my.bicycle

I'm on FaceBook lately. Come find me there . Alternately, a collection of my various presences is aggregated through a tumblog unsurprisingly hosted at tumblr. It has its own RSS/XML feed .

NONTRIVIAL ADMINISTRIVIUM; the b l o g : it will be m o v i n g ... to hosting at blogspot , as it affords better access to new Google tools. So find me here: http://brianwanamaker.blogspot.com/ When i started my.bicycle , I wanted a simple tool to put text and links up on my private domain here. It seemed like a good safeguard against data loss: I'd have Blogger.com's copy on their servers, another copy on my personal domain's servers, and whenever I wanted to I could make a local copy as backup, or for editing, on any machine I currently used. Good grief, times can change. Blogger was a single, somewhat dubious option in the blog tools field, and it was unclear what Google was going to do with their new toy. Just as when SixApart bought LiveJournal, there is a trepidation on the part of users that their efforts are going to be gobbled up by the whim of some corporate decision to "take their ball and go home." At this point my desire to have local backup in addi...

I'm abandoning Bloglines, an online Feed Aggregator where I followed my RSS/Subscription feeds. Though I prefer NetNewsWire Lite, there was no guarantee that I'd be following RSS feeds while in front of my Mac. Bloglines, being a web-based service, allowed me to check from any computer, but had trouble updating many feeds, couldn't find feeds, and stoped paying attention to some without further explanation. Even so, being able to have something that was mostly consistent across any computer I use is pretty great. Now I'm using Google Reader , which is also web-based, works across all my computers, and is so far a simpler, more elegant UI to browse through. It also provides a widget for sidebar integration in my blog (Look! Over there!), allowing me to simply and easily propagate articles that are interesting into this blog's sidebar. There's no editing, publishing, or massaging of the data (and no easy way for me to add a Comment on it). On the other hand, it...

Tutorial here . ( Thanks , Ben !)

Despite the web being a surrogate for a real-world social life, there are plenty of people who don't want to check five different places to keep up with me. Go figure. I am pondering how to best lasso all my presences, My.Bicycle, Flickr, LiveJournal, into a unified whole. Flickr 's easy; I can drop it in the sidebar. LiveJournal lets me restrict access to some entries, and that's really convenient. Probably what I want is to tie the Comments here to my LiveJournal account. Essentially I want to mirror the posts here to my LiveJournal, and let Comments happen there. This is largely what Game Politics does, and I think it is what Josie Nutter does. How can I implement this, LazyWeb? Can anyone see any drawbacks, other than losing the anonymity of my LJ?

I got really tired of the narrow main column, and the graphics that would sometimes only half-load/display in the old template, so I yanked it out and stuffed things in a new template that doesn't have such stuff. Expect construction-dust wonkiness as I get the sidebar back in shape, as well as Comments re-activated, etc.

I’ve deleted my Friendster profile (actually a couple months ago), and have replaced it with a link to my del.icio.us bookmark directory. It has its own RSS feed, and is generally a dump for research, along with other notes. If anyone else who reads this blog has a del.icio.us account, please leave a Comment.

Wikalong is a wiki that embeds itself in the Mozilla Firefox browser sidebar. Use it to make a running wiki-commentary of the web, or see what others have said about sites. My favorite mail program, Mozilla Thunderbird , has implemented RSS reading in a recent nightly build. Sam-I-Am, I don't know why this isn't being implemented in Firefox instead; mail application to read a stream of articles that most commonly reference web pages? While I know that RSS can be used for just about anything (e.g.: easily tracking the latest BitTorrents), but in general doesn’t this seem more web-centric than mail-centric? (via waxy and del.icio.us/revgeorge )

While visiting the Firefox site this morning to see if there are any updates, I noticed that it should do dictionary lookups right from the location (URI) field. Just type "dict word" where "word" is the term under investigation. Only it doesn't really work. Several different dictionary sites will be load, dependent on the word accessed. That's not bad per se, but some words returned non-dictionary pages. The first word worked, apparently coincidently: "fecund" lead to synonym results on die.net , which in turn has a sidebar link for Lies.com which is providing evidence for investigation for putting Bush away for a term. Which, really, would make all this worthwhile. Update: Mea culpa. It's not a "dictionary search," it's a " Keyword search ." Keywords look pretty cool.

If you've never followed the Fictionwise link in the (overly wide) sidebar, perhaps now's the time: they're offering five Hugo-nominated short stories for free for a limited time. They're offered without copyprotection, in a number of popular formats.

Astute readers may have already noted on the overlarge sidebar, there is now a link to an RSS Feed for my.bicycle's Comments . The RSS feed is the primary reason I'm not using Blogger's integrated Comments funtion.

Los Angeles always has the most interesting traffic accidents. This one was a car on fire . The car horn was blaring at top volume and sounded like bag pipes dying.

If you don't already, check Futurismic (also on sidebar, to the right) for all kinds of wild, hopeful, or at least interesting tech and culture aritcles (e.g this National Design Triennial entry, " Wave Garden "). My good friend Jeremy runs it, and I sometimes contribute there as well. The term "futurismic" captures the spirit of futur- ism , since "futuris- tic " anymore conjures images of Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," or the Apollo astronauts. Where has our future gone?

This service offers an autoconverter from Atom to RSS . Readers using non-Atom-compliant aggregators may now use the new link provided in the sidebar. (via Lockergnome's RSS Resources )

This post is to provide a convenient place to engage in Commenty dialog regarding Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt , which would have been topical when that was the author on the sidebar, and now would appear simply silly. Comment away, Tim.

I just put a blurb up on the new DOD interest in balloons up at Futurismic (see sidebar). I apologize in advance for the puns.

Found this interesting story about one guy's addiction to Friendster . I can kind of relate, but after finding Tribe.net , fascination with F'ster seems really pointless. The author of the story realized this too, and took it upon himself to make something new and interesting out of it by turning his profile into a constantly changing, online art installation. Of course, once The Friendster Balrog got wind of shenanigans, it tweaked his account so he was no longer able to freely upload pictures without a time-consuming official review process. The same thing happened to me, and for both of us, it was the same reaction: there went the fun . There is SO much going on in the way of building virtual communities right now, and F'ster is missing the boat big time by trying to be what it was intended to be, instead of what the street has made from it.

A lot of stuff about Friendster is still impressive, but a number of things about it continue to alienate me. The bulletin board delivers a message to the poster's 1-degree friends, and any responses only go to the original writer, condemning any chance for thread-discussion. The personal-picture guidelines are overly strict, and unevenly enforced: a self-portrait I sketched for use on the site (prior to the inclusion of the current, draconian guidelines on the Add Picture page) was deleted from my profile. Without knowing the roolz, it seemed arbitrary. After reading the rules, and proceeding to see pictures of Bruce Lee, Brad Pitt , and the Rubik's Cube in use as other's image, it seemed a particularly lame move on the site's part. It's clear that there is some reasoning behind the people controlling it who want it to remain a form of valid reputation-through-association, which in turn may lead to some form of trust-based-system for like minded friends, or mem...