A friend of a friend - of many, many friends, actually - died overnight, it seems. The departed is not Seattle local and to my knowledge, I never met him. But lots of people I love chose to love him too, and so I’m unhappy. Reflective, maybe. Moody.
WFHB is having the locals show - Frankie, Phil and Al played. Jim hosted. Now they are playing a song by someone I’ve never heard (Tinyfolk, it seems) called “Oh, I miss my Indiana” which appears to contain a Dale Lawrence lyrical reference and which appealed to my current melancholy.
ATTN LEAGUE:
My RSS project is approaching fruition. How’s this sound?
Y! Pipes RSS aggregation -> Leagueblog.
CRAZY INTERNET GRAPHIC.
1 teaspoon molasses
1 tablespoon hot water
2 oz Kentucky bourbon
Ice
4 oz club soda
a pinch of ground clove, cinnamon, and nutmeg
Stir molasses and hot water together to make an ad hoc simple syrup.
Add bourbon, swirl.
Hold up to light, and experience anxiety at the brown color, turbidity, and lack of transparency. If lucky, note slight greenish tinge.
Add ice.
Fill glass with club soda, and add pinches of spice.
Drink!
—
Inspired by an upper-south molasses cookie that I recall as a ‘lilypad’ and which I associate with a childhood visit to Mount Vernon. Which, I know, is in Virginia.
We ended up not being able to go to a friend’s Derby party, which bums me out a little, having donned the white linen and all. One hopes this might well make up for it.
It strikes me that this can also be made most profitably with rum. Note that the spices and liquors involved were all readily available staples of the day over 200 years ago. As you drink it, you may experience symptoms of time travel.
AFP: Blast of tornados kills seven in US
Ah, geez, on the drive home ATC cited “twenty-five,” up from the above nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nineteen whirlwinds cited by AP. Every year, the same nightmares.
On a hunt for some RSS trickery. The objective is to capture RSS data in such a way as to calso create archives of the data. It’s a hard Googleslog, as the functionality I’m after is in demand by SEO types and consequently there are a raft of “FOR ONLY $50 I WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO BUILD A NO_LABOR TRAFFIC MAGNET WEB SITE ON THE INTARWEB” baloney.
Here’s what I have come up with, for personal reference.
Magpie RSS seems to be the default tool used for any and all server-side RSS post processing activities.
Lilina is a server-side news aggregator. It’s pretty configurable but relies on an aging-out scheme to dispose of older news items. I haven’t found a way to actually write out persistent archives, but the default collection and presentation is based on time, so this might work.
SimplePie, like MagpieRSS, seems to be a popular RSS munger. However, there is a dearth of projects leveraging it. There is a comprehensive how-to in the now-closed support forum on snipping off a cold HTML archive.
The very closest I have gotten, however, is the maybe-too-simple RSSMinisite, which does exactly what I want, but which has some design flaws. It outputs each RSS item to a flat text file in a data archive, which is great, but the filenames are drawn from the ‘title’ element of the item directly, with no error checking. This leads to file overwrites. Restructuring the file-write to incorporate date-time stamps plus a partial title element would solve that problem, and adding a date-based subdirectory creation routine would solve any concerns about overpopulated directories, at least in the short term.
The true short term goal I’m after, though, is just a non-item-count limited RSS update list. For that, I think Lilina meets my needs sufficiently.
Doc 40: Mick Farren, recommended to me with extreme prejudice by the Best Bus Driver in the World.
