A Transformation In My Thinking

Recently, at the urging of a well-known Web dude, I added “permalinks” to the entries here.  That’s what the little paragraph symbols are all about.  At that point, I figured that I ought to drop all of my past posts into some kind of system that could automatically generate said “permalinks,” as well as allow me to finally publish an RSS feed.

Most people would say “I’ll use Blogger!” or “time to install Moveable Type!” but I didn’t really want to run a CMS package just to store and syndicate my random mutterings.  So I of course did the obvious thing, and decided to pour the whole archive into XML, using my own private markup, and then teach myself XSLT so I could take that archive and produce whatever output I wanted—the home page’s five most recent entries, the permalink archives, an RSS feed, whatever.  Okay, there was an actual work-related reason: learning XSLT will make me better able to help manage DevEdge, which is driven by XML, XSLT, and CSS.  But mostly I was doing my usual thing, and effectively learning how to fly a helicopter just to get to the corner grocery store.

So here it is!  You syndicators can pick up the RSS feed if you like, and be automatically informed whenever I work up the energy to write another entry.  Aren’t you lucky?  I know you’ve just been dying to see this happen.  I even went to the effort of writing entry titles, which I didn’t have before, just to make the feed content look better.  Who loves ya?

Now I’ll probably decide to teach myself HTTP and Perl just to build my own skeletal RSS aggregator.  Yeah, that sounds reasonable…

• A Transformation In My Thinking was published on Friday, October 4th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Tech category.
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