I have been playing with the daily post setting on del.icio.us and tonight I’ll find out if it is going to work…

Basically, the daily post spits out a post to your blog containing all the sites I linked to on del.icio.us that day, at a set time. You can read up on how to configure it to work with WordPress on the support forum. The url to visit to create this for your own blog is http://del.icio.us/settings/yourdel.icio.ususername/daily.

So, check here after 22:00 GMT to see if mine has worked – it will save me a job creating link blog posts, anyway…

• Listable is a Web 2.0 thing for making tagged community lists. Hmm. They do have a rather nice list of Web 2.0 sites though.
• Dave Winer notices how slowly Gmail is recently. It’s a nightmare – think the Google Talk integration must be clogging things up. Strangely (or, actually, not) things are much quicker in FireFox.

That’s it for today. Pathetic! Must try harder.

I have needed a simple wiki solution for a little problem of mine, and I have found just what I was after.

I just needed a page or two that could be easily edited for the handful of people who are attending the Palimpsest Big Day Out in May – usually this stuff is handled on the forums, but this can be a nightmare when you are hunting through pages of messages. Installing a whole wiki on my webspace would be overkill, so I needed a hosted solution.

Steve Rubel yesterday pointed to StikiPad which I have a go, and it was ok, but the free version only allows for 5 revisions! Rubbish.

In the end I found PBwiki through Google. And it is perfect. Simple to set up, a simple method of user authentication, revision histories and everything else you might need. OK, so the free version has adverts and certain limitations about the number of pages you can have, but it is perfect for almost any simple wiki needs.

This is the strangest bit of comment spam I think I have ever got:

You are no way on the 300th page of Google – in fact, your on the first and number 2 for my search “successful blogging” – your last one made me laugh because I just started this whole blogging thing and I keep trying to convince myself that I don’t care if no one reads it – but sadly, I do care – thank you for your post 🙂

It linked back to a site with ‘blog’ in the URL but I didn’t fancy clicking it…

after a particularly nasty bout of the winter vomit flu, which has obviously spread from the West Midlands to the Welsh borders.

The few things I have read on the web recently have been posted to del.icio.us. I’ll try and carry on as normal from today.

• How to Make Wikipedia better
• Deliciousing – Scoble wonders how to use del.icio.us best. I had a think. Why not post anything you find interesting to del.icio.us, then later on, review them and post the best of the bunch on your blog? I might try this out tomorrow.
• Microsoft backs off on blog censorship
• Introduction to RSS
• By popular demand, Parsnip now has a forum.

Pinch, punch, first of the month.

• Seamonkey released
• The one that got away – Philip Cowley on Blair’s defeats last night. Mr Cowley was my tutor at university in Hull.
• How to Manage Your Draft Blog Posts
• Council mumbles Microsoft benefits
• GeoURL – websites near me
• £9m Technology Breakthrough – more government IT waste

WordPress Development Blog › 2.0.1 Release

Summary of changes:

• You can now specify an upload directory, and whether to use date-based storage or not.
• Caching has been fixed under certain PHP enviroments.
• Permalinks have been fixed for weird enviroments as well.
• XML-RPC uploading works.
• Compatibility with older versions of PHP.
• Several WYSIWYG fixes and cleanups.
• Imports now use much less memory.
• Now works with MySQL 5.0 in strict mode.

Ah, payday at last. December’s pay came before Christmas – this has been one hell of a long month.

• Blogs versus the NY Times in Google
• Graham Parsnip relaunched in blog form
• Jody Digger has started blogging recently
• The winds of change are blowing – the interesting Office Weblog is moving
• Home Page Goals
• Peter Dawson’s Naked Conversations Project
• Suprglu is quite interesting. It allows you to cobble together all of your RSS generating online content: del.icio.us, flickr, blogs, etc etc. Here’s mine.

I have now converted this site’s permalinks to a human readable format. This was one of those things I had thought would be really hard, so I kept putting it off. However, in WordPress 2 it’s really easy!

Just go to the Options tab and choose the Permalinks subtab. There are a list of common options – I chose the Date and Name based one. Then hit Update Permalink structure and it saves and produces a text box on the screen with some code in it. This needs to be copied into a file called .htaccess which should be in your blog’s root folder. You may have to create this file. Save that, and you are away!

Don’t worry about links to your posts that exist which point to the old numeric style URLs – these still work!

FeedDemon 2 has a cool little icon on each post you read to link to it in your del.icio.us archive. I’ve actually started to use this now for a few things. Here is the RSS feed, if you are interested.

It would be nice to have a ‘blog this’ icon too. Currently it’s either going through the menus or hitting ctrl-shift-b.

Robert Scoble has an old blog hosted at UserLand, or rather had. It’s now gone.

Oh, UserLand, where did my old blogs go?

Yikes, the first couple of years of my blog are gone. UserLand took down those blogs. I don’t remember getting an email warning me about that, but I might have (junk filters catch a lot of that stuff).

My old site used to be at http://scobleizer.manilasites.com and the stuff is just gone.

Lots of old blogs used to be stored there. That’s a lot of history that’s gone. Hopefully I can get it back, I just sent them email.

This is a serious problem, I guess. At least by hosting your blog yourself, you know what’s happening to it. People who write their blog posts offline with an editor can save backup copies on their own machine.

I ought to look into backing up this blog, and the others I host. Hmmm – I guess this is done by just backing up the MySQL database. I wonder if there is a way to save a flat HTML file of the site, with all the content in it?

• Ban Comic Sans
• grou.ps might be interesting, but is suffering from being dug at the moment.
• Google’s Anti-Spyware Project
• Flickr provides an RSS feed for comments on your photos – useful enough, as it means you don’t have to log in everytime to check for comments, but it also gives a little thumbnail of the photo being comments on – excellent!
• Google Removes Its Help Entry on Censorship

Analyst claims so: “We believe that Google is in the midst of creating its own iTunes competitor, which we’ve dubbed ‘Google Tunes. We think this is a logical step, now that the nascent Google Video product has been introduced.”

read more | digg story

Hmmm. Does anyone know of a non-evil, non-megalomaniac search engine I could use?

This is my first post from digg, and it seems pretty cool. digg puts the links (the ones inside the quote) right at the bottom of a post, but I think I prefer them inside the quote, certainly above my comments, which means an edit. Still, I have to do that anyway to add in the categories, and the real time saved is in copying and pasting the links.

This is going to mean I will hardly write any original posts in the WordPress editor at all! When I am at home I tend to use the Performancing Firefox extension for writing posts, when browsing with FeedDemon I use BlogJet. Both these products automatically quote text and links for me, speeding up the process a good deal.

In fact, while I am at it, something that annoys me about the editor in WordPress 2 – when I select text and hit the link button to make that text a hyperlink, it doesn’t automatically add in the http:// bit for me, which was a real time saver in previous versions.

Also, it would be good if you could define a set list of links, which if that word was used in a post it automatically parses it into a hyperlink. You could make is case dependent, so camel-casing would prevent many mix-ups. So, everytime I typed WordPress, on publishing the post, that word was made to link back to wordpress.org everytime, meaning I don’t have to bother. That would be cool.

Plenty going on this morning – Today kept my attention for the whole 2 hour journey…

Blair apology to Soham parents

Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair has apologised to the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman for comments he made about the Soham murders.

Sir Ian Blair told the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) on Thursday that “almost nobody” could understand why it had become such a big story.

He called the media institutionally racist in its coverage of murders.

If Ian Blair hadn’t already convinced us all that he was a complete nitwit with his sophistry immediately after the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, he certainly has now. To infer that race plays any part in the hysterical media coverage over the Soham murders is absurd: Blair admitted himself that the coverage of the Damilola Taylor murder was an exception to his theory. He asked why the “murders of white lawyer Tom ap Rhys Pryce and Asian builders’ merchant Balbir Matharu” didn’t received a similar level of publicity that the Soham ones did. The answer to this is so obvious I can’t be bothered to type this.

The shame is that Blair has a point, only he is too dim-witted to make it properly. The hysteria that engulfs the media after a tragedy like that which took place in Soham should be moderated in some way, but only because it is distastful, irrelevant and unhelpful. Not because it is in some way racially motivated, which it clearly isn’t.

Hughes to launch leadership bid

Simon Hughes is to formally launch his campaign for the Liberal Democrat leadership, a day after admitting he was “misleading” about his sexuality.

Good. To be honest, I don’t think he can, or should, be criticised for being ‘misleading’. I think many commentators have been too harsh on him, and treating the issue far too frivolously. I would imagine that coming out is not an easy thing to do, no matter what one’s personal beliefs on the matter, and, given that Hughes has had heterosexual relationships as well, there is clear evidence he had some sort of inner turmoil on the issue. That he feels the need to make statements about issues such as this shows that the sad state of affairs the media is still in in this country. Who cares, really?

The only way this could be of any significance would be if it somehow emerged that Hughes played a more active role in the shameful campaign for his election in the infamous Bermondsey by-election, the conduct of which he has apologised for.

Israel rules out talks with Hamas

Israeli interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ruled out any talks with “an armed terror organisation that calls for Israel’s destruction”.

International mediators have urged Hamas to renounce violence, as efforts begin to form a new government.

Near-complete results gave Hamas 76 of the 132 seats in parliament.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas – who also heads the ruling Fatah party – has said he remains committed to a peaceful settlement.

This seems a fairly reasonable line for Israel to take, all things considered. Hamas’ election raises so many interesting issues: the rise of Islamists and their popularity with the Middle Eastern public; the fact that they are the first terrorist organisation to jump straight into power by passing most of the democratic ‘pyramid’ (to use a kind of footballing analogy); their commitment to a referendum to introduce sharia law.

It’s pretty frightening though too. Let’s hope that Hamas can be pulled towards the centre ground as Ariel Sharon found himself.

• GPLv4 – just about funny, but even for geek hunour it’s borderline
• Barwick plans England coach talks – my choice: Guus Hiddinck. The thought that the likes of Curbishley, Allardyce or – God help us – Steve McClaren might get the job because of their Englishness is absured. Stuart Pearce maybe, but he needs more time.
• Hamas: what happens next?
• Performancing for Firefox Handbook
• Boris Johnson: Assisted suicide is problematic, but better than months of agony: I can see all the disadvantages, and if the law were to be changed, then it would need careful review, to make sure that people were not coming under any pressure whatever to take their lives. But I think it might be better than seeing increasing numbers of British people forced to take their lives in a foreign country
• Lennon tipped for Foxes post
  

Couple of interesting points from MJR:

Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images

Just tried to leave a comment on Sasquach wears a yellow hat at blogger.com – it has one of those annoying “type the letters from the distorted image” screens (which don’t work well [w3c]). Even when I switch images on, I can’t get the letters accepted. I don’t know if it’s a problem with the site or my eyes, but it’s really annoying.

Quite right! Though what is worse is blogger blogs that will only let you comment if you register with blogger. That really is just rubbish.

Google Problems: China; and World Economic Forum TV

25 Jan 2006: google is taking a lot of heat online for agreeing to Chinese government content requests. I won’t criticise the actual decision too much, because it’s typical corporation behaviour: follow the money, like the rest of the World Economic Forum. If you’re buying Chinese products just because they’re cheaper, you’re part of the reason they have the money and part of the reason that google is following them – corporations are seldom held accountable. If you don’t like that, maybe you should Boycott Made In China as well as google?

I think most people’s problem is that it is such hypocritical behaviour – MSN and Yahoo! have had this sort of thing in place with China for ages, and no one batted an eyelid – but perhaps many people – naively – expected better from Google. At least Bill Gates never pretended to be anything other than evil… And fine, it is typical corporation behaviour. But isn’t it nice that at least once people kick up a stink over it?

• The Beast – 50 most loathsome Americans, 2005 edition
• Secret life of Matisse wins Whitbread prize