sw'as

WP-Footnotes 4.0

2010-08-05T14:35:14+10:00

The first update to WP-Footnotes, my WordPress plugin for simple creation and maintenance of footnotes on a WordPress site has just hit the shelves.

It's the first update in over two years - sorry about the delay - and should bring the plugin inline with WordPress 3.0.x.

I suggest downloading it from the WordPress Extend site. If you have any bug reports or feature requests head on over the the WordPress Plugins Trac system. Thanks.

If you're a crack WP Plugin developer and want to contribute, get in touch. I think the two year timeframe for an update indicates that I could do with a little help. Do good work and I'll consider adding you as a committer.

What Do You Suggest? - V2

2010-07-19T19:27:48+10:00

It's been a while since I released the original WDYS and since then I've slowly been working on a feature I wanted from the very beginning, but didn't have time to implement: cross locale comparisons.

You can check them out now at What Do You Suggest v2.0.

Google's suggestions are tailored to your location. So for any given set of terms, Google will suggest something different depending on where you are in the world. You can now compare the suggestions made by Google across two locations. To take a (somewhat topical) example, if you're in Australia and you type the word Rudd into the Google search box, all of Google's suggestions are related to ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. However a Canadian doing the same thing will get an entirely different set of suggestions, with zero overlap (here they are compared.)

Personally, I find it fascinating to expose the differences in suggestions. Let me know if you find anything fascinating.

Although the suggestions Google makes are drawn (as far as I know) directly from the frequency and volume of searches made by users, this demonstrates the potential Google has to influence what people see, hear and learn about the world. Do you think it could inadvertently reinforce prejudices and stereotypes or escalate nationalistic thought or behaviour?

I don't expect the influence would be great, but it seems a logical conclusion to draw that it might have at least some effect. Especially when you consider that search results, not just suggestions are tailored to your location.

Notes

If you'd like to see a specific location or language added, let me know
I've added, a few locations and languages, but need additional help testing and adding letters, words and questions to the suggestion feature for languages other than English. Can you help?
At the time of v2 release, Google doesn't seem to be returning a count of results for each suggestion.

Have fun exploring. Leave a comment if you find it interesting.

GHD Resolutions 4/4/10

2010-04-15T18:10:13+10:00

Yeah, it's a little late.

My resolutions this year were:

Just Do It,
Take Financial Control, and
Engage More

More mixed results this month. I'm not feeling particularly motivated to do this, so it's going to be a laundry list this month:

Until recently I'd maintained Inbox Zero for nearly a month.
My Weekly Review seems to have become more of a Monthly Review - which obviously isn't good enough. Thursday mornings. No matter what. (Easier said than done.)
I've maintained my morning walking habit which is good. I'm starting to get a little bored of it and plan to step it up to a running habit soon. Having something goog to listen to helps. I've been bingeing on the Sunday Night Safran Podcast this week.
Wake time has slipped a little. Winter makes it hard, but I'm trying to move it back to 6am.
I did get my hair cut last month like I promised myself I would, but it's time for another already.
I need to go to the dentist. I need to go to the doctor. These are two things that are failing to just get done.
Laura now has her name on the title deeds to a house and on a mortgage contract.
I went to last month's BWD meetup, but I'm missing this month's to write this.
I've been hanging out at Gertie's as a default something to do on Thursday evenings. You should come.

The wrap

Not a great month for sticking to GHD Resolutions (or reviewing them in a timely fashion). This month I'm going to focus on: - keeping up my walking habit and evolving it into a running habit, - doing a weekly review on Thursday mornings rain, hail or shine.

Useful Discovery

2010-03-05T13:36:47+10:00

Yesterday What Do You Suggest was featured on Information Aesthetics (thanks to Michael for submitting it) and then got picked up by Gizmodo. Needless to say, I thought that was pretty exciting. Since it's getting some attention, I thought I'd better post something more about it.

When I started building WDYS, my only aim was build something that used the Google Suggest data in an interesting way (and give RaphaelJS a try). After playing with it for a while and showing a few friends, I thought I'd achieved that goal. In many ways I found it more than just interesting - I found some of the results utterly fascinating, and very informing.

Sometime later I started thinking about whether it could be more than a novelty data visualisation with next to no practical use. I tried, but simply couldn't find a useful application.

Then I saw a tweet from @recipepuppy and, on a whim, seeded WDYS with the word caramelized and hey presto, I'd found a practical use - recipe discovery.

Seed it with more or less any cooking style or technique and you'll find an array of recipe options you might never have otherwise thought of or discovered.

This sort of works with ingredients too, but generally not quite as well.

Because each of the results given by Google Suggest (presumably) represent millions of searches I expected the results to be fairly narrow. I expected it would only rarely throw up suggestions I'd never heard of, but if you give it a go, I guarantee you'd find something new, probably weird and possibly delicious.

Another Practical Use?

It's actually fairly difficult to find (or define) the type of words which turn it into a useful tool for discovery. I just stumbled across this one, and still haven't found another. If you find something that makes WDYS useful I'd really love to hear from you.

GHD Resolutions 3/3/10

2010-03-03T21:16:15+10:00

And before you know it, the first GHDR review day rolls around.

My resolutions this year were:

Just Do It,
Take Financial Control, and
Engage More

The progress...

... has been mixed at best. The detailed report follows.

Just Doing It

I initially thought I'd been doing quite well - I've certainly been very busy at work, and even completed a whimsical personal project over a weekend and a bit. But then I realised that those aren't the things I actually need to focus on just doing - I'm already pretty good at whimsical personal projects. As I've already identified, it's the mundane I have trouble with and I can identify plenty of mundane I haven't done.

I've been telling myself this week I'll get my haircut for at least the past month.

I have made a little progress on doing a GTD refresher. I've got my filing system back up to scratch (almost) and been pretty good at completing a Weekly Review every Thursday morning. I still really need to read the book again, and I will.

(I'm also counting this post as a win in the just doing it column.)

Taking Financial Control

I tried - for at least a couple of hours - then I hit a road block and didn't manage to circumvent it. I'm a web-based creature and I'll take web-based SaaS over desktop software any day of the week - especially expensive desktop software. A couple of years ago I bought Quicken (after using a free student version for quite a few years), then promptly bought my first Mac and never looked at it again.

This month I tried to find an Australian equivalent of Mint without any luck at all ((Just to rub salt into the wound, Mint is now owned by Quicken, who have (wisely) discontinued the online version of their software in favour of Mint, but (unwisely) done so before introducing a version of Mint which Australians can actually use.)). There are a few options out there but none I found seemed to have anywhere near the usability I would expect.

On the upside, Laura and I are very close to finalising the purchase of our first investment property - which at least partially ticks the take financial control box. At least we're doing something constructive with our (no longer) spare cash.

Engaging More

I've massively failed at engaging more. The one industry meetup I almost made it to ended up being blown off for an evening at my local with a mate - which was totally worthwhile, but could have been done the next night or the previous night. Never mind. There's always this month - got any suggestions?

The Rest

On the rest I've been doing pretty well. I've been exercising every morning (excepting the crazy weather of late). I read Managing Humans which was well worth the small investment of time and money. I also bought some shelves which I'm expecting to magically make my life simpler - all they've done so far is sit in my office slowly gathering office detritus. What are they waiting for?

This month

Just Do It: Finish re-reading GTD. Get a haircut.
Take Financial Control: Find a reasonable way to track expenditure and income (and settle for something suboptimal above doing nothing at all).
Engage More: Go to the next Brisbane Webdesign Meetup Group - they're looking at HTML5 which could be kind of interesting since I'm currently building a client's site using HTML5 for the first time. Go to the next Petcha Kucha.

Also this month, I'll keep exercising every morning. I want to get back in to yoga which I've neglected for a month or so now. And to keep simplifying I'm going to throw/give something away.

Should be easy.