Blog before you Think!

I'm in Italy for three weeks soon, so my theme is getting a little vacation too.


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del.icio.us just got another feature for digging into the crates and discovering interesting links: recommendations.



On your page for any tag (with 10 or more bookmarks associated with) there is a well hidden link to recommended taggers and URLs you might be interested in.



The pages for URLs also provide a show/hide related URLs link.


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Chris Applegate came up with a smart way of writing his notes for a presentation he gave:

Firstly, I reduce the notes to stubby one or two-line sentences, and get rid of punctuation and capitalisation to discourage me from treating them like sentences to be read out monotonously. Then (and this is the dinky part), I size the words and phrases according to how important they are;

With all those tag clouds and folksonomic zeitgeists around, which are rewiring our cognitive patterns, this might be a highly effective technique.


[creativity] [infoeconomy] [metatagging] - trackback

Vendors of old fashioned digital PDAs probably are scratching their heads due to a dramatic decrease of sales after 3/11/2004 (the day Merlin Mann introduced the Hipster PDA). You know the story of the analog paradigm shift thereafter (and vendors of index cards give themselves high fives, probably without knowing why).

I'm currently consolidating my bookmarks, and Hipster PDA hacks made quite a long and impressive list (which is far from being exhaustive, and if you've been hanging around at 43 Folders or scanning del.icio.us, Flickr, or Technorati, you probably know them all):



The Hipster Mini works just like the regular Hipster PDA, but instead of using index cards, it uses blank business cards (best kept in elegant cases)


The Hipster Tablet PC takes a different approach: bigger and cheaper,



and so does Jason Kottke,



but undisputed champion in this category is Clark Venable's Palmster PDA



Christian Eriksson's Zipster and Fliptop Hipster PDA reuses ZIP cases and DuraClip® Clear Front Vinyl Report Covers


The Guest Check PDA takes a soft approach.


Obvious Diversion upgrade the Hipster PDA with a Clock.



Leo Faoro punches holes and binds the cards with loose-leaf rings,



Doug Giuliana binds the cards and protects them with pieces of sailcloth,


and J Wynia gives a step by step tutorial for piercing and punching HPDAs here. He also created a full fledged index cards based grocery process.



Tammy Cravit developed a Portable Workspace based on post-its,



and David Meadows' Duckster PDA is a DIY reinterpretation for teachers.


Javier Cabrera has many more Hipster PDA models and various pimps.



Merlin even spotted an ancestor as used by Thomas Jefferson: Ye Olde Hipster.


Good readings:
Organizing Your Hipster PDA - Merlin's authorative follow up
The Hipster PDA and various Hipster PDA Hacks at the 43F Wiki
Interesting implementation of GTD using Moleskines - Moleskines and index cards avant la lettre at the GTD forum
The Personal Analog Device at the c2 Wiki takes a geek peek
“Paper? Ain’t that extinct?” from Douglas Johnston (who also is the dad of the most lovely D*I*Y Planner, but templates for the Hipster PDA would fill another list)
Even Wired and the Washington Post were impressed.


[hipsterpda] [hack] [productivity] - trackback

Peter Cooper's FeedDigest launched about two weeks ago, and it's a nifty little app.

At a glance, Feed Digest frees the feeds you are subscribed to (or your own) from your feedreader and makes them mix-, filter-, and republishable any way you want.

Check the frontpage for a list of the major use cases, I'll just take a look at the publishing features:



The basic unit is no longer a feed, but a digest (which is composed of one or more feed sources). The free account gives you 5 digests composable of 3 feed sources each and will display up to 15 items, and if you are the real data junkie you can upgrade to up to 150 digests composed of up to 100 sources (see the picture above).

Each digest is highly configurable (sort by date, title, or randomized; asceding or descending; how many items you want have displayed; encoding; filter by keywords matched; display only live items (if they still are in the source feed); remove duplicates or not),

and (and this is where FeedDigest really shines): each digest has various output formats for most (re)publishing needs:

* JavaScript
* RSS/Atom
* WML
* and HTML (you can create customized templates here) which you can publish stand-alone or include via PHP or however.


[feeddigest] [webapps] [atom] [rss] [rails] - trackback

Apropos generators (forget my previous posting) - The Generator Blog is a blog dedicated to software that creates software. Software to play around and have fun with. - more than 400 generators are (currently) listed.


[generator] [blog] - trackback

Just stumbled upon Kevan Davis' The Surrealist, a site full of advanced text juggling experiments.

What's Your Spammer Name? - (mine is Scops J. Lockian)

The Advertising Slogan Generator - (got the title for this entry there)

The Infinite Teen Slang Dictionary

banana
n. LSD without school.
All your banana are belong to us, Shana.

and highly recommended The Prior-Art-O-Matic

Design #2537609117
It's a chainsaw that runs on methane and looks bigger than it really is.

[generator] [webapps] - trackback

There are systems, and if these systems reach a critical mass or a certain degree of differentiation, second order systems evolve, which describe these systems. (The same goes for these second order systems).

supr.c.ilio.us is a second order tagging site (the World's First Social Social Tagging Site Tagging Site™), which is a specialized service for tagging and keeping track of all those tagging sites which emerged during the last year or so.

There is one major flaw in the user interface: it's pretty hard to keep track of the sites you tagged yourself. The URL for displaying a users site is http://supr.c.ilio.us/userdocs/list_for_user/[userid] (userid being the number assigned to you by the system, not your username - so you have to find out your id yourself).

But it has a built-in rating system (number of votes for a site and buzzword compliance), and you can hook up with other meta-taggers.


[webapps] [tagging] [metatagging] - trackback

This was just a matter of time: a tag-aware dating service - consumating (Hot nerdy girls and indie rock boys! With glasses!)

Members can assign tags (characteristics) to themselves or to others, can write little essays about themselves or statements about others, and you can browse all members by tags of course. The user interface is quite nice, actually.


[dating] [tagging] [webapps] - trackback

Another tip for Blogger bloggers: did you know that you can backup your entire blog?

Regretably, it's no one-click backup of your blog, but a workaround for grabbing all your posts in a single file is documented in the Advanced Use section of the Blogger Help.

The whole procedure takes about 10 minutes (you basically have to backup your template, replace it with a another one, change a few settings, republish your blog, save the backup-release of your blog to your disk, restore the original settings and your original template, and republish again), but it's well worth the effort.

Supplementary to the instructions given, you could set Enable float alignment in Settings | Formatting to No (otherwise you get <div>'s spread all over your backup file).


[blogger] [backup] [minitip] - trackback

I added a add to del.icio.us link at the bottom of the posts here for convenient (self-) bookmarking pleasure.

del.icio.us expects something like http://del.icio.us/post?url=[the url]&title=[significant title], so if you run a Blogger blog, adding this snippet to your template will do the trick:

<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>&title=<$BlogTitle$>: <$BlogItemTitle$>">add to del.icio.us</a>


[blogger] [delicious] [minitip] - trackback

For fans of tag clouds who need a higher level of granularity: Analys.icio.us.

This tool takes a string or an URL and generates a beautiful map of the used words (stop words can be removed):




[webapps] [maps] - trackback

Seems like del.icio.us has a new feature: Linkrolls, which will display your latest del.icio.us bookmarks as part of your blog or website (you just need to add a tiny snippet of code).

You can style the result however you want via CSS, and you can adjust a few parameters:




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[1]

[2]

[1] Interview with David Thomas (distinguished developer, software process thinker extraordinaire, and (co-)author of The Pragmatic Programmer) at the ServerSide.

[2] Talk with Dego (drum and bass genius) at the Red Bull Music Academy.

Both have more in common than one might initially expect. I'm too lazy to spoil you the fun of finding out what, but listening to David Thomas really was a pleasure (if you just go for the raisins pick the parts about building ones knowledge portfolio).


[music] [development] [productivity] - trackback

btw, if you are like me tearing out your hair in despair, because you can't assign an owner to this damn fish (see my previous entry), you might enjoy switching positions and become a psychiatrist for abused cuddly toys:


this is Lilo (showing symptoms of double bind)

(via jay is)


[games] [misc] - trackback

Whose Fish?

There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a different brand of cigar and keep a different pet, one of which is a Walleye Pike.

There are 15 hints given (some of them really suspend reality - the Dane drinks tea??), and only estimated 121,348,731 people will be able to solve the puzzle.


[games] [misc] - trackback

Jason Fried from 37signals proposed a productivity tip yesterday: Throw everything on your desk in a box (and just take out what you really really need, and throw out the remaining items in the box after 30 days).

But how would eliminating all unused clutter affect the boredom even the most challenging job yields every once in a while? Without useless stuff or toys to play with we would be devastated!

So my tip is to keep everything (well seperated and containerized!). Once boredom strikes you can stimulate your creativity or spike your energy level by creating small works of art reusing the things you would have tossed otherwise.






[clutter] [productivity] [hack] - trackback

One of the shortcomings of the Hipster PDA is the vulnerability of your data, if you lose your Hipster (or parts thereof). Even if your handwriting is terrible, people still might be able to decipher your next actioned groceries or business ideas.



Handywrite is a beautiful (and open sourced) handwriting system which will give you pretty good protection of your data from spying eyes. You only write what you hear using the simplest possible strokes. Handywrite even offers data compression, if you apply the built-in abbreviating principles.


[hipsterpda] [productivity] [hack] - trackback