onfocus

Mary's Peak

Goodbye BlogFodder, we hardly knew ye. The site/mailing list that was meant to inspire weblog posts across the web won't be adding anything new to the blogosphere. I thought I would be able to send out a single post idea every day for a year, but life and work conspired against me. Rather than sending out one or two more before December 31st, I'm stopping the site/mailing list now. There's no lack of inspiration out there for weblog authors, and now I'll focus my post ideas solely on this site. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Beyond the creative exercise of coming up with fodders, and the fun of reading people's reactions to them, the site was a great way for me to learn about Movable Type. I built a custom Trackback form, integrated MT with an external mailing list, and learned more about scripting MySQL.

There are currently 486 people subscribed to the list. There were 183 Fodders total. And strangely there were 138 Trackbacks. The most popular BlogFodder was 11 Objects.

Note to self: look into adding RDF photo descriptions to snapGallery.

This George Lakoff interview about how conservatives have been successful by framing debates with language is brilliant:

The phrase "Tax relief" began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush's inauguration. It got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for "relief." For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add "tax" to "relief" and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.

I've been meaning to pick up Lakoff's book about categorization called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things for a long time. And now I have another of his to add to my list: Moral Politics. [via boing²]

Aaron Johnson took the algorithm for checking the existence of Amazon images that I described in Fail-Safe Amazon Images, and showed how you can use it in Java, C#, and Cold Fusion. Very cool, thanks Aaron! Beyond its use for Amazon development, I think this is an interesting exercise in translation between development environments.

I think I'm doing a live audio interview/chat over at Script School Radio today at 2:30 pacific time. We'll probably talk about weblogs, scripting, Amazon, and other subjects I write about here all the time. We'll see.

Update: Yep, that's exactly what happened. It was good to talk with TDavid about all of the above.

Amazon launched a new feature called Search Inside the Book. This lets anyone search the entire text of some (not all) books. More at Business Wire. More at Amazon.com.

You can try it by searching the full text of the book We Blog (try "microcontent"). When you click on an individual result, you see the full page (sign-in required) with your search term highlighted. You can also click the arrows to read surrounding pages. Another way to find results is by typing "microcontent" into the standard search form—you'll see an exact location of the word in the books that are returned. Since there are only eight results for "microcontent" I don't think this search is finding every book that contains the word. (But maybe "microcontent" is only mentioned in eight books, I need a better test.)

So...

• I bet this feature will be added to the API very soon.
• I wonder how this feature will affect the search results/sales for books that don't have their full text on Amazon.
• How long will it be before you can pay your money and read the whole book through Amazon?
• I'd like to see an image search.
• Libraries should do this.

This opens the door to some potential new Amazon Hacks (this book is not full-text searchable at Amazon, btw). But I must...focus...on...work.

I wrote an article for the O'Reilly Network called Fail-Safe Amazon Images. It shows ways you can code to handle products that don't have images (even when the API says they do) and ways to be prepared for non-responsive servers. The article has some server-side code examples in ASP, PHP, and Perl—with a bonus client-side version in JavaScript. I use the JavaScript safety-net on this site anywhere I show Amazon images (to see it in action view source here, there, or anywhere)—along with a modified version of the ASP sample for Weblog Bookwatch.

If you combine the code in this article with Hack #93 in Amazon Hacks (Cache Amazon Images Locally), you can be well prepared for network congestion, products without images, and anything else that could interfere with an Amazon-dependent application.