I use s5 for all my presentations, and I’ve been giving a lot of them the past couple years. Although I’ve been tempted, I haven’t yet broken down and purchased a presentation remote, because I’m not sure any of them will work with:
This blog is six years old today. Now, I was planning a big retrospective, but the archives are all there and you can go browse through all 1845 entries. Six years of blogging and I’ve managed to spew out over 1800 entries (Jen’s posted too, which I’ll talk about in a little bit), and people have posted over 1600 comments, and I didn’t have comments for the first year of the blog when it was over on Blogger.\
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The blog started out orange, and with spacemen, and went through quite a few different designs (some of which I don’t even remember). Thankfully, Jen decided to join the party and I came up with the design we’ve got now, based on a photo Jen took on our trip to Bethany Beach last summer.\
So here we are, six years of blogging about my life, my family, some about work and about other assorted nonsense. You know, I don’t think I’ll be stopping any time soon. I go through phases where I don’t post for a week or so, but I always come back. I always find some other reason to come back and write. It’s become a part of my life, and things may change around again (you never know), but lawver.net will probably always be some sort of blog.\
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Thanks, blog, for holding all the nonsense, and for keeping an archive of me over the past six years. Thank you Blogger and thank you Movable Type.
There are dark chocolate M&Ms in my snack cupboard.
Holly did some filming and made a cool little video about Mashup Camp. You’ll only be able to see this entry if Dreamhost isn’t still having “issues”.
My mom asked if I was just blowing off steam when I blogged last week about the church. While that was part of it (writing is cathartic), I am also serious about this. I understand the church’s position on preaching out against gay marriage, but to enact a law? That is just wrong. Not only does it go against the idea of ‘Separation of Church and State,’ it also goes against the church’s 11th Article of Faith: We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may.\
After every change within the church, members have fallen away, unable to accept the change. This may be true of me now.
There was a fun discussion at Mashup Camp about Microformats for APIs. It started as a question about using microformats for documenting APIs, which I think was resolved fairly quickly by deciding to try it using XMDP. There’s a short example on the wiki now that I came up with. It’s not complete and doesn’t contain eveything I think should be in it (error codes, response format, etc), but its a start. (Christine Herron posted some notes as well)\
The discussion turned into a plea (from me) to start thinking about using microformats instead of coming up with new XML languages for APIs. There are already competing formats that replicate, in entirely new markup, structures available in HTML. Why not just use XHTML?\
For example, instead of the various formats returned by the different search engines (and I’ve used several by now), why not return this (inside an XHTML document)?
<code>
<ol start="1">
<li><a href="http://url">Document Title</a>
<p class="description">Description goes here</p>
<blockquote>Snippet goes here</blockquote>
</li>
</ol>
</code>
You could, of course, add more, but that’s basically what you get back in any search API. Why does it need to be any more complicated than that? For sites who want something simple, they wouldn’t even need to parse the result, just display it. They could even use javascript on the client side once it’s displayed to come up with the proper next/previous links.\
I think there’s a lot of room for discussion here, and I don’t think that we can reasonably replace all XML-based APIs with microformatted XHTML, but it’s a discussion worth having.
Christine Herron blogged about our Microformats and API’s panel at Mashup Camp and only got one little thing wrong… I don’t work for Yahoo, never have. I work for AOL and am quite happy here. Maybe I need to get a tattoo…
I’m at Mashup Camp (well, I was earlier, now I’m trying to figure out just how early I can go to bed and not wake up at 3 AM), and I’m not all here. I feel really bad, but I’m just exhausted. I skipped the afternoon sessions because I didn’t think I could contribute, and there’s only so much that caffeine will do for you.\
I’ll try to be “present” tomorrow. I had a really good time this morning, but faded quickly. I think my body is just tired of traveling. It’s tired of adjusting to time zones weird beds, bad chairs and ridiculous rental cars.\
I’m going to try to go to bed early tonight and hopefully I won’t wake up at 5AM again (I’ve gotten about four hours of sleep the past two nights). If I met you today, I’m really sorry if I gave you the impression that I’m not passionate about what I do, or not interested in what you’re doing. I am, on both accounts. Mashup Camp is full of people doing extremely cool things. I’m just too worn out to see them right this minute.
I’ve mentioned it before, but Episode 79 of Radio Clash is the best podcast ever. Tim’s put together a retrospective of early mashup/bootleg remixes, and it’s priceless. If you’ve ever been interested in what mashups are all about, this single podcast will turn you on and blow you away. Owner of a Lonely Butt will make you shake it and laugh it off all at the same time (and enya vs. prodigy is great too… I remember listening to that a long time ago, nice to have it back).\
Bravo, Mr. Bearcub, bravo.
The web page as service thing I talked about before is live now, and I’ve built my first module that uses it. If you go to my profile, you’ll see a little module in the left-hand column called shared buddies (if you want to see the source) that, if you’re logged in and have a profile, will grab the buddy gallery and see which buddies we share. Isn’t that cool?\
I’m looking for other ideas for modules to mash up people’s pages, so be on the lookout for other cool stuff. If you’ve got ideas, please post a comment!