Blog

Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

Basic HTML tag cheatsheet

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After a friend asked me a few questions about the basic HTML tags while trying to clear up some confusion, I went Googling for some sort of cheat sheet listing just the most basic tags. I couldn’t find one — just came up with a lot of full-blown tutorials or cheat sheets listing every tag in the book — so I tossed this together. Hopefully it helps.

I’m only looking at the tags most likely to be used in your standard, basic weblog post, so there won’t be much in the way of structural stuff here, just presentational.

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Girl talk, MT32b3, and Alan Moore

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Had a pleasant evening after work yesterday, when I headed up the hill to Charlie’s and got together with Melissa, her daughter (whose name I either didn’t catch or, more likely, have forgotten), Christa, and Erin. Quite fun, actually, being as I ended up in a situation I’ve stumbled into quite a few times before in my life and always enjoy when it happens — being the only guy in something of a ‘girl talk’ session. Laughter, rants about current and former lovers and friends, ongoing drama…all that fun stuff.

There are times when I really enjoy not being the “typical male”…or at least far enough removed from that stereotype that I can occasionally be around for such things. I may have worked over the years at decreasing the amount of drama in my life, but I must admit, I do enjoy being a spectator! ;) Quite enjoyable, in any case, and it seems that this may become something of a weekly event.

After coming home and chatting with Prairie for a while until she wandered off to bed, I upgraded my Movable Type beta installation to v3.2b3, which is essentially the final candidate build. Ran into one small oddity during the upgrade process, but after filing a bug report and having Brad Choate pop up in iChat to talk about it, I’m leaning towards it being a caching issue and nothing major with the system.

I’m looking forward to upgrading my main site to v3.2 once it’s finalized and I’ve had a chance to go over the new documentation. This may end up meaning that I do a full redesign — there are a lot of changes in the new templates, and it may take me some time to wrap my head around all of them. I’m not sure yet if I’ll upgrade the backend and keep the current design and then work on a new one in the background, or just go whole-hog and start over with the new basic designs…more to ponder.

I’ve also just finished reading Alan Moore‘s ‘V for Vendetta‘ graphic novel after the movie trailer peaked my curiosity about the original movie, and am currently working my way through Moore’s ‘The Watchmen‘. While Prairie (a confessed ‘book snob’) may giggle at me for reading “comic books”, I’m enjoying both of these, and ‘V for Vendetta’ in many ways seems very topical in todays world — which, given its subject matter, is actually a little disturbing.

And that pretty much sums up life in the world of me at the moment. Not quite sure what my plans for the weekend are, though there’s a lot of Seafair stuff going on around town right now that I may see if I can find a way to check out at one point or another. As is usual for me, though, I’m not planning much of anything more than about 20 minutes in advance…except for running off to work, which (insert overly melodramatic sigh here) I must go do. Off with me, then!

iTunes “24 Hour Man” by Lock Up from the album Something Bitchin’ This Way Comes (1990, 4:46).

Interestingness

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I’m probably one of the last people to actually make mention of this, but the big news in the Flickrverse over the past few days has been the introduction of two new features: tag clusters and ‘interestingness’.

Tag clusters are a great addition, analyzing photos by all the tags associated with them and then ‘clustering’ them with other photos with similar groups of tags. This allows for distinguishing photos of feline tigers from operating systems code named tiger, even though they both share the common ‘tiger‘ tag.

‘Interestingness‘ is much more vague. Here’s how Flickr explains it:

There are lots of things that make a photo ‘interesting’ (or not) in the Flickr. Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing. Interestingness changes over time, as more and more fantastic photos and stories are added to Flickr.

In a sense, it works in a somewhat similar method to Google’s Pagerank system, using community interaction with the photos to determine what’s catching the communal eye at any given point. Page views, number of comments, how many people have marked a photo as a favorite, and the tags and groups a photo is assigned to seem to play a part in how ‘interesting’ it is deemed. Obviously, this isn’t a qualitative ranking of the photo itself, and shouldn’t be seen that way, but it’s a very nifty way to go bouncing through the Flickrverse and discover photos you might not have found otherwise.

Each user has now gained a list of their top 200 ‘most interesting’ photos as determined by the system. I was somewhat amused to check mine and find that of my top five, only one of them is actually a picture that I’ve taken — the other four are screenshots or satellite photos from other sources. I think I’ve got a lot more photos that are a lot more interesting than those — but then, a computer algorithm is only going to do so well at figuring this stuff out.

Here, then, are my current top five ‘most interesting’ photos:

Satellite view of the line to view Pope John Paul II laying in state. Punk Love I - Innocence Quicktime 7 rocks! Steve Jobs is Willy Wonka. Or something. My walk to work

And, for entertainment purposes, my current ‘least interesting’ photos (though these change more frequently, and as the ranking only counts 200 out of the 3492 photos I’ve uploaded so far, I guess they still count as pretty interesting…programmatically, at least):

Jake, Chris, Samantha, Jeff, Manuel, Josh, Seattle Weblogger's Meetup, Seattle, WA Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WA Gay Pride Parade, Seattle, WA Blowing Bubbles, Fremont Solstice Parade, Seattle, WA 'Electric', Art Rage Studios, First Thursday Art Walk, Seattle, WA

iTunes “Somebody” by Veruca Salt from the album For the Masses: A Tribute to Depeche Mode (1998, 4:05).

July Seattle Flickrites Meetup

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Had a very pleasant time at the inaugural Seattle Flickrites Meetup tonight. I showed up just a bit after 7pm and hung out until the last of us left just a bit before 10pm. Not a bad turnout for a first gig, either. Eight of us ended up showing up: Weave, studiozoe, Voodoo Zebra, ChrisB in SEA, me, Tom Harpel, Shaylor, and kreminem.

Conversation bounced between the requisite gadget ogling, podcasting, and various Flickr groups and personalities, but by far the most popular topic for the evening was the “Seattle (n)ice” syndrome. Much (good-natured) fun was had at the expense of the only two “native” Seattleites in the group as we laughed about the inability for either of them to just pick up and do something without at least a day’s notice — bare minimum. A few days is better, if a week or two of warning can’t be given first. Otherwise, they’re just too busy doing something…even if it’s nothing at all.

My photos from the evening are up, and more are starting to appear: ChrisB in SEA‘s, Tom Harpel‘s.

iTunes “Push Upstairs” by Underworld from the album Beaucoup Fish (1999, 4:34).

LiveJournal Syndication Update

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Allrighty then…it wasn’t the solution that I was hoping for, but I think I’ve managed to fumble my way through a solution for my issues with the woody_eclectic LiveJournal feed.

Thanks to a comment from qweltor, I found out that there’s simply no way to disable comments on a LiveJournal syndication feed — they’re just on, like it or not. So, not only wouldn’t there be a way for anyone to go in and turn off the comments for the existing feed, but there wouldn’t be a point to my going in and creating a new feed account. That handily blew all of my already-conceived plans out of the water.

So, I ended up coming up with a new plan. And I do love it when a plan comes together…

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LiveJournal readers: help!

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Okay, here’s the situation. Right now, there’s 29 of you reading my stuff (or at least skimming it occasionally) through the LJ syndication account woody_eclectic, which I think is great. There’s just one little issue, though…and it’s one that I can’t (easily) fix on my own. Update: Never mind…looks like there’s no simple fix after all. More info below…

The big issue is that comments are turned on for each of the syndicated posts. Since I wasn’t the one to set up the account, though, I don’t get notification when someone leaves a comment though LiveJournal. So, if someone comments on one of my posts — as has happened here, here, here, and probably other posts in the past — I’m generally not likely to see it. Additionally, LiveJournal only stores the last twenty or so entries, so once they disappear, any comments associated with them disappear as well.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do about this. I asked in a syndication-specific LJ community today, and it appears that while there is an option to turn comments on or off for syndicated posts, only the person who originally set up the syndication account can do that according to this comment, comments are on no matter what, and there’s no way to change that.

So…could whoever set up the syndication feed (assuming you’re still subscribed to it) do me a big favor and turn off the “allow comments” setting? Everyone reading my feed will still be able to click through to the original post on my weblog to comment there along with all my non-LiveJournal readers, so this won’t be entirely removing the ability to comment — it’ll just consolidate all the comments into one place, where they won’t disappear, and where I’ll actually see them.

I’ll give a few days or a week or so to see if this works (it may not, as it’s entirely possible that whoever originally set up the feed got bored with me and unsubscribed, leaving it orphaned and without anyone to change the settings). If it doesn’t, I’ve got a backup plan…it’s just one I’m not looking forward to implementing…but it looks like I’m going to have to go forward with a variation of this:

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Profile Pages

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In the course of updating my about page, I spent a little time cleaning up some of my profiles on other sites that I’ve picked up memberships in at one point or another over the years. Most of them I haven’t bothered to do much with after initially signing up, so it was interesting coming back to them and seeing the changes that have taken place.

The two most altered from what I remember are my Tribe.net and Yahoo! pages. Tribe has apparently undergone some rather major updates since I was there last, and Yahoo recently introduced their Yahoo 360 service. Amusingly, the two services now offer enough similar features that I’ve been able to nearly duplicate my profile on each one — everything from recent weblog posts to my del.icio.us links to my Flickr photos, all collected together on one page. Must admit, while I’m not likely to become a heavy user of either service, all the new fancybits are nice to see, and should be quite handy when connecting to other people who use them.

Feel free to check out my profiles and add me if you use either of the services. Or not. Y’know…whichever. ;)

iTunes “Da’Ale Da’Ale (Remix)” by Haza, Ofra from the album Just Say Mao (1989, 6:05).

Housekeeping

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I’ve finally gone in and made a few slight tweaks to my about page, adding a short list of other sites that I participate in and a few other bits and pieces here and there.

One change that is more major in my head than anywhere else is the addition of a paragraph about my identity as “the Microsoft blogger”. I’ve resisted this until now, as I’ve always felt that: one, it’s a very small part of who I am, and I’ve never been entirely comfortable with looking like I’m trying to capitalize on the fracas; and two, it was a dumb mistake on my part that I keep hoping will evetually disappear into the great bit bucket of ‘net lore.

However, given that the three primary posts about that event (the picture, the day I was let go, and my wrapup from a few days later) are consistently the most heavily trafficked pages on my site — lately, they’ve been getting a boost every time new information on the Xbox leaks out, as one person or another feels compelled to point to me during the ensuing discussion — I figured it was time to just shrug my shoulders and admit that yeah, that’s me, and point to the pages in question.

I’m still not entirely comfortable with that, but ignoring it in the hopes that it would go away hasn’t done much, and I’m not so determined to get away from it that I’d actually delete the posts in question…so, there they are.

At least I didn’t end up inadvertently coining a new term for getting fired — ‘djwudi’d’, ‘michael’d’, or ‘hanscom’d’ just doesn’t roll off of the tongue like ‘dooced‘ does, anyway. ;)

Eclinkticism returns

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Assuming I’ve managed to figure out the right combination of shell scripts, SSI includes, CRON jobs, and other associated voodoo, the Eclinkticism linklog in the sidebar should be up and running again. As before, it’s just a dump of the most recent items I’ve added to my del.icio.us account, so feel free to add that RSS feed to your reader if you like.

iTunes “What’s Going On” by Lauper, Cyndi from the album Twelve Deadly Cyns…and Then Some (1989, 3:51).

Playing with MT 3.2 Beta

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I’m spending a little bit of time playing with the just-released public beta version of Movable Type 3.2 on a separate weblog. While I was tempted to just jump straight into upgrading this weblog straight away, I figured that it would be best to wait for a bit when I saw the list of already known bugs that still need to be squashed.

Still, I’m quite impressed with what I’ve seen so far, and it’s nice to have something of a ‘test bed’ to play with while work progresses towards the final version. Feel free to stop by and say hi if you’re curious.

iTunes “Dream Induction” by Emergency Broadcast Network from the album Telecommunication Breakdown (1995, 3:20).