I took a few minutes today to freshen up this site’s color scheme to match the vibrant one at echoloquation.com, my lifestream/tumblog.
IE users, you’re out of luck ATM, as the header logo is a “reverse-transparent PNG” with the background color behind it, so from now on I can easily change the color of the logotype just by changing the background color on the image.
After coming up with a solution to how to implement the blog:via machine tag on this site, I turned my attention this morning to how to do something interesting with it.
Since I used a custom field to implement adding machine tags to posts, I looked for a way to easily search values in those fields. I found a Wordpress plugin - Search Custom Fields - that lets me search the values in a custom field by appending key=<custom field name>.
http://redmonk.net/?key=machinetags&s=blog:via
As you can see from that uri (try it out), the search term now applies to the custom field, not the post content. But searching for all posts with ‘blog:via’ is not that interesting. If you check out this post page, I’ve tweaked the machine tags display so that next to each “blog:via” is a “more” link that takes you to a list of posts that were via that URL:
It’s not perfect yet - with my implementation (a ‘machinetags’ custom field with ‘blog:via=http://daringfireball.net’ value), I can’t actually search for “machine tag where the tag is blog:via and the value is <url>”. I may yet switch to a “blog:via” custom field.
Also, geeks ahoy! I’ve started a page on Machinetags.org for blog: machinetags.
There’s a good discussion (in the comments) on CreativeBits about recovering from getting your first logo idea rejected, with some good thoughts on determining the actual target of an identity.
I came up with something fun and modern, which is what they always promote to their clients. My CEO sent the logo (as well as other comps) out to “test it” with 50 of their past clients and it got shot down.
Jeremy Keith and I had a geeky chat this morning about machine tags, rel=tag, and the like.
A while back I was thinking about how to encode “via” information in a blog post/tag, so that eventually I’ll be able to do more interesting things with where I’m getting my links/inspiration. Jeremy and I talked then as well, and the idea of using a machinetag came up, and we came up with a format:
blog:via=<permalink>
Since then I’ve tagged a few posts with this format, but haven’t been really comfortable with mixing the machinetags in with my usual tags (I confess mostly this was because they did not break properly and made my layout look janky). So I pinged Jeremy and we talked it over. Eventually he gave me the piece of information I was missing: machinetags are not related (no pun intended) in any way to rel=tag. They just happen to confusingly share the label “tag”.
Aha! This freed me to implement my machine tags separately from the normal post tags, as you can now see on this post about the FontBook. In this case I created a WordPress custom field for them. I may continue to tweak the presentation a bit, but I like what I’ve got.
Further Reading:
Realized tonight while watching that Equilibrium is Dead Poets Society with gun-fu.
It’s billed as “the largest typeface reference in the word,†and just a single flip through its 1,500 pages leaves one with no reason to doubt that claim.
Ahhhh, I would love to curl up with this book for a few weeks.
[via daring fireball]
Jodi and I are big John Cusack fans - I can think of only one movie of his we’ve seen that we didn’t like (1993’s superbly casted but poorly written Identity).
So in filling our recently acquired NetFlix queue, I snagged Better Off Dead, which I missed when I was 14 but which Jodi and I watched in the last few days.
What can I say… Better Off Dead is a typically hysterical Cusack black comedy, full of neurotic and existential angst. What it also is filled with is odd bits of off-beat animation, both traditional and claymation, strange non-sequiters like the psychotic paperboy, and characters too weird to explain at all (i.e. Lane’s mother and younger brother). And we laughed all the way through it.
Moments of particular merit (or pure mind-boggling “wha”-ness):
4 out of 5 claymation hamburgers.
Read an early draft of my Personal Platform.
This site is hosted with Dreamhost, probably the best hosting provider I've worked with. They provide an awesome management backend, fantastic deals on hosting, an astonishing amount of bandwidth/disk space, and one-click installs of a *bunch* of common web tools.
