on thursday, i turned 31.

to celebrate, i wandered around san francisco with my friend ambur.

we visited several independent bookstores, got a taco, commissioned a $7 reflection on pickles and the number 31 from a man sitting on the corner of haight & ashbury with a typewriter and a sign reading: ‘pick a topic. pick a price. get a poem.”, met up with rongo! for dinner in chinatown, and saw the last airbender in 3D.

i also thought a lot about my goals for the year, and launched a new blog.

i have been thinking about splitting this blog into several more focused pieces for a while now, but i keep getting distracted, and in the meantime, my real goal is to just start writing more, anywhere, about anything, and for whatever reason i am having a hard time writing regularly here because i have this preconception about the sorts of things i want to write about, and it hangs me up.

so for my birthday, i decided to try starting fresh and clean, with the simple goal of writing something every single day for a year, just to see what happens. after a bit of brainstorming with ambur, i chose the name revolution 31, because that’s how many times i have traveled around the sun now, and also because the project is a vehicle for change.

i am using wordpress.com, instead of hosting the blog myself, because i want it to be as easy as possible, and i keep recommending wordpress.com to friends, so it will be good to keep my inside knowledge up to date.

i figure i’ll still blog here sometimes, or at least cross-post some things, but if you’re interested in following the whole year, point your feed readers to http://revolution31.wordpress.com/feed/.

now back to celebrating that other revolution.

cue fireworks.

well.

since my last entry in this blog, i have begun using facebook, extensively, and i find that it has in some ways replaced my blogging, because it is good for me to be encouraged to be pithy, and the reward in terms of feeling more connected to so many people in so many different spheres of my life is addictive.

somehow, in the past year, facebook has managed to swallow up so much of the general population that it’s network now includes: the more computer savvy members of my extended family, in both colorado and florida, which means many cousins whom i see once every couple of years, if i’m lucky; most of my friends from highschool and college, including people whom i have not really seen or heard from since, but liked at the time, and now i really appreciate having a window onto where their lives have led; designers and techie people whom i have met and/or worked with since going to grad school, and who are now dispersed; bloomington townies i knew and loved before ever going to IU, and have been anchored by since; and various other people i met while traveling in the UK, living in portland, becoming involved with burning man, and generally circling the western 2/3 of this country for the last two years, while keeping as many tops spinning as possible in order to figure out what the hell to do next.

that’s quite a list, when it comes down to it, and it makes facebook by far the easiest way for me to keep up with the world right now. better than email, better than the phone, better than christmas letters, better than blog posts that i always Wish i could find time to write but then never do…

facebook is like just being able to think of the title of a blog post, and then not actually having to say anything else about it, unless people prompt you, which is a really nice option for my brain. :)

and i do like the freedom to write more than a 140 character twitter update, and attach pictures and links, though as with any new freedom, a learning period wherein we all must learn what it means to be judicious with our powers is part of the deal.

i still like twitter, and i should use it more, but it only includes the hci/techie circle i mentioned above, and celebrities and companies and news sources, which is nice, but not nice enough to win over facebook, when i’m pressed for time.

when i explain twitter to people, i call it a virtual water cooler, and i think that facebook status updates have really grown into the potential of that concept. it’s like a network of water coolers, with one in every building of your life, from which you draw not water, but random sequences of interesting tidbits of news and commentary, from everyone you have ever known.

and friends who don’t know each other – who live in different countries even! – can meet through your comments!

and we are forced to choose which sorts of conversations we WANT to carry on this publicly, and which to have more privately — how much do we talk about what we Really did last weekend? or what we think about our boss? or who we are going to vote for? or what we think about our neighbors?

and what does our willingness or reluctance to be transparent about these things say about us?

it is fascinating.

and i am thrilled to be able to witness it, much less shape it.

it is an example of why i continue to err more on the side of technophilia than technophobia.

so…

find me on facebook if you want, k?
:)

i logged on here because i was reading old blog posts, and realizing how long it has really been since i wrote, and how i do enjoy the record of my life and thoughts that my blog provides me, regardless of whether other people enjoy reading it, so i should do my best to avoid letting the gaps get too large.

and i don’t know about you, but when i have trains of thought like that, i find it best to follow them through, which in this case, meant just hit “write post” and see what happens.

and now it seems that i have written a post about facebook, which is fine.
it really is the best answer to “so, where’ve you been?” when it comes to the part of me that lives in the blogosphere, so it’s as good a place to start as any. :)

it’s characteristically not pithy, however, so i’ll just have to come back later with updates about, you know, the part of me that lives in the real world. ;)

i know i say ‘i’ll say this later’ a lot, but eventually, i might just surprise us all.

one potential benefit of winning nanowrimo this year is that it will make a daily writing habit easier, so i just have to structure my time, and that’s kind of my focus right now with kwerk, so ding! winner!

oh, yeah! i just won nanowrimo! :)

remember two years ago when i first tried it and failed miserably after a week or so of nervous effort, and then went on a trip to florida wherein i barely wrote at all?

don’t worry, i don’t really remember it, either.

but i really did blog more in those days, didn’t i?
huh…

anyway, i’m kind of in shock about it this time, because it was too easy, and that means that i really have no excuse to not write a novel…

but that’s another post, too.

hasta.

the best writing teacher i ever had was a man named andrew hess.
andrew was the grad student who taught my section of the expository writing class that all freshmen at NYU were required to take as a part of the general education sequence. most people hated this class, and, as with many classes that are taught by an assortment of grad students, a lot of them probably had pretty good reason. the odds of me ending up with andrew as an instructor were slim, and even slimmer because his section of the class met at 8:30 in the morning, which would never have been my first choice, but it so happened that it was the only section that fit into my schedule that was also a ‘computer section.’

the whole idea of this is actually kind of baffling now, but this was 1997, and most people didn’t have laptops, and some people didn’t even have a computer at all, so you didn’t always get to turn your papers in digitally. you actually had to, like, print things out, and find a stapler. but my freshman year at NYU they were trying out this new thing by having ‘computer sections’ of writing workshop. we met in a computer lab, and turned in our papers via email. we also did things like chat together in class about something we read.

it was all meant to be very cutting edge, and, in what i suppose was a foreshadowing of my future interest in hci, i thought it was exciting enough that i wanted to sign up for it, even though it meant going to class at 8:30 in the morning. i had just finished going to highschool for four years, after all, and i had to get there at 7:15, so 8:30 sounded quite reasonable. after a full year of staying up until 3 in the morning on a regular basis, and almost never getting more than 6 hours of sleep a night, i changed my tune, but in the narrow window between eras, i signed up for andrew hess’s section of writing workshop, and it changed me. for the first time in my life, i had a teacher who saw right through my bullshit, and tore my writing apart, and challenged me to really think about what i was saying instead of just babbling because it was easy for me to babble, like i’m doing in this blog post.

la la la la.

it was hard, and it scared me a little, and if i ever get my act together and actually write something that makes me proud, it will be partly because of andrew hess, and i will say so in the acknowledgements.

anyway, one of the things that andrew did was ask us to write something that he called a ‘metatext’ after each of our papers. the idea was to give us a place where we could express our thoughts on how the paper went – did we like it? did we leave something out? what hung us up? what did we know was confusing?

this practice raised the caliber of andrew’s editorial comments to a whole new level, because he knew what we already knew, and this experience felt to me like fresh air was finally being let into a room that had grown very stale and stifling, and it made me rather giddy.

one of the things that the metatext helped me with was being comfortable leaving things alone even when i didn’t feel like they were finished yet. i have a very hard time with drafts. i try to make things fit together from the beginning. and i fail. because that’s not how writing works, really. you need to test things. see how they feel. rework them and move them around. i resist this, because my thoughts? they are messy. and it’s hard for me to explain them. and no matter how many times i learn the lesson that it’s faster and more rewarding to just let myself say them a hundred different ways and then pick the ones that work best, i still feel bad about asking other people to sort through my muck, and nervous about going on the record with things that i don’t really mean.

i’m saying all this not because i’m feeling particularly narcissistic this evening, but because it’s a pretty good description of the core of my dilemma with blogging. i was thinking about it as i was writing the last post about kwerk because i kept getting stuck, and it made me nervous, and i remembered andrew hess, and writing workshop, and metatexts, and i thought: maybe i should start writing metaposts? separate places where i let myself ramble about what i think the post did pretty well, and how it compares to the form of the idea that i’m trying to find a way to express, and what i think i might do to make it better.

it seems worth a try, a least.

i can hide the metaposts after the jump, or something. maybe find a plugin that lets me attach notes. then people with interest in such things can read them, and the main posts might get leaner, as a result.

i’ll go write a metapost for the kwerk post now, and try it out.

i thought that this was going to be the metapost, but then i decided to tell stories instead. :)

so andrew, if you ever read this – thank you. i will have you know that you also made me very sensitive to the fact that czechoslovakia no longer exists, and i hope that the past ten years have treated you well. i am trying to focus on kwerk, and finding ways to make money in the meantime, but i am also starting to write a short story – pretty heady sci-fi – and when i finish, i will seek you out, and send you a copy, and if you have the time and interest to tear it apart, it would be a tremendous honor.

i’m helping my dad set up a blog for his law office, and he’s decided to focus on a few main category areas and build up audiences for each.

i told him that we could use the category archives that wordpress generates to filter the posts. then we could link to these pages and style them however we want as we design the site as a whole, and people can subscribe to the rss feeds for only the categories they want.

i was not lying, but today when i actually set about to ask the category feeds to play nice with my dad’s theme, it was a little bit harder than it should have been, and i decided to blog about my solution.

the theme has a big friendly “subcribe to our feed!” link, that i like very much, and it uses a file that it calls ‘subscribe.php’ to generate the link, which i also like. for those of you playing along at home, that means that you can just include ‘subscribe.php’ anywhere you want an rss link to show up, and if you ever want to change the way the link works, you only have to update one file. hurray!

for my purposes, however, a different rss link needs to be generated when you are on a category page, and it has to be the right one. one way of doing this would be to make a custom category template for each page, which wordpress lets you do by making pages like ‘category-17.php’ in your theme folder. but that would be annoying, and it would take away the benefit of having only one piece of code to change, which would be even more annoying, not to mention bad practice.

the better way is to add a condition to the ‘subscribe.php’ file that checks to see if the page you are on is a category archive, and then generates the appropriate rss link. that should be easy enough, but i couldn’t find a function that automatically retrieves category-specific rss feeds, and the otherwise convenient fact that there are several different ways to refer to rss feeds (but only one way to refer to a category-specific feed), was giving me trouble.

sigh.

i spent a while searching the wordpress codex to see if someone had already written the code or a plugin for me, because it seems like the kind of thing that would be a relatively common desire. sure enough, i found lots of people who wanted to do this, but only one who seemed to have succeeded, and his solution seemed really wonky to me and i wasn’t sure it would even work in the new version of wordpress.

in many ways, the strength of the wordpress community spoils me for times like this. i can almost always find answers to my codex questions in less than five minutes, so when i can’t, i just assume the answer isn’t out there, which probably isn’t true. in any case, if i can’t find the answer before i get tired of looking, other people probably can’t either, so it seemed like a good opportunity to increase the number of answers in the pool. :)

after a few frustrations with brackets and such that are par for the course, i made it work!

‘subscribe.php’ now uses the following code to generate the RSS link:

" title="Subscribe to this Feed via RSS">Subscribe to our Feed via RSS

that’s a lot of babbling so i won’t say more unless there are questions.
good night and good luck!

i have not posted in a hella long time! holy crap! october 1st, are you serious?!

well, i went to california and back. again. and i am currently entertaining the possibility that i might go live on a boat docked somewhere off the eastern seaboard for a while. that’s if the pump gets fixed. otherwise i’ll probably just get some seasonal work here in pdx. and it looks like i have a web project lined up, which is good news. and i am very, very glad that it is fall, because the weather is freaking gorgeous, and tomorrow i should go out and take some pictures of it.

in other news, i am going to start a new blog soon. it is going to be about pockets. you’ll understand later. but fear not, this blog will not entirely disappear. in fact, it may benefit from the admission that i am no longer going to attempt to cram everything in one place. like when you trim the leaves of a plant and then it ends up growing more fully on the remaining branches? that idea’s not just for gardening, anymore, kids.

unfortunately, i think that might be all for now. if i think of more to say, i will return. :)

i will also post pictures of my halloween costume.

and bake a pie.

may your weekend be at least so fruitful.

i upgraded to wordpress 2.3 this morning. it was a bit rocky, since at first all of the admin files didn’t make the transfer for some reason, and then i realized that somehow my categories table was erased, and now one of my plugins doesn’t work any more. i prevailed nonetheless, however, which makes me feel kinda cool, since i had to do a few very simple but not immediately obvious things that are not covered in the wordpress troubleshooting files but instead were intuited by my razor sharp intellect and nuanced understanding of the intarwebs. this enabled me to maintain an eerie calm and actually chuckle and fix things rather than believe that the universe was crashing down for the few minutes when my blog was splinched during its faulty disapparation, and that feels like a victory of human evolution right there.

i approve of this database backup plugin, which made creating the sql file that i would need to back things up in case of catastrophe very easy. and indeed, i needed it, given aforementioned erasure of the categories table. which is a hellacious error, really. i mean, wtf?!

i am frustrated with the plugin situation, given that the one that doesn’t work is the one that controls which categories show up on which pages, and that is also giving me trouble in OHEP land, and it has always struck me as such a basic and simple issue that i continue to be mystified by the shitty workarounds that people use to solve the problem.

so we’ll see how things work out in that department, and hopefully i will not discover that other crucial files are missing or major functionality is on the fritz. if i hit “publish” and accidentally launch a missile to grenada, i’m sorry. that was totally not in the manual.

the most immediately obvious perk of this upgrade is that i now have auto-save so i don’t have to worry about accidentally hitting back and erasing entire drafts. yay!

now i get lunch!

that’s what i really meant to say.

miyazaki is the best there is.

here’s a fun chain of events for ya:

my mom emailed me an announcement that this american life is hiring a web director. and i consider myself qualified and available. whoa!

thinking about applying to work for an organization like TAL is an interesting mind game, because apart from a desire to sound sincere and professional without geeking out and being like “OMG!! i listen to your show all the time!! i even have the juice glasses!!”, there is also the consideration that actually? geeking out a little bit is probably advisable. because not only are they hiring you to be a web geek, but the whole culture of the show is geeky. i mean, if they interviewed someone who was talking about how it felt to apply to work for people she admired and she didn’t admit to freaking out a little bit? i don’t think they would believe her. ira would be like “come on… wasn’t it just a little weird? wasn’t it kind of like not wanting to wear the band shirt to the concert because that is totally lame but still thinking about the fact that you weren’t going to wear the band shirt, and being kind of proud that you were cool enough that you didn’t need to show off like that, and so you hoped that would somehow get across?”

and yeah, it is kind of like that. where does he come up with these questions?! ;)

but whatever, the mind shows its propensity to dizzy itself, and it is far too easy to get wrapped up in overthinking such matters.
i’ll just write them an honest letter and see what happens.
wish me luck!

in the meantime, however, i searched my blog for posts wherein i might have mentioned the show in the natural course of conversation. it has happened several times, actually, which does far more to show that i actually consider the show to be a part of my life than any assertions i could make at this point, so score one for blogging!

two of the mentions, however, were in unfinished draft form, and that got me thinking. the first post was about habeas corpus, and the date suggests that it was actually the first draft i posted after writing a REALLY LONG rant about a variety of things, including the decision that i should publish my drafts somewhere on the public record, if not on my main page.

well, that was a noble aspiration, and reading the habeas corpus post reminded me of why. i have this funny habit, you see, of almost finishing posts and then stopping because i can’t get the conclusion quite right. it’s really quite ridiculous, but it is the only way i have found to get myself to cross the hump of starting to write something without having to worry about perfecting it on the first pass. one of the reasons that the one hour essay project is such a compelling idea in my world is that i tend to bite off way more than i can chew in most of my writing. i want to somehow connect every idea i have to some larger law of the universe and also throw in an entertaining childhood anecdote, an obscure pop culture reference, and a puppy. such neatly bundled packages take time, however, and i simply can’t do that for every blog post i dream up, as much as i may wish otherwise. instead of just posting half-formed ideas or trying to chop things into smaller pieces, however, i end up with lots of posts about fluffy stuff, and a mess of unfinished posts that i can’t bear to delete, but also almost never get around to finishing.

SO. the one hour essay project is actually an attempt at the cutting things into smaller pieces approach, and i hereby redeclare my intentions to post all my drafts, which i had stopped doing at some point while traveling. you can read them via the blither and blather link in the header, or by clicking on drafts in my fancy tagcloud. i think that i will also make a little “current drafts” list in the sidebar, because that would be sweet, and make it easier for me to remember to edit them.

and to close, for those of you intrigued by my references to TAL posts, i offer the following reference list:

• a random mention of how i am trying to arrange the world so that i can listen to the show more often (before i discovered the joy of the podcast);
• an unfinished post about habeas corpus, inspired by an episode on guantanamo bay;
• a draft i found and wrote the last few sentences of today, about the role of faith in inspiring us to embrace change rather than resist it, inspired by an episode about the rev. carlton pearson, a pentecostal preacher in oklahoma who has decided that he doesn’t believe in hell;
• my confession that i might get cable just to be able to watch the new tv show (i didn’t, but now it’s on itunes, too!!).

here’s to life in progress.

something i’ve been wanting to do for a while is shift from the boring and overwhelming list of categories on my sidebar to a tag cloud in the ultrahip web 2.0 folksonomic tradition. this is not because i aspire to be hip like three snaps in a 2(.0) formation, but because i think clouds are a good idea.

i like clouds because:
they have more information in them than lists (size is information!).
they are prettier than lists.
they take up less room than lists.
they are where the care bears live.

what’s not to love?

once upon a time, in a spurt of energy to this end, i downloaded and installed the formidably named Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, which promises nifty tag cloud goodness for all, but which ended up requiring too much of me in order to realize such goodness, so i let it drop.

i think i was frustrated because i knew deep down that it was not a very complicated problem, but it was still too much for me to think about on any one given day, so i ignored it for a silly long time.

therein languish so many of the ills of this world…

but today i prevailed!
go look! (you have to be on the main page, not viewing just this post)
heeeheehee!!!

and if you don’t want to hear anything geekier than that, you should stop reading, because now i’m gonna talk about code and stuff. so consider yourself warned.

i decided to search around again for options and advice, and i found very fruitful beginnings in:
this blog entry wherein the code professor churns out some wordpress-ready php for cloud-building, he being inspired in turn by
the technology evangelist writing about using php and css to build tag clouds for movable type blogs.

i liked the approach suggested by them because the core idea for wordpress is simple:
1) replace the part of the sidebar.php file that goes to fetch the category list with your own code that makes a tag cloud.
2) size appropriately using css.

once i thought about this, installing a plugin for the task felt silly and much less fun, so i was inspired to follow their trail.

the php as provided went through the trouble of counting the number of posts in each category even though wordpress provides a function for that, but then someone in the comments pointed that out and offered some new code, so that was nice.

the css was taken from the technology evangelist as written, and i didn’t really like it. it basically assigned each tag an id based on the number of posts in the category and then sized the tags based on that number, which is reasonable in theory except in practice it led to css brackets like this:

a.tag4 ,a.tag5, a.tag6 {
 font-size:16px;
 font-weight:300;
}

for each triad of numbers up to 30.

and apparently it just expects that no category will have more than 30 posts.

this seems short-sighted to me, particularly because if you were a somewhat balanced category user and you blogged for a number of years you would eventually get to the point where almost all of your tags were the same size. which defeats the purpose.
and sure you could go in as you wrote more and change the numbering scheme, but who wants to do that?

it makes more sense to me to size each category based on the percentage of total posts. in the beginning all your tags would be big because each post would be a large percentage of the total, but it seems like it would equalize out pretty quick, and then scale well with time.

the only downside is that it requires you to count all the posts, and writing another loop for that seemed a little excessive. i did a little more searching and found this, which offers a php function that will get the total number of posts for you. apparently people want to do that somewhat often, but wordpress doesn’t support it directly. yet. but i still love them.

anyway, here is the code that i ended up with after mashing those bits and pieces together and fiddling with dangling quotation marks and asking david for some help because he conveniently appeared on IM right when i was having an issue.

thanks, david!

if you are running wordpress and want a tag cloud like mine, open your sidebar.php file (it’s in wp-content/themes/youractivetheme), find the part that looks like this:

and replace it with this:

categories ORDER BY cat_name";


$cats = $wpdb->get_results($qrystr);


//get total number of posts to use for normalizing 
//the size of the category tags
$totalposts = $wpdb->get_var('select count(*) from wp_posts 
where post_status = "publish"');

//read and write the category data
echo '
';
foreach ($cats as $cat)
{
$catname = $cat->cat_name;
$catlink = get_category_link($cat->cat_ID);
$postcnt = $cat->category_count;
$catweight = $postcnt/$totalposts; 

/*this part sets the values that are used to do the tag sizing.  
you can fiddle with the percentage thresholds if you don't like the 
size distribution within your cloud.
if you only have a few posts or a few categories, everything will be 
big for a while.  blog more! :)  
you can also change the id text if my flippancy annoys you.  
just be sure to change the css too.  and bah, humbug. ;) */
if ($catweight == 0) $tagweight="zilch";
elseif ($catweight < .02) $tagweight = "notmuch";
elseif ($catweight < .05) $tagweight = "some";
elseif ($catweight < .1) $tagweight = "couplefew";
elseif ($catweight < .15) $tagweight = "several";
elseif ($catweight < .25) $tagweight ="lots";
else $tagweight = "damn";

echo '';
echo $catname," ";
}
echo '
';
?>

#cloud {padding:1px; line-height:20px;text-align:center;}
#cloud a {text-decoration:none;padding:0px;}


a.zilch {
display:none;
}


a.notmuch {
 font-size:12px;
}

a.some {
 font-size:16px;
 font-weight:200;
}

a.couplefew {
 font-size:18px;
 font-weight:300;
}

a.several {
 font-size:20px;
 font-weight:400;
}

a.lots { 
 font-size:24px;
 font-weight:500;
}

a.damn {
 font-size:28px;
 font-weight:600;
}