Laura and I were discussing this evening what the word “weblog” means. It turns out we think different things, and it also turns out I may be wrong. Which means maybe I need to rename this site. I found this article on Diarist.Net (their server sends the wrong media type, so unless you’re using Internet Explorer, you’ll get the source instead of viewing the page. IE is wrong, by the way) that tries to make a distinction between weblogs and online journals. It doesn’t exactly cover our discussion, but it’s close enough for government work.

I use “weblog” to refer to a vast array of different kinds of Web pages, related really only in the sense that they contain information that is updated or amended on a regular basis, and my definition would include most online journals, including ones that Laura thinks aren’t weblogs (and that, in fact, predate the term). Looking over definitions on the Web, it looks like a lot of people would rather use the term to refer only to short (“pithy”) comments presented on a single Web page in a stream of dated entries. Some would like it to refer mainly to entries that focus on the Web; e.g., links to other Web sites with occasional commentary. The latter usage appears to be what the word was originally coined for. Personally, although I frequented plenty of sites by the late ’90s that epitomized that idea, I never actually encountered the word “weblog” itself until relatively recently, and I arrived at my definition by looking at the sites I knew that used it, and I generalized it, extending the term to include the online journals of the sort I had been reading for years, like Mike’s, which I read back in high school.

To me, it seems like the term should cover a more inclusive range of sites. I guess I want “weblog” to mean “a log on the Web”, and not “a log of the Web”, which is the apparent true etymology. Maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid (and by “kid”, I’m including the Enterprise I watched last week), but I think of “weblog” and I think of something like the Captain’s Log, which included everything from reports on the ship’s status and mission to digressions on personal issues. In the Trek movies, Kirk repeatedly uses his log to rant about Klingons, and this doesn’t seem out of place. I’m not sure what this has to do with weblogs anymore, but it made sense when I started this paragraph.

I guess what I’m getting at is that If I want to write mostly about myself or my life, or to write multiple paragraphs instead of short “sound bites”, certainly I’d hope no one is going to stop me. But I’ve already named this site “Alexei’s Weblog”, which I am now worried pigeonholes the site into a framework I didn’t intend, and prejudices the reader against the sort of log I do intend on keeping.

Eric complains that my RSS feed (the Movable Type default) provides only puts the first few lines (20 words, actually) in the description. I’m not sure this is entirely bad; it certainly saves bandwidth, and I think RSS was originally designed mainly for headline syndication, not for whole articles (Slashdot doesn’t use anythings but headlines and links, for example). Besides, maybe I’d rather people have to go to the Web page to read the whole entry; it won’t be mangled by whatever aggregator they’re using, and they might make or read some comments.

Still, in the interest of playing with fun new toys, I’ve got an experimental new RSS feed with full entry descriptions. I don’t plan to switch to this anywhere else on the site, though, at least not for now.

Of course, Eric’s RSS has some problems too. The lack of <link> tags for the entries, for example. Eric also complains about not being able to easily find the RSS feed for LiveJournal sites. While little orange XML buttons are handy, tools that can parse the HTML header for <link> tags (different ones) have no trouble with LiveJournal sites. While LJ’s own aggregation engine, ironically, can’t do this, tools like NetNewsWire will find the RSS feed automatically if you enter the URL to many sites. I think this is cool.

On second thought, maybe I wouldn’t like working for Joel. From what I can glean, it’s an all-Windows shop. I don’t know if I do that. I don’t think of myself as a Windows developer. Not that I haven’t been one in the past. But these days I find myself mostly doing Mac stuff, and a little Unix. I haven’t launched Visual Studio in months. But I guess the fact that I’ve launched it at all says something. I expect I’d settle into a Windows developer job in a few weeks.

This has caused me to think about my OS habits, since I’ve noticed that I’ve been using my Mac more as a primary platform the past few weeks. I seem to go back and forth. I’ve got both a PC and a Mac in front of me at my desk, so I can pick either one. Sometimes the PC wins because it has a bigger screen (that’s a big win). Sometimes the Mac wins because of cool software like NetNewsWire. But although I can flip back and forth between computers in a specific task (for example, when I’m doing development on the Mac, I’ll often have documentation open in Web browsers on the PC), I tend to gravitate towards one or the other for “primary” things like email and Web browsing. It’s been Windows for a long time. These days it seems to be the Mac more. At least, when I’m at my desk. Away from the desk, Windows wins, because it’s what my current laptop runs. My next one won’t.

I think I blame Chimera. The Mac hasn’t had a Web browser that’s felt as fast as they do on Windows in a long time. I use Mozilla on Windows, and like it a lot, but Mozilla runs slow on Mac OS X, and so does Internet Explorer. But Chimera 0.6 is downright speedy. Enough so that I don’t notice the slowness when using it, at least. So I seem to be using the Mac more to browse the Web. And read my email. And write this weblog entry.

I’ve been reading a bunch of Joel on Software lately. He says a lot of things I find really interesting to think about. I’m not sure I agree with a lot of his opinions (he says far too many nice things about Microsoft and its methodologies, even if they might be true). Still, I like reading about software development techniques, and he’s verbose and well-spoken. If he were in St. Louis and hiring, I bet he’d be a good employer, too.

One quote I found that resonated:

If you show a nonprogrammer a screen which has a user interface which is 100% beautiful, they will think the program is almost done.

This turns out to be true of programmers, too. I remember in CS 194 when Greg and I showed our interface prototype, people said things like “wow, you’re almost done.” Of course, we were nothing of the sort. We’d spent a few hours mocking up an interface with PowerPlant, and there were clickable buttons and animated icons. But nothing actually did anything. We were weeks away from any sort of usable functionality. In fact, I’m sure there were interface elements in the demo that we ended up removing because we ran out of time to actually write the code behind them. But our demo looked cool!

(I note that I’ve mentioned my senior project a few times so far in this weblog. I guess it’s on my mind?)

I just discovered that wither doesn’t actually mean anything like what I thought it meant. Not even close.

I haven’t written here in a while. I feel like I should have something to write. Something to say… But I don’t, of course. I feel like I had something to say earlier today. Maybe yesterday? But I have nothing to say now. Oh well. At least I can spend a whole paragraph explaining how I have nothing to write. That means I still remember some English. Even if I am writing about nothing. (Does this remind anybody else of Seinfeld?)

Of course, given my luck, I’ll think of something incredibly insightful and interesting to say half an hour from now, and this entry will look sort of silly.

But maybe no one will see it. Right now only Laura and Eric know this site exists, and they probably don’t read it reguarly. Oh, Sindy knows it exists, but probably not its address. I could link it from my Web page. People probably see that from time to time. It’s in my .sig, at least.

I didn’t like the look of the default Movable Type page, and it turned out not to work so well in IE 6. But I found some alternate stylesheets, and so I’m trying one of those. Maybe it’ll work a little better. One of these days maybe I’ll read up on modern HTML and design my own templates.

So I made a couple of test entries to this thing. I might delete them later, so don’t be surprised if you don’t see them below. The only reason I’ve kept them so far is that Laura commented on them, and I don’t want to delete Laura! That would be sad.

I’m not sure I like this Movable Type thing. Eric mentioned that he was thinking of switching to it the other day, so I thought I’d try it out. It seems to work okay. I don’t particularly care for the default page layout, but I’m not enough of an HTML person these days to think about changing it. Maybe I’ll try this for a bit. Or maybe I’ll use some other site if I want to keep a weblog. Laura’s mentioned LiveJournal. It looks like it might be acceptable. And the Mac clients look like they might be acceptable.
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This seems to work. But do I like it? Hmm. I’m not sure.
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Hi! This is Alexei’s weblog.