I found this cool WordPress plugin to allow OpenID logins.
So now you can login to this blog and post comments using your LiveJournal account or any OpenID account. Which really doesn’t buy you anything, except that you’ll have less likelihood of being moderated. But still, I like the idea of OpenID and am glad to support it.
I’ve added Marc to the planet. He’s currently teaching English in Korea and hopefully has a lot to teach us as well.
While I was at it, I fixed the generated HTML code to not use invalid characters in HTML ids. It seems you can’t have any of ,/?=. I just replace them with colons for now. So as long as the component feeds are valid HTML 4.01 Transitional, we should validate nicely.
Today I whipped together Planet Mikix. It’s your one-stop shop for all the blogging my group of close friends sees fit to print.
It’s rather bare bones right now, using the default template and CSS. I may or may not make it sexier.
Thanks, Dave, for the head icons! More are in the pipeline. If you are on the Planet and want to choose the image from which your head is made, let Dave or me know.
I’ve moved mterry.name (and yourenotthinkingfourthdimensionally.com) to a new web host. My previous one was really getting on my nerves.
They’d frequently disable my shell access for no discernable reason, have downtime, or provide terrible customer support. So here I am.
My friend Swifty recommended Dreamhost, and so far they seem really good. The resources/price ratio is crazy, and my disk space and bandwidth go up over time. Plus their interface seems pretty featureful and slick.
I get a lot of blog comment spam along the lines of “Very good site!” or “I totally agree!”. The obligatory list of sites of ill repute usually follows.
Which is fine, whatever. It’s just depressing to think that my spam filter is learning to conflate compliments and attempts to sell me videos of Sue’s date with the football team.
So, I use FastMail for my email service, and the IMAP server for my account totally died yesterday. I guess I won’t have email for the weekend, so don’t bother sending me any tips on how to make my dick larger or where to buy cheap drugs. Wait until at least Monday.
Note to those coming to my site by searching the Internet for “ebony booty” or “super sexy:”
Yes and yes.
It appears that while I wasn’t looking, both MSN and Yahoo! got really good at parsing XML. They both already understand mterry.name better than Ask Jeeves, the previous contender for XML search king.
Google is still doing its odd half-grokking of XML. Sigh.
Google has historically had terrible support for my websites, which are served as application/xml. My pages would show up without a summary, an unrecognized file type, no cached version, and clicking on View as HTML
wouldn’t work.
Now, it seems Google is working on XML support a tad. Some of my pages show a summary and a working View as HTML
option. No official cache (though, the HTML-ized version is a cached copy) or file type recognition yet, which means they probably still don’t parse or follow my links.
So, you may have noticed that I have been linking to Wikipedia a lot lately. For example, I used to link to the imdb.com entry for a movie, but now I link to the Wikipedia article. I also tend to use Wikipedia articles over something’s official site. I do prefer Wikipedia’s stable URLs and unbiased articles, but I am concerned that it is too much of a good thing.
A common ideal for the Internet is a vast interconnection of peers providing information. But Wikipedia is just going to keep growing, amassing more and more of the knowledge the Internet has to offer. It will obsolete vast tracts of the web, putting smaller information peddlers out of a job. It ruins the point of all this decentralization we’ve spent over a decade trying to establish.
This is why Wikipedia must be stopped. But since it is an open project staffed by volunteers, we cannot simply destroy the entity itself; we must first crush the volunteers’ wills. I suggest updating articles with valuable additions and impeccable corrections, to fool the volunteers into thinking that they are no longer needed. Once they all quit, feeling useless, we will have won! Take that, petty dream of a freely-available knowledge base!