The patience of my family and friends is probably wearing thin. My rantings are getting less and less entertaining and more and more technical lately. That's the way it has to be at the present time. I'm grappling with some tough architectural issues. If you're dealing with technical architecture issues, it always means you're doing something fundamentally wrong. Or perhaps a better description would be 'painting oneself into a corner'.

This is not always a bad thing - it's a learning experience.  How do you you get out of the corner without getting your feet messy? Always look at the bigger picture. My software is primarily a weblog. But the bigger picture is a content management system, with web 2.0 connections.

What's web2 about it? Hang on, I'm still quite a ways from being finished with this upgrade. I have yet to add my secret sauce. This particular web address used to be my XML playground, and I used to have a copy of Drupal on it. Drupal is gone now, and I've grown my own software to the point that I can start to use it as a content framework. I've started plugging in the XML-RPC layers. I've started plugging in uhm - plugins. Welcome to the new XML playground. 

Anyway, the URL framwework wasn't extensible enough. Let's throw some  URL's out and see what happens....

This all starts with http://baddcafe.com

mike

mike/DEC-2003

article/1052

post

tags

feed/mike

There's a problem here. It's the URL's starting with 'mike'. You see, everything is function-based. If it starts with 'article' I know I'm viewing an article. If it starts with 'post', I know I'm writing something. I can extend this to arbitrary actions. Profile, shop, whatever. But 'mike'? What the heck am I doing? This is a problem. I need an action (or more specifically, target page) here. Otherwise as the list of actions grows, and the list of people grows, there could be conflicts. So it looks like it all has to move down a level. http://baddcafe.com/weblog/mike - since this is all attached to weblogs. I refuse to use the word 'blog'. More on that in a moment.

That looks like the way out of the painted corner.   

Oh, about the word blog... I wrote this in a friend's weblog back east last week.... You can view the original context at dustingmybrain.com

"I also have fallen into disfavor with anything beginning with 'blog'. I was writing online for 20 years before I heard the term used. Say it out loud. Isn't that the sound you make when you're puking up a bottle of Southern Comfort? Blllooooooghhhhh! Consequently, I have to laugh everytime I hear 'blogosphere'. No, offisher, I'm not drunkenut... my blogosphere ish woggly.... oooopsh... Blllooooooghhhh!"