My fractured online time the last few weeks has been spent looking at RSS generators. I mentioned those a while back. I've had this running diary going for a while now, and in that time the blogs have taken over. At some point it's time to meld into the growing blog universe - and that means software I'd rather not have to write completely. Oh, and I need to be able to figure out some automatic way of converting the last few years of mental scraps into a new file format where the entries can be individualized and dates can be randomly accessed. Therein lies the rub. I've looked at portals and fee-based bloggers and java scrapers, all with their online editing systems. PHP/MySQL and the infamous .NET. After weeks of poring over feature lists, there almost hidden at the bottom of a page, a diary generator. Written in Linux shell (bash) in a few hundred lines of code. Sed/awk/grep. Now there's a language in which I'm somewhat fluent. A smattering of useful style sheets. Cool. Maybe I'll have an updated diary format pretty soon. Hey, there's still configuring the thing. This is Unix, the devil is in the config... And then there's the matter of finding new things to rant about. Think I've pretty well beaten my pet topics into the ground.

The Xmas kickoff yesterday at the malls went well for my shoppe also. After the last couple of gloomy holidays it would be refreshing to see the economic engine get out of idle.