Collapsing the Stack
Werner Vogels: Yep, the best way to completely automate operations is to have to developers be responsible for running the software they develop. It is painful at times, but also means considerable creativity gets applied to a very important aspect of the software stack. It also brings developers into direct contact with customers and a very effective feedback loop starts. There is no separate operations department at Amazon: you build it; you run it.
Sounds like a very good idea.
Where this gets tricky is with dependences. Trivial, but concrete, example: Werner’s Atom feed contains (in part):
<summary><![CDATA[ … Q&A … ]]></summary>
Over time, I would expect Amazon’s policy to advantage people who tend to shun dependencies (do I really need an RDB here?), complex frameworks (which make your life easier 95% of the time, but a living hell the other 95% of the time), and even those that avoid conveniences like IDEs.
Some Thoughts on Web Services, Caching and Autonomy
... [more]Trackback from Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life at
I assume this is some Atom torture test.
You are correct.
I wonder which aggregators get it right.
It is with great pleasure that I can say that as of sometime yesterday, Bloglines now gets it right. Their change is not retroactive, so look at the link for SMS for Geeks (which is correct) and For the Want of a Nail, which reflected their previous behavior.
Posted by Sam Ruby atAnything that uses FeedTools 0.2.25 gets it right. And yes, it was a torture test.
Posted by Bob Aman at
He, my feed is an out of the box MT 3.2 Atom feed. Does this demonstrate that it is better to use a service, than to buy a piece of software? And if you buy software are you responsible to pushing it through all sort of validators to see if the developers got it right?
I am lazy today; anybody wants to give a me an MT3.2 atom feed template that does produce a valid feed?
Posted by Werner atWerner: those are the right questions, I just don’t know the answers. If you are using MT 3.2 (and care about this issue), the fact that MT 3.2 implements feeds with a template that can be tailored by the installer is actually a plus — by contrast, compare options available to the the wordpress.com users.
In this particular case, if your template looks something like this:
<summary><$MTEntryExcerpt remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$></summary>
Then you might see better results with:
<summary type="html"><$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml="1"$></summary>
The fact that I can find the template and make this suggestion without ever having installed MT in my life is also worth noting. As is the fact that ultimately, whatever template you end up with is your responsibility. ;-)
Posted by Sam Ruby atThanks Sam. Done. I wasn’t running away from my operational responsibilities. I just didn’t have the right instrumentation in place :-)
So remove_html doesn’t really remove all html... Fixed the other problems in the feed also. Can’t do the utf-8/ascii one until I can get to the server.
Posted by Werner at
Werner: I don’t know if this is a problem, but I don’t see an instance yet where your summaries are different than your content. I know that it is possible in MT to have distinct summaries, but I don’t know the mechanics enough to know why your excerpts are the way they are now.
If you are not in the practice of providing short excerpts for your posts, you might consider omitting the summary element entirely.
Meanwhile, this has turned into a success story, and one that presents other intriguing questions and suggestions, such as the value of ‘open source’ (note the use of lowercase) in applications with dependencies.
Posted by Sam Ruby atIt has been a long time since I thought about my habits/policy/configuration. But you are right my practice was to not distinguish between summary and content. I’ll need to think about that a bit longer, but for the moment I’ll dump the summary assuming it is not mandatory element.
Posted by Werner at
Any Way You Cut It
Sam Ruby on the convenience of so many frameworks... complex frameworks... make your life easier 95% of the time, but a living hell the other 95% of the time......Excerpt from Making it stick. at
You build it, you fix it
An interesting observation:Yep, the best way to completely automate operations is to have to developers be responsible for running the software they develop. It is painful at times, but also means considerable creativity gets applied to a very...Excerpt from holygoat.co.uk at
Dominion and Sovereignty
When I was young, access to computers wasn’t quite as readily available as it is today. Undeterred, I used to ride my bike up to the University of Maryland. My mother once wondered what I was doing with all those college students, so she stoppe... [more]Trackback from Sam Ruby at
The links in your feed are totally screwed up in RSS Bandit. I assume this is some Atom torture test.
I wonder which aggregators get it right.
Posted by Dare Obasanjo at