So a couple of weeks ago blogger decided to support the use of images by blogspot users. Now it would seem that Blogger have decided that they don't support user favicons any more. My favicon has been replaced with the orange & white "B." Now, this logo already appears in my "I power blogger" button in the sidebar, and in the toolbar at the top of the page. You'd think they'd be willing to let me have a little fun in the address bar?

I suppose it is possible that Geocities have decided they won't support *.ico's any more, but the file is in my account. The code for my icon is still in my blogger template.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.geocities.com/jrfj44/fb.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Update 8/01: Alright, I'm going to turn down the heat on the rant-o-meter. Maybe it's a browser thing? Investigating.....

Update Later 8/01: It's back. Who knows....

See also blogger-hacks, favicon.

Ken at Incredible Blogs is testing del.icio.us and experimenting with tagging. All good stuff!!

Filed In: del.icio.us, incredible-blogs

A legal use for a cool tool...

"Lawyers are using the Way Back Machine (a Web site) to obtain information that no longer resides on the Net. The Way Back Machine has been storing data since 1996. It has over 40-billion Web pages.

If you've never been to that site, it's pretty cool. Check out your Web site from years ago. Or if you'd like to see what Amazon or Yahoo looked like way back, it's available."

I wonder if pages that were taken down by the operators & are no longer viewable are admissable from the archive? Interesting.

From Incredible Blogs

Filed In: incredible-blogs, webtech, wayback

Want to tag? Here's two locations for a bookmarklet that will generate valid technorati tags for you to paste into your posts.

The bookmarklet from Cathome1 will work for you, no editing required. The link to the bookmarklet is in English, in the first grey box in the post. Drag the link to your links bar, click it when you're ready to enter your tags, put your tags in the box & click OK. The bookmarklet will generate a line of code containing tags that are visible to Technorati (& other tag search services). Click over to the "edit HTML" side of the create post window, paste in the tags at the end of your post, & you're tagged!! Then watch the Technorati Tag Search to see your post.

Oddiophile has a bookmarklet too, but it is offline as I write.

Apologies for duplicating previous posts's content. It occurred to me that these tools have an alternate use....

Update 8/01: Fritz has edited the bookmarklet script & hosted it on a US server. Check out his "Online Tag-o-Matic." As before, drag the "create tag text" to your links bar for bookmarklet operation.

The technology meta-blog Digg has a very cool feature that allows account-holders to blog stories to their own blogs from Digg with one click. (see the Digg FAQ.) Digg automatically includes a link back to their posting of the story, and a one-click link for Freshblog readers to "digg" (vote approvingly for) the story. Thus the recent stories that you see that include links such as this

read more | digg story

make use of this feature. Excellent.

I write an explanation both to explain the odd-looking new links on some of my posts, and to get to this: How to tag a post in Digg so that I don't have to re-open it in the Blogger post editor & add tags to it?

Simple, as it happens. Ted Ernst's technorati-delicious bookmarklet generates tag code that you can paste straight into the Digg compose window. Tags generated with this bookmarklet will point to your account on del.icio.us but be visible in Technorati tag search results too. Click the bookmarklet link in Ted's post, drag the link from the pop-up window to your links bar, then right-click, scroll through the code in the properties field & change Ted's del.icio.us username to your own where you see del.icio.us/username

If you don't need del.ico.us / technorati combo tags, & want to paste tags that are valid for Technorati only into your posts from Digg, this bookmarklet from Cathome1 will work for you, no editing required. The link to the bookmarklet is in English, in the first grey box in the post. Drag the link to your links bar, click it when you're ready to enter your tags, put your tags in the box & click OK.

Oddiophile has a bookmarklet too, but it is offline as I write.

So, bookmarklets to add technorati tags to blog posts that you write in Digg. Cool.


See this story on Digg.

"Space tourism is set to boom in 2008. That is when Virgin Galactic plans to start carrying paying customers to the edge of space in a fleet of suborbital spaceships designed by Burt Rutan. And those would-be astronauts without a couple of hundred thousand dollars to spare can compete for a free seat in an online computer game."

Categories: spaceflight, technology, business

read more | digg story

"Motorola and Oakley have announced a new toy for those of us who are always on the phone and like the newest style - the RAZRWIRE. The RAZRWIRE is a Bluetooth headset integrated into a pair of Oakley sunglasses that allows the user to chat while up to 30 feet away from their Bluetooth-enabled cell phone."

read more | digg story

Categories: technology, wireless, gadgets

include:

MB at Clevertalk.

Thom Allen, who is looking at further automating the process using Wbloggar. This I will be interested to see, since the easier it is to tag, the better. Let me know how it goes!!

Blog comedy, in the form of a 1950's style pamphlet addressing Blog Depression:

"What we turn our attention to now, however, is the insidious, prolonged strain of dissatisfaction which stays with a blogger, right below the surface, throughout a blog’s lifetime. the diligent and self aware blogger can resist this destructive undercurrent, make changes, adapt, rationalize, but for many, untreated, it can cause much needless suffering in the form of full fledged blog depression.

Below you will find a 6 page pamphlet meant as a public service to help educate bloggers about this growing problem. feel free to download the complete pdf and disseminate this work to those you know and love. otherwise click each to see the larger version. “the more you know...”

thenonist.com via metafilter

Some buildings, a whole lot of common-sense, and any sort of PR pulse:

"We all know that Microsoft has a tentacle in just about every pie on the planet, but what exactly is Redmond's black ops department up to in Nevada?"

read more | digg story

Update: Zoli reports that Sun, Oracle and Google are all missing too, but the WTC is still there. What kind of childish rubbish is this? Get it right, Bill. This is as bad as the White House staff taking all the "W''s off their keyboards. It might have looked really funny as an in-house joke, but out here in the real world it looks dumb.

Keep track of the position over the globe of every mayor satellite, the space station or the shuttle with this great applet from NASA, it also provides the coordinates to watch them fly over your city (if they fly over it of course).

read more | digg story

New Freshblog logo produced using the CoolArchive logo generator. Easy, quick, and with lots more options than other logo-makers that I tried.

Update 7/28: New logo, new Favicon. Again, easy to do w/ the logo generator.

Google's gone personalised, with IGoogle, and their service is pretty darn slick, if you ask me. I guess some folks out there are concerned that some of the content they enjoy on Yahoo is not currently available, but the Google site is clean & clear & it is very easy to add any custom feed that you choose.

I do not immediately see what needs to be done to get a one-click add link that I could add to my sidebar. If you know what that would look like, let me know!!

via Zenyenta, where there's an excellent list of requested upgrades to the service:

What features does it still need? Well, the bookmarks are a start, but they need work. They need labels or tags and they either need to be sortable or they need to sort themselves alphabetically. A bookmarklet for adding bookmarks is needed. And finally, a secure connection to the inbox should either be the default or an option.

Want one of those little two-tone rectangular buttons that bloggers like to use to link to places? Well, here's a buttonmaker tool that will make one for you. It works, too:

via BlogsCanada

Update: The Brilliant Button Maker lets you include an image in your button.

and information sorting, tagging, bookmarking and cross posting, with Digg. Next question, What's Digg?: "Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do."

Learn more about Digg.

via Zoli's Blog

Have, of course, taken the opportunity to post about the category method on Digg.

Alright, I promise I haven't gone completely drop-down crazy... Well maybe just a little....

Here's the code to turn your "recent posts" display in your blogspot blog into a drop-down menu.

<p style="text-align: center">
<select name="PreviousItemsMenu" onChange="location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;">
<option value="/">- Recent Posts -</option>
<BloggerPreviousItems>
<option value="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"><$BlogPreviousItemTitle$></option>
</BloggerPreviousItems>
</select>
</p>

I modified Li Zhao's code for the archive drop-down to work with the "10 most recent posts" display in blogger. Let me know if it works for you.

I used centricle to convert the code so that it would display in this post. Thanks to Improbulus for the tip.

See other posts in Blogger Hacks: The Series

Ping-o-Matic!: "Pinging lets dozens of services know you've updated your site and increases traffic to your blog. There are a number of services designed specifically for tracking and connecting blogs. However it would be expensive for all the services to crawl all the blogs in the world all the time. By sending a small ping to each service you let them know you’ve updated so they can come check you out. They get the freshest data possible, you don’t get a thousand robots spidering your site all the time. Everybody wins."

Looks like these folks hit a few more places with their pings than the folks at pingmyblog too, IceRocket being the most obvious one....

Many thanks to Mark at Escape from Obsession for encoding the drop-down menu for del.icio.us tags & sharing his efforts with the world. Much appreciated!!

I have added this feature, initially including only those tags that I've used more than 20 times, & adding an "all categories" link that goes to my del.icio.us homepage.

Excellent. Thanks, Mark!!

Update 7/27: After visiting Miles to Go, where there are del.icio.us categories in the works too, I have decided that I like drop-down menus for making the sidebar tidy. Miles to Go even shows different drop-downs, depending whether you're on the homepage, a post page or an archive page. So, more menus. The code for the archive menu for blogger came from Li Zhao. Here's my implementation:

<p style="text-align: center">
<select name="ArchiveMenu" onChange="location.href=this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;">
<option value="/">- Archives -</option>
<BloggerArchives>
<option value="<$BlogArchiveURL$>"><$BlogArchiveName$></option>
</BloggerArchives>
<option value="/">Current Posts</option>
</select>
</p>

See other posts in Blogger Hacks: The Series

Noexes is using del.icio.us for categories, but he won't say why....

'tis a mystery... ;-)

Adam at How My Dog Ate The Internet is categorising with del.ico.us too, as part of a site makeover.

Aine Luisa is categorising too!! Check out Feileacan

A Welsh View points to the Googlizer, a tool to let you "find out how many of your pages are indexed in Google and Yahoo! Also finds out how many backlinks are in Google." All good stuff.

So... discovered 43 Things via i-marco's tag cache for "blog." Looks like a great interactive community, & the limit of "43 things" per user will ration the interaction, raise the quality, & force users to be considerate with what they post. Interesting, esp. in comparison to the Linkfilter model of earned experience points, levels of experience, and daily rations of contribution points.

What do you want to do with your life? It is not an easy question to answer – and you shouldn’t have to answer alone. Browse 43 Things to find out what others want to do. You might find some goals you share. Click the “I want to do this” button to add a goal to your list. Got an idea for a new goal? Just type it in the text box on the homepage or at the bottom of any page on the site. Bam. Now, it’s your thing.

My first "thing" is to ask for help with the del.icio.us drop-down menu that I'd like to use here, but don't know how to build. Not one of the 43 most significant things I want to accomplish in my life, but hey, it's a start...

When you post a goal, you're able to contribute to someone else's goal, & so, quid-pro-quo, I have posted a link to my categories post for the folks who want to learn to tag.

Am interested to see that these posts are taggable too. Looks like the site will keep track of how I've tagged my "want" posts so that I can navigate them, as well as giving me the chance to see how other people have tagged & recorded those same posts.

Thinking about the LA Times Wiki, Linkfilter & other recent preoccupations, I realise that I'm v. interested in how people are carefully crafting the available technology to build civil communities. Perhaps making folks think before they speak is one possible way forward?

p.s. - Is the limit on "things" 43 for a reason, or is it random?

Update 7/26: Ask & ye shall receive!! Many thanks to Mark at Escape from Obsession for encoding the drop-down menu for del.icio.us tags & sharing his efforts with the world. Much appreciated!!

After finding one of my posts had been Furled, I figured I should add a one-click link for those folks too, so here it is. Thanks to Improbulus at A Consuming Experience for the code. Have fun Furling!!

So, I may have just killed my twelve subscribers, since I don't have server access to ask them to redirect, but I have simplified the syndication of this site with a Feedburner Smartfeed. Not only is this accessible to both Atom and RSS readers, but the fine folks at Feedburner will collect stats for me so that I can see what's happening in Freshblog feed world, & see how long it takes me to get back to 12 subscribers!!

The operation was fairly straightforward. View my page source, copy the meta-tags, hide the blogger meta-data tag in the head of my real template, & paste in the tags from the source, then edit the autodiscovery tags so that automated feedfinders will find the feedburner one and not the default blogger atom feed. Here's the scoop on which tag to modify, but I'd recommend that you read the whole thread.

Update: Improbulus dissects the blogger meta tags & tells you what each one is for, and which one to mod to change your feed.

See also Blogger Hacks: Syndication.

Thanks to GTD Wannabe for the inspiration.

Was feeling pleased with the 12 subscribers I have on Bloglines 'til I looked at the stats for Collision Detection (223) and BoingBoing (24,234)... Ha-ha!! That'll burst your ego-bubble.

Anyway, have added a section on syndication & feeds to my blogger hacks post, mostly having to do with 2Rss.com & their conversion of the blogger atom feed to an RSS feed.

Have also spent a little while longer with Bloglines, having previously been an exclusive devotee of the Kinja. I like Kinja because it presents the posts from your selected feeds on a public page in (mostly) chronological order, and so you can read the new stuff from multiple sources on the first page &c without having to log in. Here's what I've finally noticed about bloglines, though. Despite the logging in & the listing of posts by blog, There's a sort of mini-del.icio.us thing going on there, with their clip / blog function. Here's what I'm thinking... I can't use del.icio.us to bookmark other people's stuff because I'm using my del.icio.us as a category manager... So let's try the bloglines clip blog as a back-pocket to put stuff in for later.

To read the blogs that I subscribe to, visit Freshbloglines, & click links in the sidebar. The feeds from the blogs that I subscribe to will open in new windows. If you're signed in to bloglines, (again with the signing in) you'll be able to copy posts to your clip blog. Worth investigating, anyway...

Excellent.

TdF'05: "Lance Armstrong let it all hang out today, storming to a victory in the 2005 Tour's long time trial in St. Etienne. T-Mobile's Jan Ullrich came to play, but couldn't quite hang with Armstrong, finishing 2nd on the day, 23 seconds slower than Armstrong.... Leipheimer will have to watch his back tomorrow, because Vinokourov is only 2 seconds behind him, easily overcome with an intermediate bonus sprint."

Meanwhile Lance will be sipping champagne on the Champs & celebrating an unrivalled, unequalled & probably never-to-be-challenged 7 in a row. Nice work!!

National Geographic looks at the genetics & biology that made it possible.

See also Dave's top ten reasons that Lance is getting cocky...

So the tag-generating script for the greasemonkey tagging method is now cataloged on Greasemonkeyed.com, a central repository for all of your script-based browser modification needs. Cool. I notice they also have a script that supports the generation of multi-word tags. I wonder what else is coming?

Oishii is "kind of a del.icio.us mini-zeitgeist. oishii! polls the del.icio.us front page every 5 minutes, and returns all sites bookmarked by at least 30 people. In the spirit of facilitating self-organization, oishii is a kind of pheromone trail allowing me and others to find the resources other members of the hive found useful, interesting, humorous, or for some other reason worth visiting again."

Excellent. There are a huge number of tools out there making use of del.icio.us, or customising del.icio.us data, for all sorts of purposes. This is an interesting one-click look at who is finding what, & where the mob is massing....

via BoingBoing.

The Blog Herald, my new read for all things bloggy and hot, or hot & bloggy, brings news of Blogpulse, a very neat, very clean & very groovy link & trend tracker for the blogosphere. The only thing missing, I think, is a dedicated tag search, & I'm sure that's coming.

So. Have added a sidebar link to my Blogpulse inbounds, and a link to my blogpulse profile, although Blogpulse only tracks the 10,000 most influential blogs, so my profile is pretty skeletal. Either way, another link & conversation tracker, w/ added features for graphing trends & such.

Blog Herald also reports a possible name-change for IceRocket. Looks like this is going to be contested territory for a while.... I'm sure the competition can only be good for us bloggers...

But this has to be a wind-up, right? MindComet :: Blog In Space: "Blogs In Space is the first entity to allow everyday bloggers to transmit the news and thoughts of an everyday person into space. Simply put we take your feed and transmit it out on a powerful deep space transmission dish...."

via A Welsh View

More folks wrestling w/ the tagging thing...

SEOforChurches has a post about tag generation as well as a javascript shortcut for posting to del.icio.us. I'll stick with the HTML version from blog del.icio.us, I think.

The Longmont Bike Blog is also getting into tagging, del.icio.us, & categories...

Birmingham has a Metroblog!! Excellent. Best of luck to the new team.

With a population of almost 1,000,000 (according to the 2001 census) Birmingham is the UK's second largest city and it's history can be traced back almost 2000 years. Located in the heart of the midlands of England, the city experienced rapid growth during the industrial revolution of the 18th century. The many canals threading through the region were the lifeline of industry, allowing the transportation of coal, iron, merchandise and anything else that could be transported by barge to and from anywhere in the country. Traces of this history are still scattered around the city, including many of the original buildings.

Here's a link to my early post of little known trivia about the city.

Have added a whole new set of features to the sidebar where my feed links used to be.... Now you can syndicate this blog's contents in every way I could think of, search cosmoses and tags, and add Freshblog to all the major feedreaders, as well as blogrolling Freshblog with one click. If I've missed a link to somewhere good, let me know!!

Syndicate FreshBlog:

Atom Feed
RSS Feed
Del.icio.us Feed

Add Freshblog To:

Bloglines
MyFeedster
MyYahoo!
Blogrolling
Kinja

Freshblog's Inbounds on:

Technorati
IceRocket
Bloglines

Search Freshblog's Tags on:

Technorati
IceRocket
Taggling

BoingBoing: "In April, scientists reported that the ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct for decades, is alive and well in the Big Woods of Arkansas. Now, three biologists are saying that the team who reported evidence of the bird may have jumped the gun...."

I love a good scientific dust-up...

From the BBC & the official race website. Lance had a 2min 46 sec lead over Ivan Basso after Wednesday's stage, came in 2nd on Thursday's stage by 56 seconds, & will apparently be cranking to win the time-trial on Saturday, so that he's won at least one stage during his 7th consecutive tour victory.

BBC Sport: "Steve Harmison produced some inspired pace bowling as Australia made just 190 on the first day of the first Ashes Test, Harmison returning 5-43.

Harmison cut Ricky Ponting with a short ball, dismissed him for nine and then cleaned up the tail after Andrew Flintoff and Simon Jones also shone."

Good start!!

on the 2-week anniversary of the previous attacks, an attempted copycat, or so it seems.....

BBC, Londonist, One Man....

Update: Boingboing links to the Wiki that is under construction....

Lisa has a problem. The pedestrians exist, but they're trained to stay in their bubble. How to break them out? WalkLA: "Between Sherman Oaks and Studio City there are more pedestrians than I would have expected. Except they're all on their cell phones, staring straight ahead, striding along in focussed, independent universes. I might have to try to penetrate somehow. I'm not sure how."

A rude t-shirt? a loud-hailer? deely-boppers? a tickling-stick?

I jest. Here is the essential dilemma in modern life. We're all worried that the person next to us is a psycho in disguise, and that if we engage them we'll regret it. We go from A to B without making any sort of meaningful contact with another person. I hope you find a way to break the barrier, Lisa!! Go for it!!

Have been meaning to note for a week or so that the post-count stats-collection part of my blogger profile has been hidden, & is no longer displaying pre-election post titles. It's actually not displaying stats or post titles of any sort, but that's OK, since it links back here & I have the "10 most recent" list posting to my sidebar. Thanks for cleaning up the old post links, blogger!!

The stats aren't public any more, but they're there. On my "dashboard" blog management page I'm told that this blog now has 1051 posts....

See also: Profile stats turned off.

has its very own group on Flickr. via BoingBoing.

the message from BoingBoing is "don't mess with the hydrants..."

Makes sense to me. There's pictures of a couple of hydrant mods in the original post.

Interesting to note that the city will issue a spray-cap and a traffic control barrier for your hydrant-hydrated block-party if you ask them nicely.

Google Moon: "In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing."

You really should visit & zoom in all the way. The close-up is excellent!!

So we're back up, my friends!! Freshblog is being crawled as we speak, & my tags are popping up left & right in the search results again. (just look for the toothbrush!!) If someone over there did something special, many thanks, & if it was just a regular crawl, I apologise for my impatience.

By the way, Technorati now has me updated 25 minutes ago, which is darn near real-time for the James Doohan post.

So the two-fer tags are back up. Groovy!!

CNN & BloggingLA:

James Doohan, the burly chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in the original "Star Trek" TV series and motion pictures who responded to the apocryphal command "Beam me up, Scotty," died early Wednesday. He was 85.

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. (1330 GMT) at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.

B.LA reports that Mr Doohan's ashes will be sent skywards...

See also: 08/31/04: James Doohan gets star on the Walk of Fame, & the BBC's obituary.

So, have been led to Icerocket. They can't see my tags either at this point, but I only pinged them a little while ago..... They offer keyword search, link search and tag search too. You can't ping them with pingmyblog yet, but I bet you'll be able to soon.

Hopefully the tags I'm making will be more than visible to their servers....

So clearly I'm not the only one who is listed but not popping up in the returns. There's a discussion going on out there, and as usual, by the time the blogosphere at large turns on to something, the cutting edge are off looking for the next thing.

A VC:

"Jason Calacanis begged Yahoo! and Google to enter the blog search market in a widely read post on his blog last week.

The comments indicate some frustration with Technorati and rightly so.

I get about 10 trackbacks a day from blog posts that link to me. About 20% of them get picked up on Technorati. It's gotten to the point that I don't bother to check who is linking to me with Technorati anymore. I used to do that query at least once a day and on many days I'd do it more often than that."

Er, first-off, that many repeat hits might be why it isn't working so well for the rest of us.... Secondly, 'tis interesting to note that there are other bloggers out there in the nether-world of the "not recently updated" who are really more "not recently detected".

Not a big issue, of course, and the scaling issues in this whole thing are clearly mind boggling, (80,000 new blogs created every day!!) but after finding a cool way to tag, 't'would be great if it worked.

Update 7/20: My blog now says "updated 1 day ago," so it's been seen, but the tags still aren't showing up in the body of the searches, I don't think....

So my allegedly multi-purpose tags are not quite so multi-purpose. For some reason, they've dropped off the face of the technorati tag search. I am investigating....

My posts still appear in the del.icio.us results sidebar on the Technorati tag search results page, but they're not making it into the main list, which sort of makes the 2-birds-with-one-stone category method a waste of time.

I have checked the tag syntax (url and rel="tag" &c) & it seems to be the same as that described on the technorati tag help page, so who knows?

Update: The tags must be OK, because our German friends at Taggling can see them just fine... (see their recent results for Harry-Potter.)

Now that I have some original material on this blog I have taken a step towards retaining some control over that material. I have an attribution & share-alike Creative Commons license now that requests attribution for references to Freshblog, and requests that any work that builds on original material from here is distributed under similar terms.

TomDispatch.com:

Welcome to paradise. But where are you? Is this a new science-fiction novel from Margaret Atwood, the sequel to Blade Runner, or Donald Trump tripping on acid?

No, it is the Persian Gulf city-state of Dubai in 2010.

After Shanghai (current population: 15 million), Dubai (current population: 1.5 million) is the world's biggest building site: an emerging dreamworld of conspicuous consumption and what locals dub "supreme lifestyles."

Dozens of outlandish mega-projects -- including "The World" (an artificial archipelago), Burj Dubai (the Earth's tallest building), the Hydropolis (that underwater luxury hotel, the Restless Planet theme park, a domed ski resort perpetually maintained in 40C heat, and The Mall of Arabia, a hyper-mall -- are actually under construction or will soon leave the drawing boards....

via BoingBoing.

See previous Freshblog posts on development & promotional doings in Dubai.

New Intro 2/16/06:

This script broke when Firefox and Greasemonkey were updated. It has recently been edited to work with the upgrades, and links here now point to both this revised basic script, and to the original version (for anyone using earlier versions of Firefox or GreaseMonkey)

For a third, feature-rich script, see my how-to for Johan's script.

_________

It occurs to me that my posts about the Greasemonkey categorization method [1] [2] haven’t been especially clear & may not be all that helpful. I was writing as I was puzzling it out, & so my how-to wasn't especially definitive. However, since I’m finding this to be far & away the most straightforward strategy for tagging & categorising posts in blogger, here’s a detailed how-to.

You should:

1. Use the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser
2. Install the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, which enables you to run open-source user scripts on specific webpages.
3. Get a del.icio.us account.
4. Install either Greasemonkey Script 3187: For Firefox 1.5 and GreaseMonkey 0.6.4 or Script 1240: For earlier versions of Firefox and Greasemonkey.
5. Edit the tag-generating script to point to your del.icio.us account.
6. Install the Technorati & Del.icio.us tag-generating script in your Firefox browser. The script runs on blogger “create / edit post” pages and adds a field to the form where you can type your tag / category keywords.
7. Add a “my categories” link to your sidebar that points to your del.icio.us page

http://del.icio.us/username/

7. Write a post, publish it, & bookmark it on del.icio.us.

So, step-by-step:

1 - Greasemonkey only works with Firefox, so you need to be happy browsing with Firefox. (let’s face it, why wouldn’t you be?)

2 – Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that enables you to run open-source user scripts on specific webpages. To enable Greasemonkey, visit their website & click the install link. As Improbulus notes at A Consuming Experience:

if nothing happens and you see just below your tabs a message in horizontal bar that "To protect your computer, Firefox prevented this site (greasemonkey.mozdev.org) from installing software on your computer", you should click "Edit Options" at the end, then "Allow" and "OK" to allow that site to install software, then try clicking the Greasemonkey extension link again, give it a few seconds then click "Install now". Close and re-launch Firefox.)

3 – Visit http://del.icio.us/ and sign up for an account.

4 – With Greasemonkey enabled in your browser (step 2), choose a script and go to the page that displays the script content.

• Script 3187: For Firefox 1.5 and GreaseMonkey 0.6.4
• Script 1240: For earlier versions of Firefox and Greasemonkey
  

From the above-linked pages on Greasemonkeyed, click either Install this Script or Original Source Location (both seem to be the same .js file). Copy the text of the script into a text editor, and edit to insert your del.icio.us username instead of mine.

Save the script, & upload it to your web server. Then view the script in its new location, go to the “tools” menu in Firefox & select “install user script.” When prompted, select OK & you should see a message indicating that you’ve been successful.

5 - To tag your posts, simply click over to the HTML view in the compose window, type keywords in the new field that was added to your page by the greasemonkey script, and click “append tags.” When you publish your post, it will have tags included that are visible to Technorati & link to your page of bookmarks on Del.icio.us. As I’ve said here before (sorry to repeat…) Technorati tags don't have to link to technorati. They can link to del.icio.us and technorati will find them because of the rel: tag attribute.

Now only one step remains. Bookmark your post on Del.icio.us, into a del.icio.us account that only contains posts from your site & not from other sites. To bookmark on del.icio.us you can use either the bookmarklet that is available from the site, or a one-click link out of your post.

Update 2/16/06: The script has been revised to work with Greasemonkey 0.6.4 and Firefox 1.5

H2O Playlist: "H2O playlists are more than just a cool, sleek technology -- they represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.

H2O Playlists make it easy to:

transform traditional syllabi into interactive, global learning tools

share the reading lists of world-renowned scholars, organizations, and cultural leaders

let interested people subscribe to playlist updates and stay current on their fields

promote an exchange of ideas and expertise among professors, students, and researchers

communicate and aggregate knowledge -- online and offline.

So, go on ... check out existing playlists or create your own. You can also read our philosophy behind building this technology."

via Metafilter.

So the blogosphere is a-twitter once more with the scoop in how to make your webmail account into a mini hard-drive accessible from any PC with a web connection. Linkfilter & Welsh View both have the scoop on 2 new & straightforward sources for this.

"Roamdrive requires that you download an application whilst XmailHardDrive has an online interface. I've tried the XmailHardDrive and it's easy to use and has a very clean interface."

So it seems that you could take the floppy disk out of your bag, & transfer your files with g-mail.... Not a supported function though, & not encouraged by the e-mail people.

Get sorted. Take the sorting hat quiz & see which house you belong in. I find myself in Ravenclaw.

In the welcome return of a regular read, Brian Micklethwait is back. Over at his new blog, Brian has a blogroll, & as a consequence of this addition he is wrestling with the "The" in blog titles, and how it can complicate your list of links. He's also going off on a wonderful tangential rant about pop bands and the alphabetizing of CD collections:

"I used to be rather scornful of pop combos who called themselves Pox, instead of something like The Pox Brothers, or whatever. I mean, if the definite article was good enough for The Beatles and for The Rolling Stones, then it ought to be good enough for Oasis, but apparently it isn’t.....If I had ever wanted to arrange pop musicians in alphabetical order, I would have thanked heaven for Oasis, Pox, Misery, Abba, Mud, Mouthwash,...etc "

Comedy gold!! For my ten cents, I am a recently-converted dropper of "the", occasioned by my frequent inability to find my link to culture kitchen in my sidebar. My CD's, though, are crammed on a shelf every which way!!

While the rest of us take the car three minutes away to the Grocery Store, David Horton is running 40+ miles a day for 63 days, and 'tis only day 42. : "Early start from Hwy 44 and the 46 mile day ended up being some of the most boring terrain around. The views looking behind to Mt. Lassen (the plugged volcano) and ahead to Mt Shasta (the only 14er in northern California) were at least encouraging. A highlight from the day was passing a large pond filled with white pelicans with black tipped wings. Later on Mark and David (Mark ran 40 miles with Horton today) heard and saw a large bald eagle in its nest not too far from the trail. Fortunately Horton’s immediate fear was not realized, the eagle stayed in its nest and did not dive bomb the two runners. Royce Zumalt joined the crew today and will help tomorrow as well. Josh will be back to crewing on his own come Thursday"

via Metafilter.

linkfilter.net: "Ali G creator Sacha Baron Cohen duped an American TV station into interviewing his bogus Kazakhstani journalist Borat live on air yesterday. Despite his increasing profile in the States, with an HBO series already under his belt, Cohen managed to talk his way onto the morning news show on WAPT-Channel 16 in Mississippi." Read how, or read my post about Borat in NYC.

Boing Boing: "The Guardian is running a contest to write a notional Dumbledore death scene from the upcoming Harry Potter in the style of famous authors, including Hemingway, William Carlos Williams and AA Milne. Some of these are freaking brilliant." Guardian Books.

Discovery Channel: "July 12, 2005 — Stonehenge's megaliths come from the mountains of Wales, according to a study which pinpoints the quarry where the bluestones were cut around 2500 B.C.

Writing in the July-August issue of British Archaeology, Timothy Darvill, professor of archaeology at Bournemouth University, and Geoff Wainwright, a retired English Heritage archaeologist, describe a 'small crag-edged promontory with a stone bank across its neck' at one of the highest points of Carn Menyn, a mountain in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire, in southwest Wales."

via rebecca's pocket.

In an oh-so Harry Turtledove alternate history meets reality move, the Klingons are showing up at Civil War re-enactments. Excellent!!

WorstWeatherEver has the scoop, and a gallery of pictures that will keep you laughing for weeks, my friends: "It is a little known fact that the Klingons aided the Confederacy during the war and would've been victorious had the Romulans not interfered and given the Union their cloaking device..."

via: The Web Fantastic & Bloghorrea.

hiding modern-day Agricultural slavery. NPR.org: "Florida lawmakers are looking into allegations that several of the state's farm labor camps are running what one U.S. attorney calls modern-day slave operations.

For the most part, the workers are U.S. citizens, and many are homeless African-American men recruited from shelters and soup kitchens. Lured by promises of work, they hop into vans, only to find themselves in fenced farm camps, forced into debt by their bosses and sometimes paid with drugs instead of money."

Listen to the report. This is twenty-first century America, for goodness sake!! Shut these places down!!

This year's big pop-culture event is going to create a splash in the blogosphere. Technorati Weblog: "Technorati currently tracks almost 150,000 mentions of "Harry Potter" including over 1000 blog posts tagged with "Harry Potter." You can expect the conversation around Harry Potter to increase this weekend as readers lose themselves in the 672-page epic and discuss the plot with their blogging communities."

Engadget: "We’re not sure if this is the first law of its kind in the US (anyone know whether it is?), but we have a feeling it won’t be the last: apparently Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich signed off on a legislation Tuesday making it illegal to have TVs and/or media players installed in the frontal areas of cars..."

Makes good sense to me. Watch the road!!

Sure, I'm available, accessible, listed and interactive 24/7/365... so says Michael Bloomberg in a monster gaffe that has every whack-job in Metropolis calling to share the joy. Gothamist: "The NY Times reports that the Mayor's communications director said Bloomberg's townhouse received "more calls than we can count" while the Post was able to fix the uncountable number as "more than 100 calls." A Post reporter tried calling a few times, but only got a busy signal or Bloomberg's voicemail."

How long 'til Sir Michael of Bloomberg has a new & unlisted number, do we think?

What about entirely downloadable TV?

Metafilter: “Beginning Sept. 6, PBS will make available – exclusively over the Internet, broadcast television’s first entirely downloadable series, featuring Robert X. Cringely’s interviews with personalities from the ever-changing world of technology.”

Said Cringely, "NerdTV will have an uninterrupted hour with the smartest, funniest and sometimes nerdiest people in high tech. These are people who have changed our lives whether we know it or not. Through NerdTV a broad audience of enthusiasts and students will gain a much greater understanding of these techies and the context of their lives and work."

Dumb question of the week - Is it still TV if you download it & watch it on your PC?

That's just crazy talkin'!!

But seriously, in response to a comment from Angelsong, who's trying to make this category method work for her, let's investigate: There should be a way to create a drop-down menu, but I guess you'd have to hand-code it with your most frequently used tags, & then include a link to your del.icio.us page for the rest of your tags / categories. The simplest way might be with an old style (& not especially cool-looking) drop-down form like the one on Monica's Portfolio Page.

Anyone else got a cooler drop-down form? Comments are always open & I'd love your input!! I'd take one of these in a heartbeat if we can come up with a way to make one!!

If you don't want to hand-code a list, the single link in the sidebar method seems to be working OK for me. One of the up-sides of this method is that it uses del.icio.us as a substitute category manager / list builder, & so your category list is simply the right-hand column of your del.icio.us page. It isn't on your blog, sure, but it's only a click away, & all the links on the page point right back to your blog. See my del.icio.us page as an example.

Update 7/26: Many thanks to Mark at Escape from Obsession for encoding the drop-down menu for del.icio.us tags & sharing his efforts with the world. Much appreciated!!

As we go back to the moon, we're going to be able to check out the tin cans that got us there the first time around. Boingboing: "NASA plans to send a satellite into lunar orbit three years from now. While charting the moon's surface, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) will also snap the first close-range pics of Apollo relics we've seen for three decades."

So after some research, it's almost time to start cranking out some test podcasts. Here's what we plan so far:

• Audacity as the sound recording / editing software
• OurMedia.org, CC Publisher or similar for audio file storage
• A new blogger blog as the central resource for the show
• Feedburner Smartcast to handle RSS enclosure generation.

The Windows Development Center has a tutorial that was helpful & answered a lot of questions. Reel Reviews Radio has a podcast about podcasting, and supporting images / explanation in the blog post.

If you are a knower of podcasty things, and have wisdom to impart, please hit the comments. I'm listening...

Game on!!

Bookblog.net:

A supermarket in Canada accidentally sold 14 copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, so Justice Kristi Gill last Saturday ordered customers not to talk about the book, copy it, sell it or even read it before it is officially released at 12:01 a.m. July 16.

Accidentally sold? Ordered not to sell it? Ordered not to read it? Ah, so many questions, so little time....

And here's the kicker, my friends: "The order also compels them to return the novel to the publisher, Raincoast Book Distribution Ltd., until the official release. At that time it will be returned to them.

As an added incentive, Raincoast will include Rowling's autograph and a gift pack."

Sanitised theme-park history and culture, analysed at Designboom.com:

In many ways theme park culture is much like a secular religious culture that insists that all real-life events be fit to its own theology. To do this, theme parks must take our historical events, environments, conditions and lifestyles and sanitize them while they synthesize them. A simplified history and other realities are turned into neat pleasant packages that can be swallowed in dainty morsels with very little 'indigestion.'

via Space & Culture.

Check out GTD Wannabe, a new productivity and organisation blog that is productive and organised in part because of del.icio.us categories!!

I read about GTD online and then decided to check out the book. I looked at the book in the store, and said, "Oh, this is common sense, I can figure it out" and didn't buy the book. Another week went by with me lurking on various forums. I then decided that I HAD to have the book and rushed out to get it. It may be common sense, but really, if common sense were so common, then everybody would have it...

Are you a shabby time manager and a master procrastinator? Do you blog or watch TRL when you should be working? Pay a visit....

So... Some conflicting instructions, apparently, about whether members of the U.S. Military that are stationed in the U.K. are allowed to cross the M-25 in the aftermath of 7/7. First they weren't, & now, presumably because someone sees what a huge public relations cock-up that would turn into, they are.

from One Man & His Blog.

Linkfilter points to plans for a scale model cardboard dalek.

A collectible you make yourself for your own collection. When I was in grade school I truly thought the book I found it in, TERRY NATION'S DALEK SPECIAL a treasure. I set about making my own Dalek Army with glue, vanilla folders (glueing pattern on them for sturdiness), scissors and markers (and maybe an exacto knife).

To paraphrase Mick Dundee.... "that's not a Dalek. This is a Dalek...

Check out these full-size plans originally published in the Radio Times 1973, available from the BBC by mail in the 1980's & '90s (although I wouldn't know anything about that...) & made available online for the C21st at steve-p.org.

All the Tom Cruise hoopla about the new War of the Worlds movie has me interested in finding out more about the famous "we thought it was true" Welles radio broadcast of 1938. War of the Worlds has the scoop:

Welles and Koch told the story as a series of newsflashes that intruded without warning into what sounded like a perfectly routine program....[and] a great many listeners switched at an inopportune moment from a rival network, which was broadcasting the wildly popular Charlie McCarthy Show. About 10 minutes into this show, a singer would be introduced, and this was the point a lot of listeners would twiddle their dials while waiting for the star of the show to return. Tuning into the Mercury Theater a few minutes late (and thus having missed Welles distinctively sonorous introduction) they found themselves listening to the innocent sounds of "Ramon Raquello and his orchestra", only for the music to be interrupted by the first of a series of increasingly alarming news stories....

See also:

• The Museum of Hoaxes
• National Geographic News
• Wikipedia
• Rotten.com

I've been sloppy. I was all excited about WalkLA before the walk started, & I haven't been back to the site since the perambulation began. I've missed some good stuff, too, by the look of it, not the least of which is this great image of LA's concrete waterway... taken from the roof of an abandoned women's prison.

So. Let's all go back & check in with Lisa, & watch the videos she's making as she encounters her city from ground level at pedestrian pace...

Well, wouldn't you know, it's chocolate stout!!

Young's Double Chocolate Stout has an intriguing twist. Chocolate malt and real dark chocolate are combined with Young's award winning rich, full flavoured dark beer to craft a satisfyingly indulgent, but never overly sweet experience.

Pale ale and crystal malt, chocolate malt, special blend of sugars, Fuggle and Goldings hops, real dark chocolate and chocolate essence.

via Linkfilter.

Engadget: FCC just released a report confirming that as of late last year the number of cellphone lines in the U.S. officially surpassed the number of landlines.

The future is now....

This, my friends, is what we had for IT equipment in high school...

Boingboing points us to a gallery of obsolete computers. Seeing all that stuff that was once cutting edge and is now paperweights makes you wonder what we'll be using in 20 years, & how we'll be interfacing with it, & what I'll be doing with my Pentium4.... All very Johnny Mnemonic....

And here's a new PC that's been camouflaged to look like old technology, specifically an old and very cool looking radio. Ah, my desk could be so much more fun.

via BoingBoing.

Is this turning into a comedy blog? Funny how strings of posts sometimes reflect my preoccupations that week.... Anyway, Borat's in Gotham, & he's been spotted...

New York magazine reports he was spotted on the 4 train, "lunging in to kiss surprised men and introducing himself in broken English as 'Borat from Kazakhstan.'" Of course, the "Borat" part was a giveaway, as was the semi-discreet entourage ("ten men, dressed to blend in with jeans, T-shirts, and nondescript backpacks or briefcases with camouflaged cameras")

And while we're talking about Ali G... Here's the scoop on the multiple ways to (mis) understand this act & his appeal, courtesy of Screen Online:

Among the most controversial figures of recent years is Ali G, created by white, Jewish comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen. Depending on your point of view, Ali is a white man playing a Black man to ridicule Black youth culture, a white man playing a white man desperate to appear Black in order to look cool, or even a white man playing an Asian man trying to appear black. Ali G has divided commentators, but he continues to attract huge audiences, many of them Black, who just think he's funny.