On The Use of Code in Weblog Titles

So you’ve decided to start a weblog and have a really clever idea for titling it based on a snippet of code you find particularly novel. Rad!

It’s been done before, though; a lot, in fact. And there’s a couple of things you should consider before making a decision with such long term implications. Let’s take a look at the ins and outs of clever weblog titles and get a feel for what you’ll be up against…

Jamis Buck:

the { buckblogs :here }
assorted_ramblings.by JamisBuck

Both lines are valid Ruby syntax that express no useful semantic. Your clever idea should be more clever.

Charles Miller’s The Fish Bowl

tail -f /dev/mind > blog

This tagline insinuates that Charles’s brain is accessible via a special device file (enabled by a kernel module, presumably). tail(1) reads from the end of the device, writing what it finds to stdout. With the -f argument, it runs until interrupted and “follows” the file, writing anything new as it becomes available. Here, though, stdout is being redirected to a file named “blog” in the current working directory. We can speculate that “blog” is actually a fifo node, the read side of which is connected to netcat(1) and is being carted up to pastiche.org where it’s ~~piped through a series of sed(1) filters that convert Charles’s raw thoughts into standard SQL99 INSERT statements~~.

UPDATE: No SQL and no sed(1) filters required. It’s exactly as I had suspected: Charles’s raw thoughts are actually native Perl DBI calls.

If your clever title is hardcore-Unix-hacker type clever, give up now.

Jim Weirich:

{ | one, step, back | }

Your clever title should not ignore established coding conventions (spaces around block parameters).

UPDATE: I figured I’d put my money where my mouth is and contribute instead of just whining:

[rtomayko@beandip]$ sendmail <<EOF
To: jim@weirichhouse.org
Subject: [PATCH] onestepback.org - coding convention FIX

--- onestepback.org    2008-03-10 05:32:40.000000000 -0400
+++ onestepback.org    2008-03-10 05:32:41.000000000 -0400
@@ -1 +1 @@
-{ | one, step, back | }
+{ |one,step,back| }
EOF

FTW!

Brian Ford:

def euler(x); cos(x) + i*sin(x); end

If the cleverness of your title relies on pure mathematical beauty, give up now. It is simply not possible to come up with anything better than Euler’s formula. Seriously.

Josh Susser

has_many :through

Your clever title should not be semantically misleading. Josh’s title declares that the containing model has a 1:N relationship with a model whose plural form is “Through”. It is more likely that the intended semantic was to declare that the containing model had a 1:N relationship with some other model through some other model. For instance, …

UPDATE: That didn’t go over well. =/

Pratik Naik:

has_many :bugs, :through => :rails

Admitting the shortcomings of your programming environment in your clever weblog title is highly encouraged.

Fabio Akita:

%w(Akita On Rails) * 2.0

This is valid Ruby code, somehow. The first part creates a three element array (["Akita", "On", "Rails"]). Multiplying this by 2.0 yields ["Akita", "On", "Rails", "Akita", "On", "Rails"]. If your clever weblog title isn’t feeling clever enough, multiple by the current version of the web.

Bob Ippolito:

from __future__ import *

This might be my favorite use of code in a weblog title. Python has a special __future__ module that acts as a sort of staging area for experimental language features that are to be introduced in developing versions of Python. You can get those features in current/stable versions by importing them explicitly by name. Importing everything from __future__ is both technically impossible (it raises a SyntaxError) and insanely cool.

If your clever weblog title can top Bob’s, you have my official blessing.

This entry has been tagged coding, reference, blogging, funny, haha, ruby, unix, sarcasm — follow a tag for an archive of related essays, weblog entries, and bookmarks.

Discuss

Hehe, nice

— Nico on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 07:41 AM #
hehe, thanks for linking me :-) though the 2.0 is not for web 2.0 but for Rails 2.0 ;-)

— AkitaOnRails on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 08:18 AM #
Akita:

You’ll have to change it even sooner, then!

— Joe Grossberg on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 08:36 AM #
lol :-) If a 3.0 is released soon, with more great new features, I’ll be glad to change.

— AkitaOnRails on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 08:39 AM #
Hey Ryan,

what about DEV_MEM.dump_to(:blog) ?

:-)

— Luis Lavena on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 09:17 AM #
I once used apt-get install knowledge

— You Xu on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 09:54 AM #
That’s the great thing about inside jokes. Some people get them, the rest don’t. The name of my blog is a very recognizable Rails-ism, and anyone doing Rails development gets it right away. As for long term implications, I’ve never regretted my choice of title. It’s worked well for me, and no one has ever complained about it before now.

What I don’t get is the negative tone of your article. Did you wake up feeling like you had to hate on people for no reason? If you’re shooting for Zed-class notoriety, you’ve got a long way to go.

— josh on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 10:08 AM #
I used to have this for my weblog title:
```
(format nil "Edward ~@R O'Connor" 1450)
```
Common Lisp radix format control, ~R, takes a @ modifier to turn the output into roman numerals. MCDL are my middle initials.
— Edward O'Connor on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 11:54 AM #
I am dismayed to be left out: my blog is named Push cx because I blew a couple of my formative years hacking in assembly.

— Peter Harkins on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 12:38 PM #
You might not be able to from future import *, but you can certainly: from future import braces in Python. For some reason, I don’t think the BDFL will be implementing them though:
```
>>> from __future__ import braces
File "<stdin>", line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance
>>>
```
— Ferry Boender on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 12:44 PM #
@Josh:

I didn’t take “Your clever title should not be semantically misleading” as a beat-down, although given that I like your blog, I might be biased into thinking that nobody could possibly have anything bad to say about it.

@Ryan:

I hope you aren’t going to make a habit of pointing it out when people try to be hip but fail. I can’t help but feel my own work would provide you with enough material for a thickish book :-(

— Reg Braithwaite on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 01:10 PM #
mine is called “require ‘brain’” :)

— szeryf on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 01:36 PM #
@szeryf:

You ‘require’ something that you don’t have built in :-P

— Luis Lavena on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 01:40 PM #
Reg wrote:

I hope you aren’t going to make a habit of pointing it out when people try to be hip but fail. I can’t help but feel my own work would provide you with enough material for a thickish book :-(

Not at all. “Lame attempts at hipness” could be the tagline of this blog :) And, for the record, I don’t think “fail” is a word I’d use in any kind of proximity with your blog.

Josh wrote:

That’s the great thing about inside jokes. Some people get them, the rest don’t.

Clearly.

— Ryan Tomayko on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 02:22 PM #
What do you win by attacking other people?

— she on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 03:54 PM #
brightredglow.com is Brian Ford’s blog, fwiw. Just letting you know since I noticed you have names with all the others. ;~)

— Thomas on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 04:06 PM #
Edited. Thanks Thomas.

— Ryan Tomayko on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 04:15 PM #
People need to grow a pair.

— Put A. Sockinit on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 04:21 PM #
For the Cocoa (er, OPENSTEP?) nerds, there’s always Erick Barzeski’s NSLog();.

— dsandler on Friday, March 07, 2008 at 10:08 PM #
Just a quick correction. My blog’s native storage format is Berkeley DB. As such, no SQL is involved in the pipleline.

In truth, I actually think in Perl DBI calls. This may explain some of the more bizarre behaviour of my brain.

— Charles Miller on Sunday, March 09, 2008 at 02:44 AM #
What about to name your company with ruby code? Ask Obie and their company: HashRocket.

— Diego Pires Plentz on Sunday, March 09, 2008 at 08:23 PM #
Ryan, thanks for the code review on my blog title. Although my blog is currently down as I move it to another server, as soon as I get it up, I plan on revising the title so that it conforms to existing coding standards.

Perhaps I should consider “pair blog naming” in the future to avoid such coding faux pas.

<grin>

— Jim Weirich on Sunday, March 09, 2008 at 08:37 PM #
@josh Is your comment serious or are you going for some Andy Kaufman shit here?

Ryan’s analyse of blog title pseudo-code is clearly tongue-in-cheek. He’s celebrating this supreme level of geekiness with a suitably geeky analysis. It’s meta. It’s funny. It may even be ironic.

ps. Is invoking Zed’s rant the Godwin’s law of the Rails community? pps. Love the blog, whatever you want call it.

— John on Monday, March 10, 2008 at 02:41 PM #
Here’s another one: Coder’s Eye I like the typo!

— Anonymous on Sunday, March 23, 2008 at 08:35 PM #
Nice! That might be the best one yet:
```
page = {name:"page",current=True,author=Bruce Kroeze"}
```
That looks like some strange mixture of Python (True), JavaScript, and maybe Ruby. I’d bet good money that the most suitable language you can find would produce at least one syntax error.
— Ryan Tomayko on Monday, March 24, 2008 at 01:05 PM #
This is mine. It’s purely because I suck at having actual taglines so I thought I’d just make a lame coding joke. tail -l 25 /dev/random > /root/blog.txt; ./post !$

I was thinking about making my blog output what looks like Ruby code. It’d be nice to see. Whilst Charles thinks in Perl, I think in Ruby all day, even when not at a computer. (A situation that I try to keep rare.)

— Peter B. on Sunday, April 06, 2008 at 06:48 PM #
Well well, Ryan:
```
<meta http-equiv='X-UA-Compatible' content='YOUR MOM'>
```
— Peter B. on Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 06:15 AM #
Ha! Forgot all about that ;) I promised myself I’d leave it in after IE8 finally hit, too, regardless of the consequences.

— Ryan Tomayko on Tuesday, April 08, 2008 at 12:11 PM #