Please don't look at my public websites.  They all suck.  My personal one because I just don't have the time to build a decent one and the one for the corporation I work for because, well, I just work here.

Let me explain.  I am the Senior Web Developer for the corp.  That means I control the servers and design of all the company websites, right?  Well, not quite.  The Network group controls the servers.  Ok, I don't need to worry about patches, viruses, etc., so good.  Oh, and I don't write the content of the websites either.  Well, that's good too, I don't fully understand the needs of the business as communication to their customers is concerned.  So rightly so, I am relegated to the technical aspects, which I certainly prefer.  Wait, I don't do the design either, that is up to the marketing department and business owners.  Too bad our marketing group is entirely print oriented and don't really understand the unique nuances of the web; and of course the business owners shouldn't, that's not their shtick.

So what do I do here again?  I forget...

I love SharpReader.  I have tried dozens of other readers and aggregators and always come back to it.  I just hate the way it treats ATOM feeds.  Or more specifically, MINE.

See, when I posted a entry, it gets a date.  If I ever go back and update it, it gets another date.  This is built into the spec.  One tag is labeled "published" and the other "updated".  Pretty obvious what each is for, yes?  When I tagged my own entries, I just ignored the <updated> tag.  But I have moved to DasBlog to ease my administration and now it (properly) updates said tag.  But SharpReader uses <updated>, not <published>, for its display and sorting algorithms.  So all of my entries show up out of order if I, say, go back and apply categories to stories.

Frustrating...

I want to be able to post rants and anti-establishment entries without having to worry about who sees it.  So I have a "Private" category that I want to filter out. 

You should not see this post!

I have tried to get ATOM to format nice with XSL with nearly no success.  So I switched to CSS.  It works!  Almost.  IE6 doesn't render it properly, which is annoying, as I have been a defender of IE for years.  IE7 should do fine.

If you'd like my CSS file, note the xml-stylesheet tag in the XML and grab it.  If you don't know how, then you don't really need it, do you.

Finally,

I've been watching Woot! for several months now, hoping to get a good deal on... anything.  Well today was a Woot-Off and I snagged myself a 250GB SATA drive (WD, of course) for $60.   Sweet!

Here we go again!

I am going to try this one more time.  This time I am trying to leverage DasBlog (love the name!) on my keydrive to "host" my blog.  It will take care of all of the admin work, I just need to push the RSS ATOM to my Cox Webspace.

Let's see how it rolls!