fettig.net

As of yesterday, I’ve made the fettig.net news headlines

available as an rss feed.

That means that you can easily grab/view/syndicate the latest

news from fettig.net, from the comfort of wherever you are.

It’s pretty rough at the moment - for example,

all the news items link point to the same place - but it works.

(A screenshot of my rss channel in the

Nautilus news panel

is here, or

you can see a live example of

another site displaying my news. Bear

with the self portrait I’m using as the channel image - It will

be replaced once fettig.net gets a logo ;-) ).

So c’mon, add me to your news page already! The URL is

http://www.fettig.net/rss.py.

Update: I added a little XML image to the top right hand

corner of every page. Now I’m really on the bandwagon.

Today I was looking through some old projects and came

across some code I’d written to send a person messages via either

e-mail or their AT&T wireless account. So I added a function

for Jabber messages, slapped together a form and a perl cgi

script for it to post to, and bingo, you can reach me wherever

I am.

Notes: “Jabber” only shows up as a means of contact if I’m online

and available. Cell phone messages get cut off after a hundred

or so characters by AT&T’s system. And I don’t always have my

cell phone on and/or with me, so just because you send me a

message on it doesn’t mean I’ll get right back to you.

bangs are like a pocket T-shirt

as casual as that, while fully intentional

- They Might Be Giants

And to think that just yesterday at Café Uffa I heard it said that poetry was dead. Ha!

I’ve been spending the day today putting the final touches on a

new version of

title='Hannah Fettig Photography'>Hannah’s website.

It’s my first attempt at an e-commerce site. When she does

a job, it will allow her to post the images on the web for her clients

to view and/or order prints of. It works on all browsers (that I’ve

tested), using CSS

for modern browsers, and downgrading gracefully for older ones.

Rather than try

to use an

title='Search FreshMeat.net for open source shopping cart software'>

existing shopping cart framework, I decided to write my own,

specifically tailored to the needs of a photographer selling prints

of her photos.

As usual, the details (making the UI friendly, cross-browser issues,

etc) ended up taking up way more of my time than the core

functionality. But now it’s just about done. The site will be going

live later tonight, just as soon as Hannah finishes importing the

first set of images.

Along the way, I wrote a module that provides lightweight wrapper classes for

database tables. It lets you perform common functions (selecting a record

by ID, selecting/deleting records using a set of criteria, adding a new record,

etc) without having to build your own SQL statements. Once I get the projects

section of my site up and running I’ll post it there.

Personally, I think it’s better to

sell

some proprietary software in order to stay in business

than it is to make everything open source and go bankrupt.

Writing great software takes great programmers, programmers

have to get paid, and these days you’ve gotta sell something to

cover your payroll.

Incendentally, the strategy VA Linux is pursuing here is probably

similar to what I’ll be doing in the future: open source things that

solve common problems and that will be useful to others, or that

offer an alternative to existing proprietary software, but when

you’ve got a truly innovative, marketable product, sell it.

(Just don’t patent it: if some 15 year old kid wants to write

a better program that does the same thing in his free time,

he should be able to).

I always read Zeldman’s A

List Apart. But this week I was rewarded with a special treat - a

genuinely

useful story about CSS. I’d almost started to forget how

exciting CSS was at first, how it changed my whole perpective on

what the web could be. This was a good reminder. Maybe I’ll go ahead and kiss my

<table> tags goodbye.

Well, I found the first problem with my Jabber script. Last night I left

my laptop at the office, and I forgot to log out of Jabber before I left.

So this page reported that I was online all night when I wasn’t.

Actually, this isn’t a problem with my script; it’s a problem of user

error (me not logging out). But there is a fix, and it comes from

the excellent Jabber client I use,

Gabber. It turns out

that Gabber has a nifty auto-away feature, where it will report you

as being “Away” after X minutes of inactivity, and “Extended Away”

after Y minutes of inactivity. Pretty cool. My question is, how does

Gabber monitor activity? Through X Windows? GTK? Gnome? the

OS? Perhaps I’ll take a look at the source code later.

Anyhow, I’ve got this feature turned on now. So if I stop using

my computer for more than 5 minutes, my status should appear as

“Away”, and if I stop using the computer for 20 minutes, my status

should appear as “Extended Away”, both with a comment of “Away from

my desk.”

I added a new section to my main page this morning - current status.

It shows my current status information from

Jabber. I’m almost

always logged into Jabber when I’m online, so the information

there should be accurate.

The actual Jabber status request can take a few seconds to run,

and I didn’t want to slow down the loading time for this page.

So I wrote a seperate script (in

Python, of course) that

runs as a cron job every couple of minutes and writes my status

information to a text file. Then my home page reads the file.

Seems to work so far.

As part of a continuing effort to improve this site, I did a redesign this morning.

Goals: better navigation, a cleaner layout, standards compliance, viewable in

all 3+ browsers.

Although I haven’t tested every browser yet, it appears to be

working.

In the next week I’m going to be moving all the fettig.net sites over

to a new host. After much research and email Q&A, I’ve settled on

ThinkHost. They support

Python, Perl, PHP, and MySQL, and give you lots of space, transfer,

and mailboxes for a reasonable price. Negatives: they don’t support

IMAP, so I’ll have to keep all my mailboxes locally instead of leaving them

on the server to access from anywhere, and you have to pay per

subdomain, which means that I’ll probably move some of the [site].fettig.net

sites that I maintain now to www.fettig.net/[site].

Update: Never mind, I’m decided to keep running my

own host ;-)