October 12... hyperlinks and chunks

Thanks to Dave Winer for pointing me to the MakeAShorterLink service which creates shorter URLs out of long ones. An example is http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/citybugs/findyourbug/CommonLocalInsects/CommonLocalInsects.htm is now accessible as http://makeashorterlink.com/?V20A1241 I’m not sure how often I’ll use the service, but I’m happy that it’s around.

Simon Kittle's Text::Outline Perl module renders OPML outlines, supporting nearly all the same rules that Radio and Manila support. [Frontier News] This module might be helpful when I get around to publishing OPML outlines from Ecco.

(One solution to explore is to import my current Manila blog into Radio via the ManilaSiteConverter Tool and then manage it completely via Radio. I’m concerned about losing some valuable Manila functionality going this route – although the big gain would be to have the granularity of posts that I’m desiring. I have no idea how the Metadata plugin would fit into this solution.)

As an inveterate Chinese-Canadian tea drinker with dual heritages from China and England, I was delighted to see a special section on tea drinking (“Tea Time”) in the Globe and Mail

Metadata and Blogging

I have been posting more often after discovering the WYSIWYG edit story widget in Manila that allows me to do some writing in Microsoft Word (with hyperlinks) which I can then cut and paste into Manila. It's still not the perfect solution. The HTML created by Word is encrusted with crud -- and I should be able to avoid the cut and paste operation if I were to write a Word macro to speak XML-RPC to post my entry to Manila directly. (This task is on my to-do list for my copious free time!) Also, I still don't have a satisfactory workflow for attaching metadata for my individual items so that I'll be able to find them later. I'm thinking of using the Metadata plugin in combination with NewsItems -- but I don't want to change this site into a purely NewsItem formatted site either.

Sep Nov

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