DISQUS

I'm glad to see you used Perl for a modern social app utility.

Perl still gets the job done as the crow flies.

Hi Dave!

I think you should load up eeeXubuntu on your eee instead of windows. It is a Linux distribution specifically bundled with all the eeePC drivers. You can even install it onto a 4G SDHC card and still boot into Windows from the SSD when you want to.

I have used it with great success as a media machine. The Amarok music player even recognizes when an iPod is plugged in and connects to it smoothly.

It won't be long before you don't care to boot up on the Win partition any more.

It's not that nobody did it, it's that nobody noticed. That has been the way with lots of things - the whole Ajax epiphany came at least 5 years after the techniques were in wide use, for instance.

Take Q42's Quek in this case: http://www.quek.nl/q/index.jsp?url=http://www.q...

I first noticed it in 2001. http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley/2001/...

By virtue of being on your connections list, I got a Linked-In notice saying that you were now connected to John McCain. I wondered how that came about - thanks for the scoop.

You're right - it's never been that hard, and it's practically trivial these days with advanced Ajax toolkits.

I first built it as a proof of concept with less than 100 lines of code on client and server and then expanded it into a free service that's been running virtually unchanged since 2002 - Tim Aiello continues to host it at http://www.blogchat.com. While there are a few long-time users, most people try it out and tire of it after a few days.

There are companies who have extended the idea to provide live product support, and I've used that on vendor sites a few times to good effect. I have never seen the concept gain any real traction outside of that realm, however.

Providing an embedded chat room for blogs, while a neat gimmick, has no supportable business model that I've been able to discover. It might provide minimal incremental value to a hosted blogging service, but nobody's going to pay for it when there are so many free and simple alternatives whose features are "good enough" (such as a shoutbox, one of many examples).

I'm hearin' ya.

FWIW, I went from Radio to MT too (to be exact, Radio-controlled Manilasites to MT, back in 2002) and at the time I had to write my own export/import scripts - a real bear. My move from MT to WordPress in 2005 was a whole different kettle-o-fish, since there was a built-in MT converter thingmy. The hardest part (which means the part I had to RTFM for, and even then it was a cut-paste job) was setting up the Apache-rewrite rules so people coming to the old MT urls would be brought directly to the new WordPress location for the same post. Whole shebang took me about an hour, then I took another couple of hours over the next week to mod my theme.

I would recommend spending any energy you might otherwise spend fixing this in place towards moving your blog from MT to WordPress. I did a couple of years ago and it has been smooth sailing ever since. The SpamKarma2 plugin is a huge help.

I can't figure out why they made it so mac-like that it doesn't even give you sizing handles on the edges but forces you to resize only with the bottom right corner.

At least I can tab to checkboxes and buttons with Win Safari, unlike on the mac (in both safari and FF, seems to be a mac thing). Everywhere but the mac, logins are username [tab] password [tab] rememberme [space-to-check] [tab] submit [space-to-press]. On the mac I have to leave the keyboard and navigate the mouse to the checkbox and button.

Hey you kids, get me an invitation from that Jello tree!

I suppose the most strategically talent-filled stables won't make a difference if you aren't in the right races, which has to happen at the tactical level.

Let's hope the changes that follow from the "peanut butter memo" make selective use of the talent and assets they've gathered rather than simply imposing symmetrical cuts across the board, laying waste to some good foundations for growth.

I know that from a business and acquisitions perspective, Yahoo has seemed stagnant for a while, however from my perspective in the web development geek sphere, Yahoo has been doing a stellar job snarfing up a preponderance of the top talent in the DHTML/Javascript/RichUI (or if you prefer "Ajax") field. Douglas Crockford, Bill Scott, and Simon Willison are but three of the top guys they have on staff - one could easily list a score of others (Eric Costello form the Flickr team comes immediately to mind). They have also contributed some really good development tools for the betterment of the rich UI world with their YUI library and Design Patterns library.

My take is that they are investing some good effort in talent and assets in preparation for whatever Web 2.0 turns out to actually be.

I think anyone who tries to feed us the bullshit that the fraud of impersonation can be reframed as some lesser transgression called "pretexting" perhaps deserves to be sent to Guantanamo and subjected to "waterboarding" and other such fun-sounding and equally accurately named diversions.