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Notes from the alternative universe, Feb 16 2006. aka more building supergopher!
It's kind of fun to inhabit an alternative universe, one with a lot fewer people and some different expectations about how things are connected together. It's not the blogosphere, because this doesn't feel like writing blog entries. I don't have all of the new conventions down pat yet. I think I can embed a little bit of this world in my other world via oPod, a little bit of Javascript that shows OPML in a browser window. We'll see if or how that happens. Aha! I'm systematically seeking out an Aha! moment in my life. Every few years I look around the net for good ideas that have enough richness and depth to justify devoting full time nights and days and some weekends to exploring them. Some considerable amount of soul-searching goes into this process, until there is an Aha! moment when it's crystal clear what the very short description is of what I'm looking for that's either out there in the world or within reach. In 1993, if you were running an Internet service provider, the world was your oyster and interesting people would contact you out of the blue because you had something to give to them. The web in 1996 was a place of infinite adventure. The world of blogs circa 1999 was a world full of possibility and exploration. You could dream of anything you wanted to do and it might just show up. Wikis in 2003 felt the same way. Now I think all those formulas have had enough big examples of use that people don't really want to explore new structure anymore - they just want to grow what they have. More power to them. That's how nets grow big. Some parts of OPML tickle an old Aha moment when Gopher was around. And, as always, there is some amount of interest in any emerging system when it's still new enough that all of the conventions and strategies are not necessarily cast in stone. Superpatron One of my alter egos is Superpatron, where I write about ideas (and code to implement those ideas) to make the library more useful. I'm thinking about doing an OPML directory for Superpatron and embedding it in the blog with oPod - there could be something very useful about that. I think but I'm not sure that there are already directories of library resources I could link to. Plazes Tim from Plazes showed me this morning some new features of that location-tracking service. Most notable is a new tag cloud showing where people are at the moment. In the US East Coast morning, you can find the biggest density of Plazes people in Berlin and Cologne; Ann Arbor shows up every once in a while. PlazeFeed for Plazes How to del.icio.us/tag/howto More unearthing of capabilities - Les found the Jabber support in OPML Editor - a small amount of docs are here - what I'm missing is a description of how to "Jump to user.im.jabber". Sorry, don't get it, don't see a menu option that corresponds to "jump" - ah, found it, it's in the Programmer's Menu. There's at least something in there, but I'm not versed in the innards enough to get it working the first try. It does sound promising though.... Les unearthed a way to take OPML pages and turn them into S5 slideshows. It's from something called SpaziOPML.
If you go into the Mac OS X Address Book and add a custom entry for a relative (where it says "friend" or "mother" or "child") and make that entry "tag", then you can apply tags to people. Spotlight search will find people who have been tagged with that tag, and you can search using Spotlight for that tag within Address book.
Gina Trapani of Lifehacker has a nice "Flickr Advanced User Guide" showing you some very short and useful tips on the nooks and crannies of that system. Very handy.
OPML Editor environment notes I had the wrong link, it should be http://www.pubsub.com/lists/librarian_opml.opml . OPML Editor still complains about the lack of a channeltitle, even though there's a title tag in the feed. Curious. (Thanks to Steven Cohen for the pointer, still puzzling about the behavior.) I'm trying to link to http://www.pubsub.com/lists/librarian_opml.php as an OPML feed (command-7). When I do, it complains about missing a channeltitle, but when I put that same URL in the OPML Validator everything validates OK. What's up with that? When I command-click the link to add it, it works just fine (see below) albeit adding it with no title (I edited the title below by hand). & just noting here, that some of these say they are RSS links, but they're actually ATOM links, which means they render funny at best in OPML Editor. Posting now to see what they do in this environment - ah, when posted to the net it comes through as a plain OPML file (which would be lovely to render in a viewer like oPod?...hmmm) PubSub Librarian OPML list Lazyweb del.icio.us/tag/lazyweb The Lazyweb comes through for Tom Carden, who found someone to write code for him to manage his todo list through a chat bot. Chatbots for todo list management gives the details.
"Floating Island" asks the Lazyweb, why hasn't someone done an automatic translator for chat applications? (hm, chat, a common theme)
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Last modified: Friday, February 17, 2006 at 5:44 PM.
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