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CogDog The Blog

An early 90s builder of web stuff and blogging Alan Levine barks at CogDogBlog.com on web storytelling (#ds106 #4life), photography, bending WordPress, and serendipity in the infinite internet river. He thinks it's weird to write about himself in the third person. And he is 100% into the Fediverse (or tells himself so) Tooting as @cogdog@cosocial.ca

Blog Pile

Bag Dropping Bookmarklet

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Regarding our post about a new RSS feed for the web’s eye view bag of urls site, Scott Leslie commented about our submission form being an ideal candidate for a web browser bookmarklet tool.

Scott has recently championed these underused tools for one’s browser toolbar, rightfully so, because they are very handy, bordering on indispensible.

I had toyed with this a year ago, especially since I end up posting about 80% of the new items to our
bag of urls but never finished.

But now I have, and it was very easy indeed to build a bookmarklet tool that shortens the steps for dropping a url into the bag

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How Many Grains of Sand on a Beach? (Counting Blogs)

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Deep philosophical questions or trivial trivia? “How many stars are there in the sky?” “How many grains of sand on the beach?”

The question of How many blogs and bloggers? How big the blogosphere? from blogcount yields an estimated 2.4 to 2.9 weblogs as of Monday, June 23, based on reports of the big centrally hosted systems, some off the cuff estimates of others, and yet another extrapolation fudge factor.

Oops! Typo patrol…. that should be 2.4 to 2.9 million weblogs. Thanks D’Arcy 😉

For even more numbers, see also the NITLE Blog Census which has spidered and indexed 655,557 weblogs as of today.

Despite all the recent interest in blogging, few hard numbers are available about the extent of the phenomenon, particularly in languages other than English. The NITLE Blog Census is an attempt to create and share a regularly updated database of all known weblogs.

The census has been active since early May, 2003.

Our crawlers search the Web for weblogs, and attempt to categorize them by language and authoring tool.

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New RSS Feed for Bag of URLs

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Give me a free hour and there goes another new RSS Feed. Since 1996, we have been accumulating some 4000 interesting web sites in our web’s eye view bag of urls.

Essentially the format for the content is a site title, URL, and description (does that sound like RSS or what?)

The site has an entire back end admin system where any visitor can submit a site via our drop it in the bag form. New items go into a temp holding area, until we can review them. The added feature now posts approved sites to the new Bag of URLs RSS feed.

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TrackBack Is There for Radio/UserLand

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Finally! A test site now proves that Radio/UserLand weblogs are TrackBack enabled. And it works! Got Trackback? Yup!

My blog entry here was created by using the MovableType bookmarklet tool that automatically dissected the test source, found the embedded RDF TrackBack data, and provided the ping address directly to my blog editing environment. The proof of my ping should be registered right here

It work, and it works across different blog systems. This opens the door for maybe a lot more TrackBack activity…

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Dullest Blog in the World (over-blogging)

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If ever I think I am blogging too many things, I can use the dullest blog in the world as my reference point.

Very tongue-in-cheek (we hope), this blog includes fascinating tidbits such as:

Taking a short break July 2
I was doing some things. After a while I decided to stop doing them and take a short break. At the end of the break I started doing the things again.
Hanging up a damp towel June 27
I had a towel in my hands. It was a bit damp. I hung it over the bannister so that it would dry off.
Picking up a piece of rubbish June 19
I saw that there was a small piece of rubbish on the ground. I stooped over and picked it up. Seeing a litter bin nearby I carried the item a short distance and deposited it in the bin.

and on and on it goes, loaded with comments to boot. While obviously sarcastic, look at this as an example of trying to blog way too much (I would have skipped the towel entry).

<tiphat>Credit to the very last line of the iCite entry, Would a blog by any other name still smell like a blog by any other name? itself a worthy read.</tiphat>

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Google Alert: Another RSS Feeder (and good all around resource)

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Another gem of a resource that has a hook or two into the RSS game, is the free Google Alert service.

Google Alert runs daily Google searches for you and emails you whenever new results appear. Many people use Google Alert to keep track of what the web is saying about them, their interests or any projects they are involved in.

Even if you have no clue or interest in RSS, Google Alert is an extremely useful tool to keep you in tune into web resources that cover areas that interest you.

<tiphat>Found a link to this via some long last path to an entry at IDBlog.</tiphat>

Blog Pile

Bonus Feature for MT Bookmarklet

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Scott Leslie recently posted some well deserved praise for Bookmarklets (little Javascripts to perform tasks), citing them as vastly under-used but powerful tools in your web browser.

The MovableType Bookmarklet makes blogging any website a snap, see our Blogging with the MT Bookmarklet summary.

But by pure accident, I discovered this tool has an added bonus.

The MT Bookmarklet tool is even a bit more powerful because it can also grab a portion of text from the page you are viewing, and include that in your blog editing form.

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NaDa: Does Nothing for Everybody

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On an extremely light note… hurry now and download your copy of NaDa, only 1k! “Nada does nothing for everybody”.

Most products we see on the market want to increase our productivity, organize our screen joyfully or make wonders with our sound card, but NaDa™ does nothing. This is a revolutionary whole new approach, a concept far beyond what you usually expect from the software industry. Download it and forget it.

Compatible with all Mac OSs, including OS’ÄÝX Jaguar, all Windows™ versions, all flavors of UNIX/Linux, Amiga, BeOS, everything you can think of, because we strongly believe that NaDa™ does nothing for everybody.

<tiphat>Thanks to WebWord</tiphat>

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Splitting Up MT Category Archives

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I absolutely love MovableType for publishing this weblog, and know there is quite a bit more to dig into. One thing that has bothered me is in creating my category archives, they potentially have no end in sight for how long they will get to be. They just grow and grow as you add more to your blog. And I loathe slow-loading, ever scrolling web pages.

For example, my learning objects category now has 34 posts and I see quite a few more to come. It is getting fat.

It is not too much to ask that there be some tools to break up the categories into segments, e,.g pagination. The idea would be to have a set amount of content per page (x posts), and some sort of drop down menu, or next/previous link, or even the google-style numbered sets that would self-organiize a long category archive.

Here I describe the cheap route I took.