* * * * *

                            Feature or marketing?

I've been busy the past two days with some programming—for myself as well as
a client, although I should probably spend more time on the client's code
than my own but alas …

I spent some time yesturday trying to implement Markov Chains [1] that wasn't
successful. I know I've done this before (in Pascal of all things) years ago
but I think I need to rethink how I was doing this.

Afterwards I worked on my client's project. It's not hard per se but it
involves keeping track of lots of little details and much of the data I have
to track can change at unpredictable times (old sources of data may go, new
sources may appear) so I'm having to track that as well. Again not hard, just
a bit of tedium to make sure I track everything correctly.

For today's warm-up exercise, I added functionality to mod_blog that will
send notification to Weblogs.com [2] when an entry is made. It's toggable so
you can have it send notification or not. That was not hard at all since I'm
using the form based [3] API (Application Program Interface) and not the XML-
RPC or SOAP ones (which wouldn't be that hard to hack support for either).
Why am I doing this? Would you believe “creeping featureism?”

I didn't think so.

It's marketing. Pure and simple.

[1] http://www.google.com/search?q=Markov+Chains
[2] http://www.weblogs.com/
[3] http://newhome.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm

Email author at [email protected]

You are viewing proxied material from gopher.conman.org. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.