Rubenerd

I remember reading somewhere that one of the rules of blogging is you're not supposed to explain absences. Apparently people hate them and they detract from the topic you're blog is supposed to be about.

It's been a couple of extremely busy days, but I'm back on the blogging and podcasting scene again. Thank you.

And by the way, does anyone find it somewhat hilarious that people write books about successful blogging? Does that say more about the author than perhaps they intended?

This check-in was imported to the Annexe from Brightkite, one of the first geolocation social networks.

Checked into Millenia Walk (9 Raffles Boulevard, Singapore, Singapore 03, Singapore).

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This check-in was imported to the Annexe from Brightkite, one of the first geolocation social networks.

Checked into Tanglin Mall (163 Tanglin Road, Singapore, Singapore 24, Singapore).

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Thanks to Yohanes Budiyanto for the Singapore night photo. I'll have to take my 35mm lens out tomorrow night to try and top it!

This philosophy post is so philosophical, you may very well go insane thinking about it. You've been warned.

How many grilled cheese sandwiches could a grilled cheese sandwich grill if a grilled cheese sandwich could grill grilled cheese sandwiches?

Or the uniquely Australian version:

How many toasted jaffles could a toasted jaffle toast if toasted jaffles could toast toasted jaffles?

Or the uniquely Singaporean/Malaysian version, which doesn't work quite as well:

How many teh tariks could a teh tarik tarik if a teh tarik could tarik teh tariks?

I spend my Saturday evenings blogging in Starbucks coffee shops in Singapore, and at the Boatdeck Cafe when I'm in Adelaide. This makes me hard core, in case you didn't know.

A few months ago I lampooned WordPress for it's need to have the term "category" appear within every category URL. It appears I'm not the only one who found this irritating.

For me I wanted to merge all my disparate nonsense blogs into one meta nonsense blog (Rubenerd.com) which would be easier to maintain, then use categories with their own CSS to make them still appear separate. A shrewd, devilish cunning plan worthy of Baldric himself, but alas having the term "category" in all the URis spoilt the illusion.

Original blogs	Ideal new sub-URI	WordPress illusion screwup
Rubenerd Show	/show/	/category/show/
Fun Facts	/nonsense/	/category/nonsense/
Intranet	/anime/	/category/anime/
Studies	/studies/	/category/studies/

Fortunately having played with and been disappointed by so many plugins in the past, I've finally found one that works so beautifully I'm thinking of sending the writer a grilled cheese sandwich: the adeptly-titled WP No Category Base. Not only does it work right out of the box, but it also redirects your previous category permalinks which means you don't need to mess with .htaccess files. A beautiful, elegant solution!

As the name suggests this plugin will completely remove the mandatory "Category Base" from your category permalinks ( e.g. "myblog.com/category/my-category/" to "myblog.com/my-category/".

The plugin requires no setup or modifying core wordpress files and will not break any links.

Now I can finally start to import all my other posts. Apparently the anime category gets the most hits here anyway despite it having nothing of value in it! Crazy, grilled cheese sandwich stuff.

I've already figured out how to exclude certain categories from certain places so they act like separate sites with their own styles and whatnot, now I just need to work out the feeds. I know WordPress allows you to generate separate RSS and Atom feeds for different categories, but how do I customise them? For example, add iTunes information to the Rubenerd Show category feed, but not any others.

If I spent as much time blogging and talking about interesting topics on my blog and podcast as I did blogging and talking about blogging and talking, I'd get much more blogging and talking done on my blog and podcast. Wait, what?

Links shared from del.icio.us today:

Singapore Twitterers List

(categories: twitter singapore)

Paul's complete guide to installing OSX Leopard on your MSI Wind / Advent 4211 – Netbooks @ MoDaCo

(categories: software hardware howto osx netbook leopard)

Another bomb rocked Baghdad yesterday killing 69 people; Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, two of the biggest names in entertainment passed on; and Belgian singer Hilde Rens (Yasmine was her stage name) suddenly took her own life. Twitter was awash with discussions over all of them.

Don't know what more I could contribute to the discussions other than to say they were all too young. One thing is for certain, the world is going to be a very different place without them.

As for Michael in particular, I may not have admired the guy but as a kid from the 1980s I grew up hearing his music. To me, hearing one of his songs propelled me to my life before I moved to Singapore when I was little, particularly when we still lived in Melbourne and my life was completely different. It was quite jarring to hear that he'd just left so suddenly.

Someone on Twitter mentioned that the 80s have officially now died.

Dave Winer asked us what our most desired feature for Twitter was. My thoughts haven't changed since early last year:

I’ve found virtually every tweet is a comment with a hyperlink. This limits the number of characters for the comment and forces us to use URL shortners. "URL shortner" sounds like a cake. So my most desired feature would be to have a separate field for the link to “associate” with each tweet. We could do away with URL shortners entirely (no more obscurity and middlemen that could potentially break), and we’d have the full 140 characters to comment.

Given I live in two different places my other wish would be allowing us to define a timezone override for individual tweets when we’re outside our defined timezone in our profile.

I'd also love for Twitter to make me trillions of dollars, to find cures for all diseases, to usher in world peace and to get me an introverted girlfriend, but I guess we all have to prioritise :).

Here's another Rubenerd Fun Fact for all you rabid Official Rubenerd Fun Fact fans. I know you're out there, I can hear you breathing. Oh wait, that's me.

Very few people are aware of this fact.

Thank you.

There are reports circulating the intertubes that Microsoft will be using the Microsoft Word (or Microsoft Office Word or whatever mouthful name they've chosen now) rendering engine for Outlook 2010, their personal disinformation manager. Well meaning websites like FixOutlook.org that is so popular with Twitter folk demonstrate with screenshots this move will break rich HTML email message formatting.

I'm frustrated by this story, not because of the rendering engine change but rather because there's a debate about this at all. In my view (grilled cheese pun) email with HTML to change appearance and layout is one of the most nonsensical online inventions of all time. Why?

• Spammers can include specially crafted embedded images to verify an email address is active and can include hyperlinks to malicious websites that unsuspecting users will click.
• Such messages take up far more disk space and take longer to download without really adding anything of value.
• When fatigued people get hundreds or thousands of messages a day, the last thing they need is superflous junk; just give us your message and move on!

I've always opted to receive "plain" versus "HTML" messages, but sometimes I don't have a choice. Rich HTML email needs to be quietly shot, buried and never spoken of again. Not that I'm biased.