Tim's Weblog
Tim Strehle’s links and thoughts on Web apps, software development and Digital Asset Management, since 2002.
2012-09-05

Anniversary: Tim’s Weblog turns 10

Ten years ago, in the September of 2002, I started publishing work notes and links on this page: Here’s the first post from the archives…

I’m keeping this blog strictly work related (as I do with my Twitter account). So the main topics are Digital Asset Management, the web development technology stack (e.g. PHP, JavaScript, XML, Solr), and the crafts of writing good software and managing that process well.

Because I’m a very slow writer and so many people already write excellent stuff, this place has mostly become a link blog: Pointing to articles that had an impact on my work, or at least got me thinking. (Still, I believe narrating your work is the right thing to do and I hope to get around to doing this.) If you want to know what I value, in programming and beyond, you’ll get a pretty good impression from the quotes I’m collecting here.

Unlike a typical link blog, I filter out quite heavily: I have accumulated 1,500 entries over 10 years, about three per week. Which is only 2% of the 140 articles I bookmark per week. (I’m spending half an hour per day reading work related stuff; I’m subscribed to more than 170 RSS feeds and currently follow 158 Twitter accounts.) So this really is my “recommended reading” list…

This Web site started out on my own experimental blog software, but it is now powered by DC-X, our company’s commercial Digital Asset Management system. I wouldn’t want to miss its capability to archive a web page through a Firefox extension, generating screen shots (which you are seeing in this blog), extracting the text and putting all this into a fulltext-searchable archive. When the pages I link to go away or URLs are broken, I have a copy of the full text and layout. This has become an important part of my personal digital knowledge base.

Update: I switched the blog backend to my Topic Maps engine, it no longer runs on DC-X.