Well, the long march of dissertation writing has finally set in. As one would imagine (if one knows a lot of graduate students), I'm blogging about writing my dissertation instead of, you know, writing the damn thing. That said, this post is also detailing some of the work I put into the pre-writing of my dissertation.

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Most of the time, I'm not sure why I love open source software. While I love the idea of free, communal development of interesting and potentially unprofitable software, most of the time, except for really big projects, the stuff just doesn't work right.

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There's a new version of Shorten out. I've fixed some features and started to add others.

Download it here.

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Within the last month or so, some of the popular URL shortening services, like TinyURL and Bit.ly, have added an extra number to their hashes in URLs produced. (As an aside, URL shortening services work by taking a long URL, like http://blog.pilsch.com/past/2009/5/20/shout_out_for_todd_mays_gille_deleuze_an_introduction_/ and returns a URL like http://tinyurl.com/q89t3d that can be used on services like Twitter to save the precious characters). Anyway, with the proliferation of Twitter, these URL services have become very popular and have started to increase in length (I'll explain why later). So, figuring it couldn't possible be that hard, I wrote my own.

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In about two minutes, I just implemented a deletion feature into this blog software. It took about that long to convert from Atom to RSS for feed syndication. Awesome.

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