Category: website stuff

Brainstorming Richmond community improvement ideas

Every time I go on vacation or get a little bit of time to step back and think, I end up making long "to do" lists for myself.  The lists are about projects I want to start, books to read, things to learn about, people to get in touch with.  It's common for some significant chunk of those lists to be related to how to make my home, Richmond Indiana, a better place to live, work and play.

At the same time, I recognize that other people are out there coming up with their own ideas about how to make Richmond better.  I hear those ideas mentioned at meetings, in casual conversations, in planning documents, and all over.  Sometimes I hear people talk about idea overlap - how something they thought was a new idea was something someone else had worked on in the past.  And then I start to worry that we might not be fully honoring the collective brain power we devote to improving Richmond, and I wanted to create a resource that would allow for some consolidated storage of all of those great ideas.

Thus was created the concept for a new website I launched this week, Richmond Brainstorm.com.  It's a place where people can submit their ideas for how to make Richmond better, and discuss the ideas already on the site.

Continue reading "Brainstorming Richmond community improvement ideas" →

My someecards cards

I think I've raved here some before about the someecards website and how lovely I think it is.  I have to stay away from drinking liquids when reading it lest I spray said liquid all over the screen in choking laughter.  Many of the cards you can send are hilarious because they so concisely encapsulate some of the more crude or dark thoughts that pass through the human mind now and then, and in a way that somehow brilliantly echo my own sense of humor.  That's maybe not such a good thing...some of them - okay, most of them - are outright offensive in their very existence, let alone if you were to actually to send them to another person, so I largely spend time browsing, and then refraining. Definitely NSFW.

Lately I've also taken up the habit of using the someecards motif to create my own cards, which often channel some dark thought or bit of sarcastic humor going through my own mind in moments of weakened self-discipline, but that I wouldn't really ever want to say out loud.  It's fun because other people on the site will vote and comment on them, and sometimes even send them to their acquaintances (er, enemies?).

So, check 'em out, add your own, and send me a card. Or...maybe berate me for indulging? It's always interesting to see how it plays out for different senses of humor...how does that stuff strike you?

Links, and what I'm thinking about

I haven't had the chance to blog lately, but here are some bits and pieces to chew on. First, some links:

Some topics I'm thinking about, and may eventually blog about:
Continue reading "Links, and what I'm thinking about" →

Undo

Corn Maze Navigation Done RightYou may have noticed that I was playing around with the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress, and that it was generating these weekly digests of my Twitter posts on Fridays.  I'm not going to do that anymore, but you can always follow me on Twitter directly or with your favorite blog/RSS feed reader/twitter tool or by looking in the sidebar of the blog front page.

I'm removing Google ads from my blog.  I'm tired of them, and they're not earning their keep.

You can now subscribe to the comments of a specific post such that you receive an e-mail message when new comments are posted.  Look for the checkbox right where you submit your comment.

As always, feedback is welcome, drop me a line.

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2008-10-31

  • "I thought that I heard you laughing, I thought that I heard you sing, I think I thought I saw you try, but that was just a dream." #
  • Important lesson from the movie Atonement: always encrypt sensitive communications, especially love letters delivered by young children. #
  • Oh no, the U.S. military has realized that the Internet is a communications tool for vegetarians: http://tinyurl.com/5jmxcj #
  • @DougMasson Great! They had a verifiable paper trail in place this year, right? in reply to DougMasson #
  • I'm considering going rogue, everybody's doing it. #
  • Three movies I suggest you avoid: "Noise" (too weird) "Queensized" (too cheesy) and "Silver City" (what the heck WAS that?) #
  • Hi, I'm ____ and I'll be your dedicated Dell sales rep until I'm replaced right after you place an order and my email address stops working. #
  • Congratulations on convincing yourself that today's stock market gains mean that everything is going to be okay. #
  • @jlharter Yes, who are those folks and what brought them here? And wait, who are you? 🙂 in reply to jlharter #
  • @hodgman If you have to ask, maybe you already know the answer? Unless you're being melodramatic for effect, in which case, carry on sir. in reply to hodgman #
  • If dogs take over the world, and chose a king, I hope they don't just go by size, b/c I bet there are some Chihuahuas with some good ideas. #
  • Today I pressed some areas on a screen and a machine told me I voted. I asked it to give me a paper trail, and it was silent. Machine wins. #

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2008-10-24

  • If I survived that high ropes course today, surely I can wean these kittens off of their bottles. #
  • What a lovely day, full of those moments C.S. Lewis described: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one." #
  • Whether they ever find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be considered an enemy planet. #
  • New blog post, "On practicing what you preach" #
  • Why do the caterpillar and the ant have to be enemies? One eats leaves, and the other eats caterpillars. Oh, I see now. #
  • NO CARRIER #
  • New blog post: Failed Attempts at Being You #
  • Maybe some day, the Drupal project will get its security vulnerability announcements down to less than what seems like 1 per hour. #
  • Ending a long and interesting day, looking forward to doing it again tomorrow. You? #
  • Getting on the road to speak to some great folks in Cincinnati. #

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Index of my signature blog posts

One of the weird things about blogs is that, as much time as people put into creating interesting and useful content for them, it's rare that anyone goes to the trouble to read back through older entries unless they're really looking for something specific, or are otherwise very committed to the content.

I don't expect that most of my readers here will bother with browsing through archives just for the fun of it, so I already make available a couple of topic-related mechanisms to find what you're looking for: the list of post tags (visualized in the image shown here), the category tree, the search form, the list of top-rated posts, etc.

Today I'm introducing another way to get to my core content, an index of my signature blog posts. This is a list of my more substantial and well-considered essays on a variety of topics, and I think it represents well the thinking and writing I've done on topics I'm passionate about. I'll try to keep it updated regularly, and I hope you find it useful.

Updated chrishardie.com home page

chrishardie.com newer designThose of you who follow my blog may not always bother to check in on the other parts of my personal website, which is understandable since they're much more static than the weblog. I do try to use the actual home page of the site as a fairly current jumping off point for various other projects, events, and adventures I'm involved in, and today I launched a redesigned version that organizes all of that a little bit better. It also has a photo that reflects the facial hair experiment I'm currently participating in.

The only major content component that didn't come over from the old design is a sampling of my Flickr photos, but I didn't get the sense anyone was really exploring my photography through that channel, and there's still a direct link to the photo stream on the new page. And, I added direct links to a lot of the other sites/tools where I have content or information posted.

The old design is preserved for posterity. I welcome any feedback.

A few new blog interaction features

I've upgraded the WordPress software powering this blog to a more recent version, and added a few more ways to interact with my posts at the same time:

  1. I'm now using Gravatars - "globally recognized avatars" - to display user-uploaded images next to the comments that people post. This creates a little bit better sense that you're interacting with real humans, and even adds a dash of color. If you want to try it out, just visit gravatar.com to upload your avatar today.
  2. You can now choose to be e-mailed about follow-up responses to a particular post that you comment on. While you can always subscribe to a post's RSS feed to track comments, sometimes getting an e-mail is the easiest way to go - and don't worry, you can just as easily unsubscribe too.
  3. Some time ago, I added a post rating system to the blog, allowing you to indicate what you think on a scale of 1 to 5 stars (5 being the best, of course). Posts with high ratings get a little more attention elsewhere on the blog, and each star you add also help an angel get its wings. It's a way to give feedback without typing out a comment - "thank you for helping us serve you better."
  4. Also added some time ago, but now more prominently featured, you can see posts that are related to a new blog entry, listed right below the entry itself. I tend to circle around some similar themes, and so this is at least a helpful way for me to see how things tie together; I hope it's a useful way for you to explore my other writings too.

There ya go. Let me know how this stuff works for you; as always, this space is a work in progress.

Links and Feeds for the Week - April 12, 2008

The feeds reminder and redux edition: