Brian Kerr

Like a burning comet ☄ Wordpress 2.3 has arrived; the big outward-facing feature is baked-in tagging support.

Two plugins of note at this early stage:

(1) Tag Managing Thing — Wordpress allows you to transform categories into tags, which isn’t quite right. Anything else, and you are either writing SQL or using the Tag Managing Thing. You will find it helpful for renaming, splitting, and deep-sixing tags.

(2) New Tag Cloud — plugin which exposes a Wordpress widget that is a micro wrapper around wp_tag_cloud (except that number behaves differently, go figure). The built-in widget for displaying a tag list/miasma doesn’t allow for any customization, and where’s the glory in that?

There are the usual errors and omissions in how tags are handled in the front-end template and WP administration. But the big plus is that, finally, the table structure is a little more civilized as re: post categories and link categories and (now) per-post tags baselined into Wordpress.

To say more would be to devolve into standard issue tag-and-bucket praises of del.icio.us, for which there’s neither space nor time enough, tonight!

(tags: ☄ burning-comet del.icio.us metacrap tagging weblogs wordpress)

Oh yeah:

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

Important to remember in this Facebook Moment. del.icio.us/tag/freedom0.

(tags: facebook metacrap networks politics)

Thanks to the new and improved Walker Tracker API: an adorable micro graph of my walking activity for the past few months. Find it at the top of every page. Each day is red if I exceeded my step goal, gray if not.

This bitter gray motivates me to get outside even on a hot day like today — which is good, since I’ve hit a rough patch lately on the pedestrianism front. “Increase the red” is the new increase the n.

It’s the simplest possible lashing together of Walker Tracker and Joe Gregorio’s sparkline Python CGI, with Scott Hurring’s PHP Serialize module for wire ties.

(tags: metacrap urbanranger visual walkertracker)

Nearing the line of empire with various Wordpress blogs in my life — here’s the baseline plugin list I’m using. There’s a complexity cost with this stuff, so each one counts (and several of them really, truly belong in the core software):

• FeedSmith alias FeedBurner
• Markdown
• Search Everything
• Search Hilite
• Wordpress.com stats
• wp-cache
• wp-microsummary

Also: two moonshine plugins (for ad management and server-side logging) that I use a lot but will never clean up enough for public distribution.

(tags: metacrap weblogs)

Here’s the game. Make a list, powers of two. For each number, find something in the world that takes up space in your brain, and reduce the count of instances of that something to an appropriate power of two. Yesterday and today, I played the game in my spare time, with limited success. For each something, find the original count in parentheses:

  2 e-mail accounts (3)
  4 web browsers installed (7)
  8 ssh bookmarks (11)
 16 iTunes playlists (23)
 32 twitter friends (36)
 64 del.icio.us network (77)
128 RSS feeds (!) (only got to 183, from 300+)

In almost every case, the reductions hurt a little — I had to get rid of something that wasn’t entirely dead weight, or school stuff I can pay far less attention to now. The last two (del.icio.us network and RSS feeds) were the worst. But I’m really happy with the outcome: fewer, better.

(tags: metacrap process)

A recent change: daily posting of del.icio.us links to this weblog, in their own category, but excluded from RSS feed(s). There was trouble with the feed exclusion the other day, but should be smooth sailing from here on out.

Del.icio.us has a nice tagging trellis: just the right amount of structure. Each little set of tags tells a tagset word-line nano-narrative, but you always have the to hell with it shift linguals option of clicking through a tag and seeing where it takes you. Del.icio.us is a toxic stinging jellyfish: grab a tag or tentacle or feeler or what have you and you can pull up a great glistening jellyfish chunk of the network from there with all kinds of other strands hanging off. All this to say that del.icio.us, 36 months and 4800+ links later, has become the most telegraphic software I use. I like the idea that each word is connected to a bunch of other words, each person to a bunch of other people. I like the cut-up adjacency that comes out of everybody else’s attention in the (my) network; whenever I refresh it, it’s like somebody chucked the system of the world into a hat, shook it up, and pulled out a few random crumpled pages for me to look at. I like to think that if WS Burroughs were here, he’d say this is a little sneak preview image of the unspecified whatever state that comes after the end of the war game.

(tags: media metacrap process web)

Recently have consolidated a few web sites, repositories, etc. onto a single “box” — scare quotes as it’s all bits aboard a low-capacity Xen slice from slicehost. Virtualization is a sea change, and the level of service these folks are offering (for what’s supposed to be a DIY kind of environment) is super impressive. slicehost’s community_indicators are there as well, witness a hoppin’ wiki & the forums.

Rather than an unpaid slicehost PSA, the purpose of this post was/is to act as the standard I think no links are broken but I could be wrong disclaimer. (In addition to moving this weblog off of warp, I switched to a different web server and database, and cleaned up / obliterated some agéd wordpress cruft potentially resulting in Galileo knows what.)

(tags: metacrap slicehost weblogs)