So, I must con­fess some­thing. I have not been us­ing uRSSus for a cou­ple of month­s. It all start­ed on my va­ca­tion­s. Since I had on­ly my eee, I ran in­to some prob­lems and was forced to use google read­er.

And it was NOT ter­ri­ble. Mind you, it was not great, ei­ther, but re­al­ly, not ter­ri­ble at al­l.

Since switch­ing RSS apps is a pain (be­cause you need to RE­AL­LY catchup on your read­ing be­fore switch­ing), it took me a long time to get back.

And now I find all sorts of prob­lems in uRSSus which I will have to fix. Which means I bet­ter start crank­ing.

Not that it looks bad, it's a hand­some pro­gram!

I don't ex­pect to do any­thing like last year's "A re­lease of some­thing ev­ery fri­day" mad­ness, but I will do some­thing.

Al­so, I need to re­write Bartle­Blog, the app that gen­er­ates this blog you are read­ing. It's bro­ken in many ways.

I have de­cid­ed to make this blog avail­able al­so in Span­ish start­ing yes­ter­day.

Since it's gen­er­at­ed by my own soft­ware called Bartle­Blog, that meant I had to im­ple­ment ev­ery­thing so each post can have mul­ti­ple trans­la­tion­s.

And it's start­ing to work. You may no­tice sev­er­al things:

• Be­low the ban­n­er there is an "Avail­able in En­g­lish - Es­­­pañol" thing.

• Each Post has links to the dif­fer­­ent tran­s­la­­tions for which it's avail­able.

The lo­ca­tion and styling of these el­e­ments will change, and they may be bro­ken in dif­fer­ent ways for a few days. Sor­ry about that.

There will al­so be a "Lat­er­al Opin­ion en Es­pañol" RSS feed soon.

Up­date: here it is

I sup­pose it hap­pens to ev­ery­one once in a while, and it has hap­pened to me of­ten in the past, but I am think­ing if I should keep on writ­ing this blog, or if some large change is need­ed.

Here are some ran­dom things from my head:

1. Al­­most noone reads it. Re­al­­ly. It has less than 40 sub­­scriber­s. That's pa­­thet­ic for a blog that has con­­tent for over 7 years :-)

2. Maybe I should post in span­ish, or at least bil­in­gual­­ly.

3. Maybe I should write more fea­­tures. When I write a longish piece and an­­nounce it, there is a re­spectable traf­f­ic surge.

4. On the oth­­er hand, I en­joy writ­ing it. And it's re­al­­ly very lit­­tle ef­­fort (spe­­cial­­ly now, with Bartle­Blog ;-)

5. Maybe it should be more fo­­cused in one area, make it a python pro­­gram­ming blog, or a tu­­to­ri­als blog, or some­thing like that.

6. But I am not a fo­­cused per­­son. I am a gen­er­al­ist. This week I have worked in the fol­low­ing things:

   • VoIP

   • Djan­­­go

   • PyQt

   • Lin­ux sysad­min­ing

   • Fire­wal­l/Proxy in­­­te­­­gra­­­tion with win­­­dows clients

   • Con­­­sult­ing in the most gen­er­ic sense, sit­t­ing with a com­­­pa­ny's IT staff and think­ing about their sit­u­a­­­tion.

   • Learn­ing PyGame

   And this was in 5 days of work. If I list­ed what I have done this year, it would take me 500 item­s. I am broad, how could my blog be nar­row?

7. Maybe it's just not in­­ter­est­ing? Or bad­­ly done?

8. Is it too nerdy? Is it not nerdy enough?

9. I have had a blog with a small read­­er­­ship for 7 years, why is it both­­er­ing me now?

10. If I stop, it does­n't mat­ter, I can al­ways pick it up again lat­er when I feel like writ­ing.

So, there. You, the 40 guys, com­ment on it if you want ;-)

Nowa­days, the very lit­tle time I have for per­son­al projects is spent do­ing things like fix­ing lit­tle things and adding lit­tle fea­tures to Bartle­Blog [1] and think­ing how I could use GLE and mako tem­plates to cre­ate a cool nerdy tool to cre­ate chart­s.

How­ev­er, I will be hav­ing a lit­tle time for per­son­al projects in a cou­ple of week­s, and hav­ing stum­bled on­to chip­munk to­day re­al­ly got me think­ing.

It's a se­ri­ous­ly nifty 2D physics li­brary. Con­sid­er this de­mo video:

Now, what could pos­si­bly be done with it... I need to re­al­ly think.

Since I am try­ing to make my blog in­to a se­ri­ous site [1] I de­cid­ed to take a se­ri­ous look in­to web ty­pog­ra­phy. It should be use­ful if Bartle­Blog ev­er gets a sec­ond us­er (which is not pre­cise­ly com­ing soon ;-)

Spe­cial­ly since this link ap­peared in Ned Batchelder's blog.

Right now, I am in­to ba­sic things, like ver­ti­cal ry­thm and such, but you can al­ready see a dif­fer­ence:

Now, let's go in­to more se­ri­ous ma­te­ri­al to read on the sub­jec­t.