Linkstew

Good idea: Downloading the Palm Desktop 4.0 beta for OS X to start synchronizing my Palm to help organize my life.

Bad idea: Attempting to synchronize my 8 MB Palm Vx via iRDA to my PowerBook, an operation which took more than an hour to complete.

Uh, anyway, hopefully now that that initial synch is out of the way, it will be quicker in practice... If not, my Palm will continue to be not overly useful in my quest to get organized. =\

Well, this is entirely Peter's fault/suggestion, but he brought it to my attention that Linkstew should be nominated for best programmed blog in the 2002 Bloggies.

And well, if I've got you here and wondering why I should be nominated for best programmed blog, I guess I should at least make a bit of a pitch. So, without further ado, here is why I should be nominated for this:

1. First and foremost, there's "The Stew" -- Check out the end of this entry, with the "Possibly related" links. Viewing an entry's expanded page (scroll down towards the bottom) provides an extended list of related entries, as well as the ability to see why the two entries are related. These related entries are computed dynamically by the site, based on what topics each post is filed under. To my knowledge, no other blog has a feature anything like this.
2. Next, there's the self-coded comments system, which allows the user to either pop up the comments in a new window or view the comments inline on a page with the post the user is replying to.
3. There's also self-coded search functionality, which displays all the entries matching the given search criteria as though it were any other page on my site.
4. Random entry viewing, allowing the user to endlessly amuse him or herself with a random entry from the nearly 1500 I've written over the years.
5. Each entry is filed under multiple topics, and the topics are then correlated and related topics included on each topic page. Look at the Linkstew topic, for example, and notice the "Related topics" in the upper right.
6. The front page and archive pages contain "Current Topics" much like the topic pages include related topics, to show what I was talking about in that time.
7. It does all of this, and the only URLs that contain any messy HTTP strings are the search requests. The URL for an entry view looks like http://www.linkstew.org/noid/1485.html. The URL for a topic view looks like http://www.linkstew.org/cat/LinkStew.html. And the URL for an archive view looks like http://www.linkstew.org/date/January2002.html.
8. Not to mention the part where I wrote the whole back-end posting system, that allows me to post without the need of Blogger or any of those other tools. I'd show it to you, but it's kind of password protected... =\

Of course, if you nominate me for "best programming of a weblog site", you should also nominate Fury.com for that same category. And definitely nominate Peter for "best non-weblog content of a weblog site" for his fantastic musical content. And In Passing for "best topical weblog". And if you're wondering who/what to nominate in other categories, check out Peter's list of suggestions.

So nominations have to be in by 10:00 PM Eastern Standard Time on Sunday, January 13, 2002, so make sure you cast your nominations for the 2002 Bloggies soon!

I really don't like html. There are a lot of things not to like, but the thing that most frequently drives me up a wall is trying to have multiple submit buttons for a single form that do different things. Because a form action is associated with the FORM tag, and not a SUBMIT input, you can't have one form that submits to two different scripts. Having two forms isn't really an option, because then you'd have to have a ton of redundant information on the page. So what you end up having to do is check the value of the submit variable that comes into your cgi, and dispatch based on that. This works, but I hate it, because it makes for big messy if blocks. Also, it becomes a maintenance issue, because you have to make sure the name is the same in both the html printer and in the if cases, so then you have to go define a bunch of constants for your submit names, and it's all just very ridiculous.

Basically, I wish the form action were associated with the SUBMIT instead of with the FORM.

But while I was lying around delirious last night, it occurred to me that you could probably use a javascript onClick to dynamically alter the action of the form. I'm not sure that that works...

But then I realized that the potential "solution" was worse than the problem, and put it out of my mind. For that matter, I realized that I didn't actually want to know if it would work, because if it did work it would only make me dislike html even more.