Year: 2005

Programming Texts and Tutorials

Programming Texts and Tutorials is an excellent resource about anything you ever wanted to know on the subject of UNIX programming in general, and Linux in particular. It covers a broad range of languages, protocols and software. Everything from C and Perl to Gimp and Apache. Worthy bookmark indeed.

Update (July 17th, 2016): Since the origin website to which I linked went down, here is an alternative collection of wisdom for all sorts of programming languages and technologies.  Enjoy!

50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work

I stumbled upon an interesting article – “50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work“. It was written specifically for writers, but can easily works with any other creative profession or hobby.

If nothing else, you one can change the title to “50 Strategies For Making Yourself Blog”. I remeber, back in March last year, when I changed my site to run on Nucleus CMS I decided that I will write at least one post a day. The first weeek was pretty tough. After a couple of days during which I was inspired by the new look and feel of the site, my mind went empty. I new I had to write something, but I felt like there is no one thing in the world which is worth it and not obvious enough. So what I did was search the web for something. All sorts of ‘go the random page’ websites became my favourite. I would click ‘I am feeling lucky’ button on Google for about a thousand times a day. Finely, I would come up with just a single link or an idea to mention.

Just a few weeks days later, blogging became an interesting routine. It would take me anything from 20 seconds to 1 hour to write something. I became better. Ideas became easier to get. My writing got better. I started to get into blogging mood much easier.

By now, I don’t have to put any effort into blogging at all. Jez, I have to stop myself from doing it sometimes. I can write 4 to 6 paragraphs straight off the top of my head. Without any preparation. Almost on any subject out there. My head is still a mess, but I see order appearing in there. I catch myself thinking of something. Often. My English got better both in grammar and syntax departments. My vocabulary got bigger.

And… oh, I should better stop now.

RSS Calendar

Yet another interesting application of RSS is RSS Calendar. It is a free service (though currently in beta) with which you can create, maintain, and share your own calendar. Events can be categorized, made private or public, allowed to be commented upon, etc. People interested in your calendar can subscribe to the RSS feed for the whole thing or just a part of it. They can even subscribe to a feed of the single event and get immediate updates on it any time you edit it. Invites and subscriptions can be managed as well. Looks and feels pretty neat if you ask me. The only two small complains that I have with this specific implementation is that:

  1. It relies on the JavaScript too much. Although everything works fine with Firefox, there might be a problem with lynx or some other browser.
  2. Event description is a required field, while in the real world it is not. Events titled like “My mother’s birthday” do not need any description.

Other than that everything seems nice, clean, and easy to use. Try it out.