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CNN reports that “A panel of linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is ‘truthiness,’ defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.” Runners-up included “Katrinagate,” “podcast,” “whale tail,” “muffin top,” and “sudoku.”
For those of you subscribing to my Blogger-created RSS feed (http://www.driko.org/index.xml), please change the feed address to my Feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/Drikoland), as I am hoping to consolidate my feeds through them. I believe that if you’re subscribed to Bloglines then you should already be taken care of, as Bloglines has hopefully converted all subscribers over to the new feed at my request. However, there are just too many other aggregation services out there for me to track them all down, so I’m hoping that people will see this post in time to go ahead and switch over manually.
Why am I doing this, you may ask? Well, all this talk of Microsoft and Mozilla making nice and standardizing with Mozilla’s new feed icon design (seen at right, and replacing my feed icons in the sidebar) has made me misty-eyed and ready for change. OK, that’s not the only reason. 😉
The main reason is that I’m taking the advice of Freshblog and “upgrading” my feed with the services offered at Feedburner. As the linked posts explain, Feedburner offers “smart” feeds that will convert the default Atom feed into RSS if necessary (some readers don’t support Atom yet). Feedburner also offers many other services that are too good to pass up, including better methods to track visitors, and a lot more.
Please let me know if you have any problems with the switch, and thanks in advance for your cooperation and patience if things don’t go so smoothly… 😉
I just now discovered a very cool (albeit currently “experimental”) feature of del.icio.us that allows you to automatically make a blog post of all the sites you’ve tagged on a given day. I first came across this idea at Teknokool (a WordPress site), which inspired me to figure out how to do this on my Blogger site. My first hit was theory.isthereason, which posted on how to go about this with WordPress blogs. That post led me to another one on videoblogging.info, which offered help for users of Moveable Type, TypePad, WordPress, and Blogger (woo hoo!).
Although I followed the instructions on videoblogging.info to the letter, my initial attempts didn’t seem to work. All I can figure is that there wasn’t enough lead time for the script to take effect, because over night it worked like a charm. The main thing to keep an eye on is that the time you put in is GMT; I set mine up for 4 GMT, or 11 P.M. EST.
Last night’s link post was a bit redundant, as I had made regular posts for almost all of the tagged items. That fact could become a bit annoying, as I tag all items whether I post separate entries on them or not. However, I still think this could be pretty cool, as I will now be able to automate smaller link posts. And of course it will allow me to “post” more often. 😉 Let me know what you think…
Update: I was able to play with the CSS a little bit, so I think it looks a little better now. I made sure that the fonts conformed to the rest of the site, made the line breaks a little larger, and changed the default bullets to small del.icio.us icons. I do still have several gripes with all of this, though.
No blog title is generated by this method, so I have to go back and manually edit that after the fact to ensure that the permalink title is not based on the entire post of the text. Also, there doesn’t seem to be any way to add the link=“rel” descriptor into the tags to ensure that Technorati etc. pick up the posts, so that too is a little bit annoying. If anyone has any experience or advice with this, I’d appreciate it…
Flag Game – Guess The Nation is pretty cool. You have to guess the country from its flag, and if you’re stumped it can supply clues such as capitals, anthems, neighbors, currency, and continents, although it decreases your score. I’m a little ashamed at how much I’ve forgotten…
The Worth1000.com Picture of the Day is an instant bookmark; well worth a (daily) visit…
Check out these cool new (to me) Google Map mashups:
All of these “Best of 2005” lists are probably getting tedious, but if you’re still interested, check out Fimoculous’ Top 20 Best Of Lists For 2005, which narrows down his more exhaustive List of 2005 Lists.
For some amazing astronomical images, check out NASA’s JPL 2005 Year In Images.
