Here's a pile of spare-time projects I hacked together around 2002-2003. For more recent work, try my blog (Second p0st) or one of the various links off my personal page, myelin.nz.
Older blogs: PyCS dev log for Python Community Server and .NET notes, and my noteblog for everything else.
projects
topic exchange
This was a system for people to categorise their blog posts by topic, and have them aggregated together with everybody else's categorised posts.
The last surviving note on it seems to be the original plan from the Group Forming wiki.
blogging ecosystem
Here are the results of periodic crawls of a number of weblogs (inspired by the Truth Laid Bear's ecosystem of political weblogs). They show who links to who, and who has got the most links. Each page is cached as it is read, for debugging, and link details are available.
The stats are generated by a Python script, and the raw data is available for researchers to experiment with. There's also a quick tutorial on how to load the data, for Python newbies.
the x of y
An attempt at a software thesaurus; something to link together concepts, implementations and systems in a way that makes analogies obvious.
radio comment monitor
Back in the day, we didn't get notifications for everything -- someone could comment on your blog and you wouldn't know!. So, I hacked together this thing in PHP / javascript that generates comment summary pages for Radio weblogs hosted on PyCS or one of the many now-gone UserLand servers (radio.weblogs.com or blogs.salon.com).
ring browser
Remember webrings? This was a quick hack to let you cycle through a list of blogs you like.
videoindex
At one point, back in the days before streaming was the only way to watch TV and movies, I wanted to create an index of kiwi video stores, to make it less hard to figure out where to find a video you wanted to watch. The idea here was to make an online ordering site for a whole bunch of video stores from different chains, so you can do a search and actually find the video you're after.
python community server
A free xmlStorageSystem server written in Python. Hacked together in an evening after a sort-of-challenge from Dave Winer, and 'perfected' (heh) over the next few months. It grew to host a few dozen blogs at its peak, and is now a static archive.
PyCS spawned the Community Server Wiki, a place to talk about community servers, blogging software and so on.
Thanks go to MetaKit and Medusa, which do most of the work for me (MK is the database, Medusa is the web server).
php storage system
For some reason, I felt like writing another xmlStorageSystem implementation, because it was hard to host PyCS (back in 2002 most people just used shared hosting systems, and couldn't run arbitrary Python servers). So I made a PHP one. It looks like I deleted the install on this server at some point.
contact
Clicking the envelope icon below will probably send me an email. This little PHP script has survived well -- it worked as recently as 2023!
- Phil
