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?

I am proud to say this olde blog now features not only trackback, but also Pingback. I’m so proud :). Kudos as always to Michael, the very able developer of b2. I am running bleeding edge code here, so if you see any quirks anywhere let me know. Now I have some trackbacking to do 🙂

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.

I just read an amazing article on Google called Pagerank: Google’s Original Sin. Now it brings up some interesting points about how PageRank technology works creates a reinforcing cycle of “rich” websites getting richer and bestowing their “riches” on partners and such. Frankly though, I think the article is a little whiny. If you can’t get a PageRank above 5, then you’re doing something wrong on your site. As a webmaster who has created about two dozen sites on as many domains, even with the earliest have decent PageRanks. If you write a page with good semantically meaningful markup and have useful content, people will find it even if the PageRank isn’t spectacular, and if people find it and it’s truly useful, they’ll link to it. Also most of the tips and tricks I’ve seen for optimizing for search engines also make sense for users. If your page is about a subject, but it in your title! Put it in the URI! Use real headings! Keep the most significant content above the fold! I guess it seems logical now, but I can’t say honestly that I followed all these rules when I was first starting out.

An example of what I consider to be meaningful markup and URIs would be Mullenweg.com. It has a ton of unique content and information (thanks to my wonderful sister), yet the front page has a measly PageRank of 5, and it goes down from there. However it averages 47 unique visitors a day, and the vast majority of them come from Google. Why? Because you find stuff there that simply isn’t anywhere else.

That said, PageRank can be frustrating for me simply because I feel trapped by it’s quantified measure of importance. While I don’t have any sites below 5, I also don’t have any above 6. Breaking the 6 barrier has been quite a challenge, and I don’t see it happening any time soon. Oh well. 6 is respectable, right? And she said PageRank doesn’t really matter . . .

To those of you who may have tried to validate this page in the few days may have run into a mess of errors! In reality, there was just one error, a missing end tag for a paragraph element, but it was causing the validator to throw several errors up. If validator error messages scare you and XHTML sounds like something from a Transformers episode, you might want to read Zeldman’s Better Living Through XHTML. Satisfaction guaranteed.

I’m trying out different email clients, because my mail is now all IMAP and I’m not tied to Outlook anymore, and I noticed something very interesting: when Outlook XP was running Eudora would not install. It just struck me as funny. Another funny thing I noticed when I was trying to set up someone’s computer yesterday was that Windows XP will not allow a user called “Bob.” Since the person I was installing XP for actually went by the name Bob, this struck me as a little annoying. It must be a feature.

I’ve finally gotten around to writing the instructions for Movable Type users to implement the curlme function using Brad Choate’s MTRegex plugin. The regex is the same, just the manner that it’s being implemented is a bit different. I’ve tested this out pretty extensively across this site, and there have been no problems. In fact, it’s in action right now. Once again I would like to thank Mark Pilgrim, who inspired this all.

he best instructions I can give, since I’m not a MT user myself, are to follow the very excellent instructions I’ve summarized below, replacing the MTAddRegex tags with the new ones.

1. Install the MTRegex plugin.
2. Create a new template module called curlyquotes with the following code:
   Code depreciated, see latest version
3. $MTInclude module="curlyquotes"$> to the top of all your templates.
4. Replace all occurences of <$MTEntryBody$> with <$MTEntryBody
regex="1"$>.

And your done! Post any questions you might have and I’ll respond ASAP.

It seems that as of today, I think, MySQL 4 is now going to be available in two flavors, Pro and Classic. The Pro version will have transaction support, while Classic is a “version optimized for raw speed without transactions.” It took me a few minutes to find explinations of each, here’s their product information page.

Sunday is the day when my love/hate relationship with email really comes to forefront in my mind. On Sundays my email is slow, in the sense that I don’t get much of it. Every other day of the week I can barely keep up with the volume that comes through, and I recently un-subscribed from all the lists I used to be on. I don’t get much email on Sunday, so I send a lot out. Still in the back of my mind is the hell that is Monday morning, when email pours in from everywhere and it takes me days to recover. Oh well–can’t live with it, can’t live without it.

Speaking of email, I am in the process of switching all my mail from POP3 to IMAP, which means transferring about 240mb of messages to the server. What’s nice about this though is that I’ll be able to access all of my mail, archives and everything, from any location. I wish I had done this years ago! It’s so much more convenient not having to worry about synchronization problems, and it’s given me a chance to develop a very robust filing system. I had to rethink things a little because with the IMAP server I’m using you can’t have something have sub-folders and have individual items in it. Overall I feel more secure about things because now even if my computer crashes and burns I still have all my important communications on my bulletproof server (knock on wood). If anyone is interested in moving to IMAP mail let me know. FYI, Spyder Hosting now offers it with all their accounts. Also if you tell them I sent you a nice discount might come your way.

A small preview of things to come. Deep down inside, every site wants to have a little Google in them. Right now I just have metadata about the posts themselves but I’m working on generating some interesting statistics on the site’s visitors, which we seem to be getting quite a few of.

Don’t you just love it when everyone’s favorite recording industry association is hacked to serve illegal MP3 files?

It’s strange how tides can change so quickly in my business. I thought my plate was full with three seperate websites in various stages of development, but within the last 48 hours I’ve been contacted by four other clients looking for very traditional consulting work. The “going back to my roots” comment in the cloud post might be turning out truer than I expected. How I got my start in the computer business was six or seven years ago building computers from parts and selling them with razor-thin margins–and really good support. Now all I need to do is start turning a profit . . . 😉

I’m here at school on one of the ubiquitous wireless connections and things are moving at least an order of magnitude faster than they usually do. I have no idea what’s changed, but I’m not complaining. Before it was like being on a 56k connection, and I was actually using it to see how my pages would load at slow speeds! Now it feels like decent broadband.

In other news, I got the smart quotes function so it doesn’t mangle my HTML, in fact it’s running on this site now, but it took a slightly ugly workaround and I’m searching to see if there’s a better way. Watch this spot.

About an hour ago I posted a really neat script which will translate normal prime and double prime characters into ‘curly’ quotes where appropiate. Unfortuately I still have a few bugs to work out, so bear with any ghosts you see in the blog machine today.

You may have noticed that the Currently Playing sidebar is now back online, afer about 14 days of being out of commission. This was because of a combonition of my desktop computer’s grahpics card going wonky and Winamp3 coming out. I really don’t like version 3 very much and I’m going to wait a couple of iterations before I try it again. Right now I’m enjoying my favorite pianist of the moment, Bill Evans.

Well it looks like the issues with MySQL 4.03 aren’t going to resolved anytime soon, and it was messing up other applications anytime a variant of SELECT DISTINCT was used so I went ahead and rolled the installation back to 4.02. So things should be working fine now; if you see any bugs drop me an email or something. I’m getting ready to put some new summer-themed pictures up, so keep your dials locked.

I seem to have stumbled across a bug in MySQL that crashes the MySQL server every time a query is run. For that reason the comments on this page are going to be disabled until I can get it worked out. The good news is that all entries now have trackback enabled and I’ll post more about that as soon as the comment thing is taken care of.

Friend Kelly Dean has graduated from being a mere awesome saxist and Mac devotee to being a full-fledged Mac news informant. If you think that’s impressive, be sure to check him out at the First Annual Iris Fall Jazz Festival.

The built-in address book is the single most used feature on PalmOS devices. To me this sometimes seems like the dark secret of the Palm world. Every manufacturer is rushing to add new features and increase the memory, but still the single most useful thing people do with their Palm is use the programs that come by default on every unit—the address book, date book, memo pad, to do list. I personally use an enhanced address book called Tealphone which adds some nice functionality and is rock solid. I wrote a review of it for PalmStation.com a while ago that is still mostly applicable. PalmStation used to be a really thriving site but has really fallen off as of late.

I bring all this up because I’ve been taking some pretty austere measures on my address book lately, trying to eliminate people that I haven’t talked to in forever, and don’t plan to talk to in the future. Being the information junkie I am, it’s still all backed up on my computer, but it was a very cleansing process and I feel better now because of it. As previously mentioned I had too many contacts in there, and I’m happy to say I have more than halved that number. In other Palm-related news, if you’re still awake ;), is that Friday at 3 has been set as the definite time for shooting the show. I’m very excited!

This is a test entry:

The dog’s bone was tougher than the mystery in episode 14 of “Babylon 5”.
“Charlie’s Angels” was ‘pretty darn’ cool.
So there’s a 4-way intersection with a hundred dollar bill in the middle of it. ‘Yeah?’ “Yes.”
“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”