January 2002

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), farm workers are risking their lives every time they enter a manure pit.

A nice summary of the situation:

Ok, so Spurrier leaves and is replaced by Zook who was once demoted by Spurrier in favor of Bobby Pruett who left to coach Marshall (in exchange for Billy Donovan) only to lose off coord Ed Zaunbrecher to Zook, in order to fill the offensive hole left by Spurrier who accepted a job with the Redskins, ousting Marty Shottenheimer whose son Brian played QB at Florida under Spurrier. Everybody got that?

If you look at the little bit at the end of each of the entries here, you’ll notice something new. Yep. My first major hack of MovableType has been a success. You can now email an entry to anyone you want through a handy pop-up window. It’s just like the Yahoo! feature.
Ben - the dude that co-wrote MovableType with his wife Mena - was a great help. So was my co-worker Youshik.
Once I have some of the finer details working, I will write a little tutorial on my projects blog and package it for distribution so all MT users can implement it.* It should take about a day or so.

*That is assuming that Ben and Mena say it’s okay for me to do that!

<Montgomery Burns>
Excellent!
</Montgomery Burns>

I’m about 75% done with my mt-sendentry.cgi development. Youshik has been a tremendous help with some of the trickier Perl bits and Ben is the man for being so cool about answering my eMails. I really hope I can finish working on it tonight so I can have v 0.1 released by this weekend.

Three years ago this month I made my very first purchase from Amazon.com. They sent me a coupon for a $10 discount on any purchase over $50 to celebrate my Amazoniversary. Is this a cheesy marketing gimmick? Yes. Does it work? Yes. I probably won’t even use the coupon; it expires on January 31st. But it’s little things like this that reinforce my belief that Amazon.com is the slickest “e-commerce” enterprise. As far as I’m concerned, they do everything right. Amazon and Google are the only two sites that have continuously improved over the years, and have (yet) to do anything to really tick me off. I love the fact that they remember what I’ve bought and what I own and what I’ve told them I like and dislike. (How cool would it be if you went to the grocery store and discovered that they had moved the beer aisle closer to the front door? And what if there was a clerk standing there saying, “I’ve noticed you like Budweiser. Did you know that many people who enjoy Bud also like Amstel Light?” or, “You’ve bought pretzels three times this month, so we started to stock more varieties to make sure you’re happy.” Or, heck! What if you got a letter from the grocery store saying, “You’ve been a great customer for three years now. Take $10 off the next time you come in!”)

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Ever hear of the flastmod include? Me neither. Here’s what it does. You can use it just like a #include directive server-side include, except instead of including a file, it returns the last modified timestamp of the file you request. If you’re using SSI in your site, add:

<!– #flastmod file=”index.shtml” –>

to any parsed file (ending in shtml) and it will print the last modified timestamp of whichever file you pass as the parameter. Nifty, eh? (See the bottom of the Works in Progress index page for an example.)
Note: MovableType users can simply use the <$MTDate$> tag to get the same data.

A few people have asked me about the MicroPoll in use on the “FingerTouch” post. I snagged it from Technoerotica!

Any time you see anything interesting here at davidgagne.net relating to code or web design or blogging, there’s a better-than-even chance that I’ve described how I did it (or written a tutorial even!) on my Projects blog. Check it out!

It was a dark and stormy night.

I had a rebuild error in my individual archive template.

I yelled at my monitor, “What could it be?!”

I hadn’t modified that template in weeks! Something was wrong. And it was bad. I couldn’t rebuild all. Ack! What to do? I begged Ben for assistance.

“Help!” I cried in the night. “My rebuilds are failing and I don’t know why!”
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Note to self: Remember to change MT/lib/MT.pm line 205 from

return $mt->error(”Building entry failed: ” . $entry->title);

to

return $mt->error(”Building entry failed: ” . $tmpl->errstr);

More on this later!

Here’s a very handy tutorial on CGI Programming.

Has anyone ever used BitBeamer? I’ve been using WS_FTP forever, and I just downloaded LeechFTP, but I’ve started looking for alternatives. What’s your favorite ftp app?

Note: Yes, I know that this page gets about 3 readers/month, but I still thought I’d put the question out there.

My drive home is always exciting.

from McSweeney’s: On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor

Sometimes I just find the coolest stuff at Opine Bovine … This guy, for instance, just kills me.