New York Songlines an amazing html based map of New York City with history and personal tidbits appearing in the different "blocks." Kottke describes it better than I can. And speaking of Kottke and New York, here's a comment thread on his site on cheap eating there that I bookmarked a while back.
The truth about coffee but there's no need to worry -- an interesting analysis of corruption in media at K5. Unfortunately, I didn't see about any of the effects on men who drink four to seven cups of coffee per day, but I imagine that the truth would be worrisome. I do drink quite a bit of coffee, but four cups is about my limit. I've also been drinking yerba mate with milk and honey off and on since the new year, which provides the stimulation of caffeine without the anxiety, and just feels healthier in general. I highly recommend it.
It has turned into a winter wonderland here in north Texas. We get an inch of ice and the whole state shuts down for days on end, so I've had two unplanned days off from work in a row (which isn't so cool when one is an hourly wager). In the meantime, blocking unwanted bots at diveintomark.org, One Key, and more site maintainence.
In the past week I've put together a few things on this site that were super difficult to get going - and some that weren't. First, there was the code snippet on my admin page that pings blo.gs when I update, and second, RSS. My admin page has two new fields for title and subject to take advantage of corresponding RSS fields and upon submission, opens and writes to the XML file, which is pretty cool. One of the hardest parts was trying to convert a MySQL datetime stamp to RFC822 for which there is no documentation on the web. I did it like this:
$timestamp = strtotime ($datetime);
$rfc822 = date (r,$timestamp);
I'm pretty pleased with this - I haven't worked on anything so challenging in a long time. Some resources I used:
PHP Date/Time functions,
feeds.archive.org, especially the validator and the 2.0 spec, and the resources I mentioned the other day.
There seems to be some news popping up this morning regarding tabs in safari, first here at the MozBlog, then here at MacSlash. Hoax or truth? I don't know; I just know I haven't seen it with my own eyes. I also believe Dave would have clued us in if tabs were available, if only from the debug menu. We can continue to hope, I guess.
Thanks for the mention, Brian, and I've come around to the fact that commenting is something I'm going to leave in place. It's not only handy for user feedback, but I can go back after posting and add an update or additional info in the comments.
Thanks for the mention, Brian, and I've come around to the fact that commenting is something I'm going to leave in place. It's not only handy for user feedback, but I can go back after posting and add an update or additional info in the comments.
After doing a bit of poking around, I've found a handy little Track Back tutorial that I'm going to look into tomorrow. The tutorial recommends adding a field in my weblog admin page for entry of the url to track (back[?]), rather like a "via" field, which is something I was already planning on implementing. Also of note, an RSS tutorial to look into.
News Monster, a huge feature rich news aggregator that runs inside Mozilla seems like it would be interesting, except for the fact that I've been moving away from Mozilla lately and feel very comfortable with the NetNewsWire/Safari combonation , though I miss all of the frenzied and exciting development of Mozilla components and add-ons. I just discovered another little tidbit that is making my life easier already: NetNewsWire's Preferences > General > Open pages in background. Rock.
I've finished with this iteration of my weblogging tool, but thinking about implementing some new ideas - and getting rid of some old ones - namely commenting. I just don't feel like what I say here lends itself to discussion. Also, I stripped out my old "post by category" functionality, but am thinking I want that back. In the meantime, the new archiving system has been integrated with the old, I've made some much needed updates, and now ready to get to work on some of the things I rebuilt this thing for in the first place, like RSS and more frequent updates.
The lack of posts recently is due to the fact that I'm smack dab in the middle of building another content management/weblogging system for this site, which is being made a lot simpler re-using the code from my former mac.evanrose.com site. I'm also reorganising the document structure and working on a new design -- I just don't have a ton of time.
Yesterday, being Velentine's day, we rolled to Fort Worth to visit The Modern where I ran into Eric, who was there seeing his own piece. A lovely time was had by all; Happy Valentine's day.
I have never learned so much as I have learned these past few weeks with Apple, and I'm amazed at what my customers ask me that I just don't know how to answer. For example, I learned recently that Microsoft's Entourage (now a standalone program, which might be nice for some of you) can connect to HotMail through some sort of proprietary protocol, whereas Mail.app cannot. This might be a solution (and be sure to dig the editor's note, it's funny). I'll probably end up posting lots more things like this, for my own reference.
Hi-Res has launched Massive Attack's new site. I guess this means we can look forward to a new album and a tour? Speaking of tours, I saw Coldplay put on one of the best shows I've seen in a long time. Look out too, for their one of their opening acts, Moss Eisley, who were exceptional.
Finally, got my Jaguar on, and concequently, my iChat, iCal, and Safari on. Today, I'm downloading X11 to run OpenOffice.org and The Gimp (thanks to a little tutorial here). I'll let y'all know how it goes.
Paul is back, and we're pretty happy about that. Apparently, he's switched, and we're pretty happy about that too.
Bookmarking groups of windows in Safari at daringfireball.