I’m in one of those annoying places where my brain is full of project and code ideas, and my hard disk is full of half-completed projects.

While I’m really NOT in a position to start hacking away on yet another item, especially when 99% of my active code-writing cycles is going into Spot Specific, there’s some good ideas that I really want to get out/alive.

So, I’m wondering – not dissimilar to the Shot of Jaq contribution scratch-your-itch wikithingy – should I just get them out there (even on said scratchpad, or my own site) and let them roll with the punches, see what happens.  I’m in the fortunate position where time is the one resource I’m lacking, but I’ve got pretty much everything else that I could need. Hosting coming out of my ears, spare hardware, etc. Could probably even muster some geeks and support workers to help with the project…

Anyway, what should one do when you’re sure the software you’re thinking of would make the open source world a better place, but you don’t have time to write it?

Suggestions welcome.

-Dx 

I’ve been spending a lot of time inside the inside of wordpress recently, partly by choice, partly by "force". I was requested to make some modifications to an already existing CMS to allow it to be used for online publishing, but the time available and my experience with the product in question were both very slim so I put forward a case to use wordpress and to do a total conversion instead. Client wasn’t so keen, client went away, client thought about it, client came back, wordpress happened. Writing a theme for wordpress that looks nothing like wordpress was a lot easier than I thought, and I look forward to spending some time (when I’ve removed the my study from boxes) into redoing my own site in a similar style – neuro sorta had a theme similar to the one I want, for a while. I want my content to be presented differently depending how old it is:

• Loads of space, bigger fonts, and more obvious, perhaps with a custom background colour and border
• Smaller, but still full width, with less emphasis, a stock background and no fancy border
• Left Column, 1/4width of page
• Middle Column, 1/4width of page
• Right Column, 1/4width of page

and a seperate column on the right hand side, full width, bar the header, that carries the usual wordpress gubbins. I’m also liking the idea of theme highlighting based upon category, so I will play with that too, I think Like most of my projects, I’ll probably never get off my arse and write it, but I think this recent (paid) excursion into wordpress hackery has given me the kick in the crotch I needed to get off my backside and work on my own site for a change! Maybe.

The site in question is CK:ClicK. We also have plans to take our wordpress changes into a grand unified plugin and release it open source style "at some point" soon-ish.

As emo as that sounds, it has nothing to do with knives. Although it does have something to do with resiak (he tidied up my regexp, and notified me of the bug in the first instance).

FaceHack is a tiny application that gets around the facebook inability to import from URLs with GET paramters (?’s, or question marks, as google will like to index them as) – this is ideal for you LiveJournalers, etc. because they use stuff like http://resiak.livejournal.com/data/atom?tag=facebook

It’s currently verison 0.1a and you can download it and run it to cludge around your own specialst URLs without having to wait for facebook to wake up.

Will obviously work for other type people who have this bug too.

Patches welcomed, and, yes, I will host URLs for you, friends, if you contact me and give me the URL you want "hacked".

-Dx 

PS. Try Essk’s Ubuntu Countdown for Facebook; and leave her nice comments if it doesn’t work.

Three quick topics to blog on tonight (with, no doubt a couple of distractions):

1.I’ve developed an odd craving for ice-cream late a night. I suppose it is, to my body-clock, late dessertm but even so, ice-cream at 3am is just obscene. What makes this worse is that (a) my appetite is on an "up" so I’m on big portions and (b) I cracked a tooth so the ice-cream is coming with facial grimacing for no extra charge.

2. We had a house inspection from the Land Lord and I got a little carried away and ripped into them quite heavily, more than I intended – I got carried away, but they deserved it and it was all completely true. It ended with me threatening to stop paying the rent if they never got some of the problems sorted out to my satisfaction.

3. Adam prompted me, by fluke, into some shared-house-network admin roles last night and I noticed lots of way to make the network funkier and more intergrated. I also has a mini personal security alert the other day so I thought about tightening up other aspects of the network too. So I decided to lash together "House!" – a shared house wiki type affair. It’ll link in with the pygtk samba/ldap interface I want to write for Domain Management anyway All at the famous sourceforge "This Project Has Released No Files" stage right now, of course.

I’ve got the Doctor’s tomorrow, more random ranting over things that are broken with me – should be a long list and Lo goes back to Uni after a nice long three week break – will seriously miss having her around the house every day….

Little-mum becomes Sophie, a far more suitable name for her – here’s a pic, done with my camphone, so not brilliant, but not awful either….

Also, as you can probably see – draft1 of my 50s themed homepage is done – VERY early draft, I hope it turns out to be. Something a little more, um, crafted will hopefully be the final result.

Oh and Lois‘ moving over to WordPress too.