Archive for June, 2008

Green Twit Clouds

7/29/08 - Currently, Twitter is not accepting connections from Yahoo Pipes so my second tag cloud is not working. The Yahoo Pipes blog states that they are currently working with Twitter to resolve this issue.

David Wescott’s comment on my post Green Twitter - Aggregating the Feeds of Green Twits suggested that we create tag clouds from the RSS feeds of people discussing the environment on twitter and from the RSS feeds from the same individual’s blog postings. I thought about the best way to do this for a couple of days and today created the tag clouds.

I located a site called Make Cloud, which specializes in creating a tag cloud from RSS feeds and then provides code so you can embed the cloud on your blog or website. Once I tested this with a standard feed, I headed to Yahoo Pipes to work on the aggregation. continue

Where in the Hell is Matt

Matt Harding travels around the world, dances in various locations, and films it. The first video was released in 2005 and was created to let friends and family know where he was. The video became viral and he obtained a sponsor to do the trip again and the 2nd video was released in 2006. The 3rd video, also sponsored, was just released and differs from the first two - in this one crowds of people are invited to dance with him in many of the locations. Watching it made me feel hopeful - if we really did all come together we could accomplish something great and that we really are all very much alike.

Monitoring My Bandwidth Usage for One Week

A number of ISP’s, most notably cable internet providers such as Time Warner, Comcast and AT&T, are moving to a metered access model where the customer pays for Internet access based on usage. Personally, I don’t think this is a bad idea as we pay for metered access for other utilities such as electricity and gas, but the pricing structure must be reasonable. I do not currently have cable internet access and use DSL so this will not affect me in the near future but the discussion did lead me to wonder how much bandwidth I consume.

I installed Netlimiter 2 Lite, which is a free program to monitor your network and provides statistics for bandwidth usage. I used the Internet normally for a week, between 6/18/2008-6/24/08, and then took a look at my usage. I surfed, downloaded a couple of programs, watched a long soccer game online, torrented one file, worked on this website, and watched some clips on Hulu and Youtube. I do not play online games and did not watch any streaming movies or download any large files, such as a 4 GB linux distribution. It was, I believe, a standard week of usage for me. I’m not one of the heavy users that the ISP’s are concerned with but I believe my usage is higher than the average. I am, however, the only user of the internet in my household, I don’t run my own business and I don’t telecommute. On Monday through Friday there is at least 10-12 hours that I am not using my connection and because I am trying to reduce my energy consumption my computer is almost off during that time as well.

In one week I used 7.4117 GB of data. This was 6.7748 in downloads and .6368 in uploads. My usage was highest, obviously, over the weekend because I was home and using the connection all day long The heaviest day by far was Sunday 6/22/08 with over 3GB of data being consumed. This makes sense because it was the day I watched the Spain vs. Italy Euro2008 soccer match online via ESPN360.

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Firedoglake Book Salon - Chat with Progressive Book Authors

Firedoglake hosts books salons or author chats on a variety of political, social justice, and progressive issues. Today’s chat was with Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now, and her independent journalist brother, David Goodman about their book Standing Up to the Madness

Since I enjoyed the chat so much, I started adding the upcoming chats to my google calendar. I then thought that it would be so much easier if there was a public calendar that I could simply add to mine as I currently do for Barack Obama’s appearances and Soccer games. Since one didn’t exist, I created it.

If you would like access to this calendar, it is available by searching firedoglake in Google’s public calendars.

The calendar is available in the following formats:

• XML - for use in any RSS reader
• HTML - to view in a web browser
• iCal - to add to any calendar program that supports the iCal format

The calendar can also be embedded on your website with the following code:

<iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=6lt9p8vltnm73r4l5eufddmru0%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York" style="border: 0" width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Example of a Customized Embedded Calendar of Firedoglake Book Salon Events

Green Twitter Update

My Green Twitter post and opml file have been updated based on information from It’s Not a Lecture and AIDG.

Green Twitter - Aggregating the Feeds of Green Twits

David Wescott of It’s Not a Lecture wrote a post called Green Tweeting, which was inspired by my Green Twitter post. He went a step further than I did and thought about what could be done with the RSS feeds of the individuals postings about the environment on Twitter. To be perfectly honest, it did not even occur to me to do this and I am a little jealous of David for having the idea. I am, however, glad that he shared his article with me (through twitter, of course).

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Wordpress Plugins Used on (Anti) Social Development

• Wordpress 2.5.1
• Akismet - catches comment and trackback spam. Requires a wordpress.com API key
• All in One SEO Pack - Search Engine Optimization for Wordpress Blog
• AmazonSimpleAdmin
• cforms II
• commentluv
• Exec-PHP
• FeedBurner Feedsmith
• flickrRSS
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Gravatar
• MyBlogLog Widget
• NoFollow Free
• Photo Dropper
• Related Posts
• RSS Stream
• SimplePie Core
• Twitter Tools

Does anyone have any recommendations of other plugins that I should install?