I thought about it for a long time, and finally decided to set up a separate knitting blog. I'll still cross-post to my other blog, but having a knitting blog gives me more freedom for obsessive posts that would likely bore non-knitters to tears.

It's called Lauren's Knitting due to a lack of imagination on my part.

I finally got my Ravelry invite today. I got on the waiting list about a month ago, so it didn't take long. I spent a few minutes poking around, though I will have to be careful as it could prove to be an immense time-sink for me, with all the discussion about knitting and crochet. There's even a group for KnitML there, which I hadn't heard of before.

It's interesting comparing Ravelry to Facebook, as well. Surface impressions: completely different crowd, they don't ask for any information when you sign up except for an email address, username, and password. Of course, you can add info such as birthday or where you live to your profile, but it's not needed. Lots of links to sites outside of Ravelry, thus the site feels much more open to the rest of the world than Facebook. And maybe because it's more focussed, it will be more appealing long-term (there already seems to be quite a lot of Facebook ennui out there in the blogosphere).

If you're a keen knitter or crocheter, don't be put off by the fact you have to join a waiting list; it doesn't take long to get the invite and it looks like a worthwhile resource. One neat item: the yarn listing includes people's destash info.

Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.

Eve's XML and knitting analogy got me thinking.

You can think of a written knitting pattern as being the schema, with a set of instructions, just like the schema's content model. Then each knitted item you make that conforms to that knitting pattern is like the document instance that conforms to the schema. Schemas can be restrictive or allow lots of instance structure variations, as can knitting patterns. And, to tie it into my previous post on knitting and copyright, a schema can be copyrighted (and often is). The analogy does have a few problems when you start trying to figure out the relationship of the set of tags in a document instance and the content within those tags; if you think of the knit and purl stitches as being the elements, then the yarn would be the content. Except for, yarn can't really be original in the same way as the content in an XML document can be. Some people may disagree when it comes to hand-painted yarns, of course.

Originally published on Anyway, my other blog.