1. What is growlers?
Growlers is a collection of logs and widgets that I have created for my own amusement and the amusement of others.
2. Where did it come from?
My first webpage, made sometime in late 1995, was a thing of horror. It had a lizard skin like background that was yellow, red, and green, and white text. It was more or less unreadable. Growlers traces absolutely nothing to that primordial hypertext document.
That page slowly passed through a nautical stage with maps and ships, and a bit with a lot of maple leaves. Along the way, pages were added, such that it became a site of sorts.
Sometime in the next year, I decided to put together a site called iceberg273 (because the freezing/melting point of water is 273.15 Kelvin, and that's clever). This site had a page that was intended to be changed frequently and would contain to timely and topical links. Fortunately, the page was now legible (albeit in a garish blue, yellow, and red sort of way). Unfortunately, the page was not changed frequently, because changing the page and uploading it to the server involved a lot of typing and clicking and such. That page had an iceberg icon that I drew in the margin of some biology notes. You can still see the icon in at the bottom of the left hand column of this page.
iceberg273 remained pretty static until February of 2000, when it migrated to a Manilla powered site, and actually began to be updated on a regular basis. But then the company that was providing the free Manilla site discovered that this was a lousy revenue model and disappeared one afternoon. So that was that.
Around this time, the domain iceberg273.org was purchased. It was pointed at my local university space for a while (it is a messy development site now), and I ran a weblog there that I formatted with a javascript widget and uploaded via ftp. This lasted for a remarkably long time, given the typing and clicking and such.
On the last day of 2001, I purchased this domain name (growlers.org) and web space, and learned php and mySQL sorts of things. 25 days later, I had rolled my own weblogging script.
Everything was fine until the server was hacked in mid August (except that it wasn't, but I didn't find this out until much, much later). I had written community weblogging software by this time (for a family website that never started to exist), so I installed it on the server and uploaded the backed up posts. This worked fine, except that it was really, really too powerful for what I needed.
In June of 2003, I decided to simplify things, which is why growlers.org is now running a small (two scripts, two cookies, one table) *logging program written in php, called Thot. It works adequately, and I can customize it at will. But the code is kinda ugly.
In 2007 I start blogging photos from my cellphone at blogspot, mostly because I could. And iceberg273 is also in my flickr photostream url.
3. I am [not] opposed to old growth logging. What kind of logs are these?
These logs are just short, timestamped, and easily updatable hypertext documents. I hesitate to call these logs pages per se, as they can be built from a database on the fly (that's what is done here), or can be uploaded to the server as a set of static documents (which is what I used to do back when this site was elsewhere and called iceberg273.org)
4. Why'd you change the name?
iceberg273.org was run using html, javascript and ftp. When I started learning php and mySQL, I didn't want to delete the iceberg273.org site immediately, so I needed a new domain. A growler is a small remnant of an iceberg - it's an iceberg derivative.
5. Isn't a growler actually some sort of container for beer, though?
Yeah, but I'll have some orange juice all the same.
6. Hey, I think I know what you're doing here. I saw this bit on the news last night about blogs. This is a blog, right? Right?
Well, sort of. I used to spend much more time logging things that I found on the web, but I've lately started spending my spare time making new things to put on the web, rather than looking for things other people have made. The idea of logging things is pretty flexible. Not every log needs to be a blog. (frantic.org refers to this sort of thing as a project log. So that would be shortened to what? Prog?)
7. Oh. Um. Well, where'd all the stuff that used to be here go?
I deleted it. Email me if there's something you really need to know.
8. Sometimes when I try to use some of the widgets on growlers, I get prompted for a password. What's the big idea?
In order to stem the tide of programmers who were using widgets on growlers to power their scripts (in many cases, just repackaging output and presenting it as their own), logins are now required. The login sets a cookie with a password that is deleted after a bunch of minutes (I think), thus requiring relogin. You don't need to register with personal information and an email address; login consists of copying a six character password off of a graphic, a task that computers should have significant difficulty with, but that humans and cephalopods should have no trouble with. If you can't see the graphic that displays the password because you are blocking or spoofing referrers, there's precious little I can do.
9. What software powers the growlers logs?
These are homegrown scripts and are constantly being tweaked. Growlers was previously powered by community weblogging software that I wrote called Juri, but it was much more powerful than it needed to be. The scripts are written in php and the data is stored in mySQL databases.
10. There's no formatting on some pages. Did you forget?
Use a better browser. The formatting is there, but you can't see it.
11. Who are you?
I'm the guy staring into space at the back of the room, writing code in his head.
Wednesday, June 11th, 2003
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