All about blogs
So at work I have been tasked with setting up a corporate blogging engine. My company would have about 10k users at any one moment that could use the system...so it needed to be robust, self-service and easy to administrate. Turns out, there were only a handful of things that got close to fitting the bill. S9Y, B2Evolution, Blojsom, MovableType, WordPress, Blogger and LiveJournal. The best one in my book is Blogger. At least for straight up broadcast blogging. But Blogger isn't open source and they don't have an appliance you can buy (yet). So I went with LiveJournal. My reasoning was similar to why I picked MediaWiki for the Corp Wiki solution...
- Open Source License
- Second biggest blogging engine (next to Blogger)
- written in mod_perl/perl
- VERY customizable
- Best-practice example in use: LiveJournal.com
- Excellent API support
After some mods to the base libs, we are up and running with our own instance, integrated into the corp SSO and all that goodness...a month later we've moved it to prod. Pretty damn cool. It's amazing how fast it is. You'd almost think by the speed of LJ's main site that it'd be slow, but it's not. The more I learn about LJ, the more I like it. It supports the ATOM API, RSS, FOAF, RDF, and all that goodness. Very cool.
There are also a few companies writing clients that use LJ's API's to post via BREW handsets. Not to mention the couple dozen clients for other platforms (Win/Mac/Palm/CE) that have been out for years. That very much validated my selection of a blogging engine. MovableType, S9Y, WordPress, none of them support the rich feature set of LJ. LJ's user admin interface is a little old school. It could use some polish, but that'll either come from my enhancements over the next few months or from the LJ authors.
I'm very pleased with how this has worked out and I thought I'd post so everyone else can know what a great engine LJ is. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me, I am happy to teach you what I've learned over the past few months.
The funny part about the last month or so...I've been working my ass off on a blogging solution for work. And haven't blogged hardly at all for myself. Heh.
New Star Wars movie 'a bloodbath'
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | New Star Wars movie 'a
bloodbath': "
The new Star Wars film is a 'bloodbath' which deserves its parental
guidance PG-13 rating, a critic has said after an early screening of the
movie.
Revenge of the Sith is the first Star Wars movie to receive a cautionary PG-13 rating in the US."
That rocks. I think I actually want to go see it now. :)
Nerdblog
So, I decided that keeping a seperate 'nerdblog' was silly and am merging the two. If anybody has figured out a good way to merge blogs with blogger, let me know.
Lake Hodges
Tracy and I went to Lake Hodges today to go hiking. The rain has overfilled the lake. Last year when we went, it was so dried up and small, we were laughing at it. This time, it had filled up far beyond normal and the damn was overflowing. Neato. Lots of greenery, wildlife and flowers. No rattlesnakes this time however.
I came home hungry with slight headache. Had some lunch and took a nap for a while. After a dream about getting chased by Jaws, I woke up and worked on the Fiat the rest of the night. Might be starting that sucker soon!
Yesterday I spent the day hacking up that ugly cedar tree in our front yard. Filled two 35 and one 45 gallon bucket with trimmings. Not that much IMHO. But it still has a lot to go. It's so close to the house I'm afraid to use and axe so I may have to get a chainsaw afterall. But powertools are fun.
Working Outside
Worked
outside for a few hours today. New laptop + powerful wireless means we
can sit in the grass against the tree, in the sun. Very nice. In the pic
is Brian, just about ready to fall over.
The reason I'm working outside? Work's been ultra-workey the last few weeks. This week will be a 70+ hour week for me. A first since the Telalink days I believe. But it's ok, I'm really enjoying it...and the overtime is nice. I'm implementing internal corporate blogs. And since it's a big company, it requires a pretty robust solution. Above about 500 employees, you have to start looking at internal company tools like an ISP would. Scaleable, manageable and self service. And since I should expect 10K users, self service is required. A Blogger appliance would be the best IMHO, but that doesn't exist and my contacts at Google haven't told me of anything like it coming out. So, I used a pretty famous open source package, LiveJournal, modified to work with our intranet SSO, fit corporate style, etc. Kind of a bitch to get going. mod_perl + apache 1.3.x. Wish it could run on Apache2/mod_perl2, I feel so lame putting a 1.3 out there after going to ApacheCon. Did a beta demo today to show it to the manager of our department. Good stuff, he liked it. A few more weeks of polish and we release it to the CIO, the first customer. Then to a few VP's that have been asking for it. Then everybody else. It'll change our corporate culture for sure.
Off-Road Skateboarding
Pics of Dan and Will trying out Patty's off-road board and Will's carve board. Cool!
Smoke-walk
Taking a smoke-walk with my co-workers. It's like a smoke-break but instead of smoking, we go for a walk. Discovered a nice little path that takes you out of our office complex and onto a neat little hill overlooking the freeway.
Walking between meetings
So, here I am again walking the .8
milewalk
from W to AE. It's a beautiful day outside. I should do more walking.
A parent's primer to computer slang
This is too good not to share:A parent's primer to computer slang