Brian Doherty links to Salon’s article about Carlos Castaneda, anthropological hoax-monger and cult leader. Read it, it’s good.
Mashup my blog
As part of the redesign of my blog, I have made available a JSON feed containing all the dates on which I have published. This JSON dataset is being used internally by my server to produce calendars, ‘on this day in’ lists and the such like. But the reason I am making it available is simple - I want you to build things with it!
The feed contains two sets of data - firstly, a hierarchial list called ‘multi’ which has the years, months and days that I’ve published listed inside of it. Secondly, it contains a list called ‘flat’ which lists every day I’ve published in a flat order. Why both ways? Well, I found myself writing code to sort through this list over and over again and thought that it would be easier just to double the amount of data to reduce the number of cycles processing it. I haven’t done any testing, but it should be a little bit quicker on my server to do it this way.
Why not XML? Well, I may do an XML version soon, but I’m lazy. With JSON, it’s as simple as making a PHP array and pushing it through a json_encode().
So, what could you do with this? Well, it’s up to you. Build me a widget or a funky, slidy Ajaxy calendar, visualise the data. Anything you want, really. Although I’m not totally inexperienced with JavaScript, I’m stil very much a beginner.
Remember - the date format is quite simple - tommorris.org/blog/year/month/date to get the HTML, or put .opml on the end to get OPML 2.0.
Learning Perl - convince me not to
I’m strongly considering learning Perl. I spend a ridiculous amount of time doing donkey work. I’ve tried things like sed and awk and they don’t seem to be quite what I want.
I really need a language that can just let me get one-off crap done in the least fussy way possible (and ‘fuss’ means, for me, looking things up in books, Googling, having to use a code-completing editor, keeping track of files, whitespace etc.)
So, for the Perl users out there - is it worth it, for me? I’ve got too much to do already - should I learn Perl? Is there a simpler - preferably graphical - way of processing text and/or XML files on the Mac.
