Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Being silly here. ;) Feel like harassing me about what I listen to? Here’s the place to do it….
The last ten tracks I’ve listened to in iTunes are:
This feature is no longer active, as a consequence of the move to TypePad. Sorry!
Feel free to use the comment form to praise or condemn me — or if you’re feeling rich and/or adventuresome, use the links to Amazon and pick up something new to listen to!
(This is inspired by the playlist comment feature on Phil Ringnalda’s site.)
I’ve made some revamps to my archive listing pages, in an attempt to address some of the issues raised by Dave and Kirsten.
Monthly archives I’ve kept the same — I really like the calendar-style display that they use.
Clicking through to the main archive page should be much nicer now. Rather than the huge (and rapidly growing) table listing the title for every post I’ve ever made, you’ll now see a simple list of each category I use, with a short description of the category and the titles of the last ten posts within that category.
Heading into each category’s archive page (for instance, my Humor archive), I wanted to get away from listing the entirety of each post, as that lead to huge pages, but still include more info than just the title of each post. Nicely enough, MT includes an ‘excerpt’ field for each post, and if an exerpt isn’t written by hand, MT will auto-generate one using a snippet of the beginning of each post. So, the category archive pages list the title for each post, then the excerpt. I’m going to start trying to remember to create excerpts for any new posts from here on out, but the auto-generated excerpts will have to suffice for all the old posts — at least until I get really bored. ;)
Hopefully this makes things far easier to deal with. As always, questions, comments, and words of wisdom are always appreciated!
[Addendum: the main archive listing and all category listings validate as valid XHTML. Individual entry pages should, but may or may not, on a case-by-case basis. However, there’s lots of those, and I need to go to bed.]{.underline}
In order to give it something of a workout, I went ahead and set Safari to be my default web browser. I’ll probably keep it here for the next couple days to stress test it, then switch back to Chimera until Safari moves out of beta status.
Mark Pilgrim has a good rundown of current CSS bugs that he’s uncovered in Safari so far (thankfully, though, it renders djwudi.com just fine). Amusingly enough, I may have just found one more while I was reading his post: while most of his links highlight correctly when the pointer is over them, the ‘First test case’ link towards the end of the post that has \<code> tags within the link displays oddly — the code snippets disappear! Here’s a couple quick screenshots of how it looks in Chimera and in Safari:
I’m also finding that I (along with many other people) really miss the tabbed browsing available in Chimera and Mozilla — once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s really hard to go back to having window after window all over the place. Still, the speed is definitely good, and overall, it’s not too shabby. Just definitely a beta release. Here’s hoping that future releases are as impressive as the first shot!
Just a couple quick thoughts I had regarding some of the news from Steve Jobs’ keynote speech today at MacWorld.
Apple is continuing to support the Open Source software movement. Not only have they been utilizing the Open Source community to help improve the code for OS X, but they’ve done the same with Safari, the newly announed browser. On top of that, after dramatically improving the code base that Safari uses, they are sending the improved code back into the community for public use. Very nice move.
Apple plays nice, part 2
I noticed a nice little feature in Safari during the few moments I was able to play with it before I left for work. In the main Safari menu, just underneath the ‘Preferences…’ option, is an option to disable popup windows. While the option has been around in most Mozilla-based browsers for a while (sometimes easily available, sometimes not), it’s nice to see Apple including the functionality right off the bat in their browser.
Open format files
The announcement that Keynote (the new presentation application) uses XML for it’s saved project files really got my interest. While I haven’t played enough with XML to be able to take advantage of this right off, I can think of some very interesting scenarios that could make this very useful.
Say, for instance, a script that weekly (or monthly, or daily, or whatever) pulls the Apache logfiles from your OS X webserver, extracts whatever key data points you want to extract from them, and plugs the resulting data into the right spots inside the XML file of a predefined Keynote template. Bingo – an automatically generated weekly professional presentation of your website’s traffic, most visited pages, most frequently used search terms, etc., ready for presentation to your boss, board of directors, whatever. Or, since Keynote can export to PowerPoint, you could have the report ready to send off to those Windows-based heathen. Or just export the report to a PDF file or QuickTime movie for posting on a website. All automatically generated, without the need for any interaction beyond the initial setup.
Pretty damn cool, I think.
In the meantime, I’ll just go drool over that 17\” Powerbook now…
My schedule actually works out so that I can watch Steve Jobs’ keynote address at MacWorld Expo 2003. I’ve got the live streaming webcast going now, watching people filter in…everything’s scheduled to get started at 9am, so in theory, Steve should be hitting the stage any time now. Okay — I had a hard time getting the stream going after it stalled, but I’m back in now.
And that’s it…
Noted sci-fi/cyberpunk author William Gibson has just started his blog. No RSS feed, though, which means I’ll probably forget to check it on a regular basis. Bummer.
(via Jason Kottke)
I just stumbled across Searchling, a very cool little mini-application for OS X. When running, it adds a system-wide search field that allows you to search Google, Slashdot, or a few other sites.
The coolest bit, though, is that the search options are defined by a simple XML file. So, I did a bit of digging, figured out the syntax (which really wasn’t all that hard), and added djwudi.com to the search options!
On the off chance that another OS X user might want to add me to Searchling, here’s the code to add:
<dict>
<key>name</key>
<string>djwudi.com</string>
<key>types</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>type</key>
<string>Web</string>
<key>url</key>
<string>http://www.djwudi.com/cgi-bin/search/search.pl?
nocpp=1&Match=1&Realm=All&Terms=</string>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
(Note: the string between <string> and </string> is one continuous line, a linebreak has been added here for readability.)
Update: As I’m no longer weblogging at djwudi.com, the above XML snippet won’t actually work. I’m leaving it up here, though, as a handy example of how to add things to Searchling.
In a fortuitous bit of serendipity, I just re-discovered a website I’d found a few months ago, but forgotten to bookmark — All Consuming, which scans recently updated weblogs for Amazon book links, and uses that data to track what books are currently popular in the weblog world. Nifty stuff to explore!
Amusingly enough, there’s a feature in the top right that lists the first line of a book for you to attempt to guess the source, which reminded me of a bookstore up on Broadway on Capitol Hill that does the same with a readerboard on the sidewalk. As it turns out, that very bookstore is where All Consuming’s webmaster got the idea! Small world, I tell ya.
Incidentally, though, I’ve never run across a first line up at the bookstore that I knew. Hm. Guess I just haven’t read enough yet!
on a side note, i wonder when somebody will get the hair to standardize style and do a stylebook specifically for the web? Like MLA, AP, Chicago Manual of Style, etc.
— Kirsten, in a comment on this site
Your wish is granted!
Well…er…sorta. I don’t think this is quite what you were aiming at. Pretty accurate, though!
No matter what Flash-blinded web monkeys would have us believe, the Internet is a text-based medium: especially its major discussion forums (IRC and Usenet) where people from all over the world can interact and share information. A popular misconception about text messages on the Internet is that, to be an effective communicator and earn the respect and admiration of your peers, you must be able to write lucid prose; that your messages, articles, posts and pages must be easy to understand and pleasant to read.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Popular sites filled with cutting-edge Internet cognoscenti (such as Slashdot and ShackNews) give the lie to this harmful and destructive myth: they are brimming with horrific grammar, atrocious spelling, gratuitous abbreviation and childish, arrogant attitude. To be “in” on the net, you must write like a wanker.
As far as when someone will write a real style guide, I’m not sure, though it wouldn’t really surprise me if there were one already out there and I just haven’t stumbled across it yet. Pointers, anyone?
A few more changes to the main page here, as I work my way through the ideas I’ve got running around in my noggin.