… and from Senator Joseph Lieberman, an observation about Russert that, to me, is one of the highest compliments one human being can pay another:

" … the truth is he made us all better…."

I thought not….

Well … I have. A few weekends ago I splurged on a new lens for my Sony A100 camera …

… and as I was crawling around my back yard trying to figure out how to use it properly, I spotted this tiny creature resting on a dried up leaf….

It started to move …

… and you’d be surprised how fast a snail seems to travel at this magnification.

The focus on these shots is not great, and I’ve learned a lot more about using the lens since that first day, but I got a big kick out of how close I could get to something that was smaller than a small shirt button and still capture very good detail.

The poor thing must have been camera shy, something I can certainly relate to, so I was careful not to use any flash but it tried to race off the leaf anyway …

… yet the only way out of sight was through a whole in the leaf …

… where it got stuck …

… so I set the camera aside, split the leaf to release it’s head, and off it went, disappearing into the forest…. I mean, uh, pine bark.

The lens is fantastic, definitely the best purchase I’ve made for the camera. I’ve gotten a lot better at predicting how it will react to light and focus at these close distances, so you can expect a huge quantity of photos of very small things — especially buds and bugs — to start appearing here and on my Flickr account pretty soon. I’ve also got a massive set of closeup shots from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens, taken over several weekends, that impress even me — and that’s pretty hard to do….

From our friends over at YouTube, here’s Paul McCartney and Wings singing that classic, "Snail on the Run." (It may sound like they’re saying "Band" — but they’re not.) Is the song stuck in your head yet?

I was doing some general cleanup on the site on Friday evening, and ran the site through an RSS feed validator to see how it fared. That’s when I saw errors referencing hundreds of links that I didn’t recognize. It didn’t take me long to track the links to my WordPress header.php file, where I found this:

Click the picture to see it full-sized. It’s obvious to me now that Google was generating ads for my site based on this content. There were, in all, about 600 such links at the very end of header.php. I didn’t put them there, and I don’t know anything about the two sites you can see repeated throughout these links (nor did I try to find out). I removed the 600 lines of code from the header.php file, but on Saturday discovered that several hundred others had been added, referencing two different sites but similar content. In both cases, the blocks of code were surround by <font> tags that caused the text to be hidden.

If you want to see if this has happened to you, bring up your site and select View/Page Source if you’re using Firefox, or View/Source if you’re using Internet Explorer. In my case, the spam links always appeared at the end of the source listing, but you might want to page through the entire listing since I suppose they could appear anywhere.

After the second occurrence, I changed my WordPress admin password as well as my hosting login password. So far it hasn’t occurred again, but I can see that this is yet something I’ll have to keep an eye on. If I figure out how it actually happens, I’ll certainly share it here.

Leanne Wildermuth of Artist By Nature has written about the same thing, and it was from Leanne that I learned that the source of the problem was header.php:

Got Spam in YOUR Templates?

For now, I’ve also removed most of the ads from my site, except those for Amazon.com. I may not put them back….

job_name: This can be any name you want.

out_name: The name you use to log in to your blog.

out_pass: The password you use to log in to your blog.

out_url: Described as "full URL of the XML-RPC interface for your blog" which, for this Wordpress blog, is http://www.afewgoodpens.com/blog/xmlrpc.php. I’m not sure what is is for the other supported blog software, but it’s likely that someone else has tried if for yours — so check the platform’s forums or other help pages. I found the correct URL for Wordpress, for example, on the Wordpress Codex. If you try to execute the URL, and get a message along the lines of "XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only" — you’ve probably got the right one to use.

out_time: This is the time of day that you want posts to appear, in Greenwich Mean Time. For help with Greenwich Mean Time, go here. So far, it seems typical that the blog posts appear within 20-30 minutes of the specified hour (and, no, refreshing the page repeatedly won’t make them appear any faster).

out_blog_id: I’m not sure what this one’s actually for, but I entered "1" and it worked. I’m assuming that if you have more than one blog that you access with the same profile and password, this number might vary.

out_cat_id: The category you want the blog posting assigned to. Note that this is a category number, not the category itself. In Wordpress, that translates to the id number associated with the category, which you can find by selecting Manage / Categories. In my case, the id number is 27, which is associated with the posting category "Internet Clippings."

That’s it! Easy!

Here’s a sample of one of my daily blog postings.

You’ll see that the entry was correctly categorized as Internet Clippings, and that the tags I assigned to the bookmark appear as del.icio.us tags at the end of each one. Clicking the tags takes you to all the bookmarks for the same tag associated with your del.icio.us profile. I might have preferred it to take you to everyone’s posts with that tag, since there are other ways to incorporate links to del.icio.us tags on a blog. Maybe an option to do that would be nice.

Any notes that you typed when you tagged the link also appear. There’s an unfortunate limitation of 255 characters for the notes, so what I try to do is clip a key sentence or two from the article that I think gets to its essential point. I’d like to include a comment or two of my own with each one, but I can barely take a breath that uses less than 255 characters, so I’ll have to wait until the next version of del.icio.us — which I think increases this limit to 1000 characters per bookmark — to do that. With 1000 characters, bookmarking and daily blog posting would become an excellent shortcut way to read and comment on articles and web pages, and simultaneously set them up to automatically post to your blog.

This is a very busy time of year for me, so tools like this that actually do save time but help me keep things like this blog moving are extremely useful. Too many time-saving technologies take on a life of their own, sucking up energy while giving only the appearance of activity and progress while you sit back and wonder why you don’t seem to be getting anything done. An effective technological tool is one that results in actual time compression, collapsing the time required to perform a series of tasks while achieving the same, or acceptably similar, results.