Muskblog: Homesteading the Internet since 1995

Although I perhaps should have been using the time in other ways, I’ve spent considerable time and effort building a custom news aggregator.  I was able to leverage SimplePie and PHP to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but I also wanted to scour the Internet, social media, and all the trendy Web 2.0 [...]

So I’ve been building something. And while doing so I discovered there are three different types of feeds on the Internet. Feeds that return useful information in chronological order that can be displayed and manipulated easily. Feeds that do not conform to an established standard or otherwise do not behave as expected and cause SimplePie [...]

Curation is the next big thing on the Internet with Pinterest being the media darling. Unfortunately for the talking heads in mainstream media, curation has been a feature of the world wide web since the beginning. A home page, something I’ve maintained online since 1995, is by very definition a curated collection of personal interests. [...]

Once again it took way longer than I would have liked. Once again the common denominators are PHP and people who say look, here is my code, it does this, it just works, use it… Then when you write them informing them it doesn’t work they say “Oh I wrote that two years ago, I don’t [...]

Notice I wrote “self publishing” not “blogging”, the world wide web always had the concept of self publishing and user created content. Everyone was supposed to learn HTML and have a home page. It is only with the rise of blogging, social media, and various web services that self publishing has become so easy that [...]