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July 17, 2004
The Trouble With Small-fryness
There are a few problems associated with being eager to please and being a sub-minor blogger:
When you post a plaint on your sub-sub-minor dev blog claiming the exclude categories plug-in is borked in MovableType 3, no one will happen across that entry and say "It works, you're on crack." If you spend a lot of time on crack, these problems add up.
You need things like the exclude categories plugin to work if you want your super-special RSS with categories non grata to work.
So this is an amended plugin report: ExcludeCategories does work and it's driving the Mac-Free RSS feed. It also makes it relatively easy to protect people from other categories here, like "movies," "blogs," and "things mph wrote that are about anything besides babies." So just ask. I won't redesign a single page, because that is a step too far, but it's so easy to tweak the RSS that I might as well.
On a site semantics note: iPods, while capable of working with Windows machines and even occasionally having something to do with Linux, are apparently part of a broader cultural alignment that has more to do with Apple making them than anything. That faced me with the sticky issue of whether to create an "Apple" category under which iPod and Mac items can fall, or an "Apple" category that acts as a mother category to the "mac" category and any entry that an iPod item belongs under (think: tech and music, for starters), then creating an RSS feed that was less "Mac Free" than "Apple Culture Resistance Central."
Then I thought a moment more and realized iPods are part of a broader cultural alignment that has more to do with Apple making them than anything. The company's just into making little smooth pieces of plastic and metal that are easy to use. Their laptops, when they aren't breaking because the engineering staff spends too much time doing one-hitters out behind the dumpster, are the same way. And this eMac here is similar. If it didn't have the speakers and disc tray, it'd be the lovely, pearly tear drop of a gigantic robot angel made of plastic and metal that periodically squeezes out gigantic 50 lb. tears made of consumer electronics. And god bless that angel. And god bless Apple for unleashing it on the world, even if its nail-clipping iBooks Just Die.
The other consideration is that I'm very lazy and I hate the way MT makes me save an entry before I can double back to add categories. So I'll be damned if I'm going to spend time making meta categories.
Decision: iPods are midget Macintoshes that play music and don't happen to go bong when you start them up. You can't use them as word processors, either, but having once spent a week writing a column using a Palm keyboard and squinting into the muddy display of a Handspring Visor, I'm here to tell you that's a bad idea anyhow. So having identified them as midget Macs, we'll keep them categorized there. Except for this entry, because it's not so much about the iPods as it is about the ExcludeCategories plugin working.
And also because if I don't file this entry under something other than "Mac," the person I maintain the Mac-free feed for will never know it was fixed.