Blog Entries
Blog entries, here and from elsewhere.
Blog rolling with Drupal
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/04/2005 - 09:20Over on the Progressive Blog Alliance they’ve run into some problems with blog rolling. They’re blog roll is now over 150 people and they are trying to figure out a better way to handle the blog roll.
One idea is to use the RSS feed from del.icio.us. I had set up a tag for PBA there. I haven’t updated it in a while, but it is a tool that could be used. Unfortunately, currently, the most items you can see in a Drupal block of a feed is 25 items, so this doesn’t really help a lot.
So, I started writing a modification to the aggregator module for Drupal so that you can use Drupal as a blog roller. The aggregator module isn’t really the right place to do it, but it did give me a good first pass.
NationStates and Progressive Frames
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/04/2005 - 08:39While Mairead was visiting, I asked her how much she knew about what was going on with the tsunami relief efforts. For those of you who aren’t regular readers, Mairead is my exceptionally gifted fourteen-year-old daughter who is off in college. While I know that younger folk are now getting more of their news from the Internet and from the Daily Show, I was surprised at her answer. It wasn’t that she is getting her news from Google’s News site, or from blogs. She is getting it from discussion boards at NationStates “NationStates is a free nation simulation game. Build a nation and run it according to your own warped political ideals.” They have a bulletin board where they discuss the issues, that it where Mairead is getting her news.
Granda Joe
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/03/2005 - 02:22As I surf various blogs, I find one, which seems to be nothing but memories of deceased famous people. It seems strange to me. I find another blog dedicated to the loving memory of a sister who died a year and a half ago in a tragic car accident. This one is much more real to me.
I did not intend to write two posts in such quick succession to one another about death, but that is the way life, and death, sometimes is.
Happy New Year
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/01/2005 - 10:45There is an old joke that goes, “How do you make God laugh? Make plans.” I think it is important to remember this as we make our New Years resolutions. Five years ago, I was the director of technology for a very successful financial institution. Year 2000 was a big concern. I did not expect the massive disruption that some people feared, but I did need to go into the office on New Years day to make sure everything was working properly. With the exception of one report we got from a counter party with the date, January 1, 19100, everything seemed to be working fine.
New Years Day 2000. I was putting my life back together after a painful divorce. I had met a new woman, who I would end up proposing to and marrying in the year 2000. Her mother just died a few months earlier and the grief was still quite strong, but everything looked upbeat. We were putting our lives back together and I was making lots of money.
This doesn’t look like heaven
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 12/29/2004 - 18:03“This doesn’t look like heaven.” That’s what Fiona said as she approached Auntie Anna’s casket at the wake the other day. We had explained to Fiona that Auntie Anna had gone to heaven. Yet, there was Auntie Anna’s body in this strange looking bed surrounded by flowers.
We told Fiona that this wasn’t heaven. That all that she was seeing was Auntie Anna’s body, which Auntie Anna didn’t need anymore. You could see the gears spinning in Fiona’s head as she tried to make sense of it all. She reached out and patted Auntie Anna’s arm. Motionless, Auntie Anna looked like a life-sized doll.
