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July 18, 2008 at 10:19 PM · Posted under movies, site, tech, television, videogames
There are a ton of cool things happening now. Let me show you them.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is pretty much the best thing ever. It’s a musical starring Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as a swaggering superhero, and other people that I don’t really know or care about. Watch it now, part three of three comes out tomorrow and it’s all gone by Sunday. After that if you want to watch you’ll have to pay.
Avatar: The Last Airbender has finally had new episodes all this week, leading up the to inevitably incredible two hour movie “Sozin’s Comet” tomorrow (Avatar and Dr. Horrible on the same day, sweet). If you don’t watch it, you are missing out one of the best shows on tv.
Sarah and I have made semi-complicated plans to see The Dark Knight) tomorrow (oh yes, Avatar, Dr. Horrible, AND Batman on the same day). We still can’t bring ourselves to both leave the baby at the same time, so Sarah and her sister will see it in the early afternoon, followed by a dinner by Lance, then Lance and I will see it in the evening.
E3 is going on. The coolest announcement so far may be for the 1-to-1 movement add-on for the Wii that will come with Wii Sports 2. Wii Sports 2 has frisbee throwing and sword fighting. Sword fighting and frisbee.
Terminator 4 looks fantastic. I was very “meh” until I saw that we have Christian Bale as John Connor. Bam!
The wonderful Hulu:http://hulu.com has The Secret of Nimh available for your viewing pleasure. My favorite Bluth movie and it holds up quite well.
I’m on del.icio.us roughly eight years behind everyone else, but now I have a cool little linkroll widget over there on the side. I’m pretty sure you can subscribe to del.icio.us links as an RSS feed if you’re all that interested.
Identi.ca just annouced that they’ve implemented the Twitter API, which is great because that means that every cool app people have written for doing Twitter updates will seamlessly work with identi.ca with just an address change. So Twitterific, can I have an Identi.cariffic for my iPod Touch?
Speaking of the iPod Touch. Its firmware 2.0 is great for two reasons: multiple message movemenet and deletion in email, applications. As for iPod Touch/iPhone applications I have three standouts: Remote, Pandora, and Scrabble. Scrabble is scrabble, so that’s a given. Pandora gives me access to my Pandora radio stations via my iPod Touch anywhere there’s open wifi (and that would be a huge win for an iPhone user, Pandora everywhere! Who needs XM?). Remote lets me control the iTunes on our mac over wifi with my touch. Let me say that again. I can sit on my couch, and with just a flip of my iPod Touch start browsing through our entire music collection (including videos and podcasts) and play them on our nice surround sound system. Of course I could do this before, but it involved: turning on the tv, switching to the computer video input, turning on the surround sound, getting the (sadly, wired) keyboard and mouse, and then going to iTunes and playing the music. Now I just have to turn on the surround sound, and start up Remote on the touch. Oh yeah. It’s really nice to be able to jump around our whole music collection while feeding Edward. It even streams the album artwork to the iPod just to be cool.
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May 23, 2008 at 09:03 PM · Posted under design, site
My old theme was fun and all, but if was pretty hackish and didn’t play nicely with the iPod Touch. While designing a new theme in Mephisto is pretty straightforward I don’t really have a solid chunk of time in which to do it, what with the preparations for baby and all. But I do have enough bits of time to switch to a new theme. So I did, and it’s awesome.
I’m using Qwlim, which has most recently been written by Matt Skorina. As you can see (unless you are in a feed reader) it has a great color scheme, nice layout, and check it what happens when you resize your browser window.
No really, go ahead.
Awesome yeah? The various site boxes nicely reposition themselves depending on the available space. It’s a great technique, I will have to steal it.
You may notice that the article tags don’t really factor into this page. They are still around of course, just not utilized. I may bring in a tag cloud into one of the boxes (or a new tag cloud box) when I have the time, but I really dig the layout as is.
In place of tags, this theme more heavily uses the article categories. Up to now I really only lightly used the categories, but I’ll probably try using them more in the future.
Some bits of the theme aren’t up and running yet (e.g. the theme expects a /contact page), but they should be coming up soon. I’ll also be modifying that rss icon on the left to link to the feed of the current category, not just a hard link to the main blog feed.
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May 18, 2008 at 09:57 AM · Posted under site
Here’s a feed for all comments submitted to the site. My spam protection is holding up quite well, so this should have a very high signal to noise ratio.1
- As long as you consider comments signal.
Comments Feed
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May 17, 2008 at 10:53 AM · Posted under site
I’ve gotten
RSS feeds working for my different sections:
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March 07, 2008 at 10:57 PM · Posted under design, site
Now you see where all my blogging time has been going. Yes, it was time to work on design instead of content. I really like this new color scheme, but I’m not totally sold on this crowded three column layout. I was really hitting the limits of what I could cram into one sidebar.
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January 03, 2008 at 12:37 PM · Posted under design, site
Comments comments everywhere! You can now add a comment to any of my recent events (books read, videogames played, etc.) or any of the quicklinks. The quicklinks page doesn’t display comments in any manner, and the quicklink individual pages aren’t customized, and the events page isn’t customized, and the events individual pages aren’t customized…but soon!
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November 27, 2007 at 10:53 PM · Posted under design, site
If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been tweaking the site a bit. Why don’t you look around and see what you can find. … Done? Good.
I’ve gotten what seems to be a good solution for a ‘quicklinks’ list (over there on the right, under ‘quicklinks’). It’s a sub-section blog that until tonight actually used the same layout as the main blog. If you move your mouse over and click that More… button after the quicklinks shortlist then you’ll see the new link oriented design I’ve quickly whipped up. For now you’ll still see the “full” article for a quicklink while you’re browsing through tags but that’s on the list to fix. For the small list on the main page I simply tell my layout to grab the six most recent articles in that section and display the body text for each. If you see a new tag in the cloud without a blog post to go with it then it’s almost certainly coming from a qucklink.
I also added a ‘Recently’ category to keep a running list of things that I’ve done recently. I’m not doing as good a job of keeping up with that one but I like it. It gives me a space to do quick reviews and talk about movies, videogames, books, etc. without devoting a full blog post to them. I haven’t created a custom layout for this section yet, but that’s coming as well.
I’ve also tweaked the tagcloud yet more. I squashed a couple bugs and think I’ve got it about to where I like it.
Lastly, I fixed a glaring error in the CSS that prevented the site from rendering properly at small widths. Now Wii compatible!
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October 21, 2007 at 02:03 PM · Posted under design, site
Ok! I’ve modified the tag cloud plugin to up the size of more recently used tags and drop the size of less recently used tags. If a tag is little used and hasn’t been used a while it’s dropped off the cloud altogether.
Have I mentioned how much I love Ruby?
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October 20, 2007 at 07:48 PM · Posted under design, programming, site
Unless your browser’s cache doesn’t know when to quit, you should notice a nice new look for my site. Now including one of my favorite web interfaces, the tag cloud.
Developing a theme using liquid markup was surprisingly quick and easy. Rather than being horrified as when I first examined the code behind a Wordpress theme I was pleasantly surprised at the logical nature of the system. As an example, let’s look at how the web browser title is generated:
<title>{{ site.title }} - {% if article %} {{ article.title }} {% else %} {{ site.subtitle }} {% endif %}</title>
Pretty straightforward. But let’s start at the basics. The browser title is required to be surrounded by <title></title>, so that’s written out. But now, rather than writing out the title of my site I simply tell the site to put in the title that I’ve given it with {{ site.title }}. Further, I can apply a bit of display logic and tell the site that, “If the web site vistor is currently reading a specific article, then put that article’s title in the browser title; otherwise put in the site’s subtitle.” Nice.
How about this:
<div id="tagcloud">
{% for tag in site.tags %}
{{ tag | yatagcloud }}
{% endfor %}
</div>
Oh yeah, that’s all the code that generates the tag cloud. The site knows that each article has tags, and it keeps a running list of all of them. In the above code chunk I tell the site to iterate over every tag that it knows about and refer it to ‘yatagcloud’. ‘yatagcloud’ is the method installed by the ‘yet another tag cloud’ plugin and it handles all the messy business of getting the number of articles using the tag and applying the proper styling, etc.
I followed the recent clockwork object’s guide to creating a Mephisto theme using liquid and didn’t really have any troubles. If it weren’t for the guide this theme wouldn’t exist. I read it, decided that it looked like too much fun to pass up, and decided to design a theme for my site. Since I started with my previous theme, the whole process took a couple days of off and on coding.
I still have some tweaking and modification that I’d like to do. Specifically I want to modify the tag cloud so that it modifies the tags as a function of time in addition to use. Tags used more recently will be bumped up a level or two. Tags that haven’t been used in a while will be dropped a level or two. This way the cloud really will be a floating list of the things that I’ve been thinking (or at least blogging) about.
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