Massive Site Update

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Well, at about 5 earlier today the finishing touches were put on the curlyquotes module for Movable Type, and I began working on posting it. I had a 5:30 class though, so that put things off for a while. Then there was dinner, then some friends, then the phone, and more distractions (I mean that in the best possible way!) till about 11 p.m. By that time I had been thinking about it forever so I had some neat ideas about how to present things and integrate it into the site. Well, three hours and 1300 lines of PHP later, the site now has a Script section integrated with the new membership system. Whew, Talk about feature creep!

The best writing is rewriting, as is evidenced by the regex module reaching its maturity. The basic functionalities of the member and systems are in now, but watch for it to mature quite a bit over the next week or so.

Google News

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Google News has ‘officially’ launched, insofar that it is now a tab on the now-crowded Google toolbar (not toolbar, I guess tab-bar). Although it’s still labeled as beta, those of you who remember what it used to look like know that it’s come quite a way. It seems to have some sort of algorithm running, so check it out. If you’re interested in seeing what else is cooking at Google, check out Google Labs, which currently has such goodies as a keyboard navigable interface, a glossary, something fancy with sets, and an interface that will return results based on your voice commands.

Jazz Quotes Expanded

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I’ve made quite a few changes to the JazzQuotes section of the site, the most important of which being that it now accepts submissions. I strongly encourage you if you have a favorite jazz quote that isn’t in there already to submit it. I also expanded the database to hold some interesting information in the future. Watch this space.

Search

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I’m in the process of compiling ht://Dig 3.2.0b4 to add full-featured search to this site. If you don’t have experience with it already, I would highly recommend checking out ht://Dig next time you consider making a search feature. I considered using a FULLTEXT MySQL search but that would ignore one of the largest sections of the site, the Photolog, which is not MySQL-driven (yet).

Makes for a Fun Funeral

Humor

I had the most terrible dream last night that I on death row and today at three I would be put to death. They were going to let me meet Tim-Berners Lee though, who apparently worked across the street from the place. I need to stop mixing late-night snacks with reading W3C specs. Anyway, tho thoughts of my mortality nicely dovetailed with an interesting article on cremation at Wired. I want to be the frisbee :). Warning: article is full of terrible puns.

Note to Self

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Todo:

  1. Buy umbrella
  2. Check if it’s going to rain before I go out in the morning
  3. An active desktop item for this would be cool

That said, I do enjoy frolicking in the rain every now and then, but I have electronics to watch after! I can’t think about just myself anymore ;).

Soundbug

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The Soundbug from ThinkGeek came in today, and I got to play with it a bit at House of Pies. So far I’m pretty impressed, but I’d like to try it out on more surfaces. I’ll put a full review up in the Toy section in a week or so. For those of you unfamiliar with the product, the Soundbug turns any surface into a speaker, and can attach itself to basically anything it can suction to. The volume is supposed to be able to go up to 75dBm, and you can hook two Soundbugs together for stereo sound. Pretty cool, huh?

Picture Yourself

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The (Ch|K)ristine’s have a very cool new site called Picture Yourself which is a photo site which features pictures where the subject is also the photographer. I think this is a very fun idea, and I look forward to seeing the site grow. Go check it out and submit any photos you might have. I’ve sent one in already.

Klip Me!

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Thanks to the wonderful Kymberlie (isn’t that an interesting spelling?) I have been able to set up a Klipfolio for this site, which you can get by clicking here. I’ve also added an item to the menu, so if you put it off for a month and the entry has faded into the archives, they’ll be a convenient link where you can still get this channel. This is a very useful tool, and since I’ve started using it I have become addicted to the live updates that it delivers.