Ever the glutton for punishment, am I. If you feel the following items are worth being Dugg, please do. I like to land on there once a week or so for something.

Optimizing AirPort Connectivity

Apple Defects Stellar Reporting

MacBook Pro Voltage on the Case

All said, I’m starting to feel the love of Newsvine again. Sadly, as a publisher you just can’t beat the power of Digg for a massive flux of people that won’t ever care about what you wrote again. Oh, wait, that’s not what I want … I want readers. Which is where Newsvine excels.

But, for now, hit me with Digg. I’m all for a short relationship with readers.

Okay, Dugg all to hell now. Thanks.

A little deduction goes a long way, but I’ll spell it out for the lot of you: this guy is this guy and this guy.

I’m changing my username on the sites I’m an author/owner of to make it more obvious, but now that I’m not working for Apple any more there’s no need to not say who I am as I write about the Mac, so there’s no need for the nickname/alias/handle/cover-of-darkness that was “codepoet”.

But the domain’s nifty, so I’ll keep it.

I noticed that Mac Geekery and codepoetry’s most-pulled files were RSS feeds. I’ve known that for a while, but just noticed it today. Funny that. So then I got to thinking about this fact and realized that for every pull of the feed (without caching) there’s a few dozen queries to be had. Even with caching there’s at least one query to be had. When you get 50K pulls of an RSS feed, that’s a lot of useless queries.

So, what follows is how to make a dynamic page static and updated so that Apache can do what it does best: send a static file.

As-is, the default rewrite rules for Drupal employ a basic test: let Apache send requests that exist, try to create requests that don’t. So, to get a static page in, just make the file exist. I used curl in my crontab to just pull the feed every 15 minutes and save that to a file:

Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with something to write when your life is one repetitive action after another?

The Geek Spot’s on hiatus because I’m running around trying to get a ton of things done that I’d put on the side to do GS to begin with. I’ve not written anything useful for this site in freaking ages. I’m starting to consider just dumping blogging entirely and moving to just writing things for MG in the future.

But then I realize that’s a little crazy. CP has a history and I should try and cater to it, somehow.

So I suppose what I’d like to do is let MG be the “user’s” site and have CP be the “developer’s” tip site. That would mean I’d have to rebrand any software I write to something else, but that’s not a problem, really.

I’m moving some domains around and changing how I interact with the web. As such, I’m at a loss as to where CP fits in.

For a long time I ran a personal blog called Eloquent Apathy which, you’ll note, now brings up One Bit Short instead. That would be because that’s what I’m moving to for my personal domain.

Similarly, CP has some personal stuff in its deepest depths that will be culled and moved when I become unlazy and get around to it. The frequently-linked rants, articles, and tips will stay, of course, but the older things kept because they were tech-related will get moved. OBS will be my blog, essentially: tech and non-tech, photography, etc. CP, as I can imagine it, will be what it’s become: rants, opinions, and talking about projects I’m working on.

So at some random time and place, probably around Notae’s arrival (really, I am working on it — ask the icon artist or the sole tester if you don’t believe me) the main CP page will become a static one and all of these rants and raves will become some sub-path. The feed will remain the same.

Okay, enough of that. Back to Notae.

It looks like I got a birthday gift and didn’t even know it. A fellow going by “sticktron” posted a nifty infographic detailing my previous Do-It-Yourself Smart Radio Station post. It’s certainly a bit easier to understand when you look at it this way. Note that the playlist detailed in the screenshot is unworkable due to them all being in one window, but the criteria are valid when used as detailed on the right.

This approach is based on the idea of a master playlist, which feeds off of several pools of potential songs. Each pool is created by a dynamic playlist—called Smart Playlists in iTunes/iPod—and updates itself constantly.

As your songs get listened to, rated, weeded out, given priority, etc., you will be continually upgrading the mix. It is TRULY your own personal Radio Station experience.

deviantART: Advanced Playlists for iTunes by ~sticktron,

Sadly, I’ve been quite absent from my writing lately. I’ve been stuck in monotony at work lately and then busy as a bee at home so the things I want to do get done in smaller and smaller blocks of time. I managed to get a “final” theme for Mac Geekery going such that I’m actually happy with it. I have some ideas for what to do with the site now and I’m writing a lot of articles that I will publish soon to that end.

One thing I do know about setting up Drupal, now, is that the default install that uses one large .htaccess file for everything is the slowest possible solution. I imported all those statements into a Directory statement for the virtual host and site performance at CP and MG went up over 500%. I was amazed.

If you’re running a site that depends on an .htaccess file, don’t. Import the directives into a configuration file and tell Apache to ignore the .htaccess file (or, better yet, remove it). You’ll see a huge increase in performance.

Notae is progressing well, but due to a lack of free time development on it is stunted. It’s seeing a very slow launch time due to some font fun which I have a solution in mind for but just haven’t gotten the time to implement it. When that’s done I might start a beta round. Don’t volunteer now, I’ll ask when the time comes.

Adriaan changed ecto so that it works with Drupal’s input filters better, and after finally getting around to downloading and testing it I must say, it works like a charm. The caveat being you have to name your input filter either “Textile” or “Markdown” and if you do something like chain the filters in Drupal so that both work in one filter then it obviously won’t know, etc. But for sites like this where I’ve named the filter after what it is, it’s golden.

So, thank you, Adriaan.

And for Mr. Walker’s statements about the blogapi.module I’ll happily start filing bug reports on it as I figure out what’s wrong. It wouldn’t take much effort at all to get this working properly and then, well, sheer bliss when it does.

So, not content to work around problems, I took the most annoying problem out of the Drupal/ecto post and fixed it. Item #2, the bit about not being able to use the extended entry field, was due to a curious coding in the blogapi.module file. On or about line 595 we have this mess: if ($struct['mt_excerpt']) { $node->body = $struct['mt_excerpt'] .'<!--break-->'.$node->body; } if ($struct['mt_text_more']) { $node->body = $node->body . '<!--extended-->' . $struct['mt_text_more']; } What the hell was this person thinking? Without a line break, the "break" keyword won't get parsed! Topping that, "Extended" isn't even a parsed keyword in Drupal 4.5 and there's no such thing as an excerpt in 4.5, either. So, time to re-think what we want to do with these three fields.

Some lessons for using ecto with Drupal.