Posts tagged: THE WELL

I’ve recently moved the Wellblogs aggregator to my server from its former home. It’s a simple “planet” style presentation that shows the last week’s worth of posts across a few dozen blogs written by members of The Well.

The software is a Python engine written by Michael Josephson, and I’ve been very impressed with it so far. It’s based on Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser, a MySQL data store, Cheetah templates, and some extra bits to gracefully handle the inevitable connection failures involved when fetching dozens of disparate feeds every hour. Getting everything working was a breeze, and as someone doing more web development in Python lately I’m finding the code interesting reading. Hopefully the blogs are too!

Over on the Well, in a what-is-this-web-2.0-thing-anyway topic, I posted:

I’ve been thinking about starting a joke social networking/sharing site called “huester” where you can post your favorite colors, tag them, make RSS feeds of them…

Within a couple hours Jeffrey had posted a link to colorcombos.com. It’s a site that lets you post your favorite color combinations, tag them, make RSS feeds of them… The only thing it’s missing is friending.

Half an hour later Laura posted a link to colr.org. Tags, RSS feeds, and Ajax! They get bonus points for Ajax. And for omitting that last vowel.

Ten years ago today was the public launch of Salon (as salon1999.com, not salon.com). I can’t say that I’m surprised they have lasted, because their work has consistently been excellent.

Through Salon’s connection to the Well I have gotten glimpses of how hard they have worked over the years, and I’m glad that it has continued to pay off in terms of editorial quality and reader respect, if not guaranteed solvency. (I know that predicting the hour of Salon’s demise is a fixation for some – mostly people who read second-hand accounts of SEC filings, as far as I can tell.)

Some domain names become active verbs: I googled it. Others become passive verbs: I got slashdotted.

BoingBoing, linked to by over 16,000 blogs, is a passive verb too, and two weeks ago my server got BoingBoinged.

Joe started it when he made a posting on the Well with a link to a series of (bloodless) photos from a huge motorcycle ride turned motorcycle pileup. Somebody suggested a slideshow; I took the opportunity to exercise my mass-image-resize script and to check out ImageReady’s ability to export animations as Flash. I put the resulting 2.6MB file on my neglected moto-blog, posted the link to the Well, and went on with my evening.

Though LightTPD (or “Lighty”) is the darling lightweight webserver of 2005, Jef Poskanzer’s thttpd has been serving static content securely and wickedly fast since 1995 or so.

O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com recently posted a tutorial, “Lightweight Web Serving with thttpd”, which is worth a look if you run a high-traffic site or have underpowered server hardware. The article walks you through installing and configuring thttpd, setting up CGI and virtual host support, and using thttpd as a static content server behind a more full-featured server like Apache.