Konnichiwa!

Plans & Projects

First entry in a new category: Plans & Projects. This is supposed to be a more loose form of posts, mainly rambling and rubber-ducking about my programming endeavors and projects; a sort of developer’s diary/development journal; occasional a work log. Inspired by the old .plan files of the past (which were even before my time: I read them only when news and archive sites published web versions of certain famous entries.

So, anyway, enough forewords… Last week, after a three year hiatus (and additional one or two years of very slow development before that), I updated my RandFill program and the associated personal libraries to build under Windows 7 (64-bit) with Visual Studio 2010; nothing earth-shattering, but it’s a start.

Next on my To-Do list is to get familiar with the Qt framework. I’ve lots of ideas for RandFill, but evolving upon the current Win32 foundation is painful, especially with regards to GUI growth. Several alternatives were checked by me in the past (MFC, Qt, GTK, .NET wxWidgets, etc.) and at the moment Qt looks still the most promising.

In the meantime, I was distracted by another technology: Distributed Version Control Systems (DCVS). Of course I knew about it, but never paid much attention: I had my Subversion repositories and was (and still am) fine with SVN. But after lots of reading explanations, comparision articles, discussions and so on, I will probably switch to Mercurial — but since it isn’t urgent and would only distract me further from other, above mentioned tasks, I’ll defer this for a while.

Another thing came up: Do I really want or need a Wiki on my site? DokuWiki is not bad, but I think for my workflow, a wiki is the wrong tool.
From the top of my head, some pro and contra arguments:

• Anyone can edit the content — which I don’t want or need; it’s my personal site, not a collaboration platform.

• Editable from anywhere with internet connection — true, but over the past months, I’ve only used that feature once, and not because it was needed, but just because it was there. The change could easily have waited a day longer when I was at my main workstation again.

• Design — it definitely looks like any other Wiki (i.e. not good). Yes, with enough time and energy I probably could change it; but I already spent more hours than I wanted in customizing my WordPress theme, I don’t want to repeat that again for yet another system.

• I like the idea of simple, static text files as the source — but the markup language is limited and not standardized. So, in that light, I’m currently thinking of migrating the Wiki part of this site to a static page solution, maybe created with Sphinx/reStructuredTexta, we’ll see…

In search of a replacement for Google Reader

2026-10-04: This was formerly a separate blog post, categorized as “How To” and “Miscellaneous”. But it’s not really a How-to tutorial and I also want to get rid of the Miscellaneous category. So, the next best thing (for this type of content and the timeframe [although it’s even a bit older]) is this post…

2013-06-16

Well, only two more weeks until Google shuts down Reader. It’s about time for me to plan my escape — but where to flee?

At the moment, I’ve put these three options on my short list:

1. Provide a service by and for myself (if technical possible, not checked yet); for example with Tiny Tiny RSS.

2. Use Feedly. Negative points: Needs currently a browser plug-in (for whatever reason); I’ve also read that you can’t export your feed subscribtions again?! And: It’s another, small online service provider, whose cloud can dissolve very quickly.

3. Use The Old Reader. That one was positively mentioned in several articles and comments; haven’t investigated it much yet. Similar problematic aspect: It’s another (even smaller) third party, who could disappear very quickly.

Self hosting looks like the most future proof version, on the other hand I don’t like the idea of having yet another thing to administrate in my free time…

I’ll update this post later.

Update 2013-06-29

*Phew* Made it just in time before Google shuts down Reader on monday (2013-07-01).

I set up Tiny Tiny RSS today and adjusted some settings; still need to fiddle with the design a bit in the following days, maybe use another theme, but in general I’m pretty much pleased with this solution for now.

Regarding the installation: If you’ve configured something like WordPress or a Wiki on your (shared) hosting before, this shouldn’t be a problem. Besides, TT-RSS’s documentation, several helpful articles/tutorial can easily be found with a bit of searching the net; that should you get started.