Jordy Blog

The Trouble with Pizza Girls

The trouble with pizza girls (and everyone else these days) is that they blog.

I love the internet and its bountious opportunities for citizen journalism.  Ten years ago you would never have heard this story.

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WOMA Needs a Website

Janet Meiners posted about an upcoming Wasach Online Marketing Association (WOMA) meeting with CJ (Commission Junction).  It sounds like WOMA does some really fun stuff, but for being all about internet marketing, I’m surprised that it has basically no internet presence at all.  Month after month I’ve been waiting for a WOMA website to appear, but alas, nothing.  If it weren’t for Janet constantly keeping us clued in, I would never have heard of WOMA.  That’s bad, considering that I’m probably its target audience incarnate.

WOMA, let me help you set up a simple blog site to give some credibility to the fun & interesting things you do.  It makes no sense at all not to have one, especially for you.  I’m sincere about being willing to help because I love Internet Marketing and really think Utah can benefit from a group like this; but nobody will be benfited if nobody knows you exist. Please setup a website so Utah can know what’s going on.  If you want help, there’s a contact me section on my blog; I could have it up for you in 15 minutes if you give the URL.

3DTRIS = Online 3D Tetris

3DTRIS, a new online flash clone of Blockout is pretty fun. It’s actually remarkably easy to use, for a 3D game, but the game play is still quite difficult when it gets going fast. Takes me back.

In other nerdy news, I’ve created 0D Tetris for those of us who love Tetris in all dimensions.

Here it is:

.

Rules: Press any key to not rotate the non-existent shape around non-existent axis. When you finally quit pressing keys, the game is over.

Feel free to download the source code, or just press period anytime for your own 0D gaming pleasure.

Custom Search Engines for Firefox

I created a little Firefox search engine add-on for LDSMedia (a company with which I am affiliated with through Provo Labs). (LDSMedia is a search engine site with tons of indexed LDS content –wonderful for doing LDS research, study, lesson preparation, etc.)

Anyway, now you can search LDS content right from your Firefox browser by installing this little plugin. It’s super easy. After following my link, just click on the “LDSMedia” link (note the CAPS), click “OK”, then find the new option in your list of search engines in Firefox.

So now great LDS content is searchable without needing to go to the site first. Cool, right? I use this type of search engine plugin a lot when I want to look up a word on Wikipedia. Why should you make one for your site?  It saves a step, it’s convenient for your readers, and it’s good way to increase exposure for your company –or in this case LDS content in general. I imagine we’ll be creating plugins for each of our search engines.

I thought that creating the plugin would be kind of tricky, but it’s really just a small script, and the Mozilla Search Plugin Documentation is really quite thorough. So I just followed the instructions in the quick start; it was mostly copy-and-paste with a few values changed.

So there you have it, Firefox search plugins for fun and profit!

Online Word Processing with Writely

If you haven’t seen Writely (the beta online word processor) yet, you really should check it out. I think the “online platform” thing is going to be huge, and (although I love Excel) I hope Writely rocks proprietary Microsoft to its core. Writely looks sharp and is sure to grow with the funding and reputation of Google behind it.

Some things I like:

• Writely imports and exports to Open Office’s newly ISO approved OpenDocument files
• Writely automatically backs up your files every 8 seconds
• Writely supports multiple editors at once (a purpose for which I used wiki all through college).
• Writely versions your editions so you can easily revert to previous state.

One thing I don’t like:

• “WWW2″ right in the URL… It’s just too much.

I’m sure I’ll find other things I dislike as I try it out. Writely is free, but it won’t accept new users until June or July. I signed up for the mailing list to get an early crack at it.

Introducing Google SketchUp

It looks like Google SketchUp is now live. But besides enabling users to put mock ups on Google Earth, I’m having a hard time seeing how this acquisition fits into its Google’s overall search strategy. Still, it looks pretty cool and will probably be great for branding. Plus, I believe that if it’s cool enough, a revenue model will follow.

A free trial version is available for download, but it’s currently only available on Windows. Alternatively, if you’d like to see a great, fully-featured, open-source 3D graphics and animation suite, check out Blender. It’s definitely not as sleek as Google SketchUp, but it’s much more functional.

Category-Specific Feeds in WordPress

Most people don’t know this, but WordPress automatically builds RSS feeds for specific categories. So if you wanted to syndicate only “tech” stories from the Jordy Blog, you could use this feed:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3

To view which id you could use for a category-specific feed, just click on a category and see what is listed in the address bar. If you don’t see a number, the blogger is probably using a non-default permalink structure (which is good for SEO purposes by the way).

(If a WordPress blog has nested categories, a feed of a parent category will automatically grab any stories belonging to child categories, so there’s no need to classify a story in multiple categories of the same lineage –the most nested applicable categories will do. That also means that there there’s no need to subscribe to a child category’s feed if you’re subscribed to the parent.)

Another cool trick is that you can syndicate several categories at once, and WordPress is smart enough to give you only one instance of each unique post (even though a story might be listed in two or more separate categories). For example, here’s how you would syndicate just my Technology and Business categories:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3,2

No dupes!

But there are several reasons why you might not want to syndicate by category:

1) Category syndication is a little tricky, and you’re lazy.

2) Most bloggers don’t know that the feature is available, and if they do, they know that almost no one uses it. They are unlikely to cater to your needs, categorizing and nesting appropriately, etc. And if they ever move their blog, they’ll likely not redirect category-specific feeds.

3) Category specific syndication means you might miss out on some cool content (especially on the Jordy Blog).

Overall, category-specific syndication is mostly handy for blog aggregation since you may want to syndicate several people’s views on ‘X’, but don’t really care about ‘Y’, and ‘Z’. But since most people aren’t aggregating blog feeds, most people don’t care.

Do you?

UVLUG on IPv6

UVLUG will host Dave Heldenbrand’s presentation on IPv6 this Saturday.

From Answers.com:

“IPv4 supports 4.2 billion addresses, which is inadequate for giving even one address to every living person, much less support the burgeoning market for connective devices. IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion addresses. For scale, this would allow an average of about 430 quintillion unique addresses per square inch of the Earth’s surface.”

With these kind of numbers numbers, I hope to be able to boast a static IP address for every bacterium in my stomach…

Anyway, it should be pretty cool. I hope to see you there.

Free DNS

I’m using a great free DNS service for the Provo Labs small business portfolio. EveryDNS lets you manage up to 20 URLs for free, but you get an unlimited number for 15 bucks or so. EveryDNS is a pretty cool service because it doesn’t abstract the details from you, and it’s much better to just do it yourself than wait for some dude to change it for you, especially if you plan on making a lot of changes like fast-moving companies do. Plus you (hopefully) get the added comfort of knowing it was done right, without having to make a bunch of phone calls and wait.

SSS is a Hit!

A few days ago, Dave posted about Software for Starving Students on Digg, and the downloads started coming immediately. With well over 20,000 downloads the last time I checked (a couple of days ago), the project has become a major success. We’ve transferred over 11 terabytes of data and our seeders have held up fine, although a lot of that was done through xmission and other generous mirrors. We also learned a valuable lesson: to turn off wiki and other high computation areas of our site beforehand next time.

We’ve had about 10 people volunteer to be distributor liaisons in schools all over, as well as several interested in helping with translation and distribution for versions in Italy and Cambodia. It’s incredible how small the world has become because of the flattening force of internet. It’s amazing that a few volunteers can work on a little project and have it distributed all over the world, instantly. And that’s one of the reasons that open source is thriving: it leverages free labor from skilled workers distributed all over the world, then redistributes contributions almost instantaneously around the globe. I have a lot to say about the dynamics of open source but will do that later. I’m just glad to see the SSS have seen such tremendous success. After many late nights, it’s rewarding to see our efforts pay off, and it feels good to give a little back to the open source community after so many years of quality mooching.