Archives

Ecto Plurbius Unum

EctoAlways late to the party, I finally took out some time last night to install the various libraries on my server that make it possible for me to run ecto, the desktop weblog editor and management program. It’s nice, very slick and I can see why it’s gained such a devoted following among advanced weblog authors; it sports some features — like its very handy Upload Manager — that vastly simplify working with Movable Type. Already it looks well worth its US$17.95 price tag, in spite of the fact that its globe icon is so generic I sometimes find myself staring at my Dock, not able to focus enough to identify it.

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Ooh, Ooh, It’s Magic

MagicMy girlfriend’s nephew — all of nine years old and a fount of irrepressible energy — came to stay with us for the weekend, and his new obsession is learning the magician’s trade: dice, disappearing cups of water, card tricks, magic wands, etc. He had a kids’ magic set that his grandmother bought for him, all plastic and barely serviceable enough even for a nine year-old, so on Saturday we thought we’d try to do a little better than that. We looked up “magic” in the phone book and headed to midtown to Tannen’s Magic, one of the oldest magicians’ shops in the city, and newly relocated to 45 West 34th Street.

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Styled to a Pulp

PulpFictionBecause it’s exceedingly easy to do so, because I like to tweak and tinker, and because I am procrastinating from various other design-related tasks today, I spent a bit of time this afternoon creating my own style sheet for Freshly Squeezed Software’s mixed-bag RSS aggregator (and the one that’s become my regular RSS client), Pulp Fiction. It’s called “Subtraction” and, as the name implies, it’s designed to look something like Subtraction.com. You can download it here for the cost of absolutely zero, but it’s also presented absolutely as is, with no warranties of any kind.

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Don’t Go Back to Dulles

Baseball in WashingtonIt appears virtually certain that the Montreal Expos, who have been waiting to find out where their new home will be for a brief eternity, will end up somewhere in rough proximity to Washington, D.C., at least according to recent reports. That they were headed to that part of the country was not news to me, but I was surprised to hear that it’s going to come down to competing proposals, one from the city proper — hoping to replace their long lost Washington Senators — and one from the more affluent suburbs further west and south, in Loudoun County.

I resist posting entries here about baseball, mostly because I feel under-qualified when trying to make the same kind of snotty, dismissive pronouncements about the sport that I am able to make about other subjects about which I know slightly more. But I don’t mind coming right out and saying that I’d rather not see baseball come to the Washington Metropolitan area at all than see the Expos move to Loudoun County.

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For a Better Tomorrow

Here and there, I’ve been fixing little details in the Movable Type configuration for Subtraction.com, trying to remedy some of the many, many imperfections and shortcomings on which I’ve procrastinating for so long. The comments feature is now much more reliable than before, when I had coded the form fields in a manner that might suggest a drunken night in front of BBEdit. And this evening I made some alterations to the long-neglected XML feed so that you can read the full entirety of every entry. I’ve been getting back into trying to make Pulp Fiction work for me — I’ll have some notes on that soon — and one of the things I’ve discovered is that I much prefer it when a news source provides the full text of an article, rather than just a snippet. Anyhow, more later… hopefully much more, as this low rustle of activity is a warm-up to a redesign. Soon. I hope.

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Fighting Spam for Money

MailProtectAs a kid, when I would to take out the trash as part of my chores, I remember operating on the assumption that garbage collection was free, that it was a part of city services or something and that no one really payed for it directly, but rather it came out of local taxes or some big garbage collection fund in the sky or something. It seemed so basic and essential that I was surprised, later on, to discover that it most decidedly is not free, that lots of neighborhoods and communities bill you for it directly, and in lots of co-operatives and condominiums, it’s a discrete line item on a resident’s monthly maintenance bill. This is the story that came to mind yesterday when I got an email from my hosting provider, Media Temple, announcing their new MailProtect Anti-Junk Email Service.

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Flirtations with Fame

Two minor flirtations with fame today, one for me and one for my four-legged companion.

First, the prolific Mike Rundle has posted an interview with me at Business Logs, in which you can learn more about my secret origins, recent Web standards stirrings at Behavior and the future of weblogs as we know them (caveat emptor). Combined with a dollar bill, the answers I give to Mike’s questions may not get you more than a cup of coffee, but it’s still worth poking around the Business Logs Web site, where they’re trying to use weblogs to bring real business benefits to the organizations that are forward-thinking enough to capitalize on this still-evolving medium.

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