Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
It’s a series of tubes that Al Gore invented, right?
British blogger Tom Reynolds was recently interviewed by the BBC (RealAudio link, good ’til 1/17/05 or so) about his weblog. He was joined by a few other people, representing both pro- and anti-blogging viewpoints, and the interview is definitely worth a listen — they cover quite a few points, including some back-and-forth about some of the same topics regarding bloggers rights that I addressed recently.
(via Terrance)
Jacqueline pointed out the Face Analyzer, an automated online tool where you upload a photograph and it process the photo to determine everything from your nationality to your personality. This struck me as worth killing a few minutes playing with, so I grabbed a recent headshot of me from when I got my new glasses, and sent it in. The results were something of a surprise:
100% South East Asian — and female.
I never knew. You’d think that my folks would have clued me in about this at some point in my life.
Undaunted, I cropped the photo down a bit so that there was less background, wondering if giving the system less background junk would help it concentrate on my face.
Well, it at least got the sex right that time. I’m really curious as to how it’s coming up with the nationality, though — to most people (who, admittedly, aren’t automated software systems [or if they are, I haven’t figured it out yet]), the red hair and pale-to-the-point-of-translucence skin tends to indicate northern European ancestry, typically either Irish, Scottish, or possibly the general Scandinavian areas.
I guess they’re all wrong. South East Asian it is. After all, if you can’t believe what you read on the ‘net, what can you believe?
The personality profile section was just as silly, and just as accurate.
Looks like the rumors were true: Six Apart acquires LiveJournal.
Pertinent posts:
I’ve read none of these yet, as it’s after midnight and I need to get to bed. Should make for interesting reading when I wake up, though.
Update: Okay, I stayed up a bit later and read the posts. Good stuff there — there was a lot of FUD running around due to the rumors, and I think that the three posts above do a good job of dispelling that.
Congrats to both Six Apart and LiveJournal — I’m looking forward to seeing where you all go with this.
“Get Off My Land” by Operatica from the album O Vol. 1 (2000, 5:05).
Via Mike Whybark: New Earth Time.
Their site goes into more detail, but in brief, timezones are a pain in the butt. As the ‘net connects more and more of us in real-time, perceived distances become smaller and smaller (my Flickr contacts page, for instance, has a few people scattered across the US and others in Luxembourg, Singapore, Johannesburg, Brisbane, and Tunis). Rather than having to deal with local time zones and the bother of constantly converting back and forth, NET is an attempt to standardize one global time system.
This isn’t the first time something like this has been put forward, of course. Mike referenced WRLD.time, which I’d not heard of before, and I remember Swatch Internet Time. These projects always interest me, though, and I’d be thrilled if this actually caught on.
Okay, well maybe “thrilled” is a bit much, but it’d at least fall into the “really nifty” category.
The NET site provides a couple different javascript clocks, and pointers to both Windows and Mac clock applications. The Mac software they link to is an old System 9 menu bar extention, so it’s not terribly useful under OS X — but as the JavaScript clocks look fairly simple, it strikes me that it shouldn’t be terribly hard to slap together a Tiger Dashboard widget (and, should such a thing be put together, it seems to be that it would be useful to include a converter, too…). Not that I know the first thing about doing that, aside from the very theoritical basics, but it doesn’t seem like it’d be very difficult.
Then, as long as I’m daydreaming, I wonder how hard it would be to hack around and automatically compute the NET time from the post time of each entry to include that in the dateline of each post on my site…
(via The Usual Suspects)
“Goody Two Shoes” by Adam and the Ants from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1982, 3:29).
Microsoft finally makes their long-rumored debut into the weblogging service arena with MSN Spaces. I got curious, and it’s free, so I went ahead and signed up for a Space of my own to try it out. I have no intentions of moving over…I just wanted to kick the tires a bit, so to speak.
Signup is pretty easy, as long as you have a MS Passport (I didn’t…but now I do). So far, it seems to be a fairly decent option for beginning bloggers — it’s free, there are a decent number of design templates (though there’s only so much customization you can do, much like the entry-level TypePad system), you can choose whether or not to syndicate your blog (with RSS 2.0 only), comments and Trackback are both supported (interestingly, Trackback has three options: disable, accept from everywhere, and accept only from other MSN Space weblogs, with the last option being the default [and I don’t seem to be able to switch it off of the default so that I can allow Trackback pings from everyone]), there are a few default categories and custom categories can be added…all the basics, and some frills.
MSN Spaces apparently ties in tightly with both MSN Messenger and MS Outlook (though I can’t play with that, being a Mac user), and as such, adds a special privacy option that can restrict visibility of your weblog to only people on your MSN Messenger Allow list, along with an option to only allow selected contacts in your MSN Address Book to see your blog.
There are settings for moblogging (blogging via cell phone) — amusingly, though, when I first clicked on the “Mobile” settings tab, I got an “unknown authority” error dialog. Not having a cell phone, there’s not much here I can play with.
You get 10 MB of storage, with no indication if there’s a way to increase this (or if there will be a way in the future). That should be fine for a good amount of text, but enough photos will eventually eat into that, so there’s a simple file manager to allow you to delete any photos you’ve uploaded.
Finally, there are some simple statistics available, showing total page views, views this week, today, and in the last hour, along with a referrer list (no idea how extensive the referrer list is, as I’ve got all of three hits so far while poking around with things).
So far, so good — it looks like a decent entry-level weblogging service.
One thing did catch my eye, though, and it could be a big one: apparently, posts have to be written with paragraph tags (\<p> and \</p>) or linebreak tags (\
), otherwise your text gets all smooshed together into a single paragraph. I was surprised enough that this would be the default behavior after I posted my first test post, but looking through the interface, I can’t see an option to turn on any sort of automatic linebreak conversion that would allow someone to type normally and actually get paragraphs. I can see this causing some serious headaches from HTML-ignorant newcomers who expect to see paragraphs and instead get huge blocks of unseparated text!
(Caveat: I am looking at this via Safari on my Mac, so it’s entirely possible that this actually works correctly with IE/Win — though if that’s the case, that’s another strike against the system, in my view.)
There is a note on the bottom of the posting screen that “Some HTML tags may be removed from your entry for security and formatting reasons” — unfortunately, they don’t list which tags may be removed. And what’s this “may” bit? Are they or aren’t they? Will the list of which tags get removed change from time to time, and if so, why? Odd.
Clicking the “Trackback” link takes you to the comment entry form, and I can’t find a Trackback link to send a ping to. I can’t find a Trackback address in the source code, either, and auto-discovery from the MT QuickPost interface isn’t coming up with anything either. Perhaps that’s due to not being able to set the global Trackback acceptance flag?
Permalinks are ugly — for instance, the permalink for my first test post is http://spaces.msn.com/members/michaelhanscom/Blog/cns!1plKnLKPq0gBtnAfWaupqTNA!106.entry. Ouch.
Source code is also ugly (though honestly, that’s exactly what I expected). Heavily table-based, lots of crud and cruft. Running it through the W3C validator returns 193 errors, and that’s after the validator displays a big warning that no Doctype was found so it’s guessing 4.01 Transitional.
End result: it’ll keep newbies and MS fans happy (assuming that that bit with requiring paragraph or linebreak tags is fixed), but power users and web standards geeks (who are probably not the target market anyway) will definitely want to look somewhere else.
(via Scoble)
“Making Plans for Nigel” by XTC from the album Rock and Wave Vol. 1 (1979, 4:10).
Almost a month ago, I signed up for the free StatCounter statistics tracking service, and I’ve been checking in every few days to see what kind of traffic I’m getting on my site.
From the 11th to the 31st of October, I’d been averaging around 1,333 page loads per day, with 1,090 unique visitors, 1,022 first-time visitors, and 68 returning visitors (keep in mind, those are all averages). Not anywhere near the top of the ‘net, but not terribly shabby, either.
Then, over the past few days, I’ve suddenly been watching my traffic start to spike, topping out (so far) yesterday at 2,757 page loads…
A little curious about what was causing the spike, I checked out my referrers and search terms. Turns out that the majority of the spike is caused by people searching for information on how states voted combined with the state’s average IQ, which first started going around the ‘net back in May regarding the 2000 elections. The table that was flying around the ‘net was later declared a hoax, but apparently the meme is still fairly popular, and a lot of people have been landing on my post because of that.
Turns out that someone has actually updated the table for the 2004 election — though they’re using the same data for the IQ, so I’m sure the table is just as faulty for this election as it was for the 2000 election. As it still seems to be amusing people, though, I added a quick update to my original post noting the new table (and calling attention to the fact that it’s a hoax, though most people probably won’t care about that), and in the meantime, I’ll just enjoy the upswing in traffic.
“Tripnotized Vol. 1 (Part 1) (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Tripnotized Vol. 1 (full mix) (1995, 1:11:25).
Flickr hasn’t been loading for me at all today — all morning long it was giving me a DNS error saying that the server couldn’t be found.
Now I seem to be getting something…but I don’t think I’m getting what I’m supposed to be getting, and I’m afraid that were I running an exploitable browser (like, oh, Internet Exploder), I might be getting some nasty surprises.
Loading the main flickr page ( http://www.flickr.com/ ) stalls for a while, and then loads one of the many generic “looks like a search page while we install exploits onto your system” pages that float around when domains disappear. Included in the page are two javascripts, one of which ( http://www.flickr.com/js/pu.js ) is loading a popunder window.
This is really a shame. Looks like someone forgot to renew their domain on time, and it got snapped up from underneath them. Hopefully it all gets straightened out soon.
Update: They appear to be back. No word (yet?) on the flickr blog as to what might have happened.
“X-Lover” by Sheep on Drugs from the album One for the Money (1997, 3:55).
Yet another in the ongoing saga of webloggers canned for really stupid reasons. This time, it’s Troutgirl, who until recently worked for Friendster.
Ontario Empoblog has a good rundown of the situation.
With the addition of the new Mac OS X release of Skype, there are now a veritable plethora of ways to get ahold of me online, should anyone be so inclined.
I think that’s it. Did I miss any?
iTunes: “Inquisition” by Skinny Puppy from the album Nettwerk Decadence (1992, 4:26).