I’m sticking with the default lame-ass Kubrick theme, as it seems to be the only one that plug-in developers test against, and I don’t have time to mess around editing the template to fix one thing while breaking another.
EDIT: I couldn’t resist, I’m trying K2
Not the one who has been emailing you for your assistance transferring TEN MILLION US DOLLARS to a foreign bank account.
Discussion thread here.
My dissertation post is here. When I edit the document at Google Documents and republish, it overwrites the post, so any explanatory text or tags are lost. One thing that is a little annoying is how it tries to take over the right-click context menu. I end up with the Google Document right-click menu opening up, with the Firefox context menu on top of it, obscuring the top half of the google menu.
I would have thought Google would have known better than to try to subvert such an important browser function. Bad Google, Bad!
The good: revision control, easy collaboration, seamless output to many formats, rich editing features.
The bad: post metadata isn’t preserved, non-standard browser UI, no way(I know of) to put the post on a separate page.
Maybe I could get the best of both by sticking the RSS feed of revisions on a separate WP page.
I used Sharpreader for years, and I still think it’s the best of the free stand-alone readers, even though it’s not the prettiest, and the mechanism for changing feed properties is about the wonkiest thing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t want to change, because I’m a minimalist at heart, but I just wanted a little more.
While looking around for something that would be just a little easier on the eyes and not so restrictive in terms of user-configuration, I found Newzie. I used it for a couple weeks at home, and I liked how it looked better than Sharpreader, RSSOwl, or Greatnews. The large variety of news reading modes was a welcome change. I used the single column, full-article newspaper view the most, because the headline rarely indicates the content in many of the feeds I subscribe to, such as Ask.Metafilter and all of the Scienceblogs feeds; However, if you have the full posts laid out one after the other, you can skim them easily. This works particularly well for Flickr feeds.
I realized after a couple weeks, however, that I just liked reading things in Sharpreader better. The reason is that Newzie has designed its own novel UI. Right-clicking doesn’t work like you expect, closing and minimizing doesn’t work like you’re used to, and it’s just unpleasant to switch between UI styles like that. Simply clicking a link would open up a IE tab within the application, no matter if you selected “open” or “open in new window”. There was a third option, called “Open (ext.)” that would open the link in IE externally. There was no way to open a firefox window externally if you were using the Gecko rendering engine, and the only way to do it using embedded IE was to install the “Open in Firefox” extension for IE, and right-click and select open link in firefox from the context menu. The way this worked would change depending on what mode you were in, too. Simple things, like right-clicking a feed in the left pane would open a slew of options, none of which were “Mark all read”. Every article container had all these buttons and options that would popup upon mouse-over, but I never used them, because they were for deleting the post or changing the read status or some other thing I didn’t care about. Who wants to manually mark each individual post they read? Who wants to go through and individually delete old, read posts? Another annoying thing was the unnecessary distinction between “New” and “Unread”. If I haven’t read it, it’s new to me, OK? So while I found Sharpreader to be unpleasantly restrictive and minimalist, Newzie was way over the top with unnecessary, cluttered features. The developer should focus on making what features he has coded work right, rather than grafting on a slew of half-ass new ones.
I’m using Sage now, which used to work not so well on pre-2.0 Firefox, but seems to work great in the latest release. It works in the sidebar just like History or Bookmarks do, instead of grafting on some new interface. Marking of items read is done via the browser history, instead of some hack. Because it obeys the conventions of the system within which it operates, I was able to use the Optimoz tweaks extension to auto-hide it in the sidebar, giving me all the navigational ease of a 3-pane interface, with the page presentation of a full window. Because it obeys the conventions of the system within which it operates, you can use a custom stylesheet to display the feed however you’d like, with no need for a little buttons or preference for each style, color, background, font, and so on. This also allows you to benefit from the design capabilities of someone other than the developer. Judging from the available styles, this is a very good thing. The only thing I don’t have that I’d like here is a display of unread messages. There was an extension that purported to do that, but it wasn’t listed on mozilla.org, and wasn’t compatible to 2.0.0.3, so I’m reluctant to mess with it.
I was just reading the Transcript of the Rock the Vote Democratic Presidential Debate (washingtonpost.com) and I remembered a lesson my dad taught me. The lesson was: “Find the Referent.” It’s from Stuart Chase’s “The Tyranny of Words“. In other words, think about what the words being used actually refer to, physically. Political speak is meticulously devoid of referents, except, of course, in the cases where the speakers abuse statistics. I want to see a debate where candidates aren’t allowed to use the phrase, “the American people”.
I was kinda enjoying the debate, and laughing about how all the other candidates, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, lord help us all, were trying to give Dean such a hard time for pointing out the unrequited loyalty of Southern white voters to the Republican Party. Bless ‘im.
Trent Lott loses his spot, Rush Limbaugh gets booted, Greg Easterbrook is fired. Each of them for making statements that could possibly have been misinterpreted, or could be seen in a more understanding light, about relatively benign issues. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, however, has made and, as far as we know, is continuing to make absolutely unambiguous statements about issues that are likely to precipitate immediate terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens, as well as to further the negative image Americans are getting in other countries. He still has his job.
I have to ask: Who would you rather piss off? The American Religious Right, or all Muslims worldwide? I guess all Muslims worldwide aren’t going to be voting for Bush in the coming elections, are they?
This story in the Asia Times is just really too good to pass up. Here’s a quote:
The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath, according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday.
And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).
Based on several nationwide surveys it conducted with California-based Knowledge Networks since June, as well as the results of other polls, PIPA found that 48 percent of the public believe US troops found evidence of close pre-war links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist group; 22 percent thought troops found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; and 25 percent believed that world public opinion favored Washington’s going to war with Iraq. All three are misperceptions.
The report, Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War, also found that the more misperceptions held by the respondent, the more likely it was that s/he both supported the war and depended on commercial television for news about it.
Raw data is here.