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ebooks

2010 January 27 in general by corprew | No comments

So, I’m currently making ebooks for people, and it’s come up enough that I thought I should make it generally known that I’m doing so. I’ve been doing this more or less since the mid-90s when I was working part time at a scientific press (which is how I got involved in early HTML standards efforts.)

I’m also doing some other ebook related things, but I thought I’d mention this on my blog because a lot of my friends are authors, writers, and &c, and they’ve been turning around and telling their friends, &c, &c, and it’s become clear I should link up those two efforts. I’m currently extending and redesigning the cuneiverse website as well.

more from the wordpress toolbox

2009 November 02 in general by corprew | No comments

This is a trivial something that seems to come up staggeringly often when translating design to implementation in word press sites, so I thought I’d post it up here so I don’t have to recreate from scratch next time I need it.

So, you have a long, carefully contrived, SEO-friendly title for your pages (or really just a minimally descriptive one), but you don’t want that to show up in the navigation menus. There are a variety of complex ways to fix this, but one of the easiest is to use code like the following:

< ?php 
    $pages = get_pages("parent=0"); # returns parent pages
      foreach ($pages as $x_page) {
        $option = '<li><a href="'.get_page_link($x_page->ID).'">';
        $short_title = "";
        $short_title = get_post_meta($x_page ->ID, "nav_title", TRUE);
        if ($short_title == "")
                $option .= $x_page->post_title;
        else
                $option .= $short_title;
        end;
        $option .= '</a>';
        echo $option;
  }
 ?>

This usually ends up in header.php, and is a good patch for the problem. There are a couple of plugins that attempt to work around this by detecting whether or not you’re in the loop (the loop being the name for the main part of post/page printing), but invariably widgets screw this up somehow, and this solution seems to work a bit better for me, especially for a navigation header (hence the name.)

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Classy

2009 October 07 in general by corprew | No comments

I’m developing an online class about categorizing web content, mostly aimed at users of content management systems. If you’re interested in being part of the trial audience for this class, comment or contact me. Ideally, this will be a series of short videos each of which will be on some particular topic.

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Rubber Duck Regatta @ Cal Anderson Park @ 7pm

2009 July 30 in general by corprew | No comments




My bag

Originally uploaded by Corprew / Zeitgeist

Examine the contents of this bag.

Rubber Duck Regatta in Cal Anderson Park’s fountain tonight at 7pm. I’ll hold another next week as well.

There are a variety of duck vendors in town for those who wish to ‘prepare.’ Archie McPhee’s come to mind. Check your bathtub for suspects as well.

There will be round robin with ducks, and also heats for any sort of random things that people want to enter into the competition.

The rules:
1. ducks get put into the fountain
2. ducks float downstream through all the rocks and bricks.
3. eventually, a duck reaches the end.

Isn’t that just… ducky.

This will happen again in a couple of weeks. A more exotic web page to follow after we try this and see what kind of web page it needs.

on words with -demic in them.

2009 May 06 in general by corprew | No comments

No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
–Animal Farm

The last week or so, obviously, have been somewhat transfigured by pandemic paranoia. Pandemic is ancient greek for either “all peoples” or “freak the fsck out,” it’s hard to tell. This can be easily distinguished from epidemic, which is greek for “upon peoples” and endemic, which is greek for “within peoples.”

Here’s a handy table for disambiguation of various words with demic in them, described in terms of internet memes:

greek root english literal meaning
pan-demic all peoples the call’s coming from inside the house.
epi-demic upon peoples getting mediæval on your ass.
en-demic within peoples never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.
syn-demic together with peoples I put a disease in your disease, so you could get sick while you’re sick

So, with this out of the way, we can proceed upon our merry way. It’s been an exciting week, I have been interested in public health and related things (epidemiology, etc…) for a long time so I’ve been watching the news, websites, twitter, and any other mechanism of public information I could get my hands on.

As for myself, I’m sort of guardedly watching the news (considering I’m traveling soon to Texas, where both US fatalities have occured), but am mostly concerned about the Northern hemisphere flu season. That said, there’ve been a lot of people coughing in this coffee shop today.

test pattern

2009 May 05 in general by corprew | No comments

This is a test to see if some stuff at celiaciq is working properly. Some of the navigation has yet to be folded into the main site, so things are wonky.

rice rice baby!

home page

books

restaurants

april refrain: LOLCat Wasteland

2009 April 01 in general by corprew | No comments

Since it’s April 1rst yet again, please enjoy LOLCat Wasteland.

Have Fun.

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more with geo

2009 March 12 in general by corprew | No comments

I’ve been doing more stuff with geodata and geoapis recently in support of a project. It’s been fun, as you can see from the previous entry.

One of the things that this project has made me aware of is the importance of caching. A number of the free, public services have occasionally been hit by surges in usage (apparently frequently coming from iPhone apps that weren’t making good use of reuse) and I’m writing an article about this.

In the meantime, largely grasping to consciousness today as I ended up finishing work last night at around 4:30 am. But hey, at least I’m not in a space station that had to be evacuated due to potential debris strike.

meta-fiction: On Stephen King and the Dark Tower. (Spoilers)

2009 February 09 in general by corprew | 4 comments

When Stephen King came to the end of his Dark Tower series, he felt that he had to rewrite the first book The Gunslinger because it was now no longer in sync with the rest of the series.

(Spoiler follows)
Read the rest of this entry »

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this american life: the future.

2009 January 20 in general by corprew | No comments

For those who haven’t looked at the new whitehouse.gov:

We will publish all non-emergency legislation to the Web site for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

Unknown what effect this will have, but welcome to the future again everyone.

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