Vos Virtual Network

Google goes green today with an alternate logo to celebrate Earth Day, which the USA started celebrating on April 22, 1970.

Michael Arrington says Twitter is now such a vital part of the technology ecology, that service outages barely matter, and as he says “I need Twitter more than Twitter needs me.”

Wired Magazine looks back to frightful days in World War I, remembering the trench warfare — chemical weapons; poison gas — on this day in 1915.

I’m thankful to be alive on the privileged planet today, and I realize that every breath is a gift. I need the earth more than the earth needs me… I need more oxygen, just like SlashDot needs more electricity to keep the creation/evolution debate going.

Yesterday, WordPress wizard Matt Mullenweg, jazzed up his blog with a new spring theme. I wonder if he designed it that way, or it just evolved by itself.

Zeldman (ALA) published a couple interesting and helpful articles on the Why and How of Ruby on Rails this morning.

Creating new stuff isn’t easy. Meticulous and beautiful designs don’t just happen by accident. Computer programs don’t write themselves. However, some scientists (like Richard Dawkins) theorize that DNA wrote itself. So, if you follow that theory, you can Twine your PC to some random Twitter feeds, go to the beach all afternoon, and when you get back, your new Ruby on Rails program will have written itself. Try explaining that one to your boss. Or better yet, find some VCs who will invest in it. (The only catch is that they might have to wait billions and billions of years for the ROI). That plan might work for you… but for programmers looking for some good advice today, you might want to check out StackOverflow.com (a new advice service for programmers) — from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.

Back to the Planet - After a flaming descent, and a “scary crash landing”, Korean, Russian, and American astronauts are glad to be back on planet earth after a visit to the International Space Station. Yi So-yeon, a nano-technology engineer from Seoul, Korea — spent 11 days in space. Peggy Whitson had been gone for 192 days (and needed help walking), and now Peggy holds the American record for most days lived in outer space — 377 days.

Tags: earth day, rails, RoR, twine, twitter, WordPress

I’ve doing a little reading about the WordPress loop. The WordPress loop is where all the main work get’s done in publishing the articles of the blog. Loops and iteration constructs are very common in many (all?) programming languages, and that is why you see things like “do while” or while, “for x = 1 to z”, or “foreach x in z” in many scripting languages.

The whole idea with Open Source software is that you can modify it, refactor it, change it to be anything you want. However, it is a good idea to start with some very small changes, and it’s really good to begin by reading a few articles about the code, and read the actual source code before you start making any changes.

Anyway, two recent articles, I have have found helpful are: The Ultimate Guide to the WordPress Loop and another called Global Variables and the WordPress Loop.

Tags: loop, modify, opensource, php, refactoring, theme, WordPress

Have you tried BlogPulse charts and graphs to track and analyze what’s behind the buzzwords?

Here is an example showing the keywords python, ruby, and wordpress (time-line is the past 6 months). Looks like the WordPress spike is beginning to fade, and I wonder what that means?

Here is another BlogPulse trend chart showing what everyone was talking about last week. Keywords/Phrases : Virginia Tech, Cho, gun control.

Now that we are on this topic, let me say that my deepest sympathy goes out to all the families affected by this horrific tragedy (mass murder, suicide); my prayers for peace and love continue unto God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, and I recommend that everyone read and meditate on Psalm 4 and Psalm 23 this week.

Tags: blogs, charting, graphing, measuring, metrics, Python, RSS, Ruby, WordPress

Another research topic… I’m taking some notes here, so I can come back to this topic later. Paul Stamatiou talks about the new WordPress blog he installed for Yahoo, (Yodel Anecdotal) as part of his summer internship at Yahoo. Apparently Paul decided to implement the random image rotator developed / explained / recommended by Dan Benjamin. You can read more about this image rotator (and see it in action) over at Automatic Labs.

I also recalled reading about another Image Rotator and Randomizer that I had stumbled across — over at Photo Matt (Matthew Mullenweg’s) a while back. Matt’s Random Image script is here. Not sure what the differences are between these various scripts, but one day when I get a chance to read the source code for each, I’ll see if there is any big diff.

Tags: blogs, image rotation, random, Research, WordPress

Don’t get your nose bent out of shape over this one, or should I say - don’t get your finger in a ringer…

Some people enjoy things you don’t like very much. People are different. A wise man once said “It’s a good thing everyone does not like the same thing. If everyone liked the same movie, you would go to watch it and the line would be 69 miles long to get into the movie (cinema) theatre.”

There have been flame wars over using TinyURL (or why you should not), and now there is TinyPic. I love it.

TinyPic.com is cool because…

• It’s free (for now).
• You can quickly upload and store pictures and videos.
• It has short URL’s, even if the images or videos are big files
• Seems to be very fast and zippy (at this point).
• Yet another place to host your photos and videos.

I’ll be trying it out for a while. Let me know what you think.

Tags: blogs, How To, I Love This, photo, photography, photos, WordPress

Here is one I am looking at - called WP-SingleMP3.

Looks OK so far.

Tags: embedded, MP3, mp3 player, plugin, WordPress

It appears to me that some people do not manage their blog roll at all — they simple add a few junky links and that is the end of it.

Let’s start off with a few questions…

How do you manage your blog roll? Do you use your blog roll as a daily reading list? Do you call it “Blog Roll” Blogroll, or BlogRoll? What is a blog roll, and how or why should you manage it? [Note: Here is a Wikipedia article on the blogroll concept.]

Definition: A “blog roll” is list of links on your blog that refers to other blogs (weblogs by bloggers you know); a list of other people that write interesting blogs; or a list of blogs you enjoy reading each day; or a list of well known or popular authors (or editors) of a blog.

Etymology of the word or phrase? Who ever thought of the word “blogroll” anyway? Seems to draw up some images of middle school or the military “morning roll call”. For instance: Did you ever have a “roll call” in school where the teacker takes attendance records? Or have you ever seen a “roll call” in the military (Marines, Navy, etc.) — where everyone has to wake up early in the morning, polish their shoes, look sharp, stand up straight, and pay attention while the officer in charge calls out the names and you say “yes sir”. The military analogy is actually a pretty good one — if you want to keep your blog roll looking spit-polished.

But if someone really wanted to really be good about managing their blog roll, what would they do? Basically you add links, delete links, and change or revise links. But what links should you add? How often should you add new links, and when should you delete old links? Start by asking yourself these questions:

• What is the purpose of blog roll?
• Why is a blog roll important?
• What is a blog roll good for?
• Why bother messing with a blog roll?
• What authors should I add to my blog roll?

If you understand the purpose for a blog roll — then you are half-way to understanding how to “manage your blog roll”.

Perhaps you can start by talking to your self about what you want your blog roll be like:

• I want my blog roll to be full of interesting blogs and blog writers who write cool and interesting articles every week (or day).
• I want my blog roll to be focused on a couple topics that I am interested in
• My blog roll will have links only to other bloggers who write about my niche-market of java-widgets.
• I will review (check the links) the blogs in my blog roll every month or week.
• I will only add active blogs to my blog roll - from experienced and active writers — and dead blogs will be deleted quickly.
• Or to be cautious — I will only add blogs to my blog roll that I have read for several months.

Or maybe you want to state the negative things about blogs you don’t like and blogs to eliminate from your blog roll.

• I will delete all blogs from my blog roll — from blogs that appear to be dead for more than 2 months.
• I will delete blogs from my blog roll that spew hateful ideas, profanity and promote un-godly philosophies and/or pornography.
• Or something as simple as deleting links when you get more than 49 links in your blog roll

Getting started. This is how I do it — but you may have a better way. Please add your comments if you have some better ideas.

1. Add new links to your blog roll as you encounter great new blogs.
2. Read the blogs in your blog roll once a day, or week, or once a month — but at least once a month. Click on the links and see what the other guy or gal wrote about recently.
3. If the person gets boring, they stop writing and the blog goes dead, or you get tired of them — delete the link.
4. Prioritize the list of blogs you are reading frequently — Who is the best? Who is red hot? Is someone writing great material consistently or did they write only 3 great articles and then everything fizzeled out…

A few words about the physical steps — which may vary depending on what type of blogging software or blogging service you use…

Since I use WordPress 2.0 for my blog - the physical steps to adding links in my “blog roll” is as simple as this:

1. Login as admin.
2. Click on “links”.
3. Add a link with author’s name or name of the blog — and the URL for the blog.
4. Make sure the link type is “blog roll”.

Other blogging tools have other tools for maintaining your links.

Tags: blogroll, blogs, editing, linking, links, WordPress