category: web


web It’s broken, I know, I don’t know how to fix it.

If you’re logged in, everything’s fine. If you’re not, the Random Posts section at left is busted up, and the spacing at the top of the page is wrong. Just log in. Make an account. It’s easy.

 

eta: holy fuck how is it 4 am, did I really spend that much time trying to fix this

web

Screen shot 2010-02-17 at 10.29.54 PM

Presented without further comment.

web Three Word Phrase

Sometimes a web comic with little to recommend it makes me laugh so hard I practically fall down.

This is the funniest thing I’ve seen all day.

200908171836

web The Linkfest

More than ten years ago, when lots of web links were 88-by-31-pixel mini-banners, I made a webpage of a bunch of them, just because I thought it would be funny.

It was, of course.

I just found it.

I’ve made one small change to it, which is to use a little CSS to make it narrower, so you can see how big it was on a monitor of the day. The rest of it is just as it was on January 31, 1999, at 8:07 pm, the last time it was edited.

Click here and enjoy it. It takes a minute to load, even now (imagine it then). The links still work.

web Strangeness might ensue, especially in feed readers

I’m going through and moving some old posts from the old blog to this one, backdating them so they sort properly.

This has necessitated changing the archives list to a dropdown, since it now goes back many more months.

I’m afraid it might also make a ton of really old posts show up as new in the RSS feed. If that happens, I apologize. It’s not over, but once I’ve moved all the posts I want to move, it’ll stop.

web Common outdoor climbing phobias and how to combat them

Obviously I’ve never been (and never will go) rock climbing, but next time I have a precipice problem, I’m going to try this.

Common outdoor climbing phobias and how to combat them | Boing Boing Gadgets:
2. Heights
I’m not normally scared of heights, but I have to admit that hanging out on the edge of a 400-foot-tall cliff and trying to look down to see how my climbing buddy was doing whilst being held in place by one flimsy rope was a little freaky at times. Since positive self-talk (it’s ok, breathe, you’re not gonna fall) was not really working, I thought of my own calming down method — I found tiny flowers and leaves in the rock’s cracks and pretended they were my dog Ruby. “Hi Ruby,” I’d say, and suddenly my fear was replaced by a warm, fuzzy feeling. “What are you doing here?” I know it sounds crazy, but try it. It works.

web Formatting improvements

I’ve made some subtle and important changes to how this page looks. Posts actually typed by me, like this one and the book list one below, will now be offset by a lighter background, so they stand out. Spacing between posts is more even. And Twitter and Last.fm posts no longer contain duplicate information (well, they do, but it’s invisible).

Vastly neater, yes? I actually had to edit some PHP to do this stuff, not just CSS. I’m pleased with myself!

web Can’t argue with this conclusion

You Are Bitter


You aren’t bitter at the world, even though you have a strong personality.
Instead, you are sophisticated and cultured. You appreciate acquired tastes.

You are very powerful. You have the ability to change a room’s energy.
While some may find you disagreeable, your points of view are intelligent and interesting.

What Taste Are You?

shopping Amazon Rank

Amazon Rank

web Welcome!

The hosting that provides my blog space on slithytoves.org is going away (my friends Kurt and Anna are getting out of the hosting-friends’-websites-for-free-from-their-house business, understandably), and after much deliberation and annoyance, I’ve decided converting the old blog contents and software to a new site is pretty much impossible.

Therefore I’ve started over, and now I’m doing what I actually want, and what better fits the Internet of 2009 rather than the Internet of 2006 (when I put together the old blog design).

The new site (the one you’re on) is http://www.kostia.net/blog … so that’s easy to remember.

It looks much different than what you expect. What it does is aggregate all the stuff that was in the sidebar of the old blog, in one stream. Instead of one ancient post in the middle and other, smaller, more recent stuff in the sidebar, it’s all together now. There are little icons to tell you what you’re looking at, and all the category/search/archive links on the left work just as you’d expect to narrow things down.

There are some technical hurdles remaining, like how anything I mark as a favorite on Etsy gets replicated in its entirety, description and payment/shipping instructions and all, and how anything I say on Twitter or mark as a favorite on Twitter shows up twice, as a post title and contents, and how anything I mark “I like it” on StumbleUpon shows up over and over and over again … BUT the author of the software that does the aggregation has a huge new version coming out in a matter of days and promises a lot of this will be fixed.

Included in the stream (as you can see in the categories list on the left side of the page) are:

everything I say on Twitter
things other people say on Twitter that I marked as a favorite
sites I comment on through StumbleUpon
items I add to my favorites (read: wishlist) on Etsy
developments in my silly little virtual city, Jasperopolis
photos I post to Flickr (this is limited; if I post 200 photos in a day, it will only show you the most recent 10)
songs and podcasts I listen to (reported through last.fm)
sites I mark on digg.com (I do this rarely)
sites I bookmark, synced through delicious.com

Not all these categories are showing yet; they will as soon as they have content.

I can, of course, still make regular web posts when I feel like it, some short, some long, and those categories are marked with the little black and white speech-bubble icon. Posts I make from my phone have a little iPhone icon.

You can comment on any post by clicking “leave a comment” or if there are existing comments by clicking where it says “1 comment” or whatever. Right now, all comments are saved for moderation, meaning I have to approve them by hand, but at least I’ll see them and not get buried in spam. I’m debating how best to make comments work, because I miss the old old days when y’all actually used to leave me comments.

far >