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!!

I couldn't have said it better myself, so I'm not going to try. Forgive the extended block-quote!!

7CM Blog: "In reality, you can do almost anything with Blogger that you can do in “superior” packages, with a little bit of ingenuity.... Most importantly, don't put off blogging because you 'heard' stuff that makes you think Blogger may not be fully 'up to the job' or because you are waiting for the perfect tool for anything to come along. As with everything else on the road to success, just get started. Blogger is perfect for that."

For some ideas about customising your Blogger blog, & adding some of the functions that you wish you could add, see my blogger hacks post.

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?