BarelyBlogging » blogging

woodsy owl

pat — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 02:50:05 +0000

I seem to have pretty good luck getting stories and comments onto Boing Boing (three or four at this point). Here’s the latest:

Government guide to destroying old Woodsy Owl costumes

Regarding the destruction of the Woodsy Owl costumes I can think of two possible reasons:

A terrorist might obtain a Woodsy Owl costume, then masquerade as a government official to access restricted areas before detonating himself.

An adult film performer might obtain a Woodsy Owl costume and use it to produce child pornography.

You can never be too careful.

fired for stealing from my blog

pat — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:41:06 +0000

Someone writing for The Harvard Crimson was fired for stealing from my blog Literally, A Web Log.

Surely this is a measure of success.

user interface blast from the past

pat — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 06:25:17 +0000

Updating my portfolio I was going through some screenshots of an old web app I made for the HP intranet. At the time I don’t think I realized that I was creating a “blog” – just making something that we needed (and I got to learn a lot about PHP and MySQL in the process).

Screencast: Judge a Web App By Its Title

pat — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 13:02:15 +0000

The second episode of “You’re Killing Me Here!” (usability and design screencast series) discusses various uses of the page title (HTML TITLE element): in particular how you can use it to communicate with users of your web application.

View the Screencast (2.5 minutes)

They like me, they really really like me

pat — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 17:02:19 +0000

Dang – my CSS tutorial has owned the del.icio.us popular page since last night. I guess I really pegged the market on that one.

Update: also has over 1200 diggs, including this nice comment:

This tut explained in about 5 minutes what hours of browsing other documentation failed to get thru to me.

You’re Killing Me Here! Web Usability Screencast

pat — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 11:18:56 +0000

Introducing “You’re Killing Me Here!” a series of screencasts discussing web site and web application design, accessibility, and usability from the perspective of a power-user.

The first episode discusses “type ahead find” in the Firefox browser and the design implications that come along with it.

View the Screencast

Hiding my del.ici.ous links

pat — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 04:19:44 +0000

I decided I didn’t want my del.ici.ous links fouling up my blog stream, so I hacked WordPress so it wouldn’t show posts tagged with mybookmarks unless you display the category page for that tag.

I still want to have del.icio.us post my daily bookmarks, because then I have an archive, plus it gives a little Google-juice to the bookmarked sites (and in the end that makes the web a better place, search-spammers notwithstanding).

After determining the Id of that category, here’s the code I added to skip it:

Three things to change about the default Wordpress template

pat — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:27:28 +0000

links in article text are not underlined
text-align:justify
article archive pages lose the sidebar. every page of your blog is an entry point, so why eliminate the sidebar when someone enters via an individual article archive page.

Most profitable blogging topic

pat — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 05:02:01 +0000

Looking at my Amazon reports, I’m always surprised that even though my woodworking pages are relatively sparse, they always generate the best referrals. I guess it pays to blog about big-ticket items.

However, I’m not sure if it’s worth it because of all the cat ladies I have to deal with.

Zee comments, zey are beck

pat — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 04:22:25 +0000

I finally upgrated WordPress, and since it handles comment spam so much better I activated comments again on this blog.

Unfortunately, I also had to ditch my old template, so until I get a chance to redesign the site you’ll be stuck looking at the default WordPress template.

To make up for this disgrace, here’s a funny graphic.

p.s. I love the new AJAX category/tag selector in WordPress 2!