RasterWeb!

Yeah, we here at Rasterboy Enterprises fully support the whole Echo Project thingy.

Especially if it deals with dates and times in an intelligent way! ;)

Hmmm, we’ve been down this road before, have we not?

I never fully drank the Movable Type Kool-Aid, and as I’ve said before, it’s an extremely well done application, from the UI to the code, I don’t have any real issues. My problem is with the license. Which people describe as vague, and rightly so. At one point in time I created templates to match this site, tested importing data, and had things tweaked just so. Still, something kept me from pulling the trigger, and it was the license. It worried me. (Then again, I’ve been called a “license weenie.”) Oh, it’s not that Movable Type wasn’t under an open-source license, it was that the license had some strange restrictions. Like the whole, “you can’t charge someone to install/support it” thing. It made sense at the time, Six Apart was just looking out for themselves, wanting to make the money (if there was any) on support services. I don’t blame them at all for that, but it did conflict with my needs.

I work with software, and I do support for software, and often I get paid for this. I invest my time and money in learning how things work and charge others for my knowledge and support. This can’t be done with Movable Type. That’s ok, there’s other software that it can be done with, and I end up using that. Still, when I look at how powerful and just plain nice Movable Type is, I think it’s a shame I can’t add it to my list.

(Oh, before you sign up for that new Google’s AdSense service, you should make sure you have a commercial license for Movable Type. Or you should ask Six Apart. Or… hmmm, it’s not really clear what you should do…)

I’ll end this by saying that I wish the best for Six Apart, the Trotts, and Movable Type. I really wouldn’t say this much about it if I thought it was crap. I think it’s good, and I want to see good come out of it. That’s it…

(See what other have to say about this.)

One more thing: Six Apart is listening, and reacting – good for them.

We mentioned yesterday that WWW::SimpleRobot did not respect the robots.txt file. Well, there’s always WWW::RobotRules, which was easily dropped into place providing me a simple robot that followed the rules of a robots.txt file, if one exists.

My “outlinebot” is working quite well now, and I’m sure I’ll be tweaking it for the next few weeks or months… If I haven’t said this in a while, I really like Perl…

Tim Bray had this idea, and I must admit, I had the same idea as well, an RSS feed of my financial transactions. I know, it’s most likely a long way off… or is it? While driving home last night I heard a commercial promoting email alerts from a bank. They seemed to be saying you could get sent account information via email. Now, I don’t know what kind of information they are sending, and I hope it’s encryped with PGP/GPG or something, but here’s where it gets interesting. If my bank sends me email with useful data, I can easily parse that data and build it into some sort of RSS feed for my own use. I know, it’s a lot more complex than that, but it’s the start of an idea anyway…

Which brings up another interesting issue. Privacy of RSS feed subscription information. Many people share their subscription file on their sites, which is a good idea, and does neat things, but I found when I did this, I first had to delete a feed, not because of a privacy concern, but because it was a resource that could not be reached by the world, and internal project server. So, I’d propose the following to the aggregator makers, add a way for a feed to be marked as private, so that when I export out my file, it can provide me with a list of public feeds that you subscribe to. It would also be useful for people wishing to avoid the embarrasing “You subscribe to what feed?” question…

I also found some code to build a site outline, as mentioned yesterday. I’m using WWW::SimpleRobot. It just took a few small tweaks to the example to get what I needed. What I’m really after is a spider I can point to a site, and have it show me all the urls it can find, so I can compare it against the files of the site (on my local filesystem) to see what doesn’t get spidered. It’s a search engine robot simulator.

(Note: WWW::SimpleRobot does not respect the robots.txt file, so use it with care.)