Post It #4

Parenting. Mr. Pilgrim on raising little humans:

Parenting is also like that Star Trek episode where they’re acting as anthropologists, watching a civilization evolve at like 100 times normal speed. (Isn’t there a Star Trek episode like that? Well there should be, damn it, I’m trying to tell a story here.) You wake up one morning and say, “Oh my God, Jim, they’re using tools! Next week they’ll be building spaceships!”

Roof status. Still there, unharmed. No storm-related damage at all. Apparently my sister wasn’t quite as lucky—her cellar/basement is a swimming pool now. Oiy.

News reader market shares. TechCrunch asks How big is Google Reader?, and while the chart in that post looks interesting, it doesn’t say much without Google Reader telling the Feedburner bot how many subscribers are there for any given feed.

Uncle Carlo. My baby sister is working on developing two little humans in her womb. Soon, I’ll be an “uncle”. The jury’s still out on whether I should feel proud (current notion) or old. Congratulations, Claudia & Tino.

Wordpress Woes and WTFs

Well, the decision has been made—it certainly feels weird.

The nice (?) side effect is my newly written Wordpress importer for RSS 2.0 and Blogcomments Module support (catchy name). Download it, put it in your WP root folder in /wp-admin/import/ and rename it to rss_2_plus_blogcomments.php. Then run the import from your WP dashboard, that’s all there is to do. Use it, abuse it, spread it, have fun.

Which reminds me: why is the original WP 2.0 RSS importer so freaking braindead?! And people—XML parsing with regular expressions? As part of the official WP package? Give me a break, really. This isn’t 1996, bloody hell.

So the new importer uses PHP5 and SimpleXML. It is still very much a hack job, but at least it’s clean and can deal with CDATA.