First post

I’ve decided to start using my web presence at scottmartin.net if for no other reason than that it’s not cool to have the “your name” domain sit idle. A blog seems like a good a thing as any. I don’t really care if anyone other than me ever reads it. You can comment if you want, but I almost certainly don’t care about what you have to say unless I actually know you or you are Lyle.

So for a start, I’ve moved away from using Livejournal to read RSS feeds and wrote my own reader. It’ll work better on my phone anyway. SimplePie makes RSS reading laughably easy. Why are the best libraries for actually doing stuff always hard to find? I was looking for work and all I could find was Magpie, which is GPLed and therefore useless (does no one understand that you might as well put your library under the You Can’t Use This Unless You’re a Hippie license), and some other libraries that care what format an RSS feed is in. Why are building the future of the internet on a standard with at least three incompatable versions that do the same thing? And that store dates using some weird text format? It takes SimplePie 10K lines of code to sufficiently abstract all the nonsense.

Another hidden but great library: Net_URL_Mapper, a Pear library that neatly does the Ruby URL mapping thing but that has almost nothing written about it in English. It works perfectly, by the way. This page will probably show up on the first Google result page for it, and that’s pathetic. (Google searcher: look at the test cases, they are all the documentation you need.)