I just published my “Bloglines enclosure downloader” script. This started as an experiment with the Bloglines service APIs. As other applications (in particular, Doppler) continued to advance, I put this on hold. Doppler had promised support for Bloglines support in version 1, so I waited. Once the final Doppler came out, I realized it wasn’t quite the way I wanted.... (more)
October 2004 Archives
I’ve been finding more and more podcasts out there and listening to as many as possible on my new Zen Touch. The problem — as others have pointed out — is not having enough hours in the day to listen to all of this. In Bloglines I subscribe to about 180 feeds, but I do a lot of skimming which... (more)
Having previously shown how the S5 slideshow system can be integrated with MovableType, I thought CityDesk might also be a nice integration point. CityDesk makes it easy to edit web pages and has a pretty powerful template system that would allow creation of S5-formatted output files. Result: after an hour or two of fiddling, I created a sample CityDesk project... (more)
(Updated: Corrected link to the sample presentation.) Anil Dash from Six Apart posted instructions for implementing Eric Meyer’s S5 slideshow system with MovableType templates. This is a great example of both the simplicity of the S5 system and the power of a template-driven website. In a couple of minutes, I implemented the technique on Cantoni.org to see how well it... (more)
There seems to be a scarcity of good quality weblogs about racing, but I just found Full Throttle which looks good. (Their RSS feed is not linked from the main page, but with a little digging I found it: Full Throttle RSS feed.) I also found Sports Blog which is kind of a meta-weblog, bringing in reports from a bunch... (more)
At Gnomedex a few weeks back, a couple of friends introduced me to “Lazy Man’s Margaritas” which were quite tasty: Equal parts: * Tequila, 100% agave (don’t use the cheap stuff) * Odwalla Summertime Lime Served over ice, these babies are just awesome. Perfect for when you’re on-the-go.... (more)
Very late to the portable audio party, I finally broke down and bought the Creative Zen Touch 20GB. It just arrived from Amazon tonight and I’ve been checking it out while watching the Red Sox beat the Yankees. So far it seems very solid. With USB 2.0, the songs copy from my PC really fast and the audio quality is... (more)
Yesterday in the season finale for the IRL racing series, Tony Kanaan finished second, celebrated his first series championship, and set a record by finishing every single lap in every race the IRL ran this year. Apparently this has never been accomplished in any of the major racing series: Kanaan made it through 16 races over nine months for Andretti... (more)
Eric Meyer has been working on a slide show format that uses XHTML, Javascript, and CSS. The software is called S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System and it looks like a promising alternative to PowerPoint or other presentation software. S5 presentations require only a recent browser for display. The look and feel is only limited by what you can... (more)
Google just launched an SMS service for retrieving search results from a mobile phone. Basically you send specific messages to the number 46645 (GOOGL on most phones). You can do some specific searches like businesses, people, Froogle prices, and word definitions. You can also do normal searches with snippets returned to your phone. I tried this on my Treo 600... (more)
While at Gnomedex this past weekend, there were numerous mentions of “PodCasting”. I had heard of this briefly in the last couple of weeks, but had not looked into it yet. There seems to be a lot of buzz around this simple but interesting concept. Basically, it’s an application of audio enclosures within an RSS feed. A special aggregator automatically... (more)
I finally got around to upgrading this site from MovableType 2.66 to 3.11 (the latest). I wanted to upgrade just to get the latest plugins and to explore the new capabilities. Plus it gave me an excuse to back up my site which I’ve done only sporadically. With improved handling for comments, I might turn them back on. In fact,... (more)
For a while now I’ve been using Textile when writing weblog entries. Textile — the “Humane Web Text Generator” — lets you use simple markup tags in your text rather than trying to write HTML by hand. For longer articles, I tend to write them in straight HTML in my editor, running them through Tidy if needed prior to posting.... (more)
Today palmOne announced the Tungsten T5 which is the latest in the handheld (i.e. non-Treo) family or PDAs. It's kind of a sad day -- the first product release since I left. This should be a nice product with full 320×480 display (no slider like the T3) and a total of 256MB of storage -- 160 MB flash drive and... (more)
The Gnomedex conference continues today… The Future of Online Content started well including discussions about the lack of individual blogging voices from big publishers (like NYTimes). Jason Calacanis gave some good insight behind Weblogs Inc; he mentioned being prepared for lawsuits which led to an interesting discussion (including apparently a cease-and-desist order from palmOne, probably about the Treo 650 pictures... (more)
The Gnomedex conference is under way this morning and it looks to be a lot of fun. We’ve got an open wireless LAN set up on the conference floor, but this morning it’s seems a little flaky. (Around lunchtime it became solid again.) My Yahoo has a special page up that points to all the bloggers who are here, along... (more)
