Matthew Rasmussen's journal of journals on various topics of interest, published here, there or somewhere since 1999.
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File Under: /web/blosxom
Blosxom still pretty much just damn works, but it's dying. A dead News link on a project site is never a good sign. It won't be long before the STP will have to move to another weblog backend, but that's for another day.
Today's issue: Facebook keeps inexplicably dropping my RSS feed. Facebook is of course happy to pretend there isn't an internet outside its walls, but I get a lot more feedback on my ideas through Facebook than in the blog comments. Whether it's the cause of this problem or not, in keeping with its age, Blosxom serves feeds in the RSS 0.90 format, which would be a bit of a ColecoVision even if Blosxom had ever done it right.
I've modified my copy of the blosxom.cgi script to produce a modern RSS 2.0 feed that validates correctly. You can do the same. Here's how:
1. Open blosxom.cgi in a text editor and scroll to the bottom.
2. Replace this rubbish:
rss content_type text/xml
rss head <?xml version="1.0"?>\n<!-- name="generator"
content="blosxom/$version" -->\n<!DOCTYPE rss PUBLIC "-//Netscape
Communications//DTD RSS 0.91//EN"
"http://my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-0.91.dtd">\n\n<rss
version="0.91">\n <channel>\n
<title>$blog_title $path_info_da $path_info_mo
$path_info_yr</title>\n
<link>$url</link>\n
<description>$blog_description</description>\n
<language>$blog_language</language>\n
rss story <item>\n
<title>$title</title>\n
<link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn</link>\n
<description>$body</description>\n </item>\n
rss date \n
rss foot </channel>\n</rss>
3. With this rubbish:
rss content_type text/xml
rss head <?xml version="1.0"?>\n\n<rss
version="2.0">\n <channel>\n
<title>$blog_title $path_info_da $path_info_mo
$path_info_yr</title>\n
<link>$url</link>\n
<description>$blog_description</description>\n
<language>$blog_language</language>\n
<generator>blosxom $version</generator>\n
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>\n
rss story <item>\n
<title>$title</title>\n
<pubDate>$dw, $da $mo $yr $ti:00
GMT</pubDate>\n
<link>$url/$yr/$mo_num/$da#$fn</link>\n
<guid
isPermaLink="true">$url$path/$fn</guid>\n
<description>$body</description>\n </item>\n
rss date \n
rss foot </channel>\n</rss>
That's it.
>HP: 0
File Under: /culture
1. verb. Treating a verifiable fact as a philosophical opinion. (Evolution, heliocentrism, tax rates, etc.)
2. adjective. An idea which is neither fringe nor mainstream; a plausible idea without sufficient refuting or corroborating evidence.
3. noun. The desire to marry outside one's ethnicity, religion or culture.
4. noun. The talent for attracting resources to oneself, as distinct from talent or charm.
5. noun. The peculiar semi-English used in Indian advertising. India's version of "Engerish."
6. noun. Putting a great deal of work into looking less attractive.
7. noun. The inflated price of a good or service from which a predetermined "discount" is expected to be deducted. (Magazines, cars, medical services, etc.)
8. verb. Looking for attractive friends-of-friends on a social networking site.
9. adjective. The quality of a language to sound good rapped.
10. noun. An imagined period of time which doesn't fit into the known timeline of history. (Nationalist myths, "ancient wisdom," the 1001 Nights stories, etc.)
11. noun. The ageing character who survives the story despite having little concern about his or her death. (The hostages in the Nausicaa mangas, Terence Stamp's character in The Limey, etc.)
12. pronoun. A neuter third-person singular.
13. pronoun. A second-person plural distinct from the second-person singular.
You'll notice that there are no adverbs on the list. We have more than enough adverbs as it is, and compositions are usually improved by their deletion.
Some suggestions for the above:
1. To murdoch? In honor of its greatest worldwide proponent.
2. Borderland? Useful for grain-of-salt publications like "Counterpunch."
3. No idea. "Exo-" constructs sound too cold.
4. Does this already exist as an off-label use of the word "gravity?"
5. Hindlish? (Hindi + English.) Not entirely accurate, but most Indian culture that reaches the West escapes via (Hindi speaking) Bollywood.
6. Emoing down? More of a term than a word.
7. Bulltag?
8. This usually gets lost under the broader term "Facebook stalking."
9. Spittable? As in "Korean is not very spittable."
10. i-time? Ugly, esoteric and hyphenated. Refers to the mathematical concept of i -- imaginary numbers which can be visualized as extending to the left and right of the number line.
11. Old soldier? Most stock characters get a term, not a word.
12. Ee? (False root of "he" and "she.") None of our other pronouns have this problem.
13. Yall? I still flinch when I hear "y'all," but unless we somehow bring back the third person singular "thou," it's our best hope. Perhaps we should drop the apostrophe and make it a proper word.
>HP: 3
>1) yes, we do need a word for that 5) Inglish? Ingrish? (from 'In'dia) 7) Nice. I like it. 12) YES. 13) My Classical Hebrew book translates the plural second person into "thou", and it took me a long time to understand what it was referring to, i.e. how "you" and "thou" or "ye" and "thee" or whatever it is they were using differ. Confusing....
>The Hindi word for English (the language, the people -- and basically white people in general) sounds in our mid-Atlantic accent sort of like UN-GRAEZ or UN-GRAE-ZEE (soft mouth G and R, like in French) even though phonetically Hindi could easily render IN-GLISH or British EEN-GLUSH. I still like "Hindlish." Saying it aloud sort of forces you to reach for that high, pure "i" and clean "l," which takes you halfway to what I know of the Mumbai accent anyway.
>Well, you know far more about Hindi and India than I do, so I defer to your expertise...
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