Inspirational Technology

Looks like one of my older posts about how to think when building REST XML protocols is making the rounds in the blogosphere.

That post was originally written to vent a little while I was trying to save a project that was consuming a very poorly designed XML web service. It was a continual process of me just shaking my head about the poor design decisions made on both sides of the system and how easy it would have been to avoid if they could have just thought a little bit differently. There are many other things to consider beyond what the post talks about, but my major point there is to simply think XML.

Hmm, “Designing REST protocols by thinking in XML”. Sounds like a good title for an article.

Note: comments are turned off on the original post so this post can be used instead.

Tonight I started thinking about how long I’ve been at this blogging thing and I realized it’s getting really close to five years. I don’t know the exact date that I started, my original blog was lost at some point, but it was somewhere around the middle of 2001 that I started.

My blog started out with the title “XML Database JuJu” and at that time I mainly wrote about XML database topics. My first use of the name Inspirational Technology was in Jan. 2002 and it started as a parallel blog to XML Database JuJu. Eventually those sites merged back together and carried forward the name Inspirational Technology. Somewhere along the way I also tried a few other names one of which was “Bright Eyed Mister Zen”. I always came back to the current name.

Here’s a little anthology of how the site has evolved through various technology changes.

Mid 2001 - XML Database JuJu launches based on some simple PHP script. I don’t even remember the name of the script and the site is lost so I can’t include it here. This was very early blogging days, I not even sure if it was really called blogging then. The system was super primitive, no comments, no trackbacks I don’t even think it had RSS. We’ve come a long way since I used this primitive system.

January 2002 - I launch 4 sites powered by Userland Radio - XML Database JuJu, Mac OS X Divinity, Xindice Realm and the first appearance of Inspirational Technology. My license for Radio was kindly provided by Clark Venable, one of the more technically savvy medical doctors around.

February 2003 - After one of my blogging lulls I moved to Movable Type and relaunched the site using the simple title “Kimbro Staken Technology and …”. Not sure what I was thinking with that. At that time, the 4 separate sites merged back together and somewhere in that time frame I changed the name back to “Inspirational Technology”.

September 2003 - The launch of my Syncato system and a new site keeping the name “Inspirational Technology”. The site went through a number of iterations as far as look goes and the screen shows the last. Syncato has gotten the longest run of any system since it was my creation. My goal actually is to someday return to a Syncato based system, but that is down the road a bit and it will be quite different from the currently released code.

May 2006 - Yet another relaunch and yet another system. This time I moved to Wordpress primarily so that I could run one of the other tools I was involved in creating, the Structured Blogging system.

So there we are, five years of blogging and evolution in tool sets. In some ways it’s weird to look back and see the trail of sites left behind. I lost my first site, but the next four are still online. It will be interesting to see if I can maintain that going forward.

One bit of advice; something I’ve learned from blogging this long and changing systems so many times is to pay very close attention to your URLs. You should never rely on a system that uses URL parameters to find posts, clean URLs are the only way. That’s something the Wordpress has problems with out of the box so make sure you make the effort to setup the rewrites required to get something clean.