Scripting News
Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution...
Uncle Arno on blogging, revisited
I've been working on archives, getting ready to retire my last Manila server.
One of the sites I was reviewing had a letter written by Thilo Ernst, a scholar who has read the writing of my long-gone great uncle Arno Schmidt, who was a German novelist. I read this letter with new eyes, 12 years after it was written. My blog writing is just as described in the letter.
It doesn't become a book, unless you subscribe to Arno's theory of what books are. Then any random collection of blog posts would make a wonderful book.
I think Dr Ernst is right, I would have had an interesting time talking with Arno.
Maybe in the after life.
It was a gorgeous day in NYC yesterday. This time of year produces some of the nicest weather anywhere, probably because the summers here are so harsh, when it finally turns temperate our souls veer to ecstasy. So I went for an unplanned impromptu recreational walk after running a few errands.
I am in the middle of Late Night Week on Fresh Air, which has been a great series of podcasts, interviews with late night hosts. David Letterman, Fred De Cordova the producer of the Tonight Show, Jimmy Kimmel and Conan O'Brien. So I thought this should be easy, get out my Nexus phone, go to the Fresh Air website, find the next show in the series, and click Play.
Unfortunately they have a "mobile" site, that makes this pretty much impossible. I was standing on the side of 60th St, in the shade, actually getting cold (!) and fumbling around, and finally gave up and listened to some well-listened-to Grateful Dead songs from Mars Hotel that were already on the device.
Why, in 2013, many many years into podcasting, do we not have this completely nailed? Ridiculous.
(My theory, the people who design the websites are execs who go to conferences where VCs give speeches about how mobile sites are supposed to work, and they make the web designers design do crazy stuff that makes the sites not work.)
Feature request for S3-hosted websites
I'm converting a bunch of dynamic Manila sites from the early days of blogging to be static sites served from Amazon S3 buckets. It's pretty great but there's one feature I'd love to see.
S3-hosted sites are case-sensitive. So if an object is named myCamera, and a link to it calls for mycamera, the link will fail.
This behavior might be okay for new sites, but for sites that were converted from other servers, it's a reason not to do the conversion because there are already lots of links that don't have the case right, because in the past they didn't have to.
One more thing -- it would be useful, in different contexts, to have HTTPS as an option. I don't want the content of the pages to be screwed with as they travel from server to the user's machine.
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