Asymptomatic

Greetings, authors of blog-posting desktop clients! This post is for you!

Actually, this post is about you. I've spent the past four hours trying to implement Atom Publishing Protocol. Actually, it's been days longer than that as I've been implementing and re-implementing accoring to the various documentation I've found online, but I've spent the past four hours just trying to get Ecto to work with my APP server code, and now I'm flat-out angry. It's not just Ecto, and I'm not sure that I should only blame the Atom architects either, so let me explain my issues.

I'm trying to implement a lot of the Atom Publishing Protocol as a server. I want to be able to list blog entries, update them, and create new ones. I have written my Atom implementation to the most recent spec, and when I access the entrypoints using raw Telnet and HTTP headers over port 80, I get the appropriate responses back from my server according to the spec.

This seems great, but this is not the end of the battle -- The so-called "Atom clients" I've been able to find just don't seem to support the spec. more

This weekend, instead of attending the Philly meetup that I organize, I'm heading up to New York City to visit with Jason and his meetup.

In case you wondered, the Philly meetup is still on, even though I won't be there, I'm sure some people will show. Check the RSVP list. Don't forget that the Philly Weblogger (non-WordPress) folks show up right afterward, so be sure to have a beer and wait around.

As far as the New York meetup is concerned, I'm currently under the impression that I'll be answering questions posed by the group, specifically things that people wrote about on my request for requests. If nobody asks any questions, then I'll just go down the list of topics from that post, babbling incoherently about many WordPress topics....

Unfortunate Event indeed. Abby and I had just finished watching the end of A Series of Unfortunate Events, when I switched the TV back to satellite and saw American Idol contestents trying to sing Queen.

I sat in front of the TV dumbfounded, and I couldn't turn away from the trainwreck. I know Queen fans who are turning over in their graves who are not even dead yet.

One of the contestents actually had the gall to say that he hadn't even heard the song he was going to perform until a week prior. You're a singer vying for a place as a so-called "American Idol" and you didn't know that song? How long have you been living under a rock?

Note that I haven't been watching this poor show all season, so I have no idea of what chaff they've already thrown off. But for pity's sake, I can only imagine how bad they must have been to have only these fools remaining. The quality of the contestants is so pathetic, I wonder how anyone can stand to watch the show. more

If you're in Philadelphia this weekend, come join us for the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup at 2pm on Saturday. We're a pretty relaxed group, and we're definitely not all geeky (ok, I'm usually the only geek present) so don't think that you need to have technical skills to come hang out.

We talk about WordPress and general blogging, and if you have technical questions there is usually someone around who can point you in the right direction. For example, we have had discussions on how enthusiastic new WordPress designers can create more advanced themes for WordPress. We've talked about the best plugins to use for different purposes. And we've also talked about recipies for desserts. Like I said, very informal.

And if that's not enough for you, the Philadelphia Weblogger Meetup shows up right after our little subgroup, so you can interact with all of the prominent Philly blogger folks and convince them all to switch to WordPress. ...

Have you noticed slowness when posting lately? I've seen more than a few recommendations on how to fix this issue, but no real fix for the fix.

WordPress 2.0 has moved the essential trackback/pingback/enclosure mechanics into a special script that gets loaded separately from when you publish a post. Instead of cycling through all of the pingbacks and trackbacks that it has queued before returning control to the browser (like in version 1.5), the publication process spawns a request for the special script and just continues normally.

The result is that you don't wait for pingbacks to finish when you publish, and they still get published properly, but in the background. So what's causing the big delay these days, if that mechanism is set up to prevent it? more