@lindsay.at

I've taken another step in Lifestreaming (as I think they call it nowadays). I took an immediate liking to soup.io as an online RSS aggregator and blog. I had collected most of my content from around the web in the "lindsay.at/everywhere" link ("Preoccupations" on my home website's menu). The problem was that it didn't work so well all the time, and was often down. By redirecting to my soup page, I can now get a better-looking, more reliable stream of the content I excrete onto the web.

I also took an immediate liking to Posterous, a blog-by-mail site. The site isn't particularly pretty or customizable yet, but it handles email input fairly deftly. I'm now treating it as a tumblelog, a receptacle for interesting and amusing links that I send to friends. With a simple CC, I can stick links on my site with trivial amounts of effort. When I get an iPhone, I can easily imagine it handling mobile blogging as well.

These two sites are also worth a mention in their very easy, no-commitment, no-password-or-signup approaches to enticing new users. Posterous simply asks for an email: they'll auto-generate a URL for you. Soup similarly gently leads you down a garden path, asking for no personal data, simply for addresses to import. Well done, and it's something that other sites will do well to emulate.

My daughter is very clever at two and one-third years of age. Not a day goes by when she doesn't surprise and delight me with something new she's learned. She just returned from a weekend with her grandparents, and proceeded to strut her newly-acquired linguistic stuff.

That a very very big butterfly!

Mummy [com]puter is tiny tiny one!

A missing verb here, an elided article there, sure, but I was amazed at the assured use of repetition for the purpose of intensificatory reduplication. I was stumped as to what to call this, as I started out thinking about reduplication, but wikipedia's article on it gave me little clue as to whether I was right. Google eventually sent me to the Language Log for the above-linked blog post. Reading the very very good post also let me know why I had such trouble finding a description of the process:

When I realized in 1999 that intensificatory reduplication (of both adjective modifiers in the noun phrase and adverb premodifiers in adjective phrases and adverb phrases) needed to be described in the Adjectives and Adverbs chapter of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, I rummaged around in all the earlier reference grammars I could find to see what they had said about it, and the answer was that the exact facts had apparently never been recorded. What Rodney Huddleston and I wrote for Chapter 6 of The Cambridge Grammar (pages 561-562) was apparently the first description that dealt with both adjectives and adverbs.

It's strange. The Language Log only came onto my personal radar when it covered LOLCODE, but it now requires an honoured place on my blogroll. My weekend has been filled with it, since I've become obsessed with the recent controversy over the Pirahã, as described in the New Yorker. The Language Log's coverage of Dan Everett's work has been a great introduction to the topic.

Today is the end of a personal era. Today is the day I let my long-held-in-reserve domain dandysalami.com expire. For a long time, I had intended the domain as a web home, and obtained it some six years ago as a quirky personal domain. (It's an anagram, get it?) I never did anything with it, and as my professional profile grew and the web matured, it seemed harder and harder to justify sending anyone to that domain with a straight face, or with that expressing anything about my identity. When I had the brainstorm about this domain last autumn, I went for it, and haven't looked back.

Still, I do feel a pang of regret, and the decision was made especially bittersweet when I received the following spam.

You are looking at a photo, made especially for you so that you can really see how your website or company name comes into its own on your company car.

To watch our [FOO]PLATES VIDEO follow this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyFUsc_d_iw.

The product you can see is called [FOO]PLATES.

[Foo]plates are three dimensional letters, made of the same material as car manufacturers use for their brand name. The letters are chrome-plated so that they are resistant to any type of weather.
A standard [Foo]plate consists of 20 characters. A [foo]plate with 20 characters is approximately 40cms (15,7 inch) long. For more than 20 characters you can request a quotation via sales@[foo]-plates-b2b.co.uk. There are letters of 2.2 cms such as a, o, m, c etc. and of 3.2 cms high such as A, B, C, D, l, p, k etc. Additional characters are _ @ ( ) ? , € - ! The delivery time is between 1 to 3 weeks. [etc.]

I elided the company name because, well, clever though it is, it's still spam, and the last thing I want is to poison my google cred with that stuff.

Anyway, I thought that was a great use of an image processing script for something that was absolutely absurd. (Plus they get props for using Myriad as the font, and for roping YouTube to run their commercial.) Has anyone else run into these folks?

There's a bit of cognitive dissonance seeing Jason Hoffman blogging on wordpress.com. Dr. "we admin servers so you don't have to", king of the DIY-ers, is going with a hosted solution. (Okay, sure, TextDrive is responsible for a fair portion of WP.com's infrastructure, but...)

Is that the natural way of things, now? People moving from hosted applications to hosted domains on servers and back to the hosted application space? Will I get sick of the control? Of fighting spam? Of responsibility for security? Hmm.

Yeah, early days. (Is it even really him? Dunno at this point.) But it's an interesting space to watch...

I don't normally watch these things too closely, but in scanning my logs, I seemed to get hit a few times by a particular search. I checked on google myself, and was surprised at the results:

This and the referrals thing are the little buzzes like winning 20 bucks in the lottery that keep me blogging, I guess.

Perhaps it's a bit cheeky to diss a CMS on a blog that doesn't use it, but I use WordPress, even if it's not on this site. My "big time" blog is moving house, from a dedicated server that I more-or-less maintain (in my wife's office), to a shared server on TextDrive. Performance certainly has taken a big hit, but I can pretty much guarantee that it can scale to higher traffic better and that it won't be taken out nearly as often or as long by random downtime.

I spent huge swathes of the weekend trying to get the site's theme working in a way that I liked. The K2 theme boasts of being a flexible theming framework, allowing you to do what you like in CSS, and "baking in" support for several popular plugins, lowering the need to tinker with the core theme files even further. The promise didn't quite match reality. K2 is an attractive, clean theme, and I like the fun, AJAXy things you can do with it, but it still has a set structure and strong ideas about how elements are displayed. Unfortunately, I was trying to match a known structure and layout, and had strong ideas about what the design should look like, myself. WordPress was good in allowing complete flexibility, but in the process I completely changed the internals of the infamous WP-loop, meaning I have to do a lot of work if ever I want to upgrade the K2 theme.

(This makes me wonder about plugging XSLT into the WordPress theme hierarchy. You can radically rewrite elements using that. So I'd imagine a master Xhtml document being created by the loop, and optionally doing a run through an XSLT stylesheet before being shipped off to the reader. Obviously, I'm a bit swayed by this site's architecture, and it's simply moving the problem to another place, and not entirely avoiding maintainability problems (and creating further performance issues as well). But, computer science is nothing if not the art of moving problems around... Anyway, that's an aside to explore later.)

What really let me down, however, was the complexity of the master CSS file for the K2 theme. The default theme has a lot of attractive, complex, subtle things going on, and the CSS is a mess to deal with. First off, if the makers of K2 want to encourage CSS-only styles, they would do well to strip out the unnecessaries in the base CSS, and move the attractive blue Kubrick-2-like theme into a default style of its own. There were far too many settings to override, deeply buried within the CSS inheritance hierarchy (I had to impose my choice of font family at least four times, manually, for example).

Quite contrary to K2's implied promises, I ended up with a cluttered, fairly arbitrary stylesheet that was a series of hacks. I know at least part of the blame falls on my empirical, hack-y CSS coding method. Part of it also falls on the state of CSS, and the tools we have to deal with it — I think there must be a better way. (Does anyone advocate grouping by properties instead of elements? All the elements of the same color could be named once, and then all font styling is done that way, etc. I see flashes of this in exemplary styles, but it isn't consistent. [I see google brings up one page, originally from 1996...])

So, since I must count you as one of my dedicated fans (especially if you've read this far), I can point you to the site as a preview, because I'm sure it's not going to be overrun by a Slashdot effect from here: mediadescri.be. I like the URL a lot. I've been sitting on it for the better part of a year.