Pie Palace

I’ve always liked the idea of open source bounties. I want open source coders to be able to make money on what they do, so I like the idea of users banding together to pay for a feature. The only drawback is that I’ve never actually seen a bounty collected. As an experiment, I’ve picked a worthy project, and I’ll be matching donations to it that (a) link back to this post, and (b) total no more than €60, (c) comment here. So hit Cofundos and take my money! (Yes, I’m avoiding typing. But this is a minipost, so it doesn’t count.) UPDATE: I’d like to make clear that I’m only offering €60 in total, and that’s matching on any single donation made after the original date of this post (April 14, 9:00am-ish, EST). I also added (c) above, so that I don’t have to check the cofundos site.

Phew. The upgrade worked. I’ve redirected the old feed URL to the new URL, and everything should be smurfy on Blogawa itself.

Of note:

• Comment links should now work (thanks MG).
• We’re now displaying 25 posts/page (thanks RG).
• Updates should occur much more often now. If I’m hitting your blog too often, let me know.
• If you’re an author, and you want your gravatar to show up, email erigami@piepalace.ca and let me know.

As far as I know, all of the feeds imported properly. Let me know if there’s anything amiss.

As alluded to last week, Blogawa is undergoing a reskinning. The new site will be pretty much the same in terms of functionality, except that it should look a bit nicer. The only major change will be the use of Gravatars to provide avatars for authors.

The URL for the RSS feed will change. I should be able to set up a forward to send your RSS reader to the appropriate place, but I may not. So if you find that your feed reader breaks, come back to blogawa and resubscribe.

Aaaany day now…

Blogawa is ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. So I’m redesigning the look. As part of the redesign, I’m putting together a wordmark that will be shown on the mast head. Here are some of the possibilities:

(The source HTML is available as well)

What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Constructive criticism?

Have you ever wished, fellow blogger, that you had a way to tell your readers when you comment on somebody else’s blog? I have. Whenever I comment on dubroy.com (for example), I’d like my blog to show that I did that.

I’ve put together the Elsewhere plugin to do that magic. When you comment on a blog with Elsewhere installed, that blog will ping the URL you entered in the ‘Website’ field on the comment form. If that website has Elsewhere installed, a link to your comment will be displayed in your sidebar.

Miniposts 0.6.8 is now out. It’s another fix release that removes post duplication issues, cleans up the preferences page, and fixes a couple of bugs with the smiley code that nataan contributed.

The big news is that the miniposts plugin is now hosted on WordPress autoinstallation site, meaning that installation and upgrades should be easy peasy. Since this is my first hosted plugin, I’ve taken a quickie screenshot, so I can remember when my plugin’s average rating was 5/5:

As much as I try to avoid it, I occasionally get sucked into gadget marketing. The latest toy that has caught my eye is the Agora Pro made by Kogan¹. It’s specs are a laundry list of what I want in a phone:

• it runs Android,
  
• it has an FM receiver,
  
• it talks wifi,
  
• and it has a touch screen.

To top it off, the Canadian price after shipping is less than $375.

Now, if it just had a “democratically depose Stephen Harper” button, I’d pre-order one right now.

1. Okay, it probably isn’t made by Kogan, but it’s being marketed by Kogan, which is close enough for my purposes. (back)

A Don Miller post has inspired my to try a new posting style. Each post is a series of short paragraphs that are grouped. Each grouping has a leading factual paragraph that lays out a set of arguments, and is followed by zero or more shorter paragraphs that have my reaction. The notable typographical difference is that paragraphs with a clear thesis sentence have that sentenced bolded. It’s the first writing style that seems to be developed for thar webbertubes. Thoughts? Comments?

One of the neat things about Facebook is its complete transparency. When a user comments on something, it’s displayed on their friends’ event list.

Sadly, the same can’t be said for blogs. If I comment on a blog, I’ll leave my email address and URL, but there’s no traceability on my blog. Readers of my blog won’t know that I found another post interesting enough to post a comment.

It would be nice if there was a trackback mechanism for comments. When I write a comment and submit my blog’s URL, I’d like my blog to be notified. After I okay the trackback, I’d like it to be available as a widget on my blog and (optionally) written to my blog’s general RSS feed.

If I was a wanker before, I’m now in wanker++ territory. I kind of like being able to post short blog-like messages on Identi.ca, without having to provide context. Then again, they’re so painfully self absorbed (and technical), that I doubt anyone would want to read them.