Monday, July 27, 2009

Some amazing facts

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I just watched this fascinating Youtube video. The world is an amazing place!


Friday, July 17, 2009

My Inbox

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Neil's empty inbox - a rare event

Neil's empty inbox - a rare event


 


Isn’t this beautiful?


I haven’t seen an empty inbox for years, and I love it! When it’s full I feel like I have the cares of the world on my shoulders. But when it’s empty, it’s like I’m making progress. Even if it might be illusory, I like that feeling.


So I’m going to persist in my strategy which can be described simply as:

If it’s junk, get rid of it.

If it’s someone elses problem, forward it.

If it’s worth reading, read it now, then delete it.

If it needs more info, request more info and delete it.

If it needs acting on, then act on it now, then delete it.


Monday, July 13, 2009

Slideshow from RSS for Wordpress

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It took me hours to find, but the easiest way I found to build a slideshow from a MediaRSS feed and add it to a WordPress blog was using the Google Ajax Feed API.


There are a few plug-ins that are supposed to work with WordPress, but I didn’t like them because they were really limited, or didn’t work on an IIS hosted blog. Good old Javascript, although it’s verbose, works fine.


That’s what I’ve used on this blog. Have a look at the slideshow on the lower right. It’s generated by the Google Ajax Feeds API.


If you don’t like getting your hands dirty with JavaScript, the best Flash based slideshow generator I know of is at VuVox.com. That’s what I use for some of the ObSrv examples of slideshows here.


The beauty of building a slideshow from an RSS Feed is that you don’t need to have the images on your own site, and the content updates continually as more items are added to the feed.


Of course, sometimes it’s hard to find a good feed. That’s where ObSrv.com comes in, because it can generate a feed from a google images search.


So when you use the Google Ajax Feed API and ObSrv.com you can make a slideshow of any topic you’d like. The one on this site is for “Information Technology”.


And just to make this post pretty, I thought I’d include a slideshow of the most recent ten pictures from the Creative Commons group on Flickr


Sunday, July 12, 2009

We've Moved!

This blog has moved!
The new address is


Please update your browser and RSS reader to the new links. All of my existing articles have moved too.

I'm now using WordPress as my blogging platform, and really like it.

If you've got any comments or suggestions, please let me know.