November 5, 2002

What’s in a name?

Darin suggested that I should have named this site “:p” since I use that a lot <vbg> Actually, that’s kinda appropriate too since I do do that a lot. I scatter emoticons all over my writing quite liberally (sometimes I think I do that a bit more than is called for by “approved” writing styles – but who care’s for other people’s conventions? :p) and it’s mostly because it is hard to convey emotions when you’re writing. I want people to know exactly how I felt when I wrote something and you can be sure that if I put a smiley somewhere that I was smiling as I wrote it. Of course, the only exception is the “:p” because I am not sticking my tongue out when I put it down … but I feel like doing so 🙂 That basically explains my attitude towards most of the world too – I like to stick my tongue out at them and say “nyah, nyah” and just do whatever I want to do and hence the constant usages (or should that be overusage? :p) of the ubiquitious “:p”

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Posted by Fahim at 8:14 am  |  3 Comments

Love makes the world go round …

I wrote rather disparagingly about love a couple of days ago and wondered if there really was as much true love around as people seem to think. And right on the heels of that rant I saw an article in a Sunday newspaper over here where it is said that "love at first sight" might not be just the stuff of books or mushy minds :p Dr. Helen Fisher of the Rutgers’ University Center for Human Evoluionary Studies, New York is supposed to have said that "You can fall in love in less than eight minutes of conversation. Humans are animals that were built for love at first sight. You can simply look at somebody and trigger that brain chemistry for romantic love."
I am not sure how far this is true and if love at first sight equates to the "pure love" that I talk of – the kind of love where you put your loved one(s) ahead of yourself. But I thought it was kind of interesting to note Dr. Fisher’s comments …

Incidentally, speaking of love, my love Jen has been making her presence felt on these pages :p So I’ve changed the banner for the site to include her as well – sorry if I am not describing your side of things too well baby, so feel free to let me know what your description should be …

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Posted by Fahim at 8:08 am  |  No Comments

I’ve discovered that it should be pretty simple to implement an application that would allow somebody to post to both Blogger and Moveable Type (MT) using a client to compose the entry offline! This should work with Grey Matter as well since I believe that it supports the Blogger API as well. However, not all the blogging applications/servers support the Blogger API in the same way – for instance, MT does not allow you to edit templates since their template mechanism is different to Blogger’s. However, this is a starting point and so I have decided to start work on a new app I’m calling BlogMan – short for Blog Manager :p It is basically using the existing Blog interface and code as a launching point – it will even have the 7.0 interface with comments display etc. even though I cannot currently support the extraction of comments … but I’m hoping that I can at least add extensions to MT to do some of this. Not sure about the others since it’ll depend on each implementation I guess. I will probably have a better understanding when I have a working prototype but that might not be for a week or so.

In the meantime, I have also been thinking about some of your suggestions and ideas for Blog. John mentioned that he liked the current separation of entry and HTML template and wanted it kept that way – with reference to a WYSIWYG entry option. This was just to do the entries, the template still would be separate. The reason for the WYSIWYG entry box would be so that you can get your entry exactly the way you want it to – especially for those who use a lot of HTML code in their entry. It personally wouldn’t do much for me since I don’t use images or lots of HTML code but there are some for whom it could be a great boon.

Then there is the questions of plug-ins. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and originally I had been thinking of a way to create a comprehensive plug-in system which would allow new features. I realize that this will probably never work. But, it is possible to allow a plug-in system which would allow new Blog tags. For instance, I know that the BlogCookie tag can be easily parcelled out to a plug-in since I don’t think everybody uses it – plus, it needs Cee to be installed to use it. A plug-in would make the whole process so much more cleaner and you could probably even have Cee installed in a completely different directory than Blog. Another good candidate for the plug-in system would be a calendar display a la MT. There are many possibilities and I’m going to look into creating a plug-in system for the next major release of Blog, which will be 8.0 but there probably will be the bug fix release that I’ve been talking about before then – especially since Tyran’s pointed out that I have broken the search text highlighting in the Find option somewhere along the way :p

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Posted by Fahim at 4:51 am  |  8 Comments