the art of writing is discovering what you believe
I added a new button/banner on the NASCAR area (what I call the proliferation of affinity stuff at the bottom left) in support of the labor movement. My recent gig at the UW taught me a lot about the value of unions, collective bargaining, and advocacy.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the email granting me permission to use the icon, with a salutation of ‘Dear comrade.’
++I {black heart suit} unions.++
Theresa Neilsen Hayden annotates a piece of astroturf [1].
Making Light: Disinformation:
[ . . . . ] slick, confident, focused, and impersonal, as anonymous as a doorknob that’s been wiped clean of fingerprints. There are no hesitations, no intrusions of personal voice, no traces of specific issues or locations or circumstances. I don’t know how much time you’ve spent staring at high-priced ad copy (less than I have, if you’re lucky), but the stuff is surprisingly hard to write. It’s not a natural style. It has to convey emotion without evidencing the kinds of distortion in the text that strong emotions produce.
[ . . . ]
What I infer is that its creators view their target audience, not as fellow citizens, nor as brothers in arms, but as a bunch of suckers.”
fn1. “synthetic grassroots. Campaigns & Elections magazine defines astroturf as a “grassroots program that involves the instant manufacturing of public support for a point of view in which either uninformed activists are recruited or means of deception are used to recruit them.”
Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent: Calling Bunny Huang. Bunny Huang to the white courtesy iPod.:
Here’s fun. This article argues that the iPod is based on a chip capable, by default, of playing Windows Media files – but Apple have disabled the feature. Other players built on the same chip could also, if not fiddled with, play AAC files. Hence and therefore, the whole iTunes Music Store .v. Everyone Else what-format-will-you-buy thing is contrived.
The followup comments with the article are worth a read: not everyone believes in the overwhelming superiority of WMA (the best comment was the one referring to it as a “lawyer’s format.”)
I have never liked the idea of blogrolls: they seemed too much like logrolling, ie, dropping names or linking to folks without reading them. Much better to extract the sites you read from your aggregator for two reasons: 1. it’s accurate, 2, it’s automatic, or as close as possible to it.
To that end, I found the very useful MTOutliner plugin and after working with its inventor, we got it working. Some impedance mismatch on carriage returns and linefeeds, of all things.
You can see it all in the bottom of the left sidebar.
I also added some more explicit references to the feeds (the links go to the home page of the site and to the feed). Those RSS 2.0 buttons aren’t buttons at all: they’re CSS-styled text, so they’re indexable by crawlers/robots and they’re easily changed.
I just wrap them in a span tag:
<span class="xmlbtn">RSS 2.0</span>
with this style applied.
.xmlbtn {
border:1px solid;
border-color:#FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
padding:0 3px;
font:bold 10px verdana,sans-serif;
color:#FFF;
background:#F60;
text-decoration:none;
margin:0;
text-align: right;
}
Michael Hanscom pointed this article out, written by none other than the coiner of the phrase “the creative class.”
It seems the diaspora might have started . . . .
“Creative Class War” by Richard Florida
Sorry, no pull quote.
Center for American Progress – The Progress Report – Page:
*Daily Outrage*
bq. Conservative allies of the White House have resorted to attacking the military service of former Sen. Max Cleland (D-GA), a triple-amputee war hero decorated for his service in Vietnam.
This is just outrageous. I don’t know what makes me more angry, the fact that someone would be allowed to broadcast this kind of slander, knowing it will be peddled as fact by “rip and read” conservative news organs, or that no one will repudiate these comments before they become woven into the fabric of the debate.
Despicable. A soldier covers a grenade to save his brother soldiers, 4 days after winning the Silver Star for gallantry, and the best a grateful nation can do is allow worthless pundits to disparage him.
I have wanted some way to make posting Amazon affiliate-coded items easier. Now, with ecto‘s handy tagging shortcuts, it’s a snap. Simply look up the item’s ASIN number, copy it to the clipboard, and the %@ token will be replaced when you use the shortcut. (There’s probably a more clever way to get the ASIN number.)
The next logical step is to plug the Amazon web services API into the iTunes “now playing” component so that the “now playing” link pops users over to Amazon rather than Google.
[ . . . ]
You know why the blogosphere doesn’t get much respect from the traditional press? It’s not because we’re brave and iconoclastic and they resent our freedom. It’s because we pull jackass stunts like this, with no thoughts about the consequences.
Jesus.
This is pathetic. Even if it didn’t reflect badly on the “blogosphere” it’s evil, stupid, and mean-spirited.
<update> The link has been taken down, but why it was deemed worthy of being posted in the first place is left as an exercise for the reader.
I have working on making all my pages as close to clean XHMTL as I can. One of the tools I use is HTMLtidy and I have it rewrite my pages as it goes through my site.
cd /www/movabletype; find . -name "*.html" | xargs /usr/local/bin/tidy
That leaves the pages machine-verifiably valid, but not what I’d call good-looking. One issue was in the individual entry pages: the navigation menu to go to next entry, previous entry or back to the main page was broken across three lines. Tidy was wrapping a <p> container around each element. As it turns out, it was taking its cue from the markup in the template.
Continue reading “in pursuit of XHTML purity in MovableType”
Microsoft Warns Software Users of “Critical” Flaw:
Microsoft’s version of that protocol is flawed, and could be used to gain control of the target machine [affected OS versions include Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP versions of its software, as well as Windows NT Server, Server 2000 and Server 2003]. The company said there was no evidence that any attacks based on the flaw had occurred.
Russ Cooper, a security expert with TruSecure Corporation, said that the latest vulnerability was especially insidious because it could allow attacks on the equivalent of the computer’s immune system. “It’s like AIDS,” he said. “This is the stuff that’s supposed to protect us.”