Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend

If you've ever been here before even a quick glance at the page will tell you that things look pretty darn different. That's because I've upgraded to the very latest MovableType and I'm deathly sick of the old look for my website. I've had basically the same thing since I started it in 2001 and it's gotten really old.

So, not only am I switching to a new version of the weblog software I use, I'm also updating pages and making improvements. One you might notice is that my reading list is not a page that I'm updating by hand anymore. Instead it directs you to my page on Reader2 where I'll keep my reading list updated. My project pages are going to undergo a similar transformation because I'm planning to try using a program called Forrest to keep those pages up to date. In general, whereever I can use a program or a website to keep my site up to date, the more likely it will be that it will be current.

Posted by John Munsch at 8:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My podcast is going to be all about creating things and distributing them. I'll talk about weblogs, podcasts, videocasts, and a lot more. The first show is lots and lots of commentary about recent podcasting news.

Just go to RogueSyndicate.com. You can get the URL there to subscribe to future shows or just click on the MP3 file for the first show to see what you think.

Posted by John Munsch at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It was four years ago today that I did the first weblog entry here. At the time I was investigating an online service called Blogger because it seemed to be a competitor to the ZWNews software which Don Thorp and I were selling. It turned out that it was and it wasn't a competitor. Blogger offered itself as a service and it seemed to be being adopted by individuals who wanted to write about things personal to them. ZWNews was software you had to install and it was marketed towards businesses needing easy maintenance of news on the front page of a company site. Long after I stopped trying to compare the two and accepted that there was very little interest in ZWNews I was still maintaining a weblog. I'm looking forward to another four years of writing. I frankly cannot understand those who get started on this and then stop. Even if no one much is reading it, you're always writing about something that interests you. It's the house organ and it plays the house's favorite songs. Write about what you care about and let an audience find you.

Posted by John Munsch at 2:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Let's just say that you don't want to have your server run completely out of disk space and then have MovableType change pages. The database it uses to hold entries from myself and Rockelle is really really screwed up.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know the redo of the website leaves a lot to be desired. It's ugly and its inconsistent on top of being ugly. And it's unfinished on top of being ugly and inconsistent. Bleh...

Nevertheless, this is my start on a redo of the website. How is it better or going to be better than the old version? Well, for one thing you can now search all of my blog entries for specific info using the search in the sidebar of the homepage. Two, the look and feel of the site is now based on CSS so I should be able to radically redo the appearance of all the pages on the website (more than 300 at present) just by altering the one stylesheet file. And three, there is now direct links to the archives, recent postings and a posting calendar (showing when I've updated the weblog recently) on the front page.

As I mentioned above, there are more than 300 individual HTML files which make up the website now. Because of that, it is really difficult to make improvements. Getting MovableType to update all of the pages it maintains takes a long time now (several minutes) and some other pages like the Resources and Projects page aren't generated automaticallly by MovableType and upgrading them to automatically adjust to the changing look and feel of the website is going to take a while. In the meantime they still look like the old verion of the webpage. When I fix them I'll probably also create an Articles webpage for links to the articles I write as well.

Posted by John Munsch at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You might notice right away that I've made one change in the website if you have been here before. There are now ads showing up on most of the pages from Google's AdSense. It offers me a way to make money on click-throughs where the ads are targeted on a page by page basis. I've looked at a lot of the ads they provide and they actually make some logical sense (e.g. ads for collectible card games on the pages related to UberCard).

I don't yet know if this will make any money but I've read some interesting reports from someone else so I thought I'd give it a try for a month or two and see how it does.

It's all part of a big makeover you should see in the site as I approach the third anniversary of this weblog. I started this thing back on February 21st, 2001 using Blogger and it's about time that the look and feel were updated, the front page started to take advantage of some of the MovableType innovations which came after I started using it (i.e. searching, a posting calendar on the front page, and direct links to recent archives and to recent stories). Also on the burners, an update to the Fedora Core Getting Started Guide (already partially completed), source code for a simple comic book reader I wrote to use on Linux since I don't have CDisplay, a couple of longer format items about Java, quite a bit of code I hope to contribute to the Prevayler project, and perhaps a new presentation like Prevayler or JUnit in 30 Minutes or Less.

In addition to putting the Google ads up to try and make some money I hope to record audio of my existing Ant and Log4J presentations (and any new ones I do). The audio would be an MP3 download you could purchase via BitPass for a couple of bucks to go with the slides (which will continue to remain free). Obviously I would go over all the material on the slides themselves but I think I could do a much better job of explaining everything than just trying to read a somewhat terse set of bullet points.

Posted by John Munsch at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My resources page was always a severe pain in the buttocks because it became this huge HTML file that was very hard to edit without messing up. Large scale removals of links, reorderings, etc. were simply out of the question.

But a while back I took steps using JOE to reproduce all the links in an OPML file (an XML based outline format that JOE and Radio both use). Now I can use an XSL stylesheet to format that OPML file automatically and publish a new version of my resources page with ease. And under JOE, reordering, removing, adding, etc. are all very easy so my resources page won't continue to slowly degrade over time.

P.S. For those of you who care, I'm going to start publishing the OPML file to the website as well as the HTML version of it (plus I'll make available the XSL stylesheet I'm using for formatting). That way it will be just like the RSS file that gets published for all my weblog entries. Maybe if everybody did that for their link farm it could be another RSS.

Posted by John Munsch at 4:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

UberCard has its first real update in a long time. I've put the draft text of the first three articles that discuss the development of UberCard on the project page and also put the information that used to be on the main page into the fourth article (which is not nearly as far along as the other three).

Please, send me some feedback if you have some either positive or negative on the articles.

Posted by John Munsch at 2:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There are new link sections for Astronomy (currently listing only Celestia) and Art Projects. As always, hit the resources section for loads of great links with full descriptions and books that I recommend.

Posted by John Munsch at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The project page for HotSheet has undergone an upgrade. This is the new format I'll be using for all my project pages in the future so I can include the exact same ReadMe.html file in the project itself and use it on the website. That will make sure that all the data is kept together and organized together (which it hasn't been until now) and that it is easier to get to everything, including the developer documentation, without having to download all the source.

Posted by John Munsch at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've started categorizing all of the old blog entries and creating my own titles for each one (previously the titles were just the first five words of each entry which is what you get when you import everything from Blogger). I've only done the first 75 entries so far but you can see that my Archives page now has archives not just by month but by category as well. That makes it much easier to find what you want if you are looking for a link or some software I referred to a while back.

Posted by John Munsch at 5:43 PM | Permalink

I've finally gotten around to doing something I said I would do a while back. I installed (with some help from Don Thorp) MOVABLE TYPE and switched to it from Blogger.

It is harder to install than Blogger because you have to actually install something on your own server. Blogger runs as a web application which simply copies files to your sever via FTP. But the complexity is worth it because of the additional features you get with MOVABLE TYPE. I can simultaneously publish an RSS headline list for my weblog, have titles for each entry, add more information for each entry which is stored on a separate page, upload images more easily, and take comments from visitors on selected entries (like this one).

Posted by John Munsch at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I've been using Blogger for some time now to run my weblog but I've never been terribly pleased with anything about it except its ease of use. So I'm going to bite the bullet and try and install a new system on the server called MOVABLE TYPE. It offers a large number of features that Blogger does not and it's advancing more quickly at this point than Blogger is.

I don't know if anyone will ever want to get me anything off of it but I've added my Amazon wish list as a link up at the top of the page. It's got DVDs, books, and various other stuff I would like to have. If you are really thrilled with something I told you about or some software I've written, maybe you could reward me :)

Posted by John Munsch at 6:29 PM | Permalink

Went ahead and added all my JNLP related links and the directories of JNLP launched applications to the resources page.

Posted by John Munsch at 3:35 AM | Permalink

The resources page has gotten a much needed makeover (there's now a linked category list at the top) and I've got at least two dozen new entries that I'll be adding tomorrow. The entries are already written but the HTML is only about half done so it will just have to wait. Also, look for some news feeds to start appearing on the main page shortly thereafter.

Tried out a couple of other RSS tools (i.e. not HotSheet). Both AmphetaDesk and Peerkat are written in Python and both are no-fee open source projects. Each is oriented around using the browser as the user interface. Personally I've found developing browser interfaces to be twice as hard as doing a conventional interface using a tool like Swing and the results aren't nearly as good. However both tools get the job done to let you build a list of news channels and sydicate them to a page they create. Plus, both could be put onto a home or work machine that was always on and had a permanent Internet connection and they could be administered from anywhere. You can't do that right now with HotSheet. In fact, I wouldn't even try to do it with HotSheet, I'd build another application using the RSS library in HotSheet to do something like that if I had an interest.

Posted by John Munsch at 11:50 PM | Permalink

Added the first seven of my "must-have" books to the resources page. I don't have descriptions up yet for the books. Currently there is just a picture of the book and its title up but I'll have descriptions shortly. Each of the books is a link to purchase the book on Amazon.com so don't be shy about buying anything I've recommended :)

Posted by John Munsch at 10:43 PM | Permalink

Added a Resources link to the site menu. This is far from the only addition I hope you'll see in the near future. I want the size of the Resources page to at least double or triple. One addition that will help expand the page will be a list of all the books that I just couldn't live without when I'm developing software.

Next up will be the Projects link. I'll use it to provide information on specific projects I'm working on like HotSheet. Since HotSheet is basically useful at this point the Projects page will go live when I add just a couple of last details onto HS and I put up the first alpha version.

Lastly, I would like to add a "worth reading" list of links to the front page. Often I sprinkle links inside the musings on the front page but I'd like to have a separate list of links that I don't think need a lot of explanation. They are just articles that deserve reading.

Unfortunately, after typing in all of the text above late last night, Blogger told me that the database servers log was full when I attempted to post the new entry. When I went back a page to where I had been writing the page no longer had any text on it. I'm glad I hadn't written something really long that I had to try and recreate. Grrrr...

It's that kind of thing that shows me just how much end users need a tool that is as easy to use as Blogger, extremely easy to install (because that's the one area that Blogger obviously benefits from being an application service provider; no installation), and is under their control. Maybe my Freenet projects will wait a little bit after the alpha HotSheet is out so that I can work on the weblogging tool instead.

Posted by John Munsch at 2:39 PM | Permalink