Thursday, January 1, 2015

New Year, and Changes On the Way

This is nothing to do with new year resolutions, as I discovered years ago that those simply do not work for me. It is more about looking at various note files which will become future posts. The good news (for me, anyway) is that there is material for something like 30 posts in various states of completion. Some of it would take as little as half an hour of work, if I were to continue as I have in the past.

I don't want to do that. I don't know that it has been particularly effective, and behind the scenes I have been organizing the work into themes that I want explore in some depth, and thinking about how to make the intended audience for any given post explicit. Do I need a simple classification scheme, or do I need to think in terms of an ontology? How is what I want to do constrained by the Blogger platform?

The simplest case was in doing the initial blog layout. I wanted the date of publication right up top. There is a lot stale information on the Web, and I think that part of that is purposeful. There is a business incentive (so-called Long Tail economics of the Web) for making publication dates harder to find. It is also a complete pain in the ass for many members of my tribe (security workers) who may have to digest dozens of news articles, blog posts, etc., every day.

I would also like to make life a bit easier for the tool builders who are creating the next generation of automated ingestion systems. So I would like to keep things as stable as possible. Meaning don't change the current date format, and put some thought into the forthcoming 'Intended Audience', etc.

I expect to fail at this. The design space begins to resemble API design (difficult to get right) and also involves some Semantic Web thought. The Semantic Web has, rather famously, never taken off. This a case where not failing horribly would be a win.

Do not expect this stuff immediately. It has been a couple of weeks since I posted, and it is going to be difficult to post again until sometime around mid-January. Sorry about that, but life intrudes.

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Comments on posts older than 60 days go into a moderation queue. It keeps out a lot of blog spam.

I really want to be quick about approving real comments in the moderation queue. When I think I won't manage that, I will turn moderation off, and sweep up the mess as soon as possible.

If you find comments that look like blog spam, they likely are. As always, be careful of what you click on. I may have had moderation off, and not yet swept up the mess.