Moving diary again
I've decided to put Vitanuova under Leonard Richardson's web logging software, Newsbruiser. This will provide several advantages to me and to my readers.
Advantages to me: Newsbruiser allows multiple items to be posted per day, which means I can post individual items as they are completed, rather than waiting until all pending items are completed simultaneously (which is my current practice and which sometimes delays posts for an extremely long time). Newsbruiser allows individual items to be written as drafts, which facilitates working on separate items concurrently and delaying them until they are really done. This should help me post more frequently, without forgetting anything that I consider important.
Advantages to my readers: Newsbruiser uses web standards better to create a web site that has substantial usability improvements over my code. Newsbruiser exports a public RSS feed, allowing people to subscribe to or syndicate Vitanuova, and to read it from within RSS newsreaders. Some people (like Cory Doctorow and Aaron Swartz) have suggested that many more people would read my diary if it had a public RSS feed; soon it will.
Aesthetics: Newsbruiser has an import feature specifically written for Vitanuova (a factor I did not even consider in deciding to switch to it). Newsbruiser is free software and designed to be extensible and customizable. Newsbruiser is written in Python, my favorite programming language. Newsbruiser's mascot is a pachycephalosaurus.
As I've mentioned here before, I have a huge backlog of dozens of incomplete diary items sitting in a mail spool file. I'm trying to separate all these out and put them into Newsbruiser drafts. When I get that done and post a couple of them to Newsbruiser, and get all of Vitanuova imported, I'll make the new Newsbruiser site public.
Some of the items that were pending when I wrote this message are: Prior art disclosures, or, investing for the future; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time; Physical limits; Asilomar; PC Unix installers; Jack Valenti and the marginalization of technologists; and the Caltech/Loyola Mock Trial. I look forward to getting my diary back on track soon with the help of NewsBruiser.
