January 2005

I’ve been checking out Wikipedia a lot lately and really blown away with the amount of information that is compiled. They’ve got an informative page about Johnny Carson who died today. He grew up in Norfolk, Nebraska, about an hour northwest of my hometown Scribner, Nebraska. Wikipedia even has a page for Scribner! Too cool.

Michael is collecting blizzard photos that he’s taking during this weekend’s storm.

I mentioned to Peter Wood that I was trying to figure out how to get plus signs to show up when I combined the Movable Type category tag to automatically create a query and link to the Technorati tag for each category on the footer of my entries here and at Exploit Boston!. He made a nifty plugin called Tag Glue that does just that. Thanks, Peter! He said that it has only been tested with MT 3.14 so it may or may not work for older versions.

Here’s what the code looks like

< a rel="tag" href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/<$MTCategoryLabel tag_glue="+"$>” title=”check out the latest photos, weblog entries and Del.icio.us links related to <$MTCategoryLabel$>“>(t)< /a >

Unfortunately I haven’t seen many of my entries here or at Exploit Boston! showing up on the Technorati tags pages. I’m not sure what’s up with that. It doesn’t have anything to do with Peter’s plugin since it wasn’t working before either.

I switched from SprintPCS to T-Mobile this week and bought a cameraphone. It’s a Sharp TM150. It takes decent pictures since it’s got a megapixel camera. I decided to not get any extra features other than the $2.99 picture messaging add-on because I probably don’t need to be attached to the internet at all times. Instead of checking my email on the T I can now do something extraordinary: read a book! Crazy talk, indeed. The camera comes with a removable 32MB SD card to store images and short videos. That will definitely come in handy since the picture messaging add-on only covers twenty photo uploads. I picked up a little card reader (attaches to my keychain) to download photos and bypass the 25 cents per picture fee after those first twenty photos. Bigger memory cards are pretty cheap. I found a 512MB card for $45 at newegg.com. One thing the camera is missing is a flash.

I took the photo of one of my roommate’s guinea pigs with the new phone using the macro (closeup) setting.

As I’ve mentioned before, on Thursday I share my 32nd birthday with another Bush inauguration. Hopefully, this will be the last time I share it with a member of that family. If you’re in the area, friends and conspirators will be getting together for food and drinks at ZuZu at 9:30 PM that night and then a new favorite band, Tom Thumb, plays a free show at 11:00 PM. They’ve got a couple tunes for download on their website. I particularly recommend “Gracie’s Mine.” We’ll grab tables for however many people are there at 9:30; but if you want to let me know you will be joining us, send me an email.

I combined Movable Type code with the new Technorati tag functionality so that each category on an entry had it’s own link to that category’s tag at Technorati. It works great on single words; but when it’s a combination of two or more words, it’s not working. Technorati’s tag needs a (”+”) plus sign between each word. I have no idea how to make this happen within the Movable Type code. Maybe I’ll just use the Technorati Tags Bookmarklet that Matt at oddiophile.com created. I was just really hoping to be able to integrate it with the footer of each entry.

If you know how to make it work the way I was hoping it might, I’d love to hear what you’d suggest!

Here’s the code I was originally using that breaks when there’s more than a single word in the query.

href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/<$MTCategoryLabel$>” title=”check out what other people are saying around the web about <$MTCategoryLabel$>“>t

Update: OK, apparently it IS working afterall. Nevermind! ;)

I dabbled with Technorati’s new “tags” functionality that combines the latest weblog entries with photos from flickr and links on Del.icio.us. It seemed like a nifty thing to use along with categories on Exploit Boston!’s event listings and announcements. Each entry’s category has a little “t” next to it which opens up a results page at Technorati with the latest tidbits around the web about that category. I’m curious to see how long it takes for something to turn up there. The entries I added recently with the “Central Square” tag haven’t turned up just yet.

Here’s the code:

href=”http://www.technorati.com/tag/<$MTCategoryLabel$>” title=”check out the latest photos, weblog entries and links around the web about <$MTCategoryLabel$>“>t

Update June 27, 2005: December 2004 through February 2005 I was part of Marqui’s “Pay to Blog” program. I wrote about them and linked to them once a week. During the three-month program I had this icon displayed on my site in the right sidebar area.

[I get paid to mention Marqui and link to their online demo once a week through the end of February.]

Saturday was an excellent mail day. My sister Amy sent me several new photos of my niece who is now eight months old and I also received my first payment from Marqui.

The Head Lemur (Alan Herrell), someone from the pre-blog web community, called yesterday from his world headquarters in Arizona about me attending Harvard’s Blogging, Journalism and Credibility event that is coming up next weekend. It’s very nice of him to put in a good word for me. We should have recorded our conversation. I think it’s safe to say his writing style on his weblog matches his speaking style.

Doris “Granny D” Haddock will be celebrating her 95th birthday at the counter-inaugural events in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 20th. She wrote an essay for the Democracy Week website that is incredible. It’d be nice to see her essay linked up around the web as much as all the blathering about the Dean campaign paying bloggers.

Look at me: I am still alive, and I am looking at you, and you are alive. This is our world as much as anyone else’s. We who are old enough or wise enough to see the edges of life can understand that we have a choice between fear and joy, and between victimization and service. All elections and other indications to the contrary, happy days are here again when we but say they are. We do not turn our hearts away from injustice or suffering, indeed we mend them as best we can with our joyful engagement and our courageous non-cooperation with the forces of fear and death. And no one can take away our joy, for even our suffering for justice and brotherhood is joyful.

This is our Velvet Revolution, American style. We resist what we must and what we can, but our victory is not in defense, but in a cultural offensive made irresistible by the power of love and courage, pulling our people together, and our own lives together, over time.