Site questions
What's a "den"? Is it a blog? A wiki?
A "den" is this site, in its current iteration (2008 April). It's not a blog or a wiki. It's a den.
But you're using pyblosxom! Isn't that designed to be a blog?
Hush.
If pyblosxom were really a blog, it would have comments built in.
Where do I post my comment?
I would love to hear from you! Please email me: bill@billpowellisalive.com.
No, I mean post my comment.
Ah, that. I have never yet experienced a comment posting system that kept out spam. I'm already battling spam in my email inbox, so I'm much less likely to miss your comment there than in a glazed perusal of hundreds of comment spam. Please don't think I want to ignore you. I love when a post sparks a lengthy conversation.
I also find that some people like to contact me without tossing their note in the blistering Internet sun. So I do assume your comment is private--let me know if you want me to post your thoughts.
Update: You can now click the handy "send public comment" link after every post, too.
Where's the site map?
There isn't one. It's a den. But you can prowl around with the tags on the right, or simply type in a date, like http://billpowellisalive.com/2007/03.
Hey! That old post isn't under the same date/tag anymore!
Yes, I'm glad you brought that up. Do not link to dates or tags. They change.
How do these dates work?
The updated date changes every time I update a post. (Unless I do it sneakily, without changing the file modification time.) This "updated" date determines the date listings: if you type http://billpowellisalive.com/2004, you'll get all the posts that were last updated in 2004. You can do months, too, e.g., all the 2004 January posts are at http://billpowellisalive.com/2004/01.
Or you can type http://bpalv.com/2004/01. I love my site name, but all those l's and i's start to blur in tiny sans serif.
However, browsing by date is somewhat unreliable; if I update one of those old 2004 posts, it bubbles up to this year and month. On a blog, this would be Very Bad, if not the Kiss of Death. But are you really interested in what I was thinking in 2004, because it was 2004?
Of course, chronology does have some use in this world, so that's why I have the begun date. This is just what it sounds like, and it shouldn't change. From now on. I'm not positive about every last page I migrated, though I did try. And this is a good time to slip in that I might pop in this "begun" datestamp when I first start a post, or when I finish it, or 3 days later when I put the last touch on and post it. Does anyone care? It's embarrassing to even to get into this kind of detail, but consoling to recall that, since you're reading this, I guess you care.
In short, none of the dates are guaranteed accurate. I hope that's not a problem for you.
Doesn't this violate the sacred Principle of Archiving By Date?
Yes.
And yes, I have read that article by Tim Berners-Lee about URIs. It's a great article! (Incidentally, if you're going to go over there, I also recommend the little history of the World Wide Web.)
I hate long, breakable links as much as the next guy. And his
warnings about categories are perfectly valid: just recently I've
realized that I shouldn't keep using linux as a category to include
programs like vim, which of course runs on almost anything you like.
If I want to move /linux/vim/vimoutliner to /vim/vimoutliner,
links to the old page will break (unless I add yet another entry to
.htaccess). Which is why Berners-Lee recommends a link like this:
http://www.w3.org/1998/12/01/chairs
The makers of Wordpress took this advice, and thus so did I. But while it makes sense for the New York Times, it's rather a pain to link to anything on your own site without a hunt.
When I found out more about wikis, I discovered that wiki folk had no intention of archiving by date. But they also had no intention of getting tangled in Collapsing Category Mayhem. There's a simple wiki solution. No categories. Every page has a different name. For instance, the Wikipedia entry on Chesterton is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton
The wiki/ directory is presumably rather large. Thinking about it
makes me dizzy. But if you think Wikipedia is a mind trip, you should
wander the original wiki:
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors
Once again, every page is in the same namespace. I just made my own page: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BillPowell. There's not much there, of course, because I'm in the middle of doing this.
And I don't know about you, but I think in terms of "chairs", not "chairs in 1998 on December 1st". If Wikipedia and the WikiWikiWeb can manage without incessant namespace collisions, the scheme ought to be able to survive my output.
So I'm going to try the wiki model: almost every page goes in the root
namespace. Or at least a single directory. What's better,
markdown/syntax and markdown/why or markdown-syntax and
markdown-why? A tough call.
I'm looking forward to a Big Directory. But with pyblosxom, they'll all be text files. Easy to grep, easy to edit. As long as I don't change the name of page once it's up, I can edit everything as much as I like. At last.
What about tags? What are tags? Why can't they just call them categories? Why can't the Internet sit still? Why do headers look dumb when they get too long?
Tags are a way of "tagging" a file with multiple ideas, rather than agonizing over the One True Category. Conversely, a tag is a match held up in a vast cavern, attracting particular creatures to its particular light.
Since tags are not part of the URI scheme, I can delete and add them as I like. Tags are simple to use. You just type, say:
http://billpowellisalive.com/tags/quest
Or even: http://bpalv.com/tags/quest
You can pop in any word you like instead of quest, and see what
happens. Most of the tags are in the tag cloud at right.
Most.
What if I actually want to link to a page?
Just copy the URL from the link to this link. You might see this sort of link elsewhere as a "permalink", which is a perfectly good name too. It just took me awhile to figure out what the heck it meant, so I thought you might be in the same boat.
Why does bpalv.com bring me straight to the den, but billpowellisalive.com goes to this whole other, prettier site?
The web address billpowellisalive.com is great fun, and it's how most people first visit the site, so it takes you to the front door. But it's rather a beast to type, especially on a regular basis. I thought you (and I) might appreciate something shorter, and if you're dropping in frequently, you're probably heading right for the den.
They both point to the same site, though. So both http://bpalv.com/faq and http://billpowellisalive.com/faq point to this page. The longer form is probably safer for a link.
If a page suddenly looks "pretty" again, it's probably one of the few "formal" pages that are linked to on the home page. Don't fret. And you can also access them with the "den look" through things like tags and dates, anyhow. That's pyblosxom flavours for you.
Why does your site look like 1995?
Don't you feel a bit cozy? After slogging through swamps of Flash
navigation and Blogger template div nightmares that take five
minutes to load, I always get a good feeling when I come to a clear
limpid stream of pure HTML.
Of course, this isn't pure HTML. CSS is a Very Good Thing. Perhaps it's lightly flavored HTML.
Philosophical questions
How can I find absolute certainty?
You can't.
Are you sure?
Yes.
Mathematical questions
What is 4 plus 19?
24.
Other questions
Is this the last question?
No.
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