brainwagon

I must admit to a certain fascination with Google Maps, and was trying to figure out how it works. AdaptivePath has a nice essay called ajax: a new approach to web applications that describes the alliance of Javascript and XML that makes it possible.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve begun to use statcounter.com to help figure out various statistics about people who visit my blog. It’s somewhat fascinating to realize that less than half of my visitors come from the United States. Look at the pie chart on the right which shows the nationality of the […]

I have to thank Russell Beattie for writing about StatCounter.com, the service that he uses to monitor his website. In the days immediately after the Apple Keynote, his website showed a significant bump in traffic. Neat. I decided to give it a whirl (for the level of traffic that I use it for, it is […]

The PhotoblogsWiki has a nice tutorial on rolling your own RSS feed for a photo weblog. Good stuff, and the kind of bootstrapping that I frequently do myself. The Wiki also references Stephen Downes’ How to Create an RSS Feed With Notepad, a Web Server, and a Beer, a very nuts and boltsy approach as […]

I’ve been thinking for sometime that I should really try out the new development version of WordPress. I hacked some crude support for enclosures into my version, but I heard that there was some new code that is supposed to deal with it in the current version, so I thought I’d give it a try. […]

In an effort to get in the mood for Halloween, I thought that I would change the default color scheme on my weblog until after the ghosts and spooks are gone. Enjoy the pumpkin orange colors, soon we will be back to Brainwagon blue.

I’ve begun to become interested in the idea of audio blogging, or more generally, multimedia blogging. Ideally, I want to have a way to compose and post new entries to a weblog from a mobile location which might include sound, pictures, video and just plain old text. Ideally, this could all be done with a […]

I’m currently using WordPress for this weblog, but I can’t help but feeling that the more that people work on it, the less I’m going to like it. After all, I have rather simple needs, and once those needs are satisfied i don’t really see a huge advantage to adding features that somebody somewhere might […]

Aether is a simple weblog/website authoring system written by Paul Harrison. He’s also got some other cool stuff that he’s written, including GIMP plugins for texture synthesis. He’s also got an electronic singing tortoise.

Mark Pilgrim has released a new version of his Universal Feed Parser. I have mixed feelings about the long term viability of this code, since it parses feeds which do not meet the specifications, which ultimately means that people never fix their broken feeds, but the specification itself is wooly enough that this is perhaps […]

The title is a bit of a fraud. This is not so much an article on how to build your own weblog as a short bit about what I think is important in building a weblogging system, what is not important and how to drive most directly toward a system that is simple, flexible and […]

I thought that this article, Modal Web Server Example Part 1, had some interesting ideas. I think that many existing web applications are hampered by the fact they are implemented in rather crufty and adhoc languages. The author of this seems a bit more disciplined. Some interesting ideas, and an excuse to look at Seaside, […]

As I work to install WordPress on this site and tweak and twiddle the look and functionality, I can’t help but think that every blog, Wiki and content management system isn’t so much an application as a construction set full of pieces that you can assemble to make a blog or website. Is there some […]