All posts tagged meta

Replacing Delicious with WordPress

Oh no! The bad news this week is that one of my favorite web apps is going to be shut down. Delicious, true to its name, was a yummy way to store bookmarks, to sort them, share them and to keep them safe — until now. Yahoo bought the website five years ago, let it languish, and are finally giving up on it altogether. And so, my bookmarks need a new place to live, where I can share them, etc.

I’ve decided to import the delicious links into my browser, but now I’m going to import delicious links into wordpress.

The good news is that soon I’ll have a big ol’ links page on here, full of stuff that I think is good on the internet.

Blog Roundup 2008

2008 was a fairly uneventful year here at nocategories.net. The site doesn’t get as many visitors as it used to, and so I don’t post very often, and because I don’t post often, fewer visitors come… and so it goes. All hope is not lost, though. Here’s a roundup of 2008′s most popular entries on this site. Other people liked this stuff. Maybe you’ll like it too.

Make Your Own South Park Character

Always a crowd pleaser, the little web page where you can design a south park character that looks like you, or anyone is mentioned here, under the name “make your own south park character“, which makes it easy to find, since that’s what people want to do. That is what the internet is for, after all: making south park characters.

Rough Living: An Urban Survival Manual

I posted a quick link to a book about how to survive homelessness, written from personal experience. Since then, the post has become the second most popular thing on this website. It is an interesting book. Says the author: “in 2000 I moved into my car and set out to learn what it takes to survive the day to day world of the United States without a steady income, without a home, and without most of what a lot of people think is essential to their lives. This book isn’t about how to live in public restrooms or how to steal muffins. This is a book for people that find themselves outside of what is normal in the United States and the rest of the world. This book is about surviving with much less than you think you need.”

Spoken Word, Recorded Poetry, and Hip-Hop

Three years ago, I was just starting to take some notes for what would become the spoken word album that I have just now finished producing at Magnanimous Records studio. I guess it took a while. I started by trying to get an overview of the different types of spoken word, recorded poetry, and hip-hop. It seemed to me that there are three “categories” of spoken word. Since I don’t like categories too much, I hope that my spoken word doesn’t fit too neatly into any of them. Those notes seem to be interesting to many other people.

I mentioned in that post that I wanted to list some examples of each type. I did end up collecting lots of examples of spoken word. I should share that list, shouldn’t I?

Software for Writers

There’s a maxim out there, variously attributed, which says: “serious writers should keep their work in circulation until it either sells or the ink wears off”. But it can be difficult to keep track of all those submissions, cover letters, editors, rejection slips, etc. Luckily, there are several good software applications that can help a writer to keep tabs on it all. I wrote an overview of software for writers. It’s pretty popular. (Now, I should probably eat my own dog food, so to speak, and start sending out more submissions!)

The History of and Development of Hypertext, and Hypertext Literary Theory

I’m happy to see that the first chapter of my undergraduate thesis is filling out this list of popular content on the site. I put a lot of work into it. For this chapter, I wanted to know: what is hypertext literary theory and were does it come from? If you are interested in the subject, or if you’ve never even heard of it before, this will provide you with plenty of information.

Crossposting from WordPress to MySpace

I have to deal with ill-communication with my friends and readers who subscribe to the LiveJournal and MySpace networks. Rather than go through all the effort of posting every post that I would ever post in three places, I simply let those other blogs languish, leaving those friends and readers in the dark somewhat.

Wouldn’t it be nice to get rid of all that?

WordPress to MySpace Auto Crossposting by Roderick Russell is a promising hack.

I installed it, so we’ll see if it works.

Updated: Spoken Word Page

The Spoken Word Page now includes:

By Popular Demand: Spoken Word Links

Before further ado, I give you: the Spoken Word page at NoCategories

You see, I got an email from Dan who writes,

I found your website very interesting on the things you have listed for Spoken
Word Poetry. I wrote down some of the links you gave so I can check them out. I am glad that
I came across your website. It seems to hard to find any sites with, or, about
spoken word poetry. Maybe somebody should start a site called the spoken word poets alliance or
something, that way we could all be found much easier.

To that end, I have created a place for that sort of content, a page, for now, on NoCategories.net. I’ll start by collecting resources, for people who want to find out about spoken word. That list will probably grow to include links to podcasts, homepages, and MP3 recordings by spoken word artists themselves. If the whole thing ever outgrows all that, I suppose it coul dmove to its own home, where it can grow to include a forum/bulletin board for spoken word enthusiasts (unless there’s one already?)

On Profiles

In my MySpace profile, I quoted my hastily written Friendster profile, which in turn is a rip off of my hastily written Orkut profile. Or did I write the Orkut one first? Who gives a shit? The point is that I write these things hastily. Perhaps it is a function of my opinion of myself, or my perception of others’

Those profiles usually say something like “people say I’m strange, and they never say why.”

Today Kyle commented on my MySpace (sounds redundant doesn’t it?) and said “I don’t think you’re strange, so there.” I got to thinking… I don’t think I’m strange either! And so what who complains about whatever might be unusual about me — That’s their problem.

From now on those stupid things will say “I am unapologetically myself”, and I’ll write one of those profiles less hastily, as soon as I have the time….

Nicer Archives

Check it out. In addition to the relatively new Contents page (which is, as always “under construction”) you can now choose whether to browse the backsections of the blog in list format or by browsing pages of exerpts.

Its that expand/collapse link at the top of the archive pages that will do the trick for ya. Have fun!

Technorati Tags

Even though activity here at NoCategories has been a little bit sluggish these days, I am anticipating greener pastures ahead. In that spirit, I’ve begun to look into these nifty things called Technorati Tags. Basically, these are links that allow content in a larger blog to be associated with keywords.

I thought that Jerome’s Keyword Plugin would be the easiest and best way to incorperate Technorati Tags, along with META keywords, into my posts. Annoyingly, that plugin almost completely defeats its own purpose by adding a list of every category in the blog to the list of keywords for any given post. So, for example, I write essays and poetry, but with this plugin installed, I’d be telling Technorati readers that my poems are essays and poems, I’d be saying that my essays are poems and essays — and that’s stupid.

Acme Technologies Zeitgeist has published a fix for the keywords part of Jerome’s Plugin that generates META keywords, and I sincerely hope that the same fix can be as easily adapted for the Technorati Tags as well.

I’d like to thank the academy.

Some of the best news to land on the doorstep in a while is that NoCategories has been nominated for an award! Two awards, it looks like. TennesseeBloggers.com has added this website to the list of nominees for the “Best East Tennessee Blog” and for “Best Pro/Anti Something” Personally, I would really like to win the “Best Pro/Anti Something” award. That award would look so beautiful on my mantle. Even more confusing is the fact that I am no longer a resident of Tennessee, although I am officially still a student there until June, compounded by the fact that this blog seems to somehow still “be” in Tennessee, compounded by the fact that I’m not sure such a thing as a website can really exist in space, whether that space is in Tennessee or anywhere. How’s that for being “Pro/Anti Something” Oh, I do hope to see that nomination become an award.

The website, “Award-Winning Tennessee Bloggers” describes itself this way:

Award designations for the websites featured on TennesseeBloggers.com are created by the host of this site merely in the spirit of good will and fun. Site awards are based on the overall theme or tone that each side depicts. Please don’t take these awards too seriously… it’s all for FUN!

The aim of TennesseeBloggers.com is simple: To help fellow Tennesseans promote their websites and generate more traffic for their Blogs.

What started out as a personal mission to locate fellow Bloggers (like ourselves) who reside in the state of Tennessee (as we do) quickly turned into this massive directory of all the best Blogs in Tennessee!

We came to realize that there are so many talented writers right here in Tennessee, as well as creative minds and people with something to say… that we wanted to give props to them all.

Thus, a “bonus”… if a subjective “award” designation from this site helps to make someone else’s site more noticeable at a glance or worthy of a read, then so be it.

I was shocked to see that the entry on the site is very well-informed when it comes to the recent confusion about the byline for this blog. Most of the recent versions of the byline have been worked into the description of NoCategories somewhere.

The only thing that isn’t so exciting about this is that the awards’ homepage doesn’t seem to have a way to suggest other blogs for nomination. I feel a little bit guilty being nominated when I am no longer an actual resident of Tennessee, and I would like to help my karma by nominating a few of the good blogs that have sprouted up among my classmates, particularly Scott King’s QuixoticEpisodic and Nathan Higdon’s Blog and lets not forget my nomination for the best title award, The Homeless Parrot

This site won a 'Best Blog in Tennessee' award!

Remember the “index” Page?

Khaled Abou Alfa, author of Broken Kode, is the designer of Manji, which is the template used on this very website. In a recent post, Khaled muses about something

I’m just going to try and tweak the index page. It’s probably going to have more in common with Pixelsurgeon or Crown Dozen, than a typical blog, but I guess that’s where my thoughts are heading right now.

Funny, that’s where my thoughts have been headed right now also. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with, considering how much I love his “just the content ma’am” approach to the template design. I’d like to see how that will mesh with an index page, a real, good old fashioned index page.

Surely you remember index pages, back before blogs, when webpages had those things that resembled cover pages (“splash pages” they were sometimes called) At their best, these pages acted like a table of contents, giving readers a clear view of just what’s going on here anyway. I think that’s a lot more of a user fiendly way to present content than to simply drop them down on a blog, like so many soldiers in alien enemy territory.

Barring begging or bribery, this will probably be my last posting for a little while. I’m up to my ears in a few creative projects right now, only one of them being a way to use the ideas mentioned above.

Long live NoCategories

NoCategories is dead. Long live NoCategories. The website nocategories.net was built last summer to be “what is decidedly not a weblog” in order to be a place for writing online. Well, its dead now. all that lives at the nocategories domain is yet another blog, this one, along with my friend Trent’s blog, and that’s about it really. There are a few other haunted structures dotting this otherwise desolate landscape…

Well, with the new year, I have resolved to change all that, or die trying.

Ideas, anyone? Anything goes.

I’m Flattered

I just discovered that this site is linked from Conversational Reading, in Scott Esposito’s list of “Lit Blogs I like”. What’s more flattering: the distinction as a “Lit Blog” or as “Likeable” or that Conversational Reading is one of the first blogs I ever started reading regularly.

One of the things I like most about Conversational Reading is its, well, conversational quality. The blog isn’t totally packed with comments, but those are good, and the posts are often an insightful response, rather than merely a link.

New Links Page

All my links, all in one place, well, almost…

variable wordpress template

I am learning how to make the category pages change their content depending upon which category you are reading. This way I can provide “realted info” when and where it is actually related. I’m doing this with something called an “is function”

I dug for an entire afternoon, trying to find out how I could get the effect that I want, and I was very happy to find the aforelinked article, explaining it all.

update: now that I am using Manji as my design instead of Kubrick I am presented with something of a challenge. Manji has no sidebar! What I like about the lack of a sidebar is that it draws attention where I want it to be, to the words. On the other hand, there is so much I can do for a reader’s orientation in a sidebar, which is also very helpful.

The “is functions” allow me to say “you are here” to a reader. More than that I can say “since you are here you might also like to go here here and here”. I really like the ability to give those things to my readers.

Something Kubrick did that Manji doesn’t do is to add that little box between the post and the sidebar that describes the text. I have copied that design feature from kubrick into my manji theme, and I think there is a lot that can be done with it.

For now, I use the “is functions” primarily to make my masthead image only show up on the header page, and to provide “sidebar” content in that little question mark on the left.

Comments, anyone?

Emblematum liber

I really want to recial the part of codex called “ephemera” for tis true purpose, that is, “printed matter of passing interest” here’s some:

Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum liber or Book of Emblems had enormous influence and popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries. It is a collection of 212 Latin emblem poems, each consisting of a motto (a proverb or other short enigmatic expression), a picture, and an epigrammatic text. Alciato’s book was first published in 1531, and was expanded in various editions during the author’s lifetime. It began a craze for emblem poetry that lasted for several centuries. We use the Latin text and images from an important edition of 1621 and we give a translation into English.

Notes on use


The emblems may be read in sequence, in Latin or in English, or in Latin-English parallel. If you know a title or a motif that you might be looking for, use our title and searching files. If you know an emblem number, go directly to it via the table of emblems. Though all the Alciato emblems have commentary files, only a few have proper explanatory commentaries. We also have a short note on Alciato, and bibliographies of early editions and secondary sources. Among other supporting documents, we have texts imitated by Alciato from the Greek Anthology.

Welcome to NoCategories.net!

I would like to welcome Trent to NoCategories.net. Trent has a new blog, called Comhrá. One of the first and most interesting is Trent’s senior thesis: Ranking the BCS. In it, he discusses the way champoinship football teams are ranked within their divisions. Trent proposes a new, mathematically precise and unbiased way to establish those rankings.

That brings the group of NoCategories Bloggers to three, which is up from a different, and less active two and down from the original two and a half. Is NoCategories dead? Long live NoCategories!

Seriously, NoCategories now includes Mr. Jason Cather, who writes mostly about politics, Joe Chait who occasionally writes about religion, myself, (maybe someday William will use his blog), and now Trent’s Comhra.

Use your archives

I hope that the new archive part of Codex will be a useful aid to my readers.

Continue Reading

small changes

I have added a navigation bar, and I’ve checked to make sure that all of the links in it actually work! how nice… There are only a few more minor adjustments to be made here at codex. these changes include a more rational sidebar, special pages for search, permalinks, and archives, probably also a revised “about me” page and a list of links — and that’s IT. then I’m done and i’ll settle into my new cave for the winter.

oops

It occurs to me that many of the links in the sidebar of this website have been broken for some time now. They are fixed now, so all you who have been banging down my door in droves to read my stories, you can be satisfied.

what’s in a name

Oops, I goofed. I thought it’d be GREAT to give my site the name “ephemera,” (you can see my previous post about that) because the name seemed just perfect, but, you see, its taken by www.ephemera.org, so my new name is a bit premature. I wouldn’t care except that ephemera.org is Derek Powazek, of fame via FRAY. I’ve got stuff about hypertext. He’s got electronic literature. I don’t wanna step on any toes. And so my search for a moniker resumes once more. I promise, I’ll make the re-naming a seamless one: same design, easy new address, and soon, like, before school starts, and then I’ll settle down for the winter. Then, I’ll use this space to write on more often – how refreshing!

My offer still stands: offer me a good name and I’ll trade you a google mail account @gmail.com (with TONS of storage)