Posts by matt

I was sharing this technique with participants in a blogging seminar I’m teaching in this week*, and I thought y’all might find it interesting.

This is a trick for making link-blogging even slicker than posting to your blog from Del.icio.us. Even if you’re not interested in link-blogging, some of the steps might be useful from an info-management perspective.

1. Enter the 21st Century and install Firefox 3. Revel in the brilliance of the AwesomeBar, which makes storing and pulling up bookmarks stupidly easy.

2. Install the glorious Foxmarks. Enjoy seamless access to your bookmarks and passwords from any of your Firefox-enabled computers, complete with robust controls over which computers can access what. Feel free to import your Del.icio.us bookmarks. You won’t be needing that service anymore (unless you require feeds for each of your tags). Mwa ha ha.

3. I’ve also installed Ex Bookmark Properties, which enables you to edit a bookmark’s description from Firefox 3’s default bookmark properties dialog.

4. Use Foxmarks to share as many bookmark folders as you desire.

5. Pipe the feeds from any shared folders into WordPress using the FeedWordpress plugin.

Done. Linkblogging is now as easy as bookmarking in Firefox. Links will post to your blog after Foxmarks syncs your bookmarks and FeedWordpress fetches the Foxmarks folder.

I used this technique to make a quick-n-dirty linkblog for the seminar.

* Yes, I realize I’m the least prolific blogger in the blogosphere, and the only reason I can even cling to that title is that I’ve got excellent blogmates. Never mind any of that. I intend to more than make up for my infrequency by employing this trick to great effect once the WordPress switchover is complete.

I just discovered this site, a collection of expositions of the fugues in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Some of Tim Smith’s writings are pretty opaque to those of us who aren’t trained in music, but many of his comments are accessible enough. (“If you think of the subject as a dancer, then the fugal process is one of finding a suitable partner. But what if the dancer has the ability to be its own partner? Well that is stretto. And stretto is what the C Major fugue is all about.”)

And the visualizations help, although I wish they were done in Flash instead of Shockwave. But hey, it was made in 2002.

Found on Ask MetaFilter: “When asked for dessert recommendations, my friend

The NYT’s annual booklist is out, in case you missed it.

(BTW, Rex’s annual list of lists is also in process.)

If you want to make your entire house smell amazing for two hours, make this. Exactly as the recipe says. It’s brilliant.

Note: The jalapenos seem like a lot at first. Just go with it. I was also tempted to put in a little more water, but I’m happy I didn’t. The recipe is perfect. Trust the recipe.

Also: My other contribution to Thanksgiving dinner is creamy potatoes au gratin. I diced the onions like a few of the other reviewers did, sprinkled over a dusting of garlic salt-and-pepper seasoning, and topped the whole with bread crumbs and a handful of shredded cheese before putting it into the oven.

I’ve got two fun US transit infrastructure data visualizations for you.

(Beat.)

OK, everyone that’s still here, check this out: a highway system map done in the style of a subway system map (from mathowie) | a hypothetical high-speed rail map with transit time estimates.

Speaking of Kevin Kelly, I had basically taken for granted that one of us had already posted his call for more visions of the near future, given our recent spate of near-futurism. It appears no one had. Well, that’s fixed.

Cake in a mug is the new omelette in a bag.

These simulated favelas created by Spanish artist Dionisio Gonzalez are magnificent. The simulations echo the ad hoc architecture of the shantytowns of Sao Paulo. As well as the pure imaginative chaos they evoke, I like that they come across as thoughtful without seeming either to exploit or glorify the real favelas.

(Metafilterrific.)

After the ABC News site auto-reloaded the page three times while I was trying to watch an 18-minute segment from This Week, I went hunting for a way to make Firefox prevent this. Fortunately, it’s wonderfully easy. Go to about:config, bypass the warning message, and look for “accessibility:blockautorefresh.” By default, this is set to false. Set it to true, and Firefox will prompt you for approval whenever a site tries to refresh itself.

If you’re wondering why so many sites auto-refresh these days, it’s basically a cheap and easy way to inflate our pageview counts. What we tell you, of course, is that we want to make sure that if you keep the site open in a tab while you click away, we want to make sure you see the freshest content when you click back. I strongly suspect if that were really our primary motive, we’d find a way to update our pages with AJAX, thereby preventing a severely annoying disruption of the site experience.