Archive for January 2009
Billy Mays has a moment.

“Stop having a boring tuna, stop having a boring life.”

Oh, and you’re gonna love my nuts.

Fox News severely misunderstands the Obamas’ relationship.

How to REALLY Import your Delicious Links into Tumblr

I’ve been using Del.icio.us, the fabulous Joshua Schachter creation, as my linkrolling tool for a few years now. Although it can be a powerful tool for organizing and browsing through interesting URLs, I find I only use it for two things: saving links and displaying said links in the sidebar of Mike Industries. For that reason, there are probably any number of bookmarking services which would amply serve my meager needs.

One service that’s caught my eye recently is the increasingly popular Tumblr. I have friends who run their main blogs off of it and others who just run one of their multiple blogs off of it. I still like hosting my own WordPress blog and would never outsource this to a hosted service, but at the same time, running all linkblogging activity through a service like Tumblr sounds appealing — especially considering I can then pull all of that activity into my main blog using something like WP-O-Matic.

The super nice thing about Tumblr is how simple the posting interface is. The “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet the company provides does a pretty good job of automatically figuring out what type of content you’re posting and treating it accordingly. In other words, if you seed from a YouTube page, the link gets posted as type “video” and is displayed accordingly. These sorts of interface niceties reduce the amount of work required to save links and thus encourage more linking activity. Both good things. The woefully inadequate “Press This” bookmarklet from WordPress just doesn’t measure up.

So… a couple of days ago when I decided I wanted to migrate all of my Del.icio.us bookmarks over to Tumblr, I couldn’t for the life of me find an automated way to do it. Tumblr has an import feeds feature but it is misleadingly named. It doesn’t actually import existing feeds. It only adds your feed URL and then posts any new items you add afterwards. This does nothing to aid in the migration of existing content over to Tumblr.

Using a combination of the Tumblr API sample code and some code I stole from Greg Neustaetter, I created a PHP script which imports all of your existing Del.icio.us bookmarkets into Tumblr.

Warning: I am not a PHP genius so I know the code isn’t pretty… but it works. It imported all 312 of my Del.icio.us bookmarks in under a minute.

In case you’re interested, here’s how to do it (caveat — you might want to do this on a fresh Tumblr account, just to be sure):

  1. Log into your Del.icio.us account.
  2. Hit http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all and save the file to your desktop as “delicious.xml”. Upload this file to your server.
  3. Upload Delicious-To-Tumblr.php to the same location on your server and edit the two lines in the file specifying your Tumblr email and password (to authenticate with the Tumblr API).
  4. Hit Delicious-To-Tumblr.php in your web browser and all of your entries will be imported.

Voila! Del.icio.us-to-Tumblr migration in about a minute. Enjoy.

Two people who met on Newsvine just had a baby boy together. Very strange feeling to have indirectly spurred human life.

Si Se Puede

Barack Obama Silkscreen Poster by Date Farmers

No matter what your political leanings are, today is a special day. Above is my favorite poster from the presidential campaign. It was beautifully illustrated and silkscreened by The Date Farmers to help get out the vote in Texas… complete with authentic Mexican Revolution motif. I believe this is the only known depiction of Barack Obama where he looks reasonably badass.

Really, really beautiful.

Jesus, who invited Quayle?
@doctyper Ha! Very nice. I meant the baseball kind though! :)
YouTube request: A highlight reel of failed hidden ball tricks.
If you don’t own a rubber icecube tray that makes perfect cubes yet, do yourself a favor and get a couple. Outstanding. Thanks Freckles!
Shared

Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

But mounting evidence indicates that this approach to information is actually totally debilitating. Faced with a flood of headlines on an ever-increasing variety of topics, we shut off. We turn to news that doesn’t require much understanding – crime, traffic, weather – or we turn off the news altogether.

- Matt Thompson on why the way we report and consume news is precisely wrong. Matt is, of course, precisely right. If you’re at SXSW next week, I don’t know how you could justify missing this talk.

Cameron’s Colosseo letterpress poster is now available: The only question is, black or white? The black is oh so tempting!

Jon Stewart Skewers Media’s Obsession with Chat Roulette: Funniest Wii Craps reference ever, as well. It’s really interesting to me that Chat Roulette is getting this much “attention” when TinyChat has been around so much longer, essentially does the same thing and more, and is much more useful to the average person. Just goes to show how viral public sex acts can be.

"Add features and customers forever and rake in the dough.":

The 2005 email that spawned Picnik, Google’s latest buy. If you’re thinking about launching a startup, you should study this e-mail carefully. It’s a perfect example of exactly how a crazy little thought becomes a big idea, and even on its own, it’s better than most “official company business plans” people present to VCs.  I gave a talk at Webstock in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago about creating a startup and I wish I had this to dissect at the time. Really good stuff.

Tumblr Finally Rolls Out Comments. Sort Of. Trolls Not Welcome. :

I actually really like how clubby it is.  Unfortunately it means I won’t be commenting on any Tumblrs since I don’t officially “follow” anyone besides via RSS, but that’s probably ok. Maybe the answer to the world’s wide-open commenting problem is something like this.

Episode 2 of Dan Benjamin's "The Conversation" is Live:

I was a guest on Dan Benjamin’s new weekly radio show last week, along with Merlin Mann, Christina Warren, Adam Keys, and Dave Nanian. Subjects discussed include Newsvine, keeping your own identity after becoming part of a big company, and the RADICAL concept of only publishing stuff to your readers and followers that is actually true.

LESS - Leaner CSS:

Given that pre-compiling CSS is an official “best practice” these days, why not use that compile step to extend CSS in powerful ways? LESS lets you use variables, nested rules, and other niceties at author-time to clean up your rules and keep everything tidy. I believe The Wolf made something like this a few years ago, but I haven’t heard about it since.

How 3D works, and why it's back:

Great article on the ins and outs of three dimensional imagery. Still doesn’t change my opinion that well-shot conventional cinematography is more impressive than the novelty that is Avatar.

The Importance of Removing Features:

This is one of the most useful articles I’ve read in a long time. As we work on focusing, strengthening, and simplifying Newsvine, the concepts discussed by Lukas ring true. “Saying no” has never been a strong suit of mine. It’s very helpful to remember how important of a quality it is. (via fullstopinteractive)

Newly released video of the space shuttle Challenger disaster: It was 24 years ago, I was in 5th grade, but I remember it like it was yesterday. School was stopped immediately and they wheeled out televisions in every classroom for us to watch the news footage. It’s great that this video has been released, but holy crap, how do you tuck something that away for two decades???

A nicely done british parody of 60 Minutes style video journalism. It’s easy to miss how formulaic our news is sometimes. (via B-Tizzle, originally via E-Chizzle)

Colosseo: This is why Cameron is a king and we are all just pawns in his world. I can’t wait to get my hands on this poster. I will point out, however, that the outro credits on the video need some kerning. Someone is going to lose their right hand for that.

Spezify:

New ways of searching are almost never as useful as old ways of searching. Spezify is pretty awesome though. It’s a visually interesting, never-ending, horizontally and vertically scrollable, topic explorer. I don’t think I’d use it for digging deep on anything, but to get a quick visually rich sampling of a topic, it’s quite fun (via tiff, a long time ago actually, over email).

Realism in UI Design:

Reminds me of my favorite logo design advice: “Never waste a stroke”. (via gruber)

Overshared
At the first Doughty show of the night at the Triple Door. If you're in Seattle you should come down for the 2nd at 10. Excellent!
This Kindle ad is cute and Applelike but misses the mark. Advertise what you do well: price and battery life http://bit.ly/cFBw70
@codinghorror Aliased Monaco 9 should be in the Smithsonian.
Why does the media continue to cover what Rob Glaser thinks about the future?
@Trenti Ummm, the Timex Sinclair came out after the VIC-20, beeeeeeeayatch! I will out-old you any day!
@paulsmith Wow. I love the user manual shooting out from Shatner's shoulder at the perfect angle. http://j.mp/am10eU
@paulsmith You have me beat by mere months there! I cut my teeth on a Practical Peripherals 1200 bauder.
@roblifford Probably a 10% chance I fly in at the last minute for a couple of nights. Other than that, planning to skip this year.
I can't believe @shauninman's first computer was a G4. I feel ancient. Mine was a VIC-20. http://5by5.tv/pipeline/5
Wow, how did I not know about Lala until now? Tons of great full albums, free: http://bit.ly/dBrdLw
Thanks for everyone who suggested Brizzly. Going to fire that sucker up again...
Is there a way to unfollow people but still allow them to DM you? Like a "mute" setting or something?
@levifig Burn-in was a bigger issue with first-gen plasmas. They are much better now. LCDs have their own lighting issues as well.
@horsedreamer The black isn't quite as good as some other top plasmas, but it's better than all LCDs. At an inch thick, I'll take it.
@levifig Isn't ghosting mainly an issue for LCDs? I've had a plasma for four years and no ghosting whatsoever.