Wulf's Web-Den

Del.icio.us have been doing some planned maintenance this morning which has revealed a glitch in my blog index script. At the moment, it polls the del.icio.us server for my most recent entries and then returns them to "standard output". If I were running it from a command line that would be the screen but, in the automated update, I redirect the output to the XML file used by my website. However, because del.icio.us has been so reliable over the past few months, I've made the dangerous assumption that it will always return the expected data, which is why my index page presently says "No matching results".

Now I've got the choice of increasing the complexity of the script to cope with the del.icio.us server being unavailable or just to live with it. For a relatively minor backwater like my site (Technorati rank: 498,891) it's not the end of the world. On the other hand, I'd like to demonstrate intelligent design in my work.

I'll have to see how much time I can find before it passes out of mind!

Tags: del.icio.us, web2.0, api, perl, blog index

As a change from crime fiction, I've just started reading The Haiku Handbook, which I picked up in the library earlier this week.

Haiku, a form of short impressionistic poetry, are something I've been interested in for some time and I'm looking forward to learning about them a bit deeper than just knowing that you're meant to have five syllables on the first line, seven on the next and five on the last.

Fingers tap on keys
Words and pictures rearrange
Global connection!

That's my little Ode to the Internet but perhaps the book will help me improve!

Tags: haiku, poetry