Grasshoppermind

Although you probably won’t see any differences to the content here, I have been making use of the W3c validation service to tidy up some of my recent postings. Cutting and pasting information can sometimes lead to bad HTML that won’t render correctly in some browsers. Using the validation service highlights those errors in the markup of your site that require attention. It’s good practice and helps to develop your HTML skills.

And one of them is not buying into Google’s IPO. Doh!

Google’s continued attempt at World Domination has seen the launch of yet another beta product, Google Talk. I’ve been testing this out with Jacko from Tuazon. You need a gmail address to try it out. I’ve got plenty of Gmail invites left so leave a comment if you want to give it a go as well.

Here are a few links for the “Grasshoppermind” in you.

Pholph’s Scrabble Generator

My Scrabble© Score is: 26.
What is your score? Get it here.

Sudoku has become an epidemic in England with pretty much everyone talking about it. National newspaper The Times credits a gentleman called Wayne Gould with the introduction of the game. If you want to try it out buy a copy of The Times, or if you’re cheap like me, check out the excellent Sudoku Generator

Finally, another piece of trivia is the ASCII Art Generator. Those of you old enough to remember a command line will know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t a clue, check out Wikipedia’s entry. For some reason I can only think of subversive uses for this such as circumventing email profanity filters etc.

                                    _   _
  __ _ _   _  __ _ _ __ __ _ _ __ | |_(_)_ __   ___
 / _` | | | |/ _` | '__/ _` | '_ \| __| | '_ \ / _ \
| (_| | |_| | (_| | | | (_| | | | | |_| | | | |  __/
 \__, |\__,_|\__,_|_|  \__,_|_| |_|\__|_|_| |_|\___|
    |_|                                             
	
 _   _     _        _
| |_| |__ (_)___   / \
| __| '_ \| / __| /  /
| |_| | | | \__ \/\_/
 \__|_| |_|_|___/\/   
	

Rev Dan Catt is adding features to his Geobloggers site quicker than I can test them! Check out the list of what’s new at his blog

More on this later, but for now go play with one of the fastest growing feature lists in geotagging.

Following on from Phillip Torrones excellent post detailing how to geotag and add Flickr images to Google Earth, I wanted to be able to tag anything to a specific location. After playing around with Tagzania I finally managed to figure out how to make this work.

Google Earth gives you the ability to create a Network Link. By pointing this at the KML output from Tagzania you can effectively map any item to specific locations on the Earth.
Once you’ve got it setup right you should see something like my example below (you may need to click on the image to see it full size).

So, how to setup your own?

• Step 1. Register with Tagzania
• Step 2. Login to your new account
• Step 3. Create your first Tagzania post

NOTE: use decimal lat and long if you’re adding the location manually, Google Earth seems to prefer decimal over traditional

Easy so far, things get a little tricky now.

• Step 4. Click on your username in Tagzania, you should now see some thing similar to this:

• Step 5. right click on the small orange KML button and open the file in Notepad
• Step 6. Copy the link in the KML file that has “kmlitems”

• Step 7. Now switch to Google Earth and Add a Network Link, paste in the link you copied in step 6.

• Step 8. there is no step 8, you’re done. You should now have your tagzania geotagged items displaying on Google Earth. (You may need to play about with Zoom etc.)

If there’s any errors in the above guide please let me know. Happy tagging.
Oh and if you want to see my Tagzania tags, cut and paste this link into Add Network Link in your Google Earth:

http://www.tagzania.com/kmlitems/user/grasshoppermind

Sheesh, migrating from MSN Spaces to here has been rather more difficult than I thought. Copy, edit, publish, copy, edit, publish, and so on. Good job I only started blogging on July 1st 2005!

At least now I’m on a decent platform I shouldn’t have to move again anyway…

Perhaps I’m being a little unkind about this survey referred to by the folks at ZDNet. Despite what seems to be common knowledge amongst those using the internet, these mistakes are repeated over and over again. For those still tempted to make things difficult for their customers I prescribe a course of Seth Godin, starting here

Quick response to security advisories from the developers of Wordpress. Secunia highlighted this flaw on 11th Aug 2005, Wordpress version 1.5.2 was released on 14th Aug 2005.

Weblogs Work quickly bashed out this article for managed weblogs. Whilst I agree that managed weblogs are going to work well for some businesses, they are using FUD to promote the idea. Personally I don’t think this is the best way to market anything.

OK, simpletags was so simple to add, I didn’t even try the other one. So seeing as how I had some unexpected time free I made a start on customising the look of the blog by hacking the CSS as well.

It looks like Rev Dan Catt has been busy since his return from holiday! Geobloggers looks different today. Dan’s site displays a google map of the earth. When you stop moving, all geotagged flickr photo’s within the map extents are returned in a floating search window. This is a great demonstration of a Map based interface, and I’m sure that there are more great ideas to come.

PS. Hate to see what your bandwidth charges are Dan!

tags: geotagging geotagged geobloggers grasshoppermind

I have found technorati to be extremely useful for categorising and indexing the content on my pages. But at the moment I have to hand code these at the bottom of each post. Tiresome.

So I will be trying out the bunny’s technorati tags and simple tags plugins for Wordpress. I’ll let you know how I get on.

tags: technorati grasshoppermind wordpress plugin

I registered www.kdrmedia.com with joker.com at a cost of $24 for two years registration. I have used Joker for a while now and I find them easy to use and their services are well priced.

www.crystaltech.com for hosting (standard shared hosting). $7.95 setup then $7.95 per month.

Wordpress selected as blogging platform following recommendation from my friends at Tuazon. Wordpress is free, simple to install and has a good community behind it.

My time spent researching and setting this up? All told probably about 10 hours so far. Now that I’ve been through it once I can save you some time if you’re interested.

Tags: wordpress grasshoppermind joker crystaltech blogging

I found ElfURL last week and at first I almost dismissed it as a “me too” clone of TinyURL. I’m so glad I read a little further into their blurb. This is a great little utility!
you can :
- Take a big URL and make it smaller.
- Create del.icio.us tags
- Create REL tags
- Each time a link is used it is counted and you can retrieve stats on that link via RSS.

I can think of several good uses for this.
Marketing: use an ElfURL signature on your email to link to your website/blog - use the Elf RSS feed to measure effectiveness of clickthroughs from your email.
Geotagging: create an ElfURL of any webpage article and Geotag it.

Any others spring to mind? Let me know.