Hi again everyone,

Well, I’m sad to say that I’ve spent most of my free time for the past week just learning the basics of blogging. The Blogger interface itself is intuitive and you can pretty much just learn it as you use it. But as with other technological innovations, there is a temptation to fritter away one’s time by endlessly tweaking the interface. So far I’ve done only the very basics, by adding some links to my sidebar and registering the blog with Technorati, a company that indexes and tracks links between blogs. Blogger maintains a page called BloggerHacks that includes code you can add to your blog template. One neat thing you can do is to add a ‘recent comments’ section to your sidebar in a fashion similar to the ‘recent posts’. I’ll have to implement that one when I have the time. Something else I’ve come across that I want to add to this blog are trackbacks. A trackback is essentially the inverse of a link — it shows who is linking to your page. Probably no need to hurry on implementing this one, though, since at the moment there probably isn’t anyone else linking here at all.

For those of you for whom this is all old hat, please excuse my naiveté. I tried looking in a few books on blogging for the technical details of this stuff, without too much luck. It seems the best way to learn the details is by looking at other people’s blogs. One of the best examples I’ve come across is The Geomblog by Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Lots and lots of technical goodies on Suresh’s blog. Of course, I don’t want to make it seem like the technical glitz is more important than the actual content of a blog. From the point of view of helping one to learn theoretical computer science, I think the best blog by far is Lance Fortnow’s Computational Complexity, which is on the low end of the ‘glitz’ scale.

One downside of the time I’ve spent playing around with the blog is that I haven’t actually studied any TCS in the past week. I’m starting to feel withdrawal pangs. But reading blogs and randomly following links from blog to blog is extremely addictive, more so I think than for regular Web content.

Here’s a real nice goody I came across in my travels: ASCIIMathML is a JavaScript utility that will dynamically transform LaTeX-style math formulas in a web page into MathML markup. This looks like a very promising solution to the problem of how to render mathematics on this blog. I’ll be trying this out in a future post. Of course, the reader still needs to have their browser configured properly to display MathML, but presumably someone seeking out a computer science blog would be able to take care of that.