August 20th, 2002:

Information Wave Technologies (a New England ISP) has made a policy to ban the RIAA from its network. This included denying their customers access to the RIAA website, as well as placing decoy files on the Gnutella network in order to attempt to discover RIAA attempts to look for material on its customer’s computers and networks. [via Scripting News]

Nucleus is a great blogging tool, as long as you are reasonably happy with the default look of it. Its template system is deep, and very complex. I managed to get all the way through it, and forced it into creating rendering things exactly as they look on revjim.net now.

Well, not exactly. There are somethings it doesn’t provide. For instance, the ability to list the most recent entries is not in its feature list. I’m sure it could be hacked in, or a plug-in could be created, but it wasn’t something I needed to do in order to duplicate my existing site. Additionally, the method of supplying date and time formatting is not very flexible at all, which means that, in order to make the system look reasonably well in all places, some modifications had to be made there. Additionally, it didn’t provide a method of easily allowing more than one index page with different sorting options, doesn’t keep track of modifcation times, and therefore, I could not recreate the “Recently Modified” page.

However, for most intents and purposes, I did manage to recreate my site in it. However, in doing so, I encountered so many things that I didn’t like, that I decided to stick with Movable Type.

For instance, because of the template system, and the lack of any real “if” logic to be employed by the user, navigation links, and per entry links became difficult to make look exactly as they should. entrys the the author wishes NOT to allow comments, my link bar shows one additional navigation separation character, simply because I couldn’t manipulate the system enough to do it any other way. I’m sure there is a way, I just couldn’t figure it out.

Additionally, the text to be displayed in place of the “post a comment” form when comments are not allowed seems to be hardcoded in Nucleus, or is a setting on some screen I didn’t think to look on. I should be able to enter it directly into my template page.

I am still going to consider contacting the author, however. With a little bit of work it could certainly be made to conform to the design needs of just about anyone, all of the hardcoded responses could be abstracted out, and in the end, the product could be very satisifying.

I’m hacking my way through Nucleus‘s template system.

The documentation seems to be complete, though a lot of it is only available by clicking icons next to the items you want help with. This means you need to at least be in the right place in order to find what you’re looking for. This means that I can’t read it all in one place to get an understanding of it, before diving in head first.

It is very complex, yet its complexity doesn’t seem to offer flexibility that wouldn’t be available if doing it as Movable Type does, or by employing the Smarty templating engine. It employes a system of skins and templates that takes some geting used to. After a little while, I thought I had it. A skin represented an entire page, and a template represented the elements in that page. This seems to make sense.

However, those lines get very blurred because the “template” concept is overloaded in Nucleus. The only time templates are actually used is when calling various Nucleus functions from within a skin (i.e. blog() or archivelist()). Because of this, it seems it would make more sense to create templates based on the function that would use it. Have an “archivelist” template, and a “blog” template, for example. But instead, in Nucleus, each template contains placeholders for ALL of the different functions.

So in my “default” template I have a section for the “blog” function, and a section for the “archivelist” function (among many others). However, the “archive” function uses the “blog” settings (and the “archive” funtion shouldn’t be confused with the “archivelist” function, which are different entities all together), so this means that another template needs to be created if one wishes the “archive” pages to have the entries show differently than they do on the front page (which I do). the same thing goes for the categories archive pages.

Everything considered, the template system is complex, seems hackish, and very difficult to absorb (especially given the state of the documentation). However, in the end, it appears the tool will function better than MovableType. Do the ends justify the means? We’ll see.

I’ve also found a few more cons. First of all, you can only place an item in ONE category. This seems absurd and is certainly a technical limitation that is easily overcome. Secondly, the date and time cannot be specified for an item. You can post-date it, and it will publish at that time, but you can’t pre-date an item and have it slip immediately into the archives.

One thing is for certain: Nucleus needs a template system overhaul REAL bad.

As I am growing increasingly frustrated with Movable Type, I have begun researching lesser known weblog/CMS solutions. In my quest, I have stumbled across Nucleus. I have installed it in a test location and have begun testing it.

It looks good. There are some things that Movable Type has that it doesn’t, but not many. Here are my list of pros and cons (in general, though they are in comparison to MovableType):

• Pros
  • PHP
  • User registration
  • Cleaner comments system
  • Dynamically generated content (via MySQL)
  • Clean categories pages
  • Ability to view posts in reverse order beyond the front page without digging into the date-based archives
  • Items can be noted to the reader as “new”
  • Items can be dated in the future
• Cons
  • Messy URLs with millions of question marks and ampersands that serach engines don’t like
  • URLs that don’t mean anything to the average reader with things like blogid=1 and cat=79 in them
  • Less flexible (and very complex) templating system that works more like LiveJournal and less like MovableType and/or Smarty
  • Still no threaded comments
  • Still no ability (without adminstrator intervention) for regular users to receive notification when new comments are made to a post
  • Doesn’t ping blo.gs (but neither did MT… I had to hack it in)

It does have a plugin system (which I have yet to research) that might allow some of the above things to be improved upon. Additonally, the author seems to be a decent programmer commited to serving the interests of his users. If I can get him to agree to a template system modification, I might be more willing to do the work, as it wont just be for me. Additionally, with a little bit of rework (and again, with the author’s approval) the system can be made to support cleaner URLs that are search engine friendly with complete backwards compatibility.

As soon as I learn the existing templating system, I’ll consider switching.

The Morning News has an article on Internet Dating written by Dennis of 0(zero)format (one of my daily reads) that will go down in history as the definitive guide to Internet dating:

The body of your ad is where you talk about yourself. Whatever you do, don’t be honest. If you were the kind of person people wanted to date, you wouldn’t be writing a personal ad on the Internet. Now is your time to shine.

[ ... ] Including a photo is a great idea, as long it’s not a photo of you. If no one else’s photo is available, keep it blurry. Only show yourself from the neck down — or the neck up! The more you leave to the imagination, the more likely it is that someone will find you attractive.

Jeffrey Zeldman writes:

We’ve all heard the one about the Japanese soldiers stationed on a remote Pacific island who continued to fight World War II through the 1960s. Nobody had told them the war was over. We’re not sure why we mention that story, but a shiny new Netscape 4.8 upgrade is now available for downloading.

(dedeicated to Jess. For letting me dream again.)

He sat outside, watching the sky before the sun had come up. One by one the little windows on his street lit up with flickering televisions and morning showers. Yet all the world was silent save the river, which never sleeps, and one cricket, who was either too stupid to realize morning was coming or too smart to care.

He went inside, fumbled into their bedroom in the dark, and woke her with a kiss on the forehead. She stretched a “good morning”, smiled, and asked what time it was.

“Get dressed. Quick,” he said.

She pulled yesterday’s jeans over her hips, slid on one of his old t-shirts, and stumbled into the living room to find him. He was waiting by the door with two cups of coffee and his keys in hand.

He handed her a cup, opened the door and said, “Let’s go.”

She went through the door asking, “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere. You’ll see,” he said.

He opened her door to his pickup truck and she climbed inside, sipping her coffee. He got in his side, kissed her quickly, and started the engine. They drove down the highway, windows down and the sky still dark, passing the morning’s traffic coming the other way. He got off the highway and wound his way through back-roads until his truck was on top of a hill facing nothing but the brightening sky.

“Just wait,” he said, pointing to that spot on the horizon that his eyes had been fixed on all morning.

The sky was getting brighter by the second running red and blue and orange paint across its face like tears. She looked over at him and he smiled, pointed at the sky again and said, “watch”.

She took off her seat belt, climbed onto her knees facing him, sipped her coffee again, and stared into the swirls of color forming over their heads. The air outside was getting warmer and it was bright enough to see each other clearly now. He glanced at her and smiled tracing the shape of her breasts under his shirt with his eyes. Then he looked back at the sky.

“Any second now,” he said.

She set her coffee in the cup holder, placed one hand on his neck, grabbed his face with her other and turned it to meet hers. Their eyes met and she kissed him softly. He look at the sky again then turned his chest toward her, closed his eyes, and kissed her again. As they kissed, she pressed her chest into his.

It was a long kiss. The kind where you stop just long enough to breathe, and then you kiss some more. The kind where the entire world disappears leaving nothing but the two of you.

They opened their eyes and noticed it was brighter and warmer than before. He looked into the sky and saw that the sun had risen; it’s sphere well above the horizon and almost too bright to look at. Most of the paint in the sky has faded. He looked back at her.

“We missed it, ” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He smiled softly, kissed her again and said, “Baby, we didn’t miss a thing.”