Small updates

Finally grabbed some time to do some small updates to the site I’d been meaning to do for a while now. There have been a few updates to Untitled as I prepare for NaNoWriMo, I’ve (finally) posted a new picture to WudiVisions, and I re-enabled the smiley hack that’s been broken since the upgrade to MovableType 2.5.

‘Bout damn time! ;)

Mac fun and games

Heave Ho!

Amsterdam Mac users certainly come up with entertaining ways to amuse themselves — creating Mac porn, having an Ellen Feiss Lookalike Contest, and tossing PC’s across a parking lot.

The picture shown here was by far my favorite of the PC-tossing pictures. While it’s most likely just an ‘elephant picture’, it looks either incredibly fey, or good ballet form.

Or both. In any case it made me laugh.

(Thanks to this Wired article about the lookalike contest.)

A reminder

Just a quick reminder — NaNoWriMo kicks off in just over a week. For the month of November, posts to The Long Letter may be pretty sparse, as I’ll be spending the majority of my free time from work either fighting my way through my NaNoWriMo attempt, or huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth and quietly gibbering to myself when I actually realize what I’ve gotten myself into.

Also, a quick word of warning from the NaNoWriMo website:

You are an arteest, and no longer have time for things like cooking and grocery shopping and laundry. Start demanding favors and treats from friends and loved ones now. That way they’ll be fully acclimated to the new you once November rolls around.

Valid RSS

Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby have just created an RSS Validator. I’ve run my feeds through, and can now ensure that I offer valid RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds for use with newsreaders/aggregators.

I even managed to get my own little addition to the feeds going without breaking them — yay!

Admittedly, I can’t honestly say I really know or understand the difference between RSS 1.0 and 2.0. But hey. They’re both there.

Microsoft switchers – oops!

So Apple‘s had their ‘Switch’ campaign going on for a while now, touting stories from ex-PC users who have switched to Macintosh computers. Apparently the campaign is doing fairly well — at least well enough for Microsoft to start a similar campaign of its own.

Unfortunately, since they (apparently) couldn’t find any customers that had actually made the switch from the Mac to Windows, and were happy about it, and willing to talk about it — they had to combine fictional accounts a hired freelance writer’s story with stock photography, as pointed out on /. earlier today.

Apparently, this isn’t a rare practice, either. I especially like the page where the people in the photograph are using a Mac 6100.

Methinks Microsoft’s marketing folks need to work on their game a bit.

Thanks to Scripting News for this one.

Small update to RSS feed

Lately I’ve been reading a ton of sites daily (65 at current count) via NetNewsWire Lite. While this allows me to skim through a huge amount of information in a short time, one of the disadvantages is that none of the RSS feeds that the sites provide give any information on comments to a given post (this isn’t a limitation of NetNewsWire at all, it’s part of how the RSS feed is written). Since I’ve often found some really interesting stuff in the discussion threads after a post, this is a bit of a downside.

So, while I doubt that very many people subscribe to my RSS feed, I figured I’d at least make my feed give me the information I want, and changed my feed template slightly. Where the code used to say…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]></content:encoded>

…I’ve altered it to say this…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]><MTEntryIfAllowComments> <![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryCommentCount$> Comments)]]></MTEntryIfAllowComments><MTEntryIfAllowPings><![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$> TrackBack Pings)]]></MTEntryIfAllowPings></content:encoded>

…so that in my RSS feed, there’s a short display line that tells whether I’ve gotten any comments or TrackBack pings for an entry.

Maybe if I’m really lucky, someone a little higher up in the blogosphere heirarchy will stumble across this and the idea will start to spread.

Trackback changes and Category links

Well, for the moment, I’ve had to give up on my goal of staying pop-up free. Grrr. I thought I had it for a while, but as it turns out, TrackBack pings won’t automatically rebuild the page that they reference, so they weren’t showing up at all unless I forced the page to regenerate. So, until I find another way of managing it (apparently displaying TrackBack pings inline can be done using MySQL, but I’ve yet to dive into that), I’ve gone back to the default pop-up method of displaying TrackBack pings. Thanks to Phil for the suggestion he e-mailed me — while it didn’t work, it was a good idea (and, incidentally, congrats also on getting that CSS bug fixed…ain’t debugging fun?!?).

The second change tonight is the addition of Category-based navigation links for the individual entry pages. On the page for each entry, just below the previous entry/next entry links, there are now links that lead to the previous entry and next entry in whichever category the entry belongs to. I’d wanted to do this for a while, but just finally found the code to get it working — much thanks to ScriptyGoddess and Pixels in Time for the assistance with the code in setting this up!