I’ve been following Pharyngula for awhile - it’s a really interesting biology blog, where PZ Meyers prolifically links to a wide range of (often cephalopod-related) topics. Cool stuff. Today, he links to this, which would make an awesome geek T-Shirt:
If you spend (too) much time in Terminal.app, this one is a keeper…
Read MoreI spent some time playing with Flickr’s cool new geotagging tool - which lets you add location metadata to any image you upload to Flickr. It works very nicely, letting you easily cluster locations, and quickly add multiple images. Here’s what I’ve done with a handful of images I’ve taken of the UCalgary campus:
Flickr Geotagging UCalgary
They also provide an easy link feature, so I can add a link directly to this map view .
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The U of C threw the switch over the weekend, and the new Drupal -powered website is now live. It’s got some (temporary) gaps, as content is migrated over from the old site, but it’s much nicer than the previous whack-a-mole navigation we had previously. And, since it’s managed by Drupal, content updates are likely to happen more often.
IT is testing the waters with the homepage migration - the site is authored/published by Drupal, but is exported as static HTML and that’s what is living on our main webserver. As they get more comfortable with hosting Drupal and with performance/scalability, they’ll start rolling out dynamically-driven sites rather than HTML snapshots.
Read MoreI’ve gotten absolutely sick of hearing about how wealthy Albertans are. On the news tonight, every other story was about how we’re so stinking rich. We’re buying everything in BC. We’re buying new cars. We’re buying so many new mansions that there aren’t enough tradespeople to build them.
Janice and I walked through the showhomes in our neighbourhood on the weekend to see what’s up. These are the same builders we used when we built our house in 2000. Except, now the price of the lots are higher than what we paid for our whole house package. The “starter” homes in our community now begin at $450,000 - almost 3x what ours cost just 6 years ago. That’s absolutely insane. We fell in love with one of the homes - but at $650,000 it’s not bloody likely. But someone’s buying this stuff.
Read MoreSo, 2 months after I finally get my Canon Digital Rebel XT (350D), they announce the upgrade. The 400D/XTi sounds pretty nice, but I’m not regretting getting the XT when I did.
Things I like about the 400D/XTi:
Things I don’t like about the upgrade:
Read MoreCole just posted a note about PSU’s podcasting training session, including a screenshot and link to the Podcasts @ PSU website. Looks very well done - I’m sure we’ll be borrowing liberally from it when we get our butts moving here.
What’s interesting to me is that the site is done in Drupal. Taxonomies to organize content. Drupal’s RSS feeds spitting out the podcasts. Very nice. It looks like a pretty stock implementation without much hackery to get things going - but knowing Cole, he’s probably added some cool stuff to streamline the publihsing process.
Read MoreI think I missed a set of Faves, so here’s a batch to catch up. Yeah. I want to be on a tropical beach right now, Rip Van Winkling…
Thanks to some great work by Christoph C. Cemper, there is now a module available to enable email notifications for comments by anonymous users (which, on my blog, is everyone but myself) on a Drupal blog. There should now be a “follow comments by email” checkbox underneath the comment submission form, which adds the much-missed feature.
It needs a (minor?) change to the stock comment.module, but Christoph provides a modified version of that. Hopefully the changes aren’t drastic enough to make upgrading Drupal less straightforward.
Read MoreI placed a couple of bids on Newton Messagepad auctions on eBay this weekend, thinking I might be able to pick one up relatively inexpensively, since they are discontinued and a decade old. Man, is there an active community of folks still lusting after these bad boys.
The auctions for the MP2100 quickly grew too rich for my blood, but I was able to win both an eMate 300 and a Messagepad 120 with a bunch of accessories.
Read MoreI’m trying to pick up a Newton Messagepad 2100 (still by far the best PDA ever created) via eBay, and was trying to find a way to track the item I’ve bid on via RSS so I can keep up to date on the auction.
But, eBay doesn’t offer an RSS feed for item auction notification? That seems like a HUGE oversight! It’s such a natural fit - I use RSS for notification from other things like Subversion, Basecamp, Tracks, etc… eBay would just fit into that. Every time something changes on an item, or on my watchlist, or my bidlist, there should be an entry in an RSS feed for me to monitor.
Read MoreI’ve been using the great CCK module on a bunch of projects (including this blog, for my bikelog). It’s really cool in that it lets you construct custom content types within the Drupal admin interface, without having to touch any PHP code. It’s like having your own personal microformat manager - it could handle things like compound content on a web page (and generate the editing form so you just fill in the blanks - abstract, body, url for more info, email contact, etc…) and I think it could even handle something like a simplified LOM for a “learning object repository”.
Read MoreGuesstimating the size of an RSS feed audience is always a huge shot in the dark, but sometimes I get curious about how many people subscribe to this silly blog. If I was willing to surrender my feeds to Feedburner, I could get some pretty detailed stats. But, I don’t want to hand over that.
So, I thought about digging into the accesslog that’s stored in Drupal’s database. I’ve set my copy to store access logs for the past 2 weeks, and it dutifully records which pages are viewed, as well as the IP address the request came from. It’s just a subset of a typical webserver log, so there isn’t any privacy issue here (if you’re really worried about being tracked online, you’re already using an anonymizing proxy…)
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