Category: The Blog Itself

Gone Vacationing

Woo. I’m actually leaving for a bit of vacation tomorrow, so I’ll not promise any steady updates for anything until returning on saturday the 26th. I’ll check up on my email on suitable occasions, but as the amount of spam that’s being let through my spamassassin is getting to new heights, your best bet for anything might be leaving a comment here.

I might upload stuff to flickr if I have the time, or I might not. I might update the blog, or I might not.

It’s a time of uncertainity!

Forgotten by Spambots

Five days. That’s all the time the mighty internet of spambots needed to forget that I exists. I feel ignored like that drunken guy that wants to be everybody’s best friend. People tend to look to the other way and make their “He’s just drunk you know” face. I’ve seen it in the eyes of The Internet.

The reason? Not a single spam caught in akismet for five days. I’m lost at sea here. Come back internet spambots. Come back! I didn’t mean what I said! Was it something I did? Please. I’m not that drunk.

Writing in English or Norwegian?

Tobias has a post about wether he should choose one language and stick to that at his blog, or if he should keep mixing norwegian and english like he does now. I’ve given this issue quite a bit of thought as I’m currently writing my blog in English, but I write professionally (for Gamer.no) using Norwegian and I’ve written several starter articles and documentation tidbits in Norwegian (most of this material is also already extensivly covered in English).

The reasoning behind writing my blog in English is that most articles I write is meant to serve as a resource for both myself and other people who are experiencing the same issues and searches for help through search engines like Google and Yahoo!. I feel that by writing my blog in English, I make the information available to as many people that I’m able to reach. I’ve several times stumbled across help on non-english blogs, and although translation tools are available, they tend to make things a bit more confusing. Using English as my primary language on my blog also enables me to participate in discussions and writing posts that are aimed at the general user groups of my fields of expertise.

Although I’ve decided to keep my blog English, I will post the occasional article in Norwegian. I’ll keep these to a category by itself on the blog, and I’ll keep them away from the front page (but I may write a short summary in English and keep link to the Norwegian post). This way I’ll keep the blog as a useful resource both to those who come here from a search engine and to those who subscribe to my RSS feed. If you read an English post and then got Norwegian articles in your RSS feed, you’d probably be confused and start wondering about how you could unsubscribe. The signal/noise ratio for this blog would exceed what you’d find acceptable.

So Tobias, my suggestion: stick to one language on the front page, but provide a category for posts in the other language. Provide an RSS feed for each language and one that merges both languages (for those of us that are bilingual) if you decide to write in two different languages. And never mix languages in the same post (<pun>except for programming languages</pun>).

Wether that language should be English or Norwegian will have to depend on your goal for the blog and who you’re writing for.

Adding a Book List

I’ve just added a list of the books I’m currently – or have just finished – reading. Kristian suggested that I added a list earlier today, so there it is. I’ll try to keep it updated as new books arrive and I make my way through them. If anything in particular stands out, I’ll make a regular post about it as earlier anyways.

The list is available in the right column on all the pages.

Moving to WordPress from Serendipity (s9y)

Oh well, I spent the last evening moving my blog from Serendipity (s9y) over to WordPress. The reason for this is that after Christer and I talked a bit, we discovered that something wasn’t working as it should with the trackbacks and pingbacks. As every good programmer does, I headed into the source instead of reading anything sensible about the subject, and well.. I wasn’t really impressed. As s9y is still catering to those who need PHP4 support, the code was a mess of functions here and functions there and no real separation, including Global variables and other messy things. WordPress isn’t much better in the “silly amount of functions” area, but I’ll leave that for the next blogpost or two about WordPress issues that’s getting on my nerves.

Anyways, after seeing their XML-RPC implementation .. which was a couple of large preg_match statements trying to look for the XML-RPC request, I called it a day and decided this wasn’t fixable to bring it up to my need. I’d very much like to patch it up and submit my own XML-RPC server for them to use, but it’s based on PHP5 and the reflection API, so no go there. All that frustration ended in installing wordpress yet again, so here we are, after spending the night of getting everything up to speed and looking like it was again. I’ll create a post later for those who want to take the same route, and I’ll include the RewriteRules to make all your old links still work in WordPress.