February 2005 Archives

CNet has an article about the new Napster flat fee service, which I have to take issue with.

Now, I could not care less about the Napster service, or really about iTunes either. But I have to disagree with the line in the article that says "Apple's approach is to charge 99 cents for each song downloaded. But you own the music, no strings attached."

Really? Is this some new version of iTunes that doesn't restrict you to only playing the music on a few machines associated with you by their DRM? Is it a new version that sells songs that don't stop working the moment that you decide you don't want to use an iPod anymore? Maybe it's a new version that will let you sell or give a song that you have purchased to someone else?

No? I didn't think so. At least with the Napster service you are getting what you pay for - limited access to all the songs in their library for the duration of your subscription. Apple on the other hand is selling, for an upfront fee of $0.99 the right to use a single specific song, on the hardware of their choice (which you have to buy from them), under whatever limitations they feel like imposing on you - forever. You can't sell your songs to someone else if you decide to get rid of your iPod, you can't even give them away. You own nothing.

Which is fine, since a lot of people seem to be okay with this deal with the devil. Shame on CNet though for claiming there are "No Strings Attached".

Alrighty - everything seems to be working now. I have the whole site under Movabletype's control, but I have set it up so that everything is generating as a PHP file now. I also created a new index template that generates just the code fragemetn needed for the sidebar. The templates for all of the other pages now have a php include statement that pulls in the code fragment for the sidebar - voila - the sidebar is now always up to date on all pages without having to rebuild the site.

Now, I know that most people who will ever read this could not care less about the intracies of how this site works, but for the one person that does a Google search trying to figure out how to do what I am doing, this will be very useful.

Now I think I can pretty easily put together an Amazon Assistant template that will auto generate all of the CD Collection pages, which will not actually be under movable types control, but will still look like they are - they will use the same stylesheet, and they will pull the sidebar info from the code fragment generated by Movabletype.

Considering that I have no idea what I am doing, I am pretty frickin' impressed by me.

The update of the site continues...

I have updated all the templates and stylesheets so everything is now back to the colors you know and love.

I have also put all of the pages under the control of Movable Type, not just the blog pages. You can see this is you go to, oh say, www.edgore.com/quake. I know that a lot of people who use Movable Type are interested in doing this, if you want to know how I did it, leave a comment asking.

The next big thing is to redo the the CD pages, whcih are all screwed up right now. The main problem is that there are just so many of them - somewhere in the neighborhood of 200. I'm trying to figure out some way that I can use Movable Type to automatically generate the sidebar information, but use the Amazon Assistant program that I wrote to generate the pages and include the sidebar that AA generates. I think it's doable, I just need some spare time to sit and think about it. Current thinking right now is to set them all up as shtml files and do an include on a MT geenrated html fragment that does the sidebar stuff.

Anyone played with doing something like that?

Of course, I could just brute force the whole thing and sit and copy and past stuff into movable type for a day or so, but that seems to boring even for me.