I’m getting an early start on the three day weekend

Later, I’ll be enjoying one of my favorite summer pastimes; a combination of bicycling and a cookout using a trailer I made just for such outings. Bratwurst and beer by the lake.

Anyway, I’ll most likely be missing the headlines and posting will drop off some time later — maybe around noon or a little later. Enjoy the weekend, folks.

[photo via trialsanderrors]

Heading out for some cycling later on today

So I don’t know if I’ll be able to get to the headlines. After being cooped up all winter, it’s time to start working on getting my bike legs back.

[image via Wikimedia Commons]

Breakdown on the side of the information superhighway

The blogging addon Scribefire has quit working with the latest version of Firefox. Scribefire seems to have been an abandoned project for a while now, so I suppose it was only a matter of time. I never used it on Tumblr, but for my Blogspot blogs it was practically essential - I hate Blogger's post editor with the passionate intensity of a thousand burning suns. It's clunky and slow and eats CPU and is just generally awful.

I've downloaded an opensource desktop editor called Zoundry Raven, which seems OK so far. It uses almost zilch for RAM, which is a big plus for me. I'm not at a point where I can recommend it yet, but it seems pretty good so far.

Anyway, if blogging began late today, that's why. And it may be light throughout the day as I get my bearings with this thing - or scrap it and try another if that's what I need to do.

[photo by aussiegall]

Cleaned up the Superfeed

I went through the Progressive News Must-Read Superfeed and trimmed the input from my Tumblr up a bit, to weed out the extraneous debate posts and other not so very important things. Like most blogging platforms, Tumblr lets you subscribe to an RSS feed of posts with a particular tag, so the Superfeed now gets only my posts tagged "#blogwire." That way my little arguments aren't hogging up the aggregator. If you want to find a tag feed for your own Tumblr, just go to your blog, click on the tag you want, then add "/rss" to the end of the URL. If you're using a feed to publish stuff elsewhere, this is a really nice way to edit the content on the fly.

As always, you can follow the Superfeed as RSS here or as a web page here. There's also a twitter feed. I use the Superfeed constantly.

My New Robot Guest-Blogger

I went to one of those fancy, new "rock and roll" shows last night, so no morning post. Instead, a quick station note. You might've noticed a post at Griper News titled "Twitter Headlines." This is a robot post from Diigo. Every link I twitter (and sometimes then some), I also bookmark with Diigo. Anyhoo, Diigo has a robo-post option, so I figured I could do a daily "tab dump" automatically. So that's what that is. I meant for it to post later in the day, but I guess my math was off.

The "Stories to Watch" are still going to be posted every weekday, but we got started on the show earlier than expected so I had to skip it. Didn't want you to think it was being replaced by a robot -- just bad timing. Basically, this is all an attempt to get all things bloggy on both the Tumblr blog and Griper News.

No back to our regularly scheduled surfing.

Mobile Sites Up

Finally got the mobile sites up. I had to go to "Blogger in Draft" (read "Blogger in perpetual Beta") to do it. Seems to work pretty well. I ran them on an iPhone emulator and it seemed to work OK. Let me know if you have issues. They should go mobile automatically if you dial in on a mobile device, but if not, just look for the mobile icon at the top of the right sidebar. The URL's directly to the mobile sites are:

http://griperblade.blogspot.com/?m=1

http://gripernews.blogspot.com/?m=1

Update your bookmarks accordingly. If you're just browsing from a regular old computer, ignore this whole thing. Nothing else has changed.