Month: April 2006

Hacks

How I’m formatting my del.icio.us links…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date April 3, 2006
7 Comments on How I’m formatting my del.icio.us links…

I’ve been using it for bloody ages now – probably a year or something – and I’ve been asked about it a few times and always meant to write it up. So here goes. If you want to post your del.icio.us links to your website like I do, it’s a pretty easy process, but it has a couple of parts. The first part is the publishing – and this is pretty well documented. Basically you visit the slightly beta-versioned del.icio.us/settings/yourusername/daily URL and fill in the information required and then once a day it’ll post to your site. Easy. But being a bit of a beta-product, the publish-to-weblog function doesn’t really help you format your links. So this is where the second part comes in.

The way I make my del.icio.us links look the way they do is by the slightly laborious process of opening up each post each day, copying it into BBEdit, running an AppleScript and then pasting the finished text it back into the form. I made the script a while back using Automator and it requires you to have BBEdit installed, so I’m not sure that it’s going to be particularly useful for any more than a small minority of you, but if you want it, it’s here: CLean-up Linklog. Basically you dump the script in the Library > Scripts folder of your user account on your Mac and then you’re done. Good luck with it.

Random

Links for 2006-04-03

Richard Bartles’ article, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs” An old classic of an article. I’m not sure I buy the divisions but there’s a good articulation of the space. What I want to know is how much of it is translatable into other socially creative spaces…

Random

If you could ask me one question…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date April 2, 2006
3 Comments on If you could ask me one question…

Okay – given my post earlier in the day about some of the abusive comments I’ve been getting recently, this couldn’t really be a more obviously bad idea, but hey – I’m refusing to get beaten down by it all. I’m really playing with my site for the first time in getting on for a month, and I have faith goddammit that everything will. be. okay.

Basically there’s this feature on Odeo that I haven’t seen massively promoted as yet and which I wanted to play with. It consists of a web page that I can link to from which any of you people out there with computers with microphones can send me little voice messages. It’s a beautiful bit of work, and pretty damn sexy and only a bit of a diversion from their original (?) podcasting enterprise. My sense is that it’s not really a fully baked thing, and it’s really looking for some people to find some use for it, and maybe that’s something we can do here today. We’re here to have a bit of fun and hopefully something will come of it that isn’t entirely embarrassing.

Now I’ve been thinking around what people might do with this kind of functionality and frankly the possibilities are endless. You could use it to collect content for your own podcasts by getting submissions from members of the public, you could use it to leave little excruciating love messages on your partner’s iPod, or use it to remind yourself of little jobs you have to do. You could treat it as a dictaphone conveniently incorporated into your internet-enabled microphone-enabled top-of-the-line Apple laptop. You could even attach a link to Odeo’s ‘voice commenting service’ to every weblog entry you produced – opening it up both to truly moving personal expressions from real listeners and to weird and intrusive comment spam about mother-daughter incest from unscrupulous bottom-feeders!

Anyway, what I was thinking was that I could ask you guys a question and then get you to answer it and then later I’d create some dumb weblog post in which I post or link to some of the more entertaining (and less embarrassing) replies and then we see if that’s interesting and if it is maybe we do it more often, and if it isn’t, maybe we don’t. And I thought given that it was my website and I was feeling particularly full of myself today, I thought maybe the first thing I should try to get from you guys was If you could ask me one question, what would it be? To answer this question just follow this convenient link or click on the bloody big icon below. And please, try and be nice!

Business

Is it a good time to start a business?

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date April 2, 2006
2 Comments on Is it a good time to start a business?

There have been a few pretty fascinating posts roaming around the blogosphere recently, and I thought I’d reference them a little more fully than normal not only because they’re particularly interesting but also because they illustrate the possibilities of conversation and debate stretching across webloggia (like in the old days before we had comment spam):

Caterina Fake: It’s a bad time to start a company
Basic premise: There’s too much competition, not enough talent and no clearer business models than there were a while back;
David Heinemeier Hansson: It’s a great time to start a business
Basic premise: If you’re not trying to win the Web 2.0 lottery there’s substantial space for building businesses (presumably enormous space if you’re planning to work as a consultancy or a design company while all the stupid money is flowing around, or if you’re building things to help small teams work together, or selling shiny office chairs and blue neon signs);
Brian Fling: Anytime is the right time to start a company
Basic premise: If you do what you love and you’re sensible about it then you can’t really go wrong;
And honourary mention goes to Jason Kottke who posted earlier than any of the above: A Whole New Internet
Basic Premise: You’ve all missed the boat already. Might as well go home.

Random

Links for 2006-04-02

OK/Cancel comments on the new argument that ugly design is attractive to users Reminds me of a talk at SXSW about humans poorly evaluating odds/stats. Don’t forget the ugly sites that don’t succeed! You’d need to compare the proportion of ugly sites that succeed with the proportion of pretty ones to have a leg to stand on.
Tom Baker apparently singing various songs in a sort-of Wiliam Shatner stylee… If you thought you coudln’t bear to go to your grave without hearing Doctor Who ‘singing’ The Smiths’ “How Soon is Now” then feel free to rest at last. Extraordinary.
Americans are starting to think that maybe Mexican Coca-Cola is the real thing (given that it’s made with sugar rather than corn syrup) They say there’s no perceptable taste difference?! Balls! Without an enormous amount of ice, I find American Coke completely repulsive. Coke in Europe tastes less syrupy and congealing. I always seek out Mexican Coke when I’m in the US.
“The Great Mosque of Djenné is the largest mud brick building in the world and is considered by many architects to be the greatest achievement of the Sudano-Sahelian architectural style” Absolutely extraordinary – I’ve been watching images of this programme on TV and it’s quite extraordinary how it fits in with the environment around it, and how well suited to purpose it is. Craftsmanship and design together…
Flickr has some beautiful Creative Commons Attribution-only pictures of Djenné’s Great Mosque I’m increasibly stunned by the breadth and beauty of some of the images that Flickr contains. Really almost whatever you can think about is represented in there. There are more of Djenné under less open licenses…
George Clooney and Brad Pitt are moving forward with Ocean’s 13 Can I just say that I thought Ocean’s Twelve was absolute rubbish and I got quite angry during the whole Julia Roberts metanarrative arsery.
World of Warcraft announce the second race from their upcoming expansion pack and it is… Wisps?! So we’re all basically assuming that this is an April Fools joke right? Specifically the bit about turning into trees in the middle of combat and taking a massive hit in defence against axes…
A terrifying story from a Minnesotan newspaper – Americans trust atheists less than recent immigrants and even poofs! “Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, homosexuals and other groups as ‘sharing their vision of American society.’ Americans are also least willing to let their children marry atheists.”
“Norah Vincent spent 18 months disguised as a man. She relives the boys nights out, the bad dates – and what happened when she ended up in bed with another woman” Watching straight men and women from a distance is always valuable, and reminds us that no matter how unbalanced the power relationship, men are just as trapped in their roles as women. Maybe more so.
PortForward.com is an extraordinary site explaining how to use routers and firewalls and stuff It didn’t quite answer my question, but I can’t help but think that I’m in the minority.
Digital Web Magazine has an article on creating dynamic websites that adjust to widescreen monitors I honestly don’t get this stuff though. I know that PC users have browsers that fill the entire screen and I get that people are used to sites that do that, but still – it’s dumb!
The Top 10 weirdest keyboards ever is a list of the top ten weirdest keyboards ever. Duh. Some of these keyboards are totally fucking weird, already. And there are eleven really, because they include the ZX Spectrum.

General Notices

A brief note about deleting comments…

Post author By Tom Coates
Post date April 1, 2006

I try to be pretty reasonable with the comments on my site – other than spam it’s a rare day when I delete a comment that someone has posted. But recently, I’ve been getting some stuff posted anonymously that want to take issue in the stongest terms with decisions I’ve been making in my life and which are full of the most aggressive insults and frankly I’ve had enough of it. I have astonished myself by deciding not to delete the vast majority of them, and I have decided that I’m actually quite comfortable to have conversations with these people (although maybe not in public) to try and break their impression of me as a cartoon villain, even though I suspect the perpetrators to be less interested in persuading me of their position than to use any ammunition at their disposal to take a swing at me. So from now on, if you’re going to abuse me and you wish to do so anonymously and without allowing me a way to respond to you, then I’m afraid you may find your comments deleted without any warning. Insulting people anonymously is just cowardly and I don’t have to put up with it.