Sunbeams illuminating a coastal forest in Port Orford, Oregon

Chuggnutt!

Category: Online

  • Oregon Weblogs

    Just wanted to give a few plugs and props to one of the better weblog-related sites out there, Oregon Blogs.

    I thought about trying to describe what it does, but the best I could come up with is that it’s equal parts RSS aggregator, group blog, and weblog directory rolled into one; really, the way to find out about ORBlogs is to just visit it. It’s one of the more solid, useful and innovative blogging apps I’ve seen (even if it is written in ASP! :) ), and continues to surprise me with new features; for instance, clicking on the “info” link for a blog reveals a detail-rich page devoted to that site, including a snapshot of what the site looks like, state and city-scale maps showing where the blog lives, metatag data gleaned from the HTML source (much of it clickable), and the most recent blog posts.

    Definitely a great site. Worth looking at even if you’re not from Oregon.

  • WTF is up with Amazon?

    Just WTF is up with Amazon.com this evening? I’m trying to place an order and I keep getting a “We’re Sorry!” message every other page load:

    An error occurred when we tried to process your request. Rest assured, we’re working to resolve the problem as soon as possible. If you were trying to make a purchase, please check Your Account to confirm that the order was placed. We apologize for the inconvenience.

    It’s totally unusable and just completely pissing me off.

    Heh. You can tell I have a lot of patience for this sort of thing, eh?

  • Button Sites

    My post about the buttons from the other day (“Those small web buttons…“) yielded up some excellent links:

    Taylor McKnight has an amazing archive of all the known buttons, 2025 at current count. Nice. I’m not even bothering to “collect” any more.

    Kalsey Button Maker is an online app that automagically creates the buttons for you. Though with all the buttons available at the other site, this is kind of redundant—but it’s fun to fool around with.

  • Google Image Search

    Playing around with Google‘s image search, I’ve thought of some advanced search features they need to implement. Hopefully someone at Google is reading this and will get right on it ;)

    You need to be able to search by specific image dimensions (in pixels); for example, I’d like to be able to type “width:80 height:15” or maybe “dimensions:80x15” and have Google return all the images that are 80 by 15 pixels (yes, this idea is directly related to my last post on the 80×15 images). This can’t be hard; Google’s already caching the size of the image and displaying that on the search results pages, so why not be able to search them?

  • Those small web buttons…

    I’ve been noticing recently the proliferation (mostly on blog sites) of those small image files that are 80 pixels wide by 15 pixels high, are generally two-tone in color and use a simple old-school-looking font. Like these:

    RSS 2.0 button ORBlogs.com button

    And I’m wondering, what’s the story? What are they called, exactly? (I’m thinking either “buttons” or “badges.”) Who’s making them? I think they’re pretty cool, actually; clever, simple, and elegant, and a damn good graphical meme that’s working it’s way around my brain. I just haven’t been able to find out anything about them online, and I’m getting really curious.

    So I’ve started “collecting” them, saving any news ones I come across into a “badges” directory on my computer. I’ve got 42 already in two days. (Hmmm, 42. Coincidence?)

    So, what’s the scoop? Anyone know?

  • Shakespeare Social Networks

    This is an amazing link: Shakespeare Social Networks.

    PieSpy is a tool designed to infer and visualize social networks on Internet Relay Chat (IRC). It works by applying simple heuristics to work out who is talking to whom. This information can be used to produce a visualization of the social network, essentially showing which users are connected and how strong those connections are.

    As PieSpy matured, it became obvious that IRC was not the only suitable testing ground. By feeding PieSpy with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays – it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works.

    So it treats a Shakespeare play as an extended IRC session. Brilliant. I love thinking outside the box!

    Of course, it doesn’t have to be limited to Shakespeare. You could feed the program any play, script, or written work that looks enough like dialogue from a chat session. Jeez, or law enforcement agencies could use it to draw social network diagrams of people based on wiretaps…

  • Violent Pong

    Here’s a link I found from Scoble, which was too good not to post: violent pong. No, it’s not a game (how many of you even remember pong?), which is what I thought at first; it’s a Flash movie. Watch it. It’s crazy and philosophical!

  • SharpReader Gone

    SharpReader is outta here. Last night’s crash wasn’t a fluke; after I downloaded the latest version and restored my feeds, I went back and added two Amazon feeds and sure enough, it crashed again. Turns out the URLs for Amazon’s feeds are too long for SharpReader to handle.

    The worst part is, after last night’s second crash, SharpReader wouldn’t even start back up at all—not last night, not today, nothing. So, it’s gone and I’m done with it. Won’t be going back.

    Right now I’m playing with FeedDemon. Seems pretty nice so far.

  • SharpReader Crashed

    Grrr… SharpReader, the news reader I use to read RSS feeds, just crashed on me, and lost all my feeds—data and URLs. After I’d added four of the new Amazon feeds. Shit.

    Oh, well. Fortunately, I had a recent backup of the OPML for my feeds, so I was able to get them back quickly.

  • Amazon RSS

    Another piece of news everyone pointed to yesterday: Amazon is now offering RSS feeds. A list of all their feeds can be found at the Amazon.com Syndicated Content page. Looks like they’re offering feeds for each top-level category in their hierarchy. The next logical step, of course, would be to offer a personalized RSS feed of your recommendations…