SAFARI 3 Progress

I've never taken SAFARI 2 out of “beta,” but what I'm working on now is sophisticated enough and different enough that I've decided if I ever release the SAFARI codebase, it will be released as SAFARI 3 (well, probably under a different name since Apple took my name and it makes it confusing saying I'm using Safari to look at SAFARI).

SAFARI 2 was essentially a port of SAFARI 1 to MySQL, with additions to make it a blogging tool. SAFARI 3 moves from there into new territory that I believe is not currently being covered by content management systems. My big initiative is metadata — each post will not belong to just one category, it will belong to tons of categories and an unlimited number of other, user definable classifiers. You can find any post by any of the metadata objects owned by that post.

By necessity, I've now introduced a new feature that I think is also innovative. For lack of something better, I'll call it Word2SAFARI. W2S allows you to upload a Word document and have it output into your new SAFARI post for further editing or posting. I've tested using both wvware and the heir of its technology, AbiWord, as the backend to process the documents. Right now, the W2S codebase runs a server side copy of AbiWord to do the processing, which seems to work beautifully. Bold, italics, highlighting and various other Word formatting bits seem to be preserved. Also, and most importantly for my present purposes, it fully supports Unicode.

If I get time and it proves worthwhile, maybe I'll add more uploading features, such as photo uploading or PDF2SAFARI.

Blog Spam I Don't Understand

A couple of days ago, asisaid was hit by blog spam (something unusual for my blog, for whatever reason). Most of it was at least semi-explicit, but it also had a peculiar quality to it: none of it seemed to actually point to anything. Several of them seemed to include phone numbers, but with the wrong number of digits. When I looked in my database, the poster left neither an e-mail nor a web site in the contact information. This left me wondering: why spam a blog if you don't even link to a product or service?

Is this just the twenty first century equivalent of graffiti?

Writers Block

It's funny. I have lots of ideas to blog when I don't have time to do so during the day, but then at night, my mind has been going blank lately. I should scribble my ideas down when I have them, I suppose.

Hopefully, I'll get more up tomorrow.

I hope you all had a nice Maundy Thursday.

Now I'm (more) Official

Well, I think that should take care of my pending business: the permanent Cranium Leakage linkage went up on over to your right a few minutes ago. That means asisaid has given up its life as just another independent blog in the sea of journals and become a major network blog! Click the pretty graphic that the mad scientists over at Cranium Leakage designed to see what the official CL web site has to say. Of course you can also check out my blogroll, which has long linked to three of the four other active CL blogs (which are well worth reading, in my estimation).

I'm Leaking Now!

I received word last night that my kind blogging neighbors Christopher, Craig, Michael voted me into their Cranium Leakage blog-thingie (a.k.a. “network”). I'll be adding my new Cranium Leakage seal to the side of my blog in the next day or two.

Thanks, guys! I'm quite honored!

Y'all can listen to the podcast featuring the business meeting that voted me in over at CL. It's a funny listen. It sounds like I'm going to end up being a call-in guest on the “show” someday — I wonder what they'll do to me? Yikes!

In case you're fretting: don't worry. Asisaid will still keep the same quality (or lack thereof) that you've come to expect. Although, in honor of this event, I think I am going to drop the medieval spellings I announced the other day.

QOTW: CMS

I thought maybe I'd try to revive my old Question of the Week meme. Feel free to participate here or on your own blog. I'll update this post with my own answer later on. I've included my answer.

What is your favorite content management system (CMS, e.g. Moveable Type, PHP-Nuke, WordPress, Drupal, etc.)? Why? How long have you used it?

Update: That's tough. At the cost of sounding biased, I'd probably say SAFARI, which runs this blog. I've used it in various ways for about six years, and familiarity is certainly one of the big reasons I like it. But even more importantly, since I've written the code, it acts mostly how I want it to. It isn't perfect by any means, but I've had the ability to carefully avoid certain things that annoy me in other CMSes I've used.

Pardon the Remodeling Dust

I've never been entirely happy with the new asisaid design I switched to early last year. The background color was a bit too minty and light, and the header was too plain. I've been wanting to try a photo-based theme for awhile, so I decided to go through my newly cleaned up iPhoto and pick out some photos. Virtually everything you see (including every photo up in the main header and in the sidebar headers) has been taken within the last few months. The first, third, fourth and fifth photos in the header were actually taken just in the last week, for example.

Note for the archive: I plan on changing the header more frequently in the future, so if you are reading this weeks or months after I posted this entry, go here to see the header I am actually referring to (in case I've changed it).

I've also replaced the drawing of a hill side that was at the bottom of each page with a real hill side of a similar shape. The drawing was a cropped portion of the old asisaid's header, which changed with the seasons. It never really fit in with the new site design, but the bottom of the page needed some color. I think this looks better.

Well, this is a work in progress, but I'd like to hear any thoughts y'all have on whether I'm headed in a good direction. Post your critiques below.

On the Fourteenth Day of Christmas

Well, I promised the last two blogs today, and here they are. There are a few others I'm considering removing from my list because of inactivity or simply lack of time for me to read them. Thus, at some point, these two blogs will round out the entire blogroll of asisaid, most likely.

The Ninth Blog of Christmas is Mark's 5 Speed Cassette. Mark found me rather than the other way around; I can't recall exactly how long ago. After awhile, I went over to his blog, and found a delightful mix of technology, faith, news and other bits of life commented on in a thoughtful way. He may not get it, but we can forgive him for that. Mark's a great guy and I always enjoy discussions with him.

And last, but not least, the Tenth Blog of Christmas is the Grey Shadow, the blog of my long time friend Eduardo. Eduardo, like Ed Hurst, has worked with me on a variety of projects, including some of the same ones as Ed: namely, ChristianSource and Open for Business. Eduardo isn't the most frequent poster, but I enjoy whatever he posts on when he does. He also likes the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Jose Luis Borges, so how can you not like his blog? The Grey Shadow is the only international blog on my list just now, with Ciaran H. posting under password protection and Flip on extended leave.

Check both of these blogs out, as well as the other ones I've mentioned over the last two weeks. I think they are surely some of the finest in the blogosphere.

On the Thirteenth Day of Christmas

Ok, I'm running behind. Tomorrow, I will finish up the Blogs of Christmas with my last two featured blogs. I'm sorry about the delay.

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas...

Well, I've gotten behind, but that's OK, there are several blogs I don't read all that reliably (or they don't post that reliably) left that I was going to cover. I'll skip those, leaving me with only three blogs I really want to mention. First up, as the Eighth Blog of Christmas is Ed Hurst's Mission, Method and Means (formerly “Plain Package”).

Though I've never met Ed in person, I feel like I might as well have. We work together on a bunch of things, including OfB.biz, Sakamuyo and ChristianSource. He's always full of thoughtful observations, helpful how-to's, and a whole medley of other things. It should not be overlooked that Ed is also a continued willing (sole) beta tester for SAFARI 2.

After a forced hiatus from reading his blog due to a WordPress bug, I'm happy to be back to seeing what he's writing on his blog. He's been working on two series in the last week, one of shameful ISP's and one on Christian romance. Take a look.