Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

The latest nifty tool from Flickr tools site Flagrant Disregard is just right for blog profiles or home pages. The imaginatively-named "Profile Widget" is a remotely hosted image that updates itself hourly, with pictures and statistics from your Flickr photostream. As it's a hosted image, it doesn't need any scripting support - so will work with LJ's restricted HTML set quite happily.

Here's mine!



Widgets can be horizontal, vertical, or compact, and can use any of a mix of recent and random images.

If you use Flickr, stick one in your profile now!

If you've got a jabber IM client - like AdiumX, Gaim, or Trillian, you can now connect to LJ's own jabber server.

One of the more interesting features, is that it lets you work with your mutual LJ friends list as your jabber roster/buddy/contacts list:

your Jabber Roster ("buddy list") is integrated with your LJ friends list. If you friend bob and bob friends you, both of you can see each other online. It has to be mutual. Friends that haven't friended you back show up as "pending subscription" in your jabber client, kinda grayed out, depending on the client.

This looks to be quite, quite useful.

Still, err, somewhat alpha.

I started this blog on the 7th of April 2002. Four years later, it's still going strong.

2565 entries, 8945 comments, according to LJArchive.The stats package in the archive notes that the most popular word of over four letters (ignoring common words) that I've used is "using". The most entries I've posted in a day is 12, and the most per month is 113...

It's been a blast! And there's plenty more to come...

Thanks for the original invite code tamaranth!

...from wendyg on the issue of advertising on LiveJournal at newswireless.net.

LiveJournal, home to approximately 1.3 million active blogs and 10 million overall, announced this week that it's inaugurating ads on its site, following on from a post on the subject from the founder about six weeks ago.

The general idea isn't all that dissimilar to what Salon has been doing for the last five years with its Premium service: you pay for the value you receive with either ads or money, your choice. LiveJournal has always offered free and paid accounts, basing the incentive to pay on limiting the features available to the free accounts. Now, it will offer an intermediate "Sponsored" level which will include ads. If you're a logged-in paid user you will never see ads; if you're a free or sponsored user (or visitor) you will see ads on LiveJournal's main site and on sponsored journals. No one has to display ads on their journal.

Almost simultaneously, Six Apart, the owner of LiveJournal, announced that it had secured $12 million in venture capital funding. LiveJournal was a cooperative community; now it's a business.

More here.

Just testing out the Pocketposter LJ client while we spend a weekend on the road, up in the frozen north visiting pdcawley...

Looks decent so far...

LiveJournal has launched a new Mobile site scheme - which includes a useful summary friends view.

At first glance there's a lot of unnecessary page furniture removed, giving you a small, fast loading page. I thin it will be useful for checking things on my phone on the road (beyond the custom view I put together a couple of years back after tweaking one that had been made available for general use). I suspect it may also be useful for quickly checking and updating without getting in the way of work...

(Though the new T-Mobile MDA Pro I'm playing with at the moment is a GPRS/3G/WiFi device with rather nice 640x480 display, which seems to work quite well with standard LJ themes. The browser in Windows Mobile 5.0 is a huge improvement over mobile browsers I've used in the past.. However this new view does seem tailored for the Blackberry 7100t I'm also using. At the moment I seem to be able to put more phones on the table than my friend Chris, what with those two, the O2 iMode NEC, my regular SPV C500 on Orange, a Nokia 3230, an O2 X4, an SPV M2000, and the iMate JAM. Yup, my very own mobile data test lab...)

Sign spotted on our local pub (which is currently being renovated): "Demolition by Ferrari".

Is latexiron moonlighting?

And is this the real reason for the jet engine?

...the latest build, 1.5.2.3U, has added support for pinging Technorati when you submit a new LJ post...

Good for getting noticed by the big blog search engines.

So, I've taken the plunge and have switched over to using an S2 layout for this here blog.

Enjoy. After all, tags work now!