After a day of listening to Christmas music (Wreck the Hallz Holiday Mix from Relative Theory Records) and an evening at the ice skating rink I was inspired to put together this black and white ice dancing delight:
Monthly Archive for December, 2005
Over the past 6 months I’ve simultaneously been managing two blogs - a personal one, amyallcock.com and a work one Amy@MEdTech. At first it seemed like a good idea to separate the work stuff from the personal stuff, but I soon began to realize that the distinction wasn’t as clear as I had anticipated. Often times I would write a post that was relevant to both sites and be very conflicted over where to post it. It became clear that I could not easily separate who I am and what I do, and I began to wonder why I should enforce this distinction in the first place.
So, in order to resolve my identity crisis I have accepted that who I am and what I do can co-exist in peaceful blog harmony and merged the two blogs on amyallcock.com. Not only will this help to provide a more unified sense of self, but managing one blog is much easier than managing two. All previous Amy@MEdTech posts and future work-related posts can be found under both the MEdTech or the Work categories.
Given the recent debate over the accuracy and merit of the Wikipedia project, I found this Penny Arcade piece to be rather funny and fitting:
For every John Doe, Adam Curry and Skeletor there are hundreds of people who are contributing accurate and (relatively) unbiased information to the project. It is only through collaboration and peer editing that the most accurate information will persist. Although Wikipedia may be more susceptible to the rantings of a lunatic, thanks to collective intelligence and peer review these postings can be corrected and filtered out. This is something that can’t be said for the so-called experts over at Encyclopedia Britannica (who could also be considered ranting lunatics depending on your point of view). As far as I?��Ǩ�Ѣm concerned, Skeletor could be a Wikipedia contributor just as easily as he could be on the Encyclopedia Britannica payroll. I prefer the collective intelligence over the opinions of paid experts, and it turns out that according to a recent study by Nature both are equally reliable sources of information.
Thanks to Andrew for bringing this humorous and illuminating Penny Arcade strip to my attention.
Tagrolls are a handy way to display your del.icio.us tags as part of your website making it easy for yourself or anyone else to browse your bookmarks by topic tags. There are several customizations which can be done to display your tagroll using the del.icio.us service including specifying the order, size, and color of the tags. Using these customizations a lot of additional information about your tagging habits can be conveyed in a visual way. When creating my own tag cloud, I choose to use colors and sizes that would display additional information about my tags - a large font and a hot color (red) for my most popular tags and a smaller font with a cooler color (blue) for the less popular ones. I ended up with the following two tag clouds:
When displayed as a tagcloud sorted by frequency, you get a nice looking gradient that not only looks cool but that says a lot about my tagging preferences. When displayed as a tagcloud sorted alphabetically, you get a more ordered listing with “hotspots?��Ǩ�� representing the most popular tags. The alphabetically listing conveys the most information since it provides two ways to scan (alphabetical listing and visual clues to frequency) whereas the tagcloud sorted by frequency only allows for browsing by frequency, something which is enforced twice in this organization. Although I like how the gradient looks visually in the transition from hot to cool, I choose to go with the alphabetical ordering, as it is the easiest way to scan a list of information and the “hotspots”, given their color and size, provide a visually attractive and effective way to identify the most popular tags.
Originally published December 12, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
Great article that contains some handy tagging tips and information on how to use some of the more obscure del.icio.us features such as the inbox. Well worth a read for both the beginner and experienced del.icio.us user.
Originally published December 12, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just came across two great resources which can help you make the most of social bookmarking with del.icio.us. The first is a fantastifc article The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users from Slacker Magazine. This article has some great tagging tips and also explains how to use some of del.icio.us more obscure features such as the inbox. All in all, a helpful read with plenty of useful tricks for both the beginner and experienced user. The second resource is Absolutely Del.icio.us, an extremely comprehensive list of del.icio.us tools. The list covers anything that you’ve every wanted to do with del.icio.us and more from how to search, post, and view bookmarks as well as how to integrate del.icio.us into your site and with other applications.
Originally published December 12, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I’m happy to report that today Yahoo announced that they have acquired del.icio.us, my absolute favourite social bookmarking service. I think that this will be a great boost for del.icio.us and was a very smart buy on Yahoo’s part. Not only can we expect faster access times to del.icio.us due to the added Yahoo server power, but I think that there is a tremendous potential for integration between Yahoo’s existing services especially in regards to tagging. How cool would it be to share tags between your bookmarks, blogs and pictures?
Thanks to the Social Software Weblog for being the first of my feeds to report the great news.
Originally published December 9, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
This is a nice article summarizing some of the best Firefox themes and extensions available to jazz up your browser. There were a few I’d heard of before such as Google Preview (which displays handy little thumbnail screenshots for your Google search results) and a few new ones as well, such as the IE-tab (which allows you to run IE in Firefox). I was hoping that the IE tab would save me from having to use IE on Windows PC to access one of the web applications that I use that requires Active X support, but unfortunately the IE tab doesn’t support Active X either. Still, the extension is handy to view those non-standards compliant but necessary web sites.
I should also mention that this article was found via digg.com, which also happens to be where I’m writing this post from using their very cool ‘blog this’ feature!
Originally published December 9, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just updated the WordPress theme from a modified form of Kubrick template to a modified form of K2 template. Both themes are by Binary Bonsai with K2 being the latest and greatest offering. K2 is more than just another pretty WordPress template though, as it has a bunch of great new features including schemes (which is an easy way to modify the K2 theme) and plugin support. I’m currently using the del.ici.ous cached plugin to display my del.ici.ous bookmarks and I’ve implemented the fantanstic Flickr RSS plugin on my personal blog.
Originally published December 9, 2005 in the Amy@MEdTech blog.
I just created my very first Predict-A-Poll, a web site that allows you to create your own polls to share with others and to cast votes on a particular topic and to predict how other people will vote. The topic of this poll is about the current showdown between the top two technology news sites and was inspired by a friends pet project, digg vs dot, which helped to heat up the debate.