by Flemming Funch
There are many small or large projects or to-do items that I have on my list to do. You know, that involve programming or server administration. How many of these things I get done depends on many things. It happens in waves. In some periods of time I get lots of my own hardcore techie stuff done. In other periods I work hard to do other people's sometimes boring programming, because I get paid for it. And other times I'm somewhere else, writing about big philosophical or political ideas. Some times I'm doing many things at the same time. Anyway, here's a short list of some of the things I'm working on.- I've been talking with Britt Blaser and Mitch Ratcliffe about Xpertweb, and mulling over the details. It involves a peer-to-peer economic network, using XML data structures. I'm going to play with the elements of a more simple and powerful prototype
- There are a number of features in this NewsLog program (which this weblog appears in) that I need to add:
- At least two levels of RSS feeds, one with full pictures and formatting, and another, more minimal.
- I already made the functionality that can send the daily contents of a newslog out in e-mail, but I need to finish the subscription mechanism, so that people can sign up for it.
- A preview function is needed, so one can see how one's posts will look before one publishes them.
- Spell checking is an often requested feature
- The stuff that appears in my left sidebar in ming.tv is custom. I need to make an easy interface for others to do all the same things.
- The MetaWebLog and Blogger API interfaces need to be implemented, to make it easier to post from various sources.
- I need an integrated RSS aggregator
- Trackback features need to be finished.
- Need to link with TopicExchange as a feature.
- RSS 2.0 features for backing up the full contents of a log
- Switch over to CSS for formatting, and XHTML well-formedness.
- Many more little things
- I just installed Quicktime Streaming Server on my server, but didn't take the time to quite figure it out. And maybe video clips in the weblogs would be a fun idea.
- I just re-compiled my PHP with Sablotron support for XSLT. Cool stuff for transforming XML documents. I need to think about whether to use that to do some things seriously differently.
- I need to make another attempt of getting into Flash enough to know how to make ActiveScript client-server connections with XML. For a number of projects I could really use a little applet in a corner of a page with a real-time server connection. You know, saying "Bing! Your friend Joe just logged in."
- I need a word processor like way of editing text online. You know, where you paint over part of the text and click the Bold button and it becomes bold. One can do that in Java, but I hate Java, and I've turned it off a while back in my Mozilla, which means it hasn't crashed since then. One can do it in Flash. Or I believe one can do it with dynamic HTML if one is a little clever. So I'm going to play with that part some more.
- I wrote a system for laying out websites from within a web browser. I need to make it more general purpose, so it can can used for, for example, laying out the contents of a weblog sidebar, or the way a product is displayed in a shopping cart, or a bunch of other things I need it for.
- I need to update my own server monitoring tools. I administer many servers, and I need a better overview of what is going on with them. I never seem to be completely happy with the existing tools, like Big Brother. I wrote a thing earlier that used XML-RPC for each server to report its status frequently. I just need to patch it up I think.
- I wrote this DNS administration program, for keeping track of hundreds of domains with thousands of virtual hosts, and writing the configuration files and updating secondaries, etc. It works great. However, I need to make it do some more things, such as keeping track of when domains need to be renewed. And keeping better track of servers and IP numbers.
Many more things, I think. But it is good to write them down once in a while.
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