Oft heard by my children, and now the name of my current project.

Lately I have been experiencing  a bit of writers block, so I figured I just needed to start afresh with a blank slate. I started yet-another-frickin-blog over at jibbajabba.info. Just knowing that I had no audience at all really did loosen things up a lot. As a result, of course, it’s a complete drivel, but I did actually make something kind of useful. It’s a Natural Language Text Classifier service, which you can give a document and in response it’ll tell you what language it was written in. That’s it. It won’t win the Nobel prize for adding meaning and purpose to a generation, but it did make me feel pretty good to get something out there.

Since my failure to get OpenID working well with my WordPress installation, I’ve decided to start with something a bit simpler, and then based hopefully upon that success build on upwards. So…

Twitter – I’m still not quite sure what the point of Twitter is, but I’m giving it a go. Adding a Twitter Badge to the sidebar was super easy. I just had to cut and paste some HTML from there into my theme’s sidebar.php. I had to add the ‘Follow me’ link at the bottom.

I can now send an update to my own blog from Twitterific on my Mac desktop, or I can send a text message from my phone. Look see! I can micro-blog about my breakfast.

AddThis – The next mini-project is to make my posts easier to share. The AddThis Button seen just below this post, and every post on this blog, allows the reader to share this post with others through any of the popular link sharing systems. I achieved this by downloading and installing a WordPress plugin provided by AddThis… super easy peasy.

FeedBurner – To make my blog easier to subscribe to I’ve published an RSS through FeedBurner. I enabled two things, a link to ‘subscribe in a reader’, and a form for subscribing by email. Both were provided as snippets of code to be cut and pasted into sidebar.php. I did have to edit them a bit to make them fit style-wise.

The FeedBurner website provides a lot of configuration options – too many I think. It took me a while to work out how to get to the email subscription page. Anyway, I’ve now subscribed to my own feed, so I have one subscriber. Woohoo!

[...To Be Continued...]

This explains the odd email I got last week taking me to task over the copyright statement in the footer of this page. Apparently I’d committed the unholy act of removing the ‘WordPress Copyright’. I patiently explained that the content of the website was indeed my copyright, since I’d authored it, and that as far as I knew WordPress was available under an open source license. Unsatisfied, the emailer threw his killer punch… ‘All Rights Reserved, that’s what I’m taking issue with’…. Hmm, so, what exactly does ‘Copyright (c) 2007. All rights reserverd’ mean I wondered:

The phrase All rights reserved was once a necessary formal notice indicating all rights granted under existing copyright law are retained by the copyright holder and that legal action may be taken against copyright infringement. … While it is commonplace to see it, this notice is now superfluous, ….(Wikipedia::Copyright)

Triple damn – he had me there – I had failed to live up to the highest standards of minimalism.

In any case the design of these web pages has nothing to do with me. I blame Ben Saunders. When he’s not doing really manly things in the Arctic, or planning to do really manly things in the Antarctic, he throws together some pretty spiffy web pages.