In an article about Margaret Wise Brown, Laura Miller calls Goodnight Moon "less a story than an incantation." That word "incantation" is suggestive, and apparently memetic. Sarah Lyall, Joshua Harris, Noah Charney, Meghan Overdeep, and many more all use "incantation" to describe this popular children's book. In their grasping for a useful turn of phrase, these writers have hit upon the literal truth: Goodnight Moon is an esoteric text whose strange pages promise dangerous knowledge to those who know how to look… read more
I like when thing are broken so I can tell how they work… read more
I used to bump into writers occasionally at parties and become seized with the urge to share my awesome story ideas with them… read more
lighttpd is a great, low-fat webserver,
but some of it's defaults make me want to pull my hair out. When
Page Speed
pointed out that I wasn't doing any caching or compressing on my static
lighttpd install, it took me an hour of grubbing around in the docs to get
mod_compress doing what I wanted, and ETags on all requests.
I'm writing down all the changes I had to make in the hopes of saving someone else one hour… read more
Downloading, organizing, and playing media are three separate tasks. I don't need a torrent client that has a built in video player like vuze, and I certainly don't need a media player that looks up album information and moves my files around like xmbc.
This guide will walk you through how to download, organize, and play your music and television shows the sensible way—with the best linux tool for each task… read more
Wish your hilarious tweets were indexed by Google? Wish your beautiful, smiling face would show up next to those search results? Wish no more! This post will walk you through how to get your tweets indexed by Google… read more
It is common for a web app to have secret keys: the admin password, the twitter API key you use, the number of cat pictures you'll let a user upload before banning them. If your project is open source, you'd like to keep these secret keys out of the published source… read more
Extension developers who want to overlay HTML on pages face two style-related challenges: preventing page styles from affecting the added HTML, and ensuring that the added HTML is visually over top of the rest of page. This blog post will show you how to use XBL to add nodes to the page with style, complete with a working demo… read more
Webspiders are fun, but the learning curve is awfully steep. Websites don't like crawlers stumbling about where they're not wanted, and barriers as simple as a login screen can stymie a beginner. Add in checks on user agents strings and javascipt-heavy links, and your weekend is over before you've gotten anything to work—side project over! This blog post will show you how to turn your browser and LAMP server into a spider capable of taking you straight to the fun… read more