As we tend to do every couple years, Jennie and I have once again overhauled the website of Cedar Ridge Christian Church, our church home in Broken Arrow, OK. I’m very proud of this one. It has a clean look but seems modern enough to not look like your run-of-the-mill church website.

… Tag them with the word “breast.” I’m not kidding. I uploaded some crappy photos from our breastfeeding class two weeks ago; one has six times more views and other has over 25 times more views than all my other crappy photos. Just goes to show that for most people, the Internet is for porn.

Not that I would really know, but I’d imagine hard drugs couldn’t be much more addictive than Facebook. I’m still sinking my roots deep into that thing, finding more and more old friends and people I forgot about (sorry; bad memory :-). Particularly, I hope to find more college and high school friends and see what they’re up to these days.

I’m still running Hpy, a place to list things that make you happy. I still think the idea is simple and neat, though it has yet to reach critical mass. Go see my list here and think about adding your own.

I host a few low-traffic websites out of my house. One of them is actually a paying customer! The last few days, I’ve been working on migrating all my web apps/sites to a new server (still at my house). This time, though, I spent some time on the infrastructure to make things more reliable. I set up RAID 1 mirroring on my hard drives. I also utilized VMWare Server (free) and built a virtual server image. I can’t feel a speed hit by doing this, and the benefits are definitely worth the extra layer of complexity: I now back up a 1.6GB 2.3GB image and know that I have the whole server backed up. No more hoping that I have all the files backed up I will need in the case of a disaster. Snapshots let me roll the server back in case I install something that screws it up. I can create new servers willy-nilly on the same hardware if I want to do other stuff (run XLink Kai for instance). If my hardware dies, I can fire up my laptop with VMWare Player and run the server while I get stuff back online. Next time I move to other hardware, I need only install VMWare Server and copy over my image. Sweet!My Rails apps are still offline at the moment. I’m having a bit of trouble getting FastCGI to work again. Maybe it’s time to look into Mongrel…Update: I installed Mongrel and cooked up a startup script. Works great! Good-bye FastCGI!

My favorite programming language had a bit of a facelift. Now the homepage is as beautiful and elegant as the language itself.

Jeremy Ruston and Bob McElrath have taken over development of ZiddlyWiki. This is amazing – to see the community value something I worked on for a big chunk of my life and desire that it continue on without me. It’s humbling and edifying at the same time! I wish them the best and hope they can take ZW places I never dreamed of.

All those Web 2.0 logos are starting to look the same… so some guy went and created an app that generates them automatically…

In my quest to make everything into a feed… I present the Code Snippet Comments feed. It goes with this site, which lacks a feed for comments posted on snippets. For this feed generation, I used a free service called Feed43. It’s quite powerful! Basically, you give it a URL and about ten minutes of your life working out some pattern recognition, and voila! you get a feed auto generated every six hours based on the content of the page. Nice.

Update: Version 2 is available here.Today, I finally got fed up with Wikipedia’s lack of watchlist feeds, so I wrote a script that generates them. A few of the photos I had uploaded to the Wikimedia Commons have been marked for deletion for some time now due to inadequate license information (my fault entirely), but I didn’t know it because I didn’t think about the Commons having its own separate watchlist. Oops. That got me thinking… these watchlists should have feeds so I don’t have to keep pulling up my bookmarks every day.