It’s been a long time coming, but my wife, Susan, finally has a WordPress blog. You can check it out at DigitalDivas.net. As you’ll see when you get there, It’s Pink! Susan spent a lot of time adapting some CSS techniques for her site, and I helped her turn her html code into a WP theme.
I’m sure she’ll be posting on a variety of topics, from web design and technology, to current events, to family matters. Everybody drop by and welcome Susan, my very own Digital Diva, to the blogosphere!
Over on waxy.org’s links, I found this list of Sesame Street videos on YouTube. Talk about bringing back some memories. I’ve always loved Capital I, and Atlanta band Rooke used to do a version of it that was just beautiful.
Other favorites include Mahna Mahna, The Ladybug Picnic, C is for Cookie, I Love Trash, and The Martians (yepyepyep). Claire has been watching some Sesame Street, and I’m sure she would enjoy some of these classics!
Oh, and by the way, if you’d like to be able to download videos from YouTube (or Google Videos, or lots of other services), check out KeepVid. Just pay attention to the instructions, because you generally have to manually name the file (KeepVid will tell you what file extension to use). You might also need to download an FLV Player.
And now that I’ve helped out the rest of you who want to automatically generate posts from your del.icio.us bookmarks (with my daily post fixer plugin), I’m turning that feature off here. It was an interesting experiment, but I’ve decided that this isn’t how I want to present that information. Let’s examine the good and bad of the automatic link posts:
As a personal example, my wife has told me that she has been looking at my blog less since I started the automated posts. The links were things that she might be interested in looking at some other time, but they were not as engaging as articles that I wrote where I was expressing my personal opinion about a subject. If my own wife doesn’t want to visit my site, something is obviously wrong, yes? Even before she told me this, I was already considering ending this experiment. I still want to bring my bookmarks more into focus, but I don’t think that this is the way that I want to do it. I’ll eventually address the problem differently, probably when I get around to designing a new site theme.
So. Ultimately, the del.icio.us daily blog post feature was not for me — at least, not for this blog of mine. But that’s not to say that other people shouldn’t use it. Their balance of pros and cons might be different than mine.
I mentioned previously that I wanted to make a WordPress plugin that would touch up the posts created by the del.icio.us “daily blog post” feature. I’ve tinkered with it on-and-off, and finally realized what was preventing the addition of the rel="tag" microformat (I forgot to double-escape some backslashes in a string). So, I present for your automated link posting pleasure, the del.icio.us daily blog post fixer plugin (.zip).
The plugin serves two purposes: it lets you set your own title, instead of the “links for 2006-01-30” format that del.icio.us uses, and it adds a rel="tag" attribute to the del.icio.us tag links (because I like microformats, and one day somebody might make a service that utilizes this information to aggregate tags in the wild across multiple tagging services).
The default post title is set to “Daily Links”. If you want it to be something different, change the variable indicated in the plugin code. I didn’t think it was worth the trouble to create an option screen for one little text string that you aren’t likely to want to change, once you’ve set it. It’s GPL licensed, so share and enjoy!
Jeremy Zawodny has some thoughts about the possible evolution of Yahoo! Groups.
There are bits of JotSpot (notable Tracker), WordPress, and Flickr that I think could be sprinkled into Yahoo Groups, not to mention Google Maps and/or Wayfaring, Yahoo! Local, Google Calendar, and a few other things.
Jeremy is a sharp guy who keeps his finger close to the pulse of current happenings on the net. Yahoo! would do well to stay open to these ideas. I’ve got subscriptions to several lists that are hosted on Yahoo! Groups, but I’ve often been annoyed at the clunky interface that it uses. I think that if Yahoo! gave Groups a little love, the potential ROI could be pretty darned good. It’s a service that lots of people use, and so it has the potential to expose those people to other services (Flickr, blogging, calendars, etc) that they might not really be aware of, yet.