Just a quick update. On Friday, July June 21, 2008, the server that hosts this website suffered a drive failure. As the techs went in to hot swap and rebuild the drive, the master drive also failed resulting in complete data loss.

Being my personal site, I hadn't been making backups regularly so I lost about 3 months worth of stuff, including the Freerunner review and the Photo tour of the ASU.

I decided at that point that my website sucks. :) I currently use Jaws CMS which is decently good but not great. The reason I chose to use it, though, was because I like pictures and all of the other blogs suck at managing pictures the way I want them – taggable and on my server. Flickr is probably the closest, but I didn't want to be limited to their storage space, service changes and stuff. Jaws lets me put images in multiple albums without duplicating the images, so I used it.

Unfortunately, the AJAX in the admin interface causes conflicts and sometimes I have to reload a page. The search system suck badly, sometimes matching falsely and not displaying matches. But the ugliest part, frankly, is the RSS feed. When I'm editing an article, it auto-saves to draft mode, but for some stupid reason, it actually posts to the RSS feed, so if my article is long (and unless this is your first visit to my site, you know I post long posts often. I actually meant “quick update” and I'm on 250 words.) it actually syndicates a half finished, often broken, blog post which may or may not be updated later.

Because of this, I'm actually writing this blog post in OpenOffice.org Writer which I'll cut and paste into the CMS. Jaws CMS does a remarkably poor job in all of helping me manage my content so I'm ditching it.

I've been trying to teach myself Python, but at work I deal primarily with PHP so I can't really sit down and just hack. I decided to take this opportunity (the drive failure, if you've already forgotten) to force myself to resolve two issues – my site that sucks and my laziness preventing me from exploring Python.

I've decided to try, at the least, to redo my site using Python, and more specifically, using the Django framework which Debian actually packages. :) This means that my normal few-times per week content won't be posted even though there's some infringement of liberty or some advance in Openmoko's progress or something else worth chatting about. Frankly, I'm lazy, and the less content I need to transfer, the happier I am. So this may be my last blog post for “a while” as I learn Django and ask questions and devote my spare time to that for a bit.

In the mean time, this site will remain up, with some broken articles. :)