one small voice

stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, et alia

about

who
what
where
when
why
how
comments

feeds

ATOM

RSS

-about-

who

This blog is made by Peter Saint-Andre (a.k.a. stpeter), patron saint of Jabber and amateur poet, translator, musician, historian, and philosopher. It's just one small voice from the world's most powerful minority: a minority of one.

~ link ~

what

I write about whatever I please (it's that whole individualism thing). Favorite topics seem to include:

Open-source software, especially of the Jabber variety
Politics, especially of the libertarian variety
Philosophy, especially of the individualist variety (Rand, Aristotle, Epicurus, Nietzsche, etc.)
Civilizational history
Society and technology in general

~ link ~

where

We're blogging to you from Denver, Colorado, USA. But I've lived in quite a few other places in my time.

~ link ~

when

First post was on 2001-09-13 (though my journal goes back farther). Fairly regular blogging since then (well, whenever the fancy strikes me and I'm not too busy).

~ link ~

why

Why blog? Here are a few reasons:

I'm opinionated, and this is my soapbox
I'm creative, and this is my sketchbook
I'm forgetful, and this is my notepad

~ link ~

how

A number of people have asked me about the little system I use to manage my weblog. In keeping with my primitivist ways, it's really quite simple. I write my blog in XML (using vi, of course!), then run the XML through a variety of XSLT stylesheets to create XHTML, ATOM, and RSS files using xsltproc triggered by a Unix shell script.

In particular, I have one XML file for each month. Each file contains multiple days, and each day can contain one or more entries. Each entry in turn has a body, a title, an intro, a category, and an ISO-8601-compliant timestamp based on which I generate the link to the HTML page fragment for the story's location in that month's blog page. So once I write an entry, I run a shell script on my webserver that applies some XSLT stylesheets to the current month's XML source file to re-generate the index.html page, the page for the month in question, the relevant cateogory pages, and my Atom and RSS feeds.

Fun, huh?

~ link ~

comments

No, my blog doesn't have a comments feature, because I don't want to host things you might want to say. If you want to comment in public, write about it at your own blog (and if you don't have a blog, start one). If you want to comment in private, contact me via IM, email, or phone.

~ link ~

identity...