Garrison Keillor critiques TS Eliot...

...in amongst other St. Louis authors (William Burroughs, etc.) who set a bad example by seeming to demonstrate that the way to be a good author was to not be happy. This was on the 1/20/07 show.

Can Blogger with tags replace DiamondWiki

I'm making some posts here to see if the new Blogger with tags (which they call labels) can effectively replace my DiamondWiki that I've been so happy with. We shall see.

A big difference is that DiamondWiki is only a blogging tool since I modified it to require a password to edit posts and the RecentChanges macro is the kludge I use to get a reverse chronological view.

We shall see.

XSLT Progress

I've been experimenting with XSLT and have found some useful tools and sites.

First of all, I'm surprised to find that there are not that many free interactive XSLT tools. Many commercial products have time limited or severely functionally limited trial versions, but I'm not interested in using something for a while and then having to buy it if I like the functionality.

I found XSLDebugger to be free, easy to install (Windows only) and useful for stepping through XSLT to better understand how it works.

I found a bunch of XSLT code demonstrating different functions that work in XSLDebugger here. Many of these sample make a distinction between push style and pull style of XSLT programming. What they're calling pull style is essentially what David Jacobs advocates in Rescuing XSLT from Niche Status - A Gentle Introduction to XSLT through HTML Templates. This style uses to handle multiple instances and is similar to what is common in a templating language such as PHP. The push style is recursive and strikes me as more geeky computer scienceish. I found Rescuing XSLT helpful in getting me started with XSLT and these example are useful in demonstrating that there are in fact two ways to accomplish the same thing.

First Try

Does this work?