So I haven’t said anything in a long while. I’ve meant to a couple times, but I keep forgetting. Lately I’ve been kinda bored… to show you just how bored I’ll tell you what Daniel and I did the other night – signed things to each other in sign language. Doesn’t sound that bad until you realise what we were signing… he knows almost no signs yet and I learned all I know from him, so we were sitting in the living room signing things like ‘You are an orange’ and ‘I am not you’ and then cracking ourselves up about it. Ya, really bored and really tired.
The Palmview Christmas program is coming soon… either tomorrow or next Saturday. Way early I know, but it’s how things fit into the school year. I am playing one song on my baritone with the ‘band’ (which is really a trio).
Tomorrow (I think it’s tomorrow) I am being hauled off to a sleepover with a guy half my age (ok, ok, a little more) that I hardly know. My brother is going so if I don’t I look rude *sigh*… hopefully I won’t die of utter and complete boredom.
Yes, school is alright… it’d be better with Chels back… so I wait…
Not much else… well, there might be, but I’ve forgotten it, so byeallfornow! If you read this, comment so I know how many readers I get, lol
This hack has been superceeded by a newer version.
A recent post at Freshblog got me to thinking about integrating the viewing of tags directly into my blogger blog. The solution presented there loads the results from tag queries into your sidebar, and checks the referrer if no tags are specified. The idea here is that if you are on my blog and query a tag, and then click a link to his blog, his sidebar will show his posts for the tag you selected here. It’s a great system, but my only problem with it was that it reloaded the current page with no apparent change at first, until you checked the sidebar. So I have modified the code for my own hack.
This hack will present a drop-down list of tags in your sidebar, pulled from the del.icio.us account you use to tag your blog and filtered for the anchor tag you use (if you use one). Selecting a tag from the drop-down list will take you to a post page on your blogger blog, so you never leave the site, that lists the results of a tag query for the selected tag. The sidebar will also update the same was as on Freshblog to facilitate the inter-blog browsing. Selecting another tag from the drop-down in the sidebar will add that tag to your query, not replace your query.
A ‘reset’ link is placed next to the drop-down box so that you can clear the tag query and switch to another tag without adding it. My version also fixes a minor bug in the original so that when tags in a referrer URL have ‘%20’s in them they are replaced by the del.icio.us-compatible ‘+’
If no tag is found in the <head> section, the script attempts to pull one out of your posts. This can be disabled on your main page by inserting this code along with that in step 2:
<MainPage><script type=”text/javascript”>var no_autocapture = true;</script></MainPage>
Now, without further boring explanation, here’s how to implement the hack :
- Create a new post on the blog you would like to implement this hack on with the title ‘Tags’ and click the ‘Edit Html’ tab for the post body, pasting the exact code ‘<div id=”tagspostpage”></div>’ into the post body. Turn comments off for the post and set the post date to January 1, 2000. The time doesn’t matter. Post this post.
- Edit the template for your blog and insert the following code into the <head> section :
<script type=”text/javascript”>
//<![CDATA[
var del_user = “username“;
var anchor = “anchortag“;
document.write(‘<script src=”http://del.icio.us/feeds/json/tags type=”text/javascript”><\/script>’);
//]]>
</script>
<script src=”http://www.awriterz.org/etcetc/tagspostpage.js type=”text/javascript”></script>
Replacing ‘username’ with the del.icio.us username where you tag your blog posts and ‘anchortag’ with the anchor tag you use (if you use one). If, like me, you don’t use an anchor tag, then replace ‘anchortag’ with nothing.
- At the bottom of your template, right before the ‘</body>’ tag insert this code :
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var thediv = document.getElementById(“tagspostpage”);
if(thediv)
thediv.innerHTML = return_tagged_posts(true);
</script>
- Insert this code into your template where you want the tags drop-down box and matched posts to appear (as they do in my sidebar) :
<script type=”text/javascript”>
list_side_tags();
write_tagged_posts();
</script>
- Save your template and republish your whole blog.
Google Base launched today. It seems to be a service that will host just about any content, from recepies to schedules to opensource projects. All items can be tagged and an arbitrary number of arbitrary fields with arbitrary datatype are available. This seems to be a service that aims at providing tools, not purpose, and you can do just about anything with it! An interesting idea, it’ll be interesting to see where it leads.
Official Announcement
Google Blogscoped Article
Tags: Google Google Base Websites
On some ‘closed’ blogging / forum services there are present some features you cannot, present, find elsewhere. One of the most prominent of these is the ability to see all comments by a particular user. Some people have decided to overcome this problem by posting their comments to del.icio.us. Johan Sundström at ecmanaut has come up with a Greasemonkey script to automate the process. This then allows you to have an RSS feed and aggregation page (powered nicely by del.icio.us) for all comments you place on other people’s blogs, and even to publish all or some of these comments to your sidebar. I fully agree with the concept here, however I believe that using del.icio.us in this manner is counterproductive, for a few reasons :
- Del.icio.us is about posting URLs, comments are content with often no proper URL themselves
- Del.icio.us is about tagging, and while there is much useful metadata that can be associated with a comment, I see little or no use in tagging it
- Because del.icio.us is not meant for this application, many features that would be useful to comments are not and will never be implemented (see below)
Viewing all comments by a particular person is certianly a useful option, even including comments posted on their own blog, however a way to filter them to just on other people’s blogs would be useful. Following all comments on a particular post is certianly also a useful option, since so many bloggers are forced to reply to comments via their blog and via email to make sure the reply is received. Following all comments for a particular blog would also be useful. While some of these features are already provided by some blogging platforms / services, they are rarely all offered and rarely in a conveniant way.
What we truly need is a new service, one that tracks comments (and possible trackbacks) from all blogs just as is being done now by those posting to del.icio.us. It could provide feeds and aggregation pages for all the features I’ve listed above, and probably many I haven’t thought of. Aggregation could also be merged in-service to one page / feed, much like the del.icio.us inbox, so that you could add posts / blogs to monitor the comments of without overcrowding your feedreader with feeds for old posts or even for all the blogs you comment on. A single feed is much more conveniant for such practise.
Johan’s Greasemonkey script could easily be modified to work with such a service instead of with del.icio.us, and independant bloggers could even integrate the comment-to-commentblogger link directly into their ‘your comment has been posted’ pages. Eventually, services like Blogger could theoretically even allow you to store your commentblogger username and password in your account and auto-post all your comments to your commentblogger account.
Tags: Blogging Comments del.icio.us delicious Syndication Web2.0 ecmanaut
I am feeling much better now 
I was mostly better yesterday, well enough to enjoy my birthday, so I’m thankful for that. I didn’t have the stomache for snacking at the party, but it could have been much worse I had a great day, first off getting much more schoolwork done than I had expected, and then with the party after supper. We had the whole station over after supper for snacks and a game. We played a modified version of Taboo (if you’ve heard of that) with words that had something to do with me.
School continues to go very well today as I have almost finished an entire week of English in the last hour. Chels gets to chat tomorrow, and I’m thinking of calling her on Saturday, so I’m quite happy right now