mysiteonline™

So there's a lot of emphasis right now on websites that are somewhat engaging and interactive, but can also highly interact with RSS/XML for purposes of other services. I'm currently in the process of creating a sub-site section of the Library's website, and have decided that this section will be graced with a forum script. Since interaction is a big thing now (and I've already mentioned it in this post), I wanted a forum that acted somewhat differently from linear, or even topic-based ones.

In steps the digg.com lookalikes. Digg may not be a forum, but why can't it be?! There are topics, there are replies, and there are categories. There are users, and best of all, there is popularity voting (for users and topics) and RSS! Well...unfortunately, all of the forums that work like this (glorum, onelobby, blogoforum, tagifieds.com -- now owned by Google because it was too good) are hosted solutions, not self-installed. There is no source code, so you either build it yourself from what you can see (and I'm not going to use Ruby, even though it would be the right tool I don't know it), or get it hosted. I really don't want an off-site forum; I like having things integrated.

There's a rather cool looking project called "Blinkk" that is hosted on SourceForge, but it's currently in a closed beta stage and no source code has been committed to the repository just yet. Okay, so I can't wait for that. What now?

Wordpress (authors) come to save the day! bbPress, a forum board created from scratch, with a simple design and purpose in mind, was created. Although there's no voting, there is a plugin ability, so I could easily add it in later, and then contribute back to the bbPress community. Neat. Customizing this "small" beast doesn't look too fun though...I have a lot of customization to do. Oh well. :P

bbPress Website

So, Matt Mecham made a new post on his blog (which I occassionally check for updates that he makes once a month, or once every two depending on his workload) and he actually had another update! Okay, so I have an infatuation with reading programmer's blogs, regardless of what they talk about.

He got in on the discussion of a To-Do list and how he uses a Post-It® Note to ink out things he needs to do -- in this day and age, and a programmer to boot! Okay, well...so do I. Actually, he's got one better on me, I have multiple pieces of scrap paper with short-term tasks spread across my desk, with notes and technical references piled around them. Either way, there's a decent discussion about what software items some of the other people use.

I just took a quick gander at one of them, and it was pretty cool. It's one of those "Web 2.0" styled sites, where it interacts with YOU on a broader scale than most, such as sending SMS messages to your cellphone to keep you up-to-date on things you should be doing, as well as maps things out for you from mashups of Google Maps. Remember The Milk. Funny name, pretty cool looking though.

I also looked at my beloved (not my script, just my choice) "GTD-PHP" script (there's a demo) and noticed the developer updated it quite a bit, at least the UI and styling. To be honest, I'm not sure if I like it, but I think it's just CSS styling, so I should be able to just continue using the old CSS stylesheet. Either way, I need to upgrade.

Another online application that's currently in closed-beta is looking pretty darn cool. If this thing's going to be free, I'm a monkey's uncle. The amount of AJAX and DOM Scripting used is unprecedented, but done well. You'll have to take a look for yourself. Scrybe - Demo Movie. The voiceover talent has a thick Indian accent, so I'm assuming that's also where this script is being developed, not that it matters, but the accent was deep. :)

Well, I've skipped the Amazon Web Services stint for a little while...probably for quite a while in all actuality. I come to find out that the libraries in our library system (we have like 60+ of them so I hear) don't all have correct ISBN information associated with the books; our own library is also culprit. Anything, anything outside of our PAC (Public Access Catalog, the web-based catalog) uses ISBNs as the unique identifier of a book. How in the heck can I mashup anything about the books without a unique identifier that is valuable to everyone? I can't think of anything, so after I got my Amazon S3 key and perused the documentation over for about 10 minutes just to get acquainted, I haven't touched it... It's sad, realy.

Anyway, now I'm back on track to trying to get our Macintosh OSX G5 Server (it's a true-blue -well, silvery white actually- blade server from Apple) working as it should be. I thought Apache would need to be started in the StartupItems control. I've since learned about launchd. I'm reading contradicting information about launchd. One camp says not to use launchd to handle daemons, other camps suggest to use it for daemons but don't actually go into any examples. I can't find any plist file examples that show the httpd process associated with launchd. Anyone have any examples, experience, or anything else? HELP!

If I find anything out later on, I'll try to remember to give an update.

UPDATE: (Nov 7, 2006)