LOLCODE

LOLCODE has now been featured as the DokuWiki of the Month for May 2008. It was really the first interview I had conducted about LOLCODE, and I was grateful for the chance: for me, working with the underlying DokuWiki software has been nearly all pleasure, with very little pain.

I launched at the end of May 2007, using DokuWiki alone. The week following the launch was full of sleepless nights, just buzzing on the volume of attention the site was getting. …[It] quickly made the front pages of Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, BoingBoing and StumbleUpon, [and] we served over a million pages in less than a week. The site still gets thousands of new visitors a week from people who still haven't seen the joke.

If you need to run a Wiki for a project, unless you have specific requirements leading you elsewhere, I would readily recommend DokuWiki.

LOLCODE is cropping up everywhere I look. It's becoming unsettling. First, I learned of Leah Culver's work on the Pownce API. LOLCODE is a legitimate return format: just append .lol to your request:

http://api.pownce.com/users/atl.lol:

OH HAI
INVISIBLE FLICKR API OM NOM NOM NOM
  GIMME USER
    I CAN HAS USERNAME
      atl
    KTHX.
    I CAN HAS FRIEND_COUNT
      27
    KTHX.
    I CAN HAS PERMALINK
      http://pownce.com/atl/
    KTHX.
    ...
  I IS BORED
KTHXBYE.

But then I learned it was just in emulation of the Flickr API (as implied by the second line of the response), where, thanks to Cal Henderson, format=lolcode sits proudly next to xmlrpc and json.

http://api.flickr.com/services/...&format=lolcode:

HAI
IM IN UR BUCKETS MAKING UP FORMATS
GIMME A_T_LS FAVORITES
  I CAN HAS PHOTO 2008_04_25_ROFLCON_10
    ITZ AT http://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/2442343070/
    INVISIBLE METADATA
    LOL
  KTHX.
  I CAN HAS PHOTO ICANHASCASESTUDY
    ITZ AT http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoast/2444666738/
    INVISIBLE METADATA
    LOL
  KTHX.
  I CAN HAS PHOTO ICANHASCASESTUDY2
    ITZ AT http://www.flickr.com/photos/stoast/2443843469/
    INVISIBLE METADATA
    LOL
  KTHX.
...

Really, you have to admit that as API formats go, this is pretty easy to read. I look forward to seeing it elsewhere: if you spot it, as always, you can send a note to lolcode@lolcode.com.

(DSC_0059, originally uploaded by davefishernc on Flickr)

Speaking on the LOLCats discussion panel (“LOLCATS: I CAN HAZ CASE STUDY?”) was fantastic. I shared the stage with some thoughtful, humble, and very funny people in the same lecture hall where I had once taken a bunch of Comp Sci classes a long time ago.

What people have written about the panel has been very generous. David Weinberger, whose keynote and subsequent panel set a very high bar for the rest of the Con, wrote some very nice things about our panel. Anna Pickard from The Guardian also wrote up the panel, and reports some of my non-cat LOL shout-outs. The ROFLCon blog itself had an abbreviated live-blog of the event. Justin Ellis of the Portland Press Herald also gave some insights into the panel, as did Gunnar and Joel.

I'm sure more coverage will come out later, but for now, some more pictures (showing off my shirt):

The pre-ROFLCon party set up by Laughing Squid was just the start of the ROFLCon awesomeness. There were so many dyson people there, it's impossible to list. Steve Garfield was the first to get a picture of my glow-in-the-dark t-shirt onto Flickr. Stories previewing ROFLCon have already appeared on blogs from The Guardian and Wired, as well.

Right now, my favorite way of gorging on ROFLCon info is the Tweetscan feed of ROFLCon info. If you want to keep an eye on what's happening, you could do worse than watch that page/RSS feed.

To all of you who already keep an eye on the LOLCODE news feed, I wish you were here, so that I could give you all a big hug.