Groovymarlin.com

I swear, comment spam is the new email spam, or something. I may get 50 email spams a day, but luckily Gmail is awesome at catching them and I only ever have to manually flag a few a week. However, comment spam is on the rise at all of my blogs. Akismet has caught 296 for me on this blog alone, just since last fall when I migrated here from Blogger. While Akismet does most of the heavy lifting, I still get a few comments a day that I have to manually flag as spam. It’s not a large investment of time, but I resent it. For one thing, these comment spammers are so relentlessly stupid! I get very low traffic on this site, so they’re really just wasting their time by spamming my comments. And, as I said, I remove all spam pretty quickly, so even the limited exposure they can get is very short-lived. And yet they persist…

I suppose my next option is to enable some kind of captcha or other device that would root out some of the spambots that apparently like my server. What a drag and a hassle. Spammers of the world, to you I say:

Two reasons I am happy today: 1. I’m feeling much, much better. 2. I’m still enjoying looking at my unbelievably HOT new template! I credit number 1 to rest, fluids, and sleep; but the second item is all due to N-Design Studio. This is by far the best blog template I’ve ever used. I don’t care if most people read blogs through some type of RSS feed now, and will basically never see my lovely blog in full color. I look at it every day, because it just makes me happy, like the big, goofy dork that I am. Look at the little green buttons! You can use them to collapse widgets in the sidebar. And yes! You can drag them around and rearrange them! Does anyone really need functionality like that? Not on a personal blog, no, but I have it and I love it!

Seriously though, I have to admit that finally starting to use Widgets with Wordpress made my life a hell of a lot easier. I can’t believe that I used to edit my sidebars by hand when I wanted to add something like the Twitter box, the Flickr badge, a list of links…whatever. I (being a serious noob I suppose) had no idea that all of that is 100 times simpler through the use of Widgets. Of course, I did manage to get a lot of experience coding CSS and HTML through all that manual editing and tweaking, which I suppose was good for me. It was painful and frustrating though, and caused me to try and discard many templates that I just couldn’t get to look “right.” Now Wordpress 2.2 is out, and it has Widgets built in - you don’t even have to install the plugin anymore. Install or upgrade to 2.2 and Widgets are supported right away, assuming you use a template that also supports them. Then you can browse through the WP Plugins directory and find all the funky Widgets you can handle.

Is this the wave of the future? Our web apps will do all the thinking and designing for us, and we just drag and drop to make things the way we want them? Perhaps, but there will still be technical and design gurus out there, coming up with the pretty things and the cool plugins and the fancy widgets. In the future, I just plan to be more of a savvy user, and less of a frustrated creator-wannabe.

I totally wasn’t going to get into this Twitter thing, AT ALL. Seriously. No. Not me. But then…I was looking at veryGEORGE!.com (he’s Heather’s cousin). And he had this cute little Twitter badge on his page, and I thought “Hey…that’s cute.” And before you know it I was sucked in. And look at the little badge sitting down there at the bottom of my left sidebar. It’s cute, right? No come on…it’s adorable and pink. It’s a widdle princess like me! And what the hell, they make it so damn easy to post to the thing. You set Twitter up as a buddy in your IM program and bam! that’s all there is to it. So when I head off to the ladies room to stare at myself narcissistically for a half hour or so, I can notify all and sundry that that’s exactly what I’m up to. And I’ll never ever lie about what I’m doing either. Trust me - if my Twitter badge says that I’m having a neckrub from George Clooney while Brad Pitt cooks me an omelet - that’s what’s happenin’ baby! YEAH!

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love and adore Wikipedia. To my mind, it is the Internet evolution of the classic encyclopedia, and a good place to start researching all manner of subjects. Sometimes you’ll find the answers you need right within its articles; other times you might follow the reference links provided to find even more in-depth information and original research. An informed and thoughtful user can easily separate the true scholarly content from the fluff (not that fluff doesn’t have it’s place).

Lately I’ve been using Wikipedia to learn more about movies that I’m interested in. IMDB is great for technical details, but I find that most entries on Wikipedia contain fairly good plot summaries and discussions of character, criticism, and controversy. Sometimes I see a film on cable and, for whatever reason, don’t give it my full attention and end up missing some details. That’s what happened when I watched Brokeback Mountain, and I found the Wikipedia entry on it extremely helpful. Or sometimes I just don’t understand the details, like when I recently saw Immortal. (In the latter case, even reading the Wikipedia entry wasn’t a whole lot of help, as Immortal is just kind of incoherent.)

So I’m going to post regularly about film articles that I like on Wikipedia. Today I read the article about Audition, a 1999 horror-suspense film from Japan. File that under the category of films I want to see but just haven’t gotten around to, for one reason or another. The Wikipedia entry contains a well-written summary of the plot as well as trivia, information on critical responses, and links to further analysis. Audition is a pretty graphic film, but its themes of power, control, and gender roles in Japanese society are interesting.

At one point, a character says of Asami, the mysterious main female character, “She is beautiful, classy and obedient.” Wow…let’s just say he got that…wrong.

I first read about tumblelogs and tumblr.com on Lifehacker. Something about Gina’s post really spurred me to try it. Maybe it was this:

“I don’t have the time to keep it up.”

“I don’t have that much to say that often.”

These are the reasons most people abandon their personal weblog or never start one. But we all come across interesting tidbits online every day that we want to remember and share - links, photos, videos, even that side-splitting IM session you had with your co-worker. A new blog format, called a “tumblelog,” is a no-hassle, no-writing-required way to share those bits and maintain a personal site with the least possible commitment.

OK, sign me up. I had read about twitter, which just seemed stupid (I mean, who really wants to know that I just finished writing a status report for my manager and now I’m about to run four really unexciting test cases? Or, better yet, go loaf in the kitchen and decide between regular and golden Oreos?). But this tumblr thing is different. I run across little snippets online every day that I try to save in order to look at or blog about them later. Usually I stuff all those links into Google Notebook and then forget about them. Now I can use tumblr, and have even more fun, because it lets me post snippets of conversations too, and quotes, and pictures…cool stuff that I want to talk about but don’t really have time to write a full-fledged blog post about. (Because I’m soooo busy with that Oreo thing, obviously.)

There’s also a bookmarklet that you can use to quickly post about anything you’re looking at in your browser. I found that it works really well, and only need to actually go to the site and launch the real editor when I want to post a conversation. Today I fooled around with the CSS and colors a little bit, and managed to make the admittedly boring theme look a little prettier. Right now, themes are sparse and presentation isn’t really all that pretty. But presentation isn’t really the point; most bloggers seem to be using tumblr as an aggregator - a way collate all their posts to various blogs and such in one place. This is easy to do because you can even set up tumblr.com to read an RSS feed and post every entry onto your tumblelog!

So you can check out my tumblelog at groovymarlin.tumblr.com. I don’t kid myself — most people won’t find it all that interesting. In a way, it’s a public Google Notebook for me, a place to reference some story or quote or picture I saw online. And I think the conversations are occasionally humorous, and probably entertaining for the parties involved (names are mostly obscured to protect the not-so-innocent).