This post is now out of date. Please see here for more recent information on the site layout and subscription information.

I just moved the RSS Subscription box around on the main page again, putting it closer to the top on the left, and adding fancy orange RSS icons. Yay for figuring out how to modify the code for widgets! (I have a love-hate relationship with the WordPress widget system; don’t even get me started.)

Anyway, I’ve been using Tumblr for a while now to post videos, pictures, quotes and other random stuff I find around on the web that I don’t really want to bother writing a whole post about, but want to share. I tried for a few weeks to redo my whole layout to be able to incorporate a sort of Tumblr-esque sidebar or section within WordPress (so that both regular posts and tumblelog posts would show up in the same RSS feed), but gave up due to my near-complete lack of php knowledge. I have had the RSS feed from Tumblr showing in the sidebar, though. Similarly, I’m getting more into Twitter lately, now that I’ve got my phone set up with it. Twitters show up in my sidebar too, but again with the lack of integration with this blog.

So here’s the current compromise. With the help of FeedJumbler and FeedBurner, I have created individual and combined feeds for these three areas of my online life. You can:

• Subscribe to the blog only. This will get you all the entries you see on this page, as well as the short asides on the top right.
• Subscribe to the tumbleblog only. This will get you everything on this Tumblr page.
• Subscribe to the Twitter feed only. This will get you everything on this Twitter page.
• Subscribe to the blog and the tumblelog. Then you get all the entries here as well as the video and photo posts on Tumblr.
• Subscribe to all three. Then you get it all.
• There is another option, not for the faint of heart. You could subscribe to my Friendfeed, which includes not only the three things above, but also my Flickr feed (photos I post), my del.icio.us bookmarks, and my last.fm listening log, my GoogleReader shared items, and other things. So if you’re trying to stalk me, here ya go.

edited 3/29/08 to include the FriendFeed option

I’m having it up to here with networking right now. Not the interpersonal kind of networking that gets you jobs and things, though I have issues with that as well; the computer kind.

My laptop has a wireless connection to the internet via the cable modems scattered throughout the apartment complex. I can connect my Xbox360 (yes, I bought one) to my laptop via an ethernet cable, which works fine for sharing media between the two (i.e., I can play songs and stuff from my computer through the Xbox360 and thus through my stereo system). It seems to me that I should thus be able to get to the internet from the Xbox360 to take advantage of the Xbox Live stuff, right? Wrong. I figured maybe I had to tell my laptop to share the internet connection, so I went into network connections and did that, but I get an error message saying that there’s an IP address conflict.

I’ve tried Googling the error message, and everything I get has to do with messing with the router. But I don’t HAVE a router. I don’t have a working modem. (I’m not leeching, if that’s what you’re thinking; the apartment complex pays for everyone’s internet, so it doesn’t matter who connects to which modem throughout the complex.) So I can’t do that.

Really bringing this to a head was my desire to poke around on the Xbox website, but they won’t even let me IN unless I sign in with my gamertag. Problem being that I signed up for Xbox Live about two and a half years ago, and apparently that was before the one time my credit card went missing and I got a new one, so it won’t recognize that I’m me (because you have to give the last four digits to identify yourself when you forget your password, which I also did). Helpfully, it says that I can find out the information I used to sign up by signing into Xbox Live on my console. Which I CAN’T DO, because I can’t get it to connect to the internet.

So, someone who knows more about networking than I do, is there any way to fix this in my current setup? Or do I need to try AGAIN to get Time Warner to fix my modem (something I have tried to do unsuccessfully, and it was an incredibly painful phone call just trying to get someone who knew what the hell they were talking about, and even then, as afore mentioned, it was unsuccessful).

In Layer Tennis (aka Photoshop Tennis, though Photoshop isn’t the only program used), designers/illustrators take turns building on each others’ graphic work, and whoever remixes and builds on the previous design with the most creativity is declared the winner. I’ve seen contests like this before, but Coudal Partners has got one of the best examples of it going on. Each match is played on Friday afternoon at 2pm CST, and each designer has fifteen minutes to complete their version before sending it back to the other designer. They’re doing it live, so every fifteen minutes, a new volley is posted with a journalist’s commentary. At least, I think that’s the way it works. I didn’t actually hear about this until a couple of days ago, so I missed the first round, which played last Friday. (You can see that one here, with some very fine work indeed.)

Round two goes live at 2pm CST tomorrow, so check it out if you can. (Or look at it later.) I wish I could do stuff like this, and in fifteen minutes, no less! Incredible.

I was doing some work yesterday, and realized how much more painful it would’ve been without various extensions in Firefox. So I thought I’d eulogize some of my favorites.

Tab Mix Plus – Gives you near-complete control over how tabs function. Whenever I use a Firefox installation that doesn’t have Tab Mix Plus, or that has it set up significantly different from mine, it drives me insane. I can’t even imagine not using it.

Del.icio.us Bookmarks – This does two things. First, it adds a “tag” button in your toolbar which lets you quickly bookmark any page on del.icio.us. Second, it replaces Firefox’s default bookmarks with your del.icio.us bookmarks, so now when you bring up the bookmark sidebar, you can browse or search your del.icio.us bookmarks right there. I’ve used del.icio.us for a long time, but sporadically, so I’d never be sure if I bookmarked something there or not. Now it’s the hub of everything I’ve ever looked at that I think I might want to ever look at again.

Picnik Image Editor – Picnik is a great little photo-editing site which can do all the basic stuff–resizing, cropping, color balancing, brightening, and even several effects like sharpen, blur, sepia, black and white, etc. It’s lovely for doing basic things to photos without having to open Photoshop (and it imports from and exports to both Picasa Web Photos and Flickr). With the extension, you can take any picture off a webpage, or even the entire page, directly into Picnic and edit it. I needed a screenshot of a webpage one time to send to technical support–no problem. I often grab photos from Amazon.com, but they have an annoying white border–no problem; I can fix it before I even download the photo.

Split Browser – This gives you the ability to split your browser into various panes, in any configuration. It’s indispensable for copying non-cut-and-pastable information from one site to another, or for keeping instructions visible at the same time as you’re carrying them out in another tab. My fingers used to go numb from Shift-Tabbing back and forth between tabs, but no more.

Text Link – This is an example of how the simplest little thing can be such an improvement. Text Link recognizes URLs on webpages even if they aren’t marked up as links, and when you double-click on them, it opens them as if they were marked up as links. Without it, you had to copy the link, paste it in the address bar and hit enter (or click go). Which doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but even a little bit of improved ease of use goes a long way.

And a few I love, but I’m not sure I couldn’t live without them

Zotero – Zotero is a research tool which captures citations from all sorts of sources (being a browser-based tool, it’s particularly good at internet sources and electronic journals and things, which a lot of other bibliographic citation tools are not), but in addition to being a citation manager, it also lets you make notes on the various citations and tag and categorize everything–plus, full text search. The only downside is that it does suck a lot of memory; I sometimes wish it had a standalone client for managing citations and notes, with the same level of browser integration for pulling citations from the web. I’m still looking for my perfect combination citation manager/note taking application–if anyone has suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them.

AdBlock Plus – I struggle with this one, actually. It blocks ads on pages, which is nice from my point of view, but not really very nice from the advertiser’s or the website’s point of view, who depend on ad revenue to keep running–and, to keep it free for me. So, yeah. On the other hand, every time I turn it off for a while, I end up turning it back on to keep my eyes from bleeding at those brightly-colored flashing ads that so many websites insist on using.

Context Search – With this installed, right-clicking on any term on a page will let you search for the term in any of your pre-defined search engines. Like Text Link, this is something that could be done with a few more keystrokes or mouseclicks anyway, but if you can make it easier and faster, why not?

Firebug – If I ever do any serious web development, this will likely move into the “can’t live without” category. It displays all the code on a give page and points out errors, etc. I tend to use it now rather than “view source,” because of the way it separates out all the elements so you can easily see them (plus, when you mouse-over the element in the firebug console, it highlights the relevant part of the page, making it ridiculously easy to tell what does what).

Fullerscreen – Hides everything except the actual window you’re looking at–toolbars, menu bar, even the taskbar. If you need the browser toolbars, you can mouse to the top or bottom to make them pop back out. This is great if you have a lot of toolbars (like the bookmark toolbar, and the StumbleUpon toolbar, and the Yahoo toolbar, and the Google toolbar), or lots of tabs open in layers. Sometimes it’s nice to just see the page you’re looking at and nothing else, and have to do less scrolling.

StumbleUpon – Speaking of StumbleUpon. I’m not really a part of the StumbleUpon community, but I do find the toolbar a really interesting way to find new sites. It’s one of the first places I go when I get bored of the internet I know and want to find some places I haven’t found yet. Some of my favorite videos and humor sites I’ve found this way.

So how do y’all have your Firefox tricked out? If you don’t use Firefox, I’m…sorry. Deeply.

I wish that book resources on the internet were as easy to find as film and music resources. Now, maybe I’m just better at looking for film and music information than book information, but I find it odd that for each type of book-related website I’d like to find, I can name an exact equivalent for the film world. For a long time I’ve wished that there were a book database as extensive and dominant as IMDb is for films (there are some vying in the area, like Internet Book List, Internet Book Database and a few others, but most of them are gearing more and more to social networking and message boards, it seems, than to straight information–compare to IMDb, which has a message board, but it’s peripheral). I gave up on that.

Now I just want a site that does for books what Cinematical does for movies–news about upcoming books, rumors, reviews, tidbits about what bigwigs in the blogosphere and media are talking about, that sort of thing. I found a lot of litblogs by poking around various blogrolls, but they all seem to be either personal/review sites (some of which look very good, don’t get me wrong–just not what I’m looking for) or too closely tied to either a specific publisher or a specific genre of book. Now in this case it may just be that there isn’t much information about books before they come out as there is about movies, simply because writing tend to involve only one person rather than cast, crew, studio, and who know who all else–you don’t have “oh, this film is being made” and “oh, here’s the director”, and “oh, here’s the cast,” and “oh, here’s the poster,” and “oh, here’s the problem they’re having with the MPAA,” etc. with books. But still. There would seem to me to be room for a professional-level group blog not associated with a particular publisher or interest group with writers who could each focus on whatever they wanted to in the bookworld (enough writers with different interests that everything would get covered) with news about which writers are currently working on what, reviews of what’s just come out, and features on earlier books perhaps or just general bookworld stuff.

As a side wish, I wanted to find a site that would list the release dates of upcoming books–not just a selection of potential bestsellers (which I can get off Barnes & Noble or Amazon), but of ALL the books coming out. This, again, is ridiculously easy with movies. IMDb has a very nice list of upcoming theatrical releases, and when I wanted to see upcoming DVD releases, a Google search for “upcoming DVD releases” gave me a dozen sites that listed every upcoming release for the next several months. A Google search for “upcoming book releases” or “book publishing dates” or variants brought me to a Barnes & Noble “notable releases”-type page and a lot of individual publisher sites. Is it really true that I’d have to look at each publisher’s list of upcoming titles to get a full picture of what’s being published soon?

What is this? Is it just that there are too many books published in too many different areas by too many different publishers for one site to keep track of it all? Are book publishing dates not as firm as film and DVD release dates? Are books just so completely uninteresting to most of the internet world that nobody cares about book information? In other words, is it a question of lack of coherence in the book publishing world that makes it difficult to produce such an triumverate of book information (database, Cinematical-esque blog, release date list), or is it a question of a lack of audience to make such a venture worthwhile? Related to the worthwhileness, perhaps, is my other petpeeve about book sites in general: Movie sites are pretty, by and large. Compare IMDb to the book databases listed above. IMDB, though not in my top ten of pretty websites, is a lot prettier than they are. Some of the bookshelf collection-tracking sites are pretty, like Shelfari, but I don’t think they’re quite what I want at the moment.

Finally, if anyone knows of such sites as I have outlined here, please PLEASE direct me to them. I would be forever grateful.

This is really, really cool technically, but I’m not at all sure how I feel about it ethically or artistically.

I’m safely back in Texas after a week at home and a week doing nothing (in the best possible way) in Minnesota; classes start back up tomorrow, and while I’m not really ready to start writing papers again, I realized yesterday that I won’t be in the newbie group anymore and I’ll get to meet some new people entering the program this year. So that should be fun. Trying to get the rest of my books at the bookstore tomorrow along with 10,000 other students probably won’t be, though. Ah, well.

Some of you may have gotten incoming links or trackbacks from jandysmeanderings.the-frame.com today; in case you did, don’t panic or change your links yet. I’m working on replacing the site that was at www.the-frame.com (which I hadn’t updated for like two years) with something a bit more up-to-date, but it may involve moving this blog–I was testing the exporting/importing function today. It may move to the jandysmeanderings subdomain, or I may just put it at the base www.the-frame.com URL. I’m still playing with my host and figuring out what’s going to work the best. Not to mention playing with WordPress themes to find something I can use as a CMS (as opposed to something that looks like a blog). I found one I like a lot, but trying to modify the code to let me center the whole layout–it’s left-justified now, which I think looks stupid–stymied me. Anyone conversant enough in CSS and PHP to help me fix it?

It’s always dangerous to advertise upcoming posts because I run the risk of not following through, but do expect June’s book and movie recap within the next day or two, and a rundown of what looks interesting on the fall TV schedule. Plus SYTYCD videos, and maybe some excerpts from the Australian Idol auditions. I’m not even kidding when I emphasize how different (and probably better) Australian Idol is going to be from American Idol this year–in the first audition episode, ALL of the contestants sent on to Sydney were singer-songwriter types; not a typical pop voice among them. I’ll get back into doing Music Mondays one of these weeks, but it may not be this week. I haven’t had time (or broadband access) to check out any new music lately; if I did Music Monday this week, it would probably be All Beatles All The Time, since I listened to them almost nonstop both on the way to St. Louis and on the way home.

I apologize for the lack of blogging going on around here, especially for the lack of the SYTYCD recaps-with-video. I’ve been home for a couple of weeks between school terms, which leads to less blogging anyway (due to the lack of need for procrastination tools), plus my computer was in the shop for a few days getting a cooling problem fixed and getting various upgrades (yay!). And this week, I’m in Minnesota getting my fill of cool weather and relaxation–with a dial-up connection. So, yeah. I’m going to be MIA for another week, but then I will try to get back into the groove once school starts.

My only SYTYCD note for tonight (though I am watching at least tonight’s, and hopefully the finale tomorrow): I STILL MISS SARA LIKE WHOA. Although, I’m okay with Lacey and Sabra in the final four; I just wish Sara had beaten Lauren. I will put up the video of the routines up when I have a broadband connection again.