del.icio.us have introduced a new tool entitled “tagrolls” which enable you to easily display a tag cloud of your links on your own website. Here are mine:
Continue reading ‘del.icio.us Tagrolls’
Archive for the 'Digital Life' Category
First the renaming of my blog, and now the moving of my RSS URL. Whatever next?! Well, my feed now includes my latest photos on Flickr and my del.icio.us links as a daily digest.
My RSS feed is now http://feeds.feedburner.com/PastThinking, courtesy of FeedBurner. Please update your newsreader!
Up until now, this weblog has been called simply “goskar.com”. The main reason for this was that I couldn’t think of a good name for it, and I didn’t think that it really mattered.
Since I’m now getting a reasonable amount of traffic (about 3000 sessions per month), I thought that it deserves a more imaginative name. As many people know, I’m an archaeologist, and these posts are my thoughts and opinions - and at the risk of sounding cheesy, the name “Past Thinking” seems rather apt.
I hope that people will continue to enjoy “Past Thinking”!
Cheers,
Tom
I have been wanting to incorporate my Flickr photos on this blog for some time now, but have never found a satisfactory way of doing this so far. There’s always been lots of under-the-bonnet fiddling to do, and as I’m not using Apache on Linux, most of the methods I’ve tried haven’t worked out (that’s also why I don’t have nice friendly URIs for my posts).
Today, however, I came across a wonderful plugin called FAlbum by Elijah Cornell. It works wonderfully, and you can see how well it integrates by visiting my new photo page. Installing it was simple and configuration is done within the WordPress admin interface.
Thanks Elijah!
Technorati Tags: flickr, wordpress
Google have just launched their beta blog search tool.
It seems to work quite efficiently, listing at the time of writing, this blog as the 4th result on a search for the word “archaeology”. My previous post, on archaeology podcasts, talked about the Wessex Archaeology events blog, which is as of 2pm today, is the top hit on the same keyword.
It will be interesting to see how quickly the Google Blog Search will index posts - and it will be equally interesting to see how Technorati react. Technorati generally manages to crawl this site within about 10 minutes of posting.
The Google Blog search does currently not have the ability to search tags at present, nor does it offer the personalised service provided by Technorati (custom feeds for tags and keywords, claiming a blog etc).
Will we be pinging Google in the near future, as an update service? It’ll be an interesting one to watch…
This time several years ago, I was stuck in an internet rut. I had a fairly fixed number of websites which I would visit daily, but, through habit, rarely step outside of that loop. I had a personal website, which I first created in 1996, but I rarely had any interest in it from the outside world - it was a personal excercise to learn new technologies. Like my web browsing, it too stagnated. I changed the look of it because I was bored, or keen to try out a new design, but the content rarely grew to more than a list of links. I would certainly never try to write something like this on it - for starters it was unlikely that anyone would find it to read it.
Static sites, stagnant sites
In the year 2000, when I begain my masters degree in archaeological computing (and coupled with a connection to SuperJaNET - the high speed academic network), I began to experiment a little more with web publishing, and found that the projects I was working on were worthy of a mention on the net. I revamped my website yet again, and began to put 3D renders of some work on there, and a few descriptions of what I was up to and some of the techniques I was working on. But I had no traffic. Manual search engine submission didn’t seem to work, links from some friends (equally obscure) websites, didn’t bring many visitors. It made me wonder what the point of it was, especially as I was hand coding everything, and was a considerable time investment.
Continue reading ‘The Power of Blog’
Podcasting is a phenomenon which is still, technically, in its infancy. The release of iTunes 4.9 in July gave podcasting a huge boost, putting the tools to subscribe to ‘casts straight into the hands of anyone and everyone.
The quality of podcasts out there varies tremendously. More and more people are learning how to create them, and how simple they can be - simply an mp3 file enclosure to an RSS feed. Podcasting is also working the other way by educating the masses about RSS and blogging.
These are heady days in the world of internet publishing, and in the United Kingdon, we like to do our bit. The first podcasting conference in the UK, PodcastConUK, to be held on Saturday 17 September in London, is going to be an exciting opportunity for podcasters and podcast listeners alike.
I shall probably be the only archaeologist attending (and yes, we have some archaeology podcasts up our sleeves..)!
Technorati Tags: podcastcon, podcastconuk, podcasting
I have known about Flickr for some years now, and have finally decided to take the plunge and sign up for an account. It’s a marvellous system - really well thought out; intuitive and easy to use.
I am very impressed by the RSS feeds, and the ability to post pictures from a cameraphone by email. There’s even an iPhoto plugin for uploading to Flickr, as well as a standalone OSX uploader.
Incidentally, I’m posting this entry from within my Flickr account…
This is going to be fun - Tehm and I have over 6,000 photos..! The pic attached here (hopefully) was taken with my Nokia 6600 at the Summer Solstice party at Stonehenge in 2004.
You can see my (currently diminutive) photoblog on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/chough/
moJave is a Java moblogging tool for mobile phones. I am writing this on my Nokia 6600, and it seems to work OK, but it feels rather clunky for everyday use. It is currently in beta, to be fair, but not much of the advertised functionality is present. It’s also not much fun writing this on a numeric keyboard!
Ecto is a fully-featured desktop blogging application, that helps you get the most out of your blog. It allows you to manage your blog using a fully OSX integrated interface, compose posts offline, integration with iPhoto, manage your pings and trackbacks, and support for multiple blogs using multiple blogging engines. Its burgeoning list of features make this an essential tool for bloggers.
In this mini-review I am using ecto 2.3.7 for OSX.
Continue reading ‘Ecto: The Review’