So I'm sitting on a site post, and the conversation goes something like this:

[Bob] the sites not up yet... :)
[Bob] it just started restarting about 5 minutes ago
> Aren't the suns like the old AT's?
> Is the Turbo button depressed?
[Bob] it comes with Turbo enabled by default
> Have you tricked out the E25K with neon lights and peltier coolers?
[Bob] and 22"'s
> sweet! with the spinny rims?
> we should totally photoshop a tricked out sun box

Fifteen minutes later, and voila, you get this.

I get a strange kind of satisfaction out of being (non-clinically) obsessive compulsive. For example:

• I can't stand typos, particularly my own
• Blosxom dates/orders blog entries by last modification date, not creation date
• I'm a bit neurotic about having my blog entries reflect the time/date/order they were actually created

What do you do when you notice a typo in your earliest blog? (Note to self: It's spelled "blosxom" which I realized only when I got a surprisingly small number of responses from google when searching for "bloxsom" vis-a-vis "blosxom")

With the thought that I'd have to find some way to hack the blosxom source to make it do what I want, google pointed me towards a much more elegant solution: "touch -t [timestamp]" will allow me to revise the entry for typos, but maintain the original creation date. Amazing what one learns via RTFM.

At first I was stumped about how to RSS-enable my blog for Safari. After doing a little bit of research at Apple.com, the fix is pretty simple. All you have to do is add a "<link>" tag to your HTML header, like below.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="feed://www.khan.org/blog/?flav=rss" />

Substitute your own URL for the href (again, if you're using Blosxom, appending ?flav=rss to your URL will suffice), and you're set.

One of the benefits of having a familymember who works at a celco is getting neat toys to play with...

So as I sit, waiting for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to begin, I decided to use the Nokia 9300's ssh client to log in and type this entry on its small but capable keyboard.

I don't think people who even use "vi" on a daily basis appreciate the keystrokes vi saves you until you're logged in via GPRS and with a tiny keyboard.

Apparently these 9300's will come built-in with word, spreadsheet, browser and presentation software. Rumor has it they will also have cameras and GPS. With freely available ssh (putty) and IM software, that's an amazing tool at practically any price!

Well, my blog is finally online. It's been over two years since the the word "blog" appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, and here I finally am.

Shout out to Gavin, whose own blog was the final tipping point for me to get off my ass and get a blog going.

Being the geek that I am, surely you did not expect me to blog about anything other than the blogging software I chose to go live with... did you? Well, I've been grappling with this decision for a while. My friend Tom Bridge suggested I go with MovableType or WordPress. Gavin was using the same hosting provider as I do (go go Geckowerx!) and MT as well, so that was my first choice.

That got derailed quickly because the folks at Six Apart can't seem to ensure their download links actually resolve to the appropriate tar.gz. *shrug*

I don't get motivated to do personal technology projects very often (c'mon, it's taken me years to even start looking at blog software), so I wasn't going to let Six Apart's snafu stop me from blogging. I started to do some digging, and ended up at O'Reilly's perl.com site, where contributor Simon Cozens mentioned fellow O'Reilly contributor Rael Dornfest's Blosxom blogging software.

From an "MVC" perspective, Blosxom's "model" is the text file, the "view" is the header/footer HTML snippets I already had from the rest of the stuff here on khan.org, and the "controller" is the blosxom cgi. Simple. Elegant. What more could you ask for? (Actually, it sucks to have to login in order to blog, but there are plugins that promise to extend "control" via Web browser and email so when I get that set up, I can blog from anywhere!)

If all that sounds complicated, the point is that this blog entry is as simple as writing a text file that looks like this:

First Post!
Well, my blog is finally online. It's been over two years since the the word "blog"
<a target="_new" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weblog">appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary</a>,
and here I finally am.<br />
...

It didn't hurt that Rael promised I'd have my first entry up in under 15 minutes (or my money back). This beat the list of items I'd have to go through for MT (and presumably a whole host of other blogging utilities), including setting up a MySQL database, installing a raft of Perl libraries on a box I only have root access on as a courtesy, etc. etc.

I haven't dug into the code, but Blosxom seems to be written and designed the way I was tempted to write my own solution until I stumbled across Blosxom. Thank goodness I was lazy enough (as in the "Three Virtues") to run across Blosxom before re-inventing the wheel!