The Hand of FuManChu

My dream, actually, is to code my job out of existence without my boss realizing it...

It wouldn't be such a bad life. And I'd have free time again!

You're writing an API that wraps a well-understood common object model with a domain-specific language. Do you really want to be an expert on a language nobody else knows?

Oh no! You're raining on the DSL parade! :-)

Mostly I agree. However I still consider doing web site creation without a good template system than website design worse than website design with a good template system. Sure it is assembly line work, but there is less work overall. All the lack of templates gives me is more work between the boring parts. I'd rather go fishing in that extra time.

I should have waited to post...

Website design templates make it easy for an artist to do website design. I can't draw, but I can write some templates so an artist can more quickly (and without dealing with technical details he doesn't understand) design a website, an place the important parts on it: pictures. I could teach an artist to design websites from scratch, but we are both happier if all the tedious details are taken care of behind the scenes.

To go back to your assembly line analogy, I'm writing software to put the body panels on cars, leaving the artist more time to put a custom paint job on the car, instead of having to bolt the panels on. If I do my job correctly, the boring uncreative parts disappear, and all that is left are the interesting creative parts.

Looks like your attempt to make referer-spammers aware you were blocking them caught the University of Toronto's Chris Siebenmann's attempt to link to you. Your implementation is hackish and unlikely to ever be read by the intended recipients, your demand for an email address when someone is attempting to fulfill your request to "leave us a comment about the error" annoying and the whole thing rather reminiscent of someone trying to be smarter than their ability to think things through. Have you considered becoming a Python programmer?

What are you blathering on about, Mr. Quarter?

Your anti-referer-spam stuff seems to be misfiring (or be set very wide; I can't tell which from the outside). I wrote something pointing to this entry, but when people click through to here, they get a 403 Forbidden 'please stop referer spam' message. (I would include the URL to the entry, but it seems that your system does't like it, and I can't even include the domain in plain text; it is utcc dot utoronto dot ca, and is presumably showing up in your referer logs.)

The 403 Forbidden response is due to ".utoronto.ca" being on the centralized blacklist for b2evolution, the blog engine that drives this site. I've removed it from this particular site's blacklist, but you should be aware that any other site using b2evo's centralied blacklist will exhibit the same problem. The University of Toronto's domain administrator should contact b2evo for further resolution.