Sunday morning geekfest

Sunday, April 08, 2007 by Dave Winer.

It's been a really interesting weekend, most of it out of view of blogging. I have been continuing the project that involved Apache. I'm doing a static rendering of the Harvard site that hosts the RSS 2.0 spec. It's going well, with the help of the community, it occurs to me that one of the things Scripting News could be is an online tech support workgroup for Apache.  

I think we must all go through this rite of passage, the docs for Apache are so cryptic and inadequate. The design of Apache itself is weak. But it is workable, you know that eventually you'll puzzle it out, and if you can find the right people to help, they can show you how to do what you need to do quickly and surely.  

I'm lucky because the techies who read this site really know their stuff. I know how good they are, because when I'm hunting for answers to Apache questions, the best resources are discussion threads scattered around the web, where people like me asked questions of people like you, and got good answers. But I got more thorough and informed answers than I saw anywhere else, and most important, they explained the theory behind the solutions, so I could in turn pass on my knowledge later. 

The cool thing about Scripting News has always been how smart these people are, how good-natured they are, and how they like to show off what they know! This is a very useful combination of skills. 

Anyway, as of yesterday I had completed the exporting of the named pages on the site, they're all linked into the index page on the new static site. These are, generally, the spec itself, the pages that link from the spec, the example files, and various documents announcing the transition of the spec from UserLand to Harvard ownership. This morning I'm working on exporting the blog posts. Then we come to the comments, and I think I'll stop there, because there has been so much comment spam on this site, that after the technical work is done, comes the editorial work of deciding what's spam and what's not spam, and I've been very carefully avoiding questions that involve editorial judgement. My goal has been to turn over the content of the site, so the new rendering will be as future-safe as we know how to make a site in 2007. It's been an incredible learning experience!