Support Fundraising Auctions For Cancer Research Mac Software

August 18, 2007

Date: 2007-08-18 Title: Support Fundraising Auctions for Cancer Research - Mac Software! layout: post tp_urlid: “6a010534988cd3970b0120a5b36c29970c” tp_favoritecount: 0 tp_commentcount: 0 Slug: support-fundraising-auctions-for-cancer-research—mac-software

Time To Go

Slug: time-to-go Date: 2007-08-15 Title: “"Time To Go"” layout: post

Simpsonize Me Steve As A Simpsons Character

Slug: simpsonize-me-steve-as-a-simpsons-character Date: 2007-08-15 Title: “Simpsonize Me: Steve as a Simpsons Character” layout: post

Darth Walken

Slug: darth-walken Date: 2007-08-15 Title: Darth Walken layout: post

I Have Spread My Dreams Under Your Feet

Slug: i-have-spread-my-dreams-under-your-feet Date: 2007-08-14 Title: I have spread my dreams under your feet layout: post I’ve come to to love reading Wil Wheaton’s blog: WWdN: In Exile. Today he describes meeting a fan who worked 10 years to get autographs of the whole ST:TNG cast - Wil was the last she needed:

Oh! One of the top five moments? A woman waited in my autograph line after my performance and carefully set down a cast photo from season three. Everyone else had signed it, even Patrick and Brent.

“You’re the last one,” she said, eyes gleaming. “I’ve been carrying this around for ten years to all these conventions, and I can’t believe I’m going to finally finish it!”

I signed it as carefully as I’ve ever signed anything, and when I finished, I looked up at her. Tears fell from her eyes.

“Thank you so much!” She said.

“Thank you,” I said, “I’m honored that I got to be part of this moment.”

Thanks for sharing that with us, Wil. (Don’t think the post title is creepy - I was a Trekker for many years, and I can easily recall the sense of wonder and awe that Roddenberry’s universe inspired in me, dreams that Enterprise tread on and crushed like so many bugs.)

Implementing Machine Tagging

Slug: implementing-machine-tagging Date: 2007-08-08 Title: Implementing Machine Tagging layout: post Ok, so last week Jodi and Adelina were off in Colorado (I’m sure Jodi will blog it soon), so I was home alone quite a bit. So what did that mean? Hackery! After exploring some machine tagging and some UI bits and pieces for machine tags on the site, I spent some time completely rewriting my machine tagging code. I started with blog:via as my first machine tag, then quickly added tags for movies in Netflix (netflix:id), books at Amazon (book:isbn) and other Amazon products (amazon:asin). Here’s a post with a blog:via tag and a book:isbn tag. And here’s one with a netflix:id tag and an amazon:asin tag. ##Implementation I’ll admit, the implementation is still a bit scattered. This blog is powered by WordPress, so to start with the tags themselves are added to posts via a custom field called ‘machinetags’ - one entry for each tag: machinetags-1 WordPress’s template tags make it easy to get at those values as an array, which I pass to a WordPress plugin I wrote just for this. The plugin builds the initial display for the related items, adding ids and classes as hooks for the next bit. machinetags-2 When the page loads, I wrote some javascript (using JQuery) that attaches custom event handlers to the click events for the “more posts” and “view” links. The handlers fire off ajax calls, so that I’m not making a lot of ajax calls as the page initially loads (which would increase page load times for something that only some readers are going to be interested in). As you can see here, clicking the links loads related content inline: machinetags-3 ##Strategies So far, all my tags live here on this site, attached to my posts. Jeremy Keith uses this same strategy, and adds a “tags in the cloud” tactic - assigning adactio:id=... tags to photos on Flickr, then doing a Flickr search to pull in photos when a post is viewed. I may explore this a bit more - I’ve been thinking about using Amazon’s tagging feature to add a monkinetic:id=... tag, then doing the lookup that way, but for products it feels more appropriate to have the hook/tag on this end. ##APIs Machine tagging is going to succeed or fail on the strength of the APIs that services offer. Amazon, while not being a posterboy for Web2.0, has an amazing REST API that is pretty easy to work with once you get the hang of it. (I’m using a technique that - acronym alert - runs Amazon’s XML output through an XSL stylesheet hosted on my server via Amazon’s own XSLT service to produce JSON.) I use it for looking up books as well as any other product Amazon offers. Netflix, on the other hand, has no API, and I had to resort to figuring out the URLs that use Netflix’s internal movie ID to make a link to the site and grab the cover thumbnail. I would love to actually show the movie title and average rating, but there’s no api for it. I also looked at IMDB but could not find even so much as a predictable way to devine a movie poster image from an IMDB title id, so while I may add imdb:title=... tags to some of my posts, I won’t be able to provide related content inline. This is really a pity, as both Netflix and IMDB are probably afraid that if they provide easy access to their content via an API, competitors might use it to disrupt their market. Well, that might be the case, but there are a LOT of us out here who would love to send traffic to both Netflix and IMDB in more interesting ways. ##If you love something… As Dave says: >People will only trust a service that gives them complete freedom to come and go as they please. Further, they’ll want to come back if you send them to cool places.

Sun People

Slug: sun-people Date: 2007-08-02 Title: Sun People layout: post

Using Blogvia

Slug: using-blogvia Date: 2007-07-31 Title: “Using blog:via” layout: post After coming up with a solution to how to implement the blog:via machine tag on this site, I turned my attention this morning to how to do something interesting with it. Since I used a custom field to implement adding machine tags to posts, I looked for a way to easily search values in those fields. I found a Wordpress plugin - Search Custom Fields - that lets me search the values in a custom field by appending key=<custom field name>. http://redmonk.net/?key=machinetags&s=blog:via As you can see from that uri (try it out), the search term now applies to the custom field, not the post content. But searching for all posts with ‘blog:via’ is not that interesting. If you check out this post page, I’ve tweaked the machine tags display so that next to each “blog:via” is a “more” link that takes you to a list of posts that were via that URL: It’s not perfect yet - with my implementation (a ‘machinetags’ custom field with ‘blog:via=http://daringfireball.net’ value), I can’t actually search for “machine tag where the tag is blog:via and the value is <url>”. I may yet switch to a “blog:via” custom field. Also, geeks ahoy! I’ve started a page on Machinetags.org for blog: machinetags.

The Freshmaker

Slug: the-freshmaker Date: 2007-07-31 Title: The Freshmaker layout: post

Getting Perspective

Slug: getting-perspective Date: 2007-07-29 Title: Getting perspective layout: post