Linkety

As a rule, I don’t do link blogging. It’s a pretty crowded field, and I’m way too slow on the draw. It’s better for me to stick with the failure analysis of torsion springs, where I have the field to myself.

Today, though, I ran across three things that I have little to add to but are deserving of more than the brief comment I can give to a link in my Twitter stream.

First is Nathan Grigg’s method for forcing Google Reader to refetch your blog’s feed immediately. This is a godsend for those of us who can’t seem to find our syntactical and typographical errors until after our posts are published. I’ll be adding his lines to my feed templates and incorporating his pinging code into my post publishing script this weekend.

Next up is Clark Goble’s variation on blackbird.py, the script I use to embed tweets in web pages. In addition to making a few stylistic changes,1 Clark has created a Quickeys macro with which he can generate the HTML code from the selected tweet in Tweetbot. This, to me, is what scripting is all about—not just using others’ work, but recasting it to fit your own needs.

Finally, Gabe Weatherhead from Macdrifter has joined the ranks of podcasters with Generational on the 70 Decibels network. Its topic is “living with technology and trying to make it all work together.” I hope he has an episode about how to find time to listen to all the cool podcasts that are out now. Then maybe I’ll be able to return to whatever show I decide to drop to make room for Gabe.

Oh, wait! There’s one more thing. The In Our Time podcast from the BBC—a show I’ll never drop—returned from hiatus this week with an episode on The Cell. Starts a bit creakily, but gets moving after about 20 minutes or so. My only real complaint is that one of the guests referred to Robert Hooke as a “biologist.” Nonsense.


  1. Notice how gracefully I’m ignoring Clark’s dig that his embedded tweets have “a more subdued and less garish appearance” than mine. I’m classy that way.