Blog Posts

del.icio.us is em.pty?

This has me a little nervous. I sure hope Joshua/Yahoo! have decent backups…

There were over 700 bookmarks in there this morning. Now it’s saying my account is empty. Man, that would suck. Definitely the major downside of using an offsite bookmark manager…

It seems like del.icio.us was more stable before Yahoo! got involved. Maybe this is just a big Moving Of Servers from Joshua’s basement to the Yahoo datacentre?

Flickr Faves for 2005/12/17

It’s been a couple of weeks since the last Flickr Faves post, and I’ve gone through another set of 36 favorites on Flickr. Some interesting shots of cool places, events, and even some old software…

Subscribe like it's 1999!

I realized that there are a few folks that read this blog without the benefit of an RSS aggregator. To each their own, I figure. So, I just installed a handy plugin to let people subscribe to the output of this blog via email.

If that kind of thing turns your crank, head on over to the Subscribe page, where you’ll be provided with links to the RSS and Atom feeds, as well as a handy dandy email subscription form.

Subscribe

There are a few ways to subscribe to this weblog.

Via RSS: Blog Entries, Comments

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The Story of the Banner Images

In the last post, I mentioned how the banner images I have on this site are photos I’ve taken at various stages and places of my life. Yes, I took each and every one of them myself.

Then, I realized that all documentation about these photos remains in my head. Which isn’t exactly a permanent or reliable memory store. So, I went and created a first draft of a page describing the images. I’ll update it as I remember more - I’ll have to pull exact dates from iPhoto’s library…

Banner Images

This page lists all of the images that are being used in the banner area of this weblog. I’m using a script to automatically and randomly select one of the images each time a page is loaded (but that may behave differently, depending on browser or caching). They are listed in chronological order, in the order they were added to the rotation pool - not the order they were taken.

On the downside of freely sharing stuff

This blog is published under a creative commons license (specifically, the non-commercial use, with attribution license) - chosen to let folks rip/mix/burn whatever they found useful. I really believe that type of sharing is important.

Regardless, I was a bit surprised to find this obvious homage to my blog design (well, to K2 and my tweaks), which closely mimics my blog’s current appearance - right down to recycling each and every one many of my blog banner images (which have been removed since I posted this).

Portfolio vs. Dossier

In the background thinking/planning for our own “ePortfolios” project (man, I hate that “e”) we realized that many/most of the off-the-shelf portfolio packages were really just simple fill-in-the-blanks templates. Not really a portfolio, at all. Essentially a simple dossier. A collection of standardized data about a person, with no real creative input required or allowed.

A portfolio (e- or otherwise) is about as far from a simple templated dossier as I can imagine. Ok. Flying monkeys with laser guns on their heads would be farther, but you get the point. Portfolios are a process of creative expression. Of reflecting on what you’ve done, how you did it, and hopefully, where you’d like to go. Every person’s portfolio should be different. Different content, different presentation, different context. Things that a dossier just can’t capture. Dossiers are good for comparing batches of nearly-identical things, and helping to highlight differences between them. I imagine a hiring committee sitting at a big table with a stack of 500 of these templated dossiers, sorting them by some criterion to get to the Right Person To Hire.

Calgary Blog

Ted Buracas just launched a Calgary blogging site: the Blog at Calgary. It looks like a great start, with links to local media, arts, music, entertainment, etc… I’ve already found a new Jamba Juice replacement called *atomic - downtown, just north of The Bay. Next time I’m downtown, I’ll have to check it out (although that may not be for awhile - I seem to be downtown about once per season or so…)

Feedster Top 500 List

I was checking my feeds this morning, and saw that Jenny Levine (of The Shifted Librarian fame) has been added to the BlogBridge Experts List - giving her top library-related blogs as a starting point for folks who are into that kind of thing. Very cool.

In the announcement, they mention that The Shifted Librarian is a pretty highly ranked blog on the Feedster.com Top 500 list. It’s sitting at #369 right now. That’s also very cool.

del.icio.us issues

Come, on, Yahoo! Get del.icio.us into your data centre… Apparently there was a power failure in the server hosting facility where del.icio.us has been living (assuming it’s not in Yahoo Central yet), and it’s been barfing all over everything all day. I just went to get some links from my account, and got this instead:

Structured Blogging: Semantic web for the rest of us?