards conforming my a…

I know that Microsoft IE can display XML files so I'm checking out the RSS file using it and I get:

The XML page cannot be displayed

Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error
and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.

System does not support the specified encoding. Line 1, Position 43

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII" ?>

In light of the recent events surrounding MSN blocking non-conforming browsers I find this very funny. Very. I guess US-ASCII is simply too hard for them to support.

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