lukebaker.org

I just got an invite to Measure Map. It’s a hosted stats solution that’s directed specifically at blogs, developed by the people at Adaptive Path. Jeff Veen gave a demo of it at Gospelcon this year. It looks like it is an interesting use of Ajax, including Flash where appropriate. Now all I need is for people to actually read the blog and generate some stats.

Be amazed at my screenshot skills. I took screenshots of the slides used in the BigTable talk. View slides.

I seem to get easily distracted or at least quickly intrigued by new things. It seems that having a constant urge of wanting to learn and understand new ideas and objects has its drawbacks. It seems lately that my personal projects get stopped because I go off and dive into some other completely different topic.

For example, my current Google Maps project is getting side-lined by things like:

• wanting to have a solid grasp of how various hash algorithms work
• wanting to fully understand FastCGI and SCGI and their inner-workings
• watching a very interesting Google talk about BigTable
• from that talk being introduced into Bloom filters and wanting to explore those more

Maybe if I blog about the problem, it’ll leave me… Do I even want that?

37signals released yet another web application today. For an overview I’d recommend their blog post and the tour. The “oh-that’s-cool-and-could-be-useful-in-lots-places” part of Writeboard would have to be the different size circles beside each revision. On the list of revisions they show a circle, which depending on its size tells the user how drastic of a change each revision was. See #4 of the tour.

From Costa Rica to Miami to Indianapolis to Grand Rapids, behold:

Mandy and I have yet to partake, but we will soon. For those un-initiated to Lizano salsa, it comes from Costa Rica and is great when mixed with black beans and rice. Cook up some homemade tortillas and you’ve got yourself a meal!

I recently noticed something quite odd. Apparently the Google PageRank for www.lukebaker.org is significantly higher than the PageRank of lukebaker.org.

PageRank for www.lukebaker.org: 7
PageRank for lukebaker.org: 4

Of course we all know my site doesn’t deserve a PageRank of 7. I investigated a little by using Google’s link: operator. It turned up some really interesting results.

Sites that link to www.lukebaker.org
Sites that link to lukebaker.org

The weird part is all those gospelcom.net pages that apparently link to my site. I have no clue why they would have ever linked to me. They certainly don’t appear to currently link to my site. Also, Yahoo!’s newly released tool doesn’t show any gospelcom.net pages linking to either lukebaker.org or www.lukebaker.org. Any ideas?

Booo for slow office connections, or at least sharing the office connection with other people.

I’ve never used a source code management system for any personal projects. However, I just started using subversion after (1) hearing a lot of good stuff about it at OSCON2005 and (2) reading the first few chapters of Pragmatic Programmer, The: From Journeyman to Master, which strongly encourages using a SCMS for every single line of code you write.

I’ve immediately found reassurance in having my project in subversion. I don’t have to worry that a change I make might be hard to reverse. I can always revert to a previous revision. I’d definitely recommend using a SCMS for all your code. I’m still trying to figure out how to organize all my code to be kept in subversion, including any “throw away” scripts.

By the way, I’d highly encourage anyone who does any coding or application design to read Pragmatic Programmer, The: From Journeyman to Master. I’m about halfway through, and it’s quite good. It feels like the sort of book that you’d want to keep around and occasionally go back to, just to refresh your mind and get a new perspective on whatever project you’re working on.

If you see this post, then the move to TextDrive was successful. I also upgraded to WordPress version 1.6-ALPHA-2-still-dont-use. So far it looks nice, I haven’t had any problems with it. There’s now a WYSIWYG (tinyMCE) for editing and creating posts. The admin area has been prettied up with all sorts of Ajax effects / interfaces. One of the reasons I upgraded to using the latest version out of subversion was so that I could upgrade as easily as the upgrade procedure Matt bragged about. Hopefully I don’t shoot myself in the foot with it, though.

Let me know if you spot any broken things on my site. I didn’t port over the gallery, and I don’t plan to. I plan to use flickr for my photo storing / gallery needs. Any request for lukebaker.org/gallery will be redirected to the gallery on my 1and1 site, however that site won’t exist in a year.

Yikes! I took the plunge. I got a lifetime hosting plan from TextDrive. Up until now, all my hosting has been at 1and1. I had gotten in on 1and1′s free-hosting-for-3-years deal. I actually still have a year left on it, but I just couldn’t let the TextDrive promotion pass me by. Hopefully this decision doesn’t come back to haunt me. :-/