web

Since co.mments.com shut down I've had to find a new site to track comments to blog article that I have commented on. It turns out that the two alternatives both suck, for different reasons.

I finally joined Facebook. I kind of like it. It looks a hell of a lot better than MySpace, doesn't suck as much as Orkut, and is similar to LinkedIn in its clean interface and simplicity. I was on Orkut for a while when it first started and then deleted my account some time later. There just wasn't much too it and was too focused on forums. Facebook actually seems kind of cool. I really like the ability to tag people in photos. Because true image search/matching is probably still years away, it's a nice workaround.

I am constantly late at returning library books. While studying at the University of Waterloo I racked up huge fines, often just by being one day late (they would send me an overdue notice the day after they were due, thus incurring $1 per book, before I could renew). I eventually wrote a little python script that would log on to the University of Waterloo's library website and renew books for me (the script ran automatically every night). That worked great for the last year that I was at Waterloo.

When I came back to Vancouver I was also late at returning books to the Vancouver Public Library. I stumbled on a site a while ago called Library Elf that sends me reminders when my books I have taken out from the VPL are almost due. It supports many other libraries as well. It automatically logs into any libraries that you add to your account and you can receive notification up to one week in advance, or every week, by RRSS and/or email. It has worked great for me, except for one time when it didn't send me any reminder. Perhaps GMail thought it was spam, I'm not sure. I might add the RSS option, just in case.

I am really looking forward to upgrading this site to Drupal 5.0. I really like the new default theme and I am thinking of using it along with a customized colour scheme. I am a big fan of using default themes by the way because it means I never have to monkey around with my theme if anything in the underlying API changes from version-to-version. For a simple site like mine, using a default theme makes the most sense. Especially for someone who is by no means an expert in HTML and CSS.

I submitted some of my Cuba photos to JPG Magazine. It is a neat print publication publishes photos based on online voting of user-submitted photos. Here's one I submitted to the "street" issue:

Actually, I've just noticed that you cannot just vote on any picture you want for some reason. It randomly selects certain photos you can vote on. I guess this is to prevent friends from voting for their friends' photos and in turn having their friends vote for theirs.

I found a really neat site that can generate custom feeds. I really wanted a way to not only get a feed of the most popular articles today on digg, but also have links directly to the dugg article, not to the digg page (sorry digg).

This site called RSSxl Beta could do it. I entered:

• Page URL: http://www.digg.com/view/all/popular/today
• Start String: <div class="news-body">
• Start Item String: <h3 id="title.*?">
• End Item String: <div class="news-details">
• Start Description String: <p>
• End Description String: </p>
• Link Number: 1