A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

• WPTouch plugin for wordpress is awesome. check out theludwigs.com from your iphone.
• Messing around with Slingbox finally. Works well tho I had to massively reconfig home network to get rid of routers — configuring to get through one router was reasonable; getting through two was nearly impossible; getting through the three I had in place would have required several PhDs.
• Download Manager Tweak. Probably prefer download statusbar
• Vacuum your firefox db. No idea if this actually did anything. Didn’t seem to make Firefox explode so I guess that is a plus.
• Polymath. Lots of great links to math formatting services for the web.
• Gliffy plugin for wordpress. Seems like it could be useful as well.

Make Your Own URL Shortening Service – url shorteners – Lifehacker. Must read this and implement.

Why Seattle VCs don’t blog – TechFlash: Seattle’s Technology News Source — John Cook wonders why we don’t blog. Obviously some of us do — myself, Rich. We do it for personal reasons, not motivated by our business — we’d be blogging if we were still at MSFT, if we were running a vinyard, etc. As such, our blogs reflect 85% our personal interests and a little bit of business interest.

John asserts that “…there’s opportunity for a VC in town to explain what is really going on in the venture industry in clear and concise terms with no BS…“ However, this is not our business. Our business is investing, and to motivate a VC-focused blog, you’d have to be convinced that such a blog would a) improve your deal flow, or b) improve your exits. Not obvious to me at all.

Additionally you’d have to be certain you could sustain the blog — the examples of abandoned blogs that John mentions seems to be a bad outcome.

Calacanis: Apple to release networked HDTVs – Nate Lanxon, MP3 & Digital Music Editor – Technology Blog at CNET.co.uk. — this would be good. The current state of the world where you have to buy some separate box and whack it into your media center to get IP-delivered content is just not going to succeed, the mainstream isn’t going to go thru this brain damage. The IP receiver has to be built into the TV or the media receiver or some other piece that people understand and know they need.

Five Amazing Color Palette Generators – ReadWriteWeb. — I don’t know why but I love color palette generators.  They have grown up a lot.

MAKE: Blog: Pinewood derby designs of excellence.  Love the pinewood derby, still remember coming in 2nd and winning the pen and pencil set so many years ago, one of my finest moments.  These examples are clearly adult-assisted but cool.  Your kid’s car should look nothing like these — mine looked like a block of wood painted gold.

MAKE: Blog: More trees with eyes! — very nice.

WordPress for iPhone…apparently not that far away

I use textile to create all my book links in the blog. as a reader pointed out, this unfortunately doesn’t link very directly to the kindle edition of books. So experimenting with textile below:

• The Story of French — this is a textile generated link just using the title
• The Story of French — a text with some kindle wordage. oops doesn’t work, when you paren a word it shows up as alternate text and is not sent to amazon as part of the search string
• The Story of French — Kindle — another kindle test. this one takes you to a search results page with Kindle edition first
• The Story of Frennch, Kindle Edition — another kindle test. blows chunks, doesn’t find any edition of the book

ok so i guess pattern 3 is the best. it is too bad that pattern 2 doesn’t work.

I’ve always wanted to have my own implementation of tinyurl — gocodes seems to fit the bill. we’ll see how it goes…

• Google Docs: Style Your Google Docs with CSS, wow, reminiscent of old word stylesheets
• Monitoring airport client performance — thanks rich
• WHatpage for rotating through start pages
• A bunch of blogging tools and hints

Fotki vs. Zenphoto vs. Nextgen Gallery | Tongfamily.com — rich is recommending zenphoto. I need a solution and this could be it

WordPress Automatic Upgrade – it rocks! | Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise | — what ed says, this thing is great. My only problem with the upgrade is that my mobile admin plugin has died, have to wait for an upgrade of that i guess.

OK website alive again. Sadly the feed location has changed for RSS readers and I am not sure what to do about that.  oh i guess i can add a redirect.  i’ll get cracking on that.

Why dead for a week? Well I tried to change blog software (movabletype to wordpress), hosting (my own server to siteground), and dns registration (network solutions to siteground) all at once. too many moving parts. i got locked in a weird state with dns pointing in the wrong location and dns being locked up due to the domain name registration transfer. lesson learned

Motivated by Rich, I am finally moving A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way off my own server and onto a hosted service. Back when I started this thing, it was fun to have it on my own box and twiddle directly with the bits. But I am past that, and doing my own MT and OS upgrades has become tiresome.

I am trying out SiteGround and wordpress as my new alternatives. I’ve duped all my content to a new shadow site, and am tweaking that. Seems to work OK, soon I will flip the domain to point to the new site.