Further Reading from September 29 2012

Touching Up
Touching Up

Well, thanks to the magic of IFTTT.com, I’ve started to use Delicious to seed information to my blog again.1

There is a limit of Feedburner that it will only post the last ten entries into the daily blog email – for Flickr photos, if I’ve had a busy photographic day, or for blog posts – and yesterday turned out to be an epic sitting-in-front-of-the-computer day2, so I posted more than ten entries to Delicious.

Here are a few tidbits that got omitted:

  1. “And Fake Steve is dead, but the self-important drama queen lives on.” http://t.co/Ij7fiPb4
  2. “Special Service Areas are local tax districts that fund expanded services & programs through localized property tax” http://t.co/aHJptHgS
  3. “iPhone 5 Wi-Fi Problems Fixed By Manual DNS Settings” http://t.co/co6IWYCc
  4. New Tracking Frontier: Your License Plates http://t.co/mEqTRK2l
  5. “Obama Orders Chinese Company to End Investment at Sites Near Drone Base” http://t.co/zgOWdrP8
  6. “Romney vows to take on Lyme disease ‘epidemic’” http://t.co/T7dJsaQO Uhh, ok?
  7. Histoire de Melody Nelson: Serge Gainsbourg’s psychedelic orchestral rock opera http://t.co/u6Y4T8zd
  8. Paul Ryan “referred to rape as a “method of conception.” http://t.co/fP4AjEFt
  9. “The Satchmo Cocktail: A Sazerac… With A Twist” http://t.co/CCSvBeY5
  10. “How many times have you said, “if only we had a president who made Lyme Disease his number one priority?””  http://t.co/r8FSjssX
  11. Brian May: Me and my animal passions | From the Guardian http://t.co/1CxVc7vf
  12. “Looking to Mexico for Alternative to Abortion Clinics” http://t.co/zukKI39q
  13. “Laws Revive ‘World Before Roe’ as Abortions Require Arduous Trek” http://t.co/cyFZ1sZ4
  14. “Cherokee Nation Chief Demands Apology From Scott Brown Campaign” http://t.co/nuMbKepI
  15. “Romney is perhaps best known for being a clown and a humanitarian, … an LSD-fueled comedian.” http://t.co/8TaXOeJd aka Wavy Gravy

Whew!

Also, I’ve created an IFTTT.com recipe which works as follows:

  • new Delicious post is created
  • if I use the tag “link”, then a new WordPress post is created with the snippet, with a link to the original URL.
  • Benefits – easy to create posts this way – basically select some text, click a javascript bookmarklet on my browser bookmark bar, and add a tag or three.
  • Cons – limit to 999 characters, limited HTML formatting, doesn’t include an image, and doesn’t allow me to frame the quote or react to it, unless I do it later.

I just tested, and I can edit the Delicious post later to add the magic trigger word, “blog” as a tag, and posts still are generated, even if they existed first a while ago. Pretty nifty.

In general, the limit of ten new mini-posts in a day won’t be an issue, as most days I am not reading in front of my computer that many hours. So, turns out I don’t need Twitter after all.

Footnotes:
  1. Boring backstory discussed here and here []
  2. due to some work I had done in my loft which took several hours longer than anticipated. Replaced some windows and some springs if you really want to know []

Some further reading from September 28 2012

Numberless Reflections
Numberless Reflections

I guess I’ll have to go back to making Delicous posts by themselves since Twitter deprecated one useful-to-me API as I mentioned yesterday. A long time ago, there was a way to merge a day’s worth of Delicious links together and make a post. I’ll see if I can figure out how to resurrect that feature. 

  • “Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts — decided to unwind by taking a short break in Fiji.” http://t.co/pHrYo1ev
  • “WaPo ombud endorses reader complaints that Wapo is too liberal; wants truth-tellers balanced. Vile.” http://wapo.st/UVOrc0  (via @froomkin)
  • Ahh, not just me, but Hipstamatic doesn’t play nice with new phone http://bit.ly/P19tov
  • “Catholic Bishop of Springfield, Illinois: Voting for Obama Jeopardizes the Eternal Salvation of Your Own Soul” http://zite.to/PaEZKV  strip non-profit status of Church! Non-profits are, by law, supposed to be non-partisan.
  • Bill Moyers: ALEC ‘is still everywhere’ http://zite.to/QLTvKK 
  • “Russia bans import of genetically modified corn” http://buff.ly/PxNgKp Possibly. Still looking for confirmation of this catchy headline…
  • “Living Landmark: How Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson Became an Encyclopedia of Chicago” http://buff.ly/PwCZya 
  • “online grocer Peapod is expanding its virtual supermarkets to 17 CTA and Metra stations ” http://buff.ly/Qw7WW6 
  • TV News Covered Paul Ryan’s Workout 3x More Than Record Arctic Sea Ice Loss- Media Matters for America http://buff.ly/THBOSP 
  • New book details NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program, as the govt moves to avoid accountability in court https://eff.org/r.a8mK  (via @EFF)
  • “City Winery-How much longer are we supposed to wait for this New York import to get its act together? “ http://buff.ly/QwqntT 
  • The Polarizing Political Paradox Redux « MADE IN AMERICA  http://buff.ly/QmUwMf  

Delicious Blog Post Went Awry

Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland

You probably didn’t notice, but my automated delicious.com posting tool has eaten some magic mushrooms, and fallen through the rabbit hole. I think it is posting every hour, on the hour, but I didn’t count after ten or so duplicates. I’m just turning it off until further notice. Apologies for all the duplicates…

Blog error – Postalicious crapped out

Not sure what happened exactly, but my Postalicious plugin went a bit nutso last night, creating several posts that were erroneous. The plugin is a simple way to keep track of interesting URLs that I don’t have the time to make a full blog post about, when it works correctly.

Not Tonight Dear

The way the plugin is supposed to work is that it polls my delicious links ever hour, finds if there are any additions, merges these snippets into a page, and publishes the page once three entries are found. There is supposed to be a time regulator as well so that a Links post is only published ever 26 hours (so there aren’t multiple Links posts a day), but that didn’t keep several posts from being published last night, posts with empty URLs at that.

500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

I’ve disabled the plugin until I can figure out what went wrong (or there’s a new version, whichever comes first). It could be a problem at Delicious.com, or it could be because of the new version of the Postalicious plugin I installed yesterday, or some other factor.

Sorry about that.

Reading Around on August 14th

Some additional reading August 14th from 12:05 to 12:45:

William Blake:

0312-0057_elohim_creating_adam.jpg

  • Think You Can Rip Someone’s Image From the Internet and Use it For Free? Think Again, You Just May End Up Sued and Lose | Thomas Hawk Digital Connection – “It was interesting to hear yesterday from photographer Christopher Boffoli who has done a lot of freelance work lately for the West Seattle Blog. Boffoli wrote me and told me about a situation where a Seattle based Realtor, Laura Miller with Catalyst Commercial Partners, used an unauthorized photo of his for a real estate listing (photo above) of hers and ended up having to pay him a $1,000 small claims court judgment over it.

    I’ll let Boffoli tell part of the story”

  • Change of Subject: Getting aboard a health plan — it’s time to throw a lifeline to 60 million Americans – “they’re fine with the idea of providing coverage to everyone. But only if it costs them nothing and leaves them with all the advantages, priorities and prerogatives they currently enjoy. In other words, the old “I’d haul you up, but you might swamp my rowboat” argument.

    Others tell me they view access to quality health care as something they’ve earned — either by working hard or being related to someone who works hard. And if others want it, let them earn it too — the old, “Go build your own rowboat, you slacker!” argument.

    Still others say that those without coverage can always fall back on the patchwork of public hospitals, charity and Medicaid — the old “You don’t need a rowboat. Driftwood will do” argument.

    Obviously, though, too many swimmers are drowning:”

  • Krugman- Republican Death Trip – NYTimes.com
  • – “President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.”
  • Court extends Tribune Co. control of Chapter 11 case — chicagotribune.com – “A bankruptcy judge said Tribune Co. can keep control of its Chapter 11 case for three-and-a-half more months as it looks to sell off some assets, including the Chicago Cubs, in its bid to exit bankruptcy protection.

    Judge Kevin J. Carey of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., on Monday gave the publisher of the Chicago Tribune an extension to Nov. 30 to file its reorganization plan to emerge from bankruptcy and to repay creditors. He also set a March 15, 2010, deadline for the media giant to win creditor support for a plan.”

  • delicious blog » Sharing Made Easier: Email and Tweet Your Bookmarks – “If you use Twitter and want to send bookmarks to your Twitter feed, associate a Twitter account (only a single Twitter account can be associated at one time) by logging into Twitter under the Twitter panel. You have the option to send all your saved bookmarks to Twitter by selecting the “Tweet all bookmarks unless private” checkbox when you add the Twitter account. If you’ve selected this option, your Twitter account will appear by default in the Send field.”
  • Juan_Gris
  • Juan Gris