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Digital Culture

Comments

I’m still struggling with comments here after the upgrade. If anyone reading would do me a favor and try and leave a comment. If it doesn’t go through, drop me a line and let me know. Gotta get some feedback and tweak settings on the damn thing.

Thanks in advance.

Categories
Digital Culture

Terry Gross is my hero!

Listen to Terry Gross verbally smack Lynn Cheney around on Fresh Air. Lynn Cheney (the wife of Dick Cheney) has written a couple of children’s books, one on history. Terry calls her out on a number of issues, from revisionist history, patriotism, the women’s movement to gay marriage and Lynn’s gay daughter. Terry actually gets Lynn Cheney to say, on the record, that she does not support a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Very interesting stuff.

Originally seen on Bookslut.

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Digital Culture

Our new visitor…

Indi

Say hello to our new housemate, Indi. She’s a rescue that one of Betsy’s students found in the parking lot of a Wal-mart of all places. We agreed to foster her since the student got caught with her in the dorms, but I’m beginning to think that it may turn into an adoption more than a fostering. She’s soooooooooo cute! So far, she’s been wonderful. Once we see if the cats ever forgive us, we’ll have a better idea how she’s working out. EDIT: Here’s a few more pictures.

As to the name…lots of people have asked us about it. It originally sprang from a line from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Sean Connery tells Harrison Ford “We named the dog Indiana.” So…we named the dog Indiana. Plus, Indi can be short for Indigo, Indie music, or Indie Film, or just independent. So…Indi it is.

In reality, I just wanted an excuse to use my Sean Connery impression anytime someone asks me about her name. đŸ˜›

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Digital Culture

The essense of my blog

As told by my search engine queries:

Feb. Referal log

Categories
Digital Culture

Small problems

Well, as Justin pointed out to me…my comment function was a bit wonky yesterday after my upgrade. Turns out that I was using Spam Karma 1.2 or so, when 1.8 was the newest version. After the update, it appears that it’s running ok, although I do want to tweak the settings a bit. I tried to post a simple text entry (no URL’s or other things to set off the spam capture) and it still routed me through a “type the text in this image” filter. I’d like to see if I can hit on a comfortable level of authentication that doesn’t feel forced.

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Digital Culture

*whew*

Ok…after a ton of background work, I think I’m happy with the first draft of this. I’m working on another, more complex layout, but for now this will do.

The actual upgrade to WordPress 1.5 was easy and smooth…it was basically a matter of uploading, pressing a few buttons, and it was done. The hard part was rescuing all the customizations that I’d done to my old template. 1.5 has a completely different (and I must say, non-intuitive) templating system. Once I wrapped my head around it, it was fine. Actually, it was good…it basically compartmentalizes a great deal of the layout into subfiles, and then lets you deal with each. But at first it was confusing as hell.

Coolest new feature: the background image of the header is a dynamically generated PNG file that reflects how busy my blog is. More posts/more comments, the higher the pulse, thanks to a kickass plugin called WP Pulse. It will be interesting to see how it works.

Second coolest feature: WP 1.5 supports page creation…WYSIWYG page creation using the WP engine, but outside the blog timeline and independent of it. So I can create quick stand alone pages using the WP template of my choice. Very cool feature, and moves WP into almost a full fledged Content Management System.

Love to hear any feedback from you guys, and those of you that are running WordPress…dive on in, the water is fine!

Categories
Digital Culture

Upgrading

If anyone visits today and gets odd templates or errors, I’m in the process of upgrading to WordPress 1.5, so there may be some rough water ahead.

So far, so good, though.

Categories
Digital Culture

The Revolution Continues…

25 Million Firefox Downloads

Categories
Digital Culture Media

The ultimate failure of DRM

Here’s a fabulous exercise in why DRM is an absolutely ludicrous answer to tech media issues. This guy found a way to strip the DRM from Napster files, and save the resultant WAV’s to CD. The result:

14 day trial = 336 hours = 20,160 minutes of potential music = 252 80 minute CDs

And that’s free music, kiddies.

I’m sorry, but….BWHAHAhahahahaha. I can’t help it. The RIAA/MPAA hijinks are laughable at this point. I said years ago that they are going to get a new model, or they will die. “Rentable” music was a stupid option…wrong model.

Categories
Digital Culture

CiteULike

An interesting website. I’m not sure what I think about it yet: CiteULike

From the site:

CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there’s no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser. There’s no need to install any special software.