Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand
by krisis
Meg at CK’s parent-by-proxy blog Meish links to an article about the creators of the recently mentioned Threadless, and how they’re upkeeping their technical skills with new drink-mixing site Extra Tasty.
Extra Tasty is pretty cool – it does everything i had been trying to implement for Tipsy Flicks. Perhaps i can just use their site for the drink mixing, thus taking a huge backend-burden off of myself. Of course, how would that be upkeeping my technical skills?
by krisis
Doing some bloggy housekeeping today, so if you should happen to visit and witness things blinking in and out of existence, that’s why.
The most visible change i’ve made so far is the much better implementation of the “hearing” section of the sidebar, which is powered by Brandon Fuller‘s fantastic Now Playing plug-in. The iTunes plug-in, which was a reasonable $10, FTPs your recent plays as a RSS to your website, where you can manipulate just about any information iTunes passes along (number of plays, album, stars, link to your Amazon referred ID, et cetera).
I had been meaning to get album covers up and running, and with only an hour or two of extra work i have it inserted tiny stars and more intelligent play counts. If you buy it and already use a little PHP on your site i’d be happy to help you get it to do what you want it to do.
For a while now i’ve been wanting to include a sidebar RSS feed from an integrated wishlisting website – i.e. one that you’d use for an online Baby Registry if you planned to draw from multiple different stores. Yesterday i found the best implementation of the idea i’ve ever seen, the very smart The Things I Want. After subscribing to the site you create a bookmark(let) in your browser, and whenever you view something you want you just load the bookmark – which guesses the item’s title, price, and image. You can add buy-priority, comments, and tags. So far the only downside is that any RSS feed is of your WHOLE LIST, which is a little cumbersome, but for a relatively new site it already gets a hardy recommendation from this blogger.
Also, some new incoming links! Heart be still. Age Old Songs is a very nifty blog that will find its way onto the sidebar later today. Also, perennial hot favorite from across the country Min Jung Kim apparently still knows i’m alive. Plus, the usual highly appreciated love from good friend Rabi @ Wockerjabby, and the continually nifty Philly-blog collective Philly Futures.
In a world of people reading me via RSS feeds in an integrated reader, or on a site like Livejournal, i often forget that some people (like me) still have good ol’fashioned domain blogs and give good ol’fashioned links to other people they read.
If you’re one of those ol’fashioned folks and i’ve recently missed you link, feel free to let me know, as i’m not the obsessive statistic whore that i was in olden days.
by krisis
As someone who has been doing this for more than half a decade, the only thing that amazes me more than the utter ubiquity of blogging is the utter proliferation of blogging trends and tools.
A newer trend in blogging (at least to me, anyhow) is the use of a blog to assemble a well researched academic text. There are two excellent examples i’ve been keeping up with daily. The first, The Long Tail, is (in short) about the 80/20 rule, based on a Wired Article i very much enjoyed. On the second, The Music of Rufus Wainwright, composer and professor Roger Bourland invites discussion of topics ranging from form and phrase structure to the challenges of accurate transcription – all from his forthcoming book examining Rufus’s music in a classical light.
In the tools category, Blogger now fluently accepts phone-posts directly from your cell with no setup required. You simply email a text message or picture mail from your phone to go@blogger.com – blogger sets up a randomly named blogspot page to receive your messages (identified via your phone # and/or phone email) until you claim it and (potentially) assign further messages to another blog. As you’ve seen from my recent posts, it can even upload your pictures via FTP. Read more at Go Blogger. Currently supports posts from Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, or T-Mobile.
In a blogging world of academic tomes and phone posts and the dreaded LJ-meets-Facebook bohemeth that is Myspace it boggles my mind to think that five years ago i was the only boy on the internet singing songs specifically to be published on my blog.
by krisis
Days keep fading into one another the way they did in high school, with nothing to mark the progress. Do you know why i can’t remember high school? Because i only have songs as signposts – no conveniently cryptic blog to inform me of my feelings.
That’s how i feel about the last year and a half. Yes, the blog is here, and it does its job of marking some of the months that have passed. Others? I can’t even tell how i got to here from September. In September it was my birthday and i was in New York and seeing everyone i know and drinking way too much wine, and here i am two months to the day.
It might have to do with my cell phone. I “lost” it just after my birthday weekend, taking with it connections to friends old and newly acquired. For a few days it was liberating – no vibrating outreach to be beholden to. The newness wore off shortly, and suddenly i felt trapped, as if i couldn’t speak to anyone outside of my co-workers or Elise. I watched their emails pass by with me on carbon copy as if on the seeing-through side of a one-way mirror, ever observing and never responding.
Or maybe it doesn’t have to do with my cell phone. Maybe it has to do with my stupid resolution a year and a half ago to spend a year only caring about work and staying happy with Elise and monitoring my budget and playing City of Heroes, and now that i’ve quit the latter and achieved equillibrium on the middle two i find that all i know how to do is first thing first thing first thing. Even when i am at home. Sometimes when i am asleep.
It’s not such a bad thing to know how to do at the age of twenty-four. I draw a melange of amaze/amuse -ment from my co-workers and superiors in my zeal for things, my “cools!” and “sounds funs!”
If only they knew; the things in that building really are the cools and sounds funs right now. And, that is how you lose two months of time without really trying.
by krisis
(And, i’m up here writing about him on my blog, which would seem lame on top of being passive aggressive except for i was, you know, at the forefront of blogging culture and have had this site for, like, eight decades in blog years. But, for a second i was just thinking “i’m up here writing about him on my blog” and i just shuddered, but then i thought “well, at least it’s not on my livejournal,” and then i felt a little bit better.)