Day: February 10, 2005

Categories
outdoors

False Spring

I haven’t been able to get out for a walk for the last few days, with cold and rainy weather, and too much work that needs to get done by Friday. I did have a nice walk last Saturday — nothing difficult or complicated, but a nice four mile walk over an easy path with enough hillwork to feel good about myself.

At the end, walking back to my car, I spotted a bit of color in the mud to the side — my first crocus, and here it was only the first week of February. A day later, sleet fell and the ground froze, and false Spring gives way to the reality that winter still exists, and with this comes both anticipation and restlessness. We’ve had a winter of cold and being indoors and now we’re ready to be out and doing. Well, except for those further south, who are just finishing their summer and getting ready to bed down into fall, and their own winter cocooning; but I don’t think it really gets that cold, even in winter, so they get only a ‘tsk’ from me, rather than a ‘poor babies’.

That crocus was rather impressive, as it pushed its small head out of the mud and muck, surrounded by faint sickly green-gold winter grass. You have to admire any living thing that takes a risk now rather than wait and wait and wait until the moment is right; even if it did freeze its petals off and is now a dried brown former husk of itself. Still there is magic in being someone’s first crocus of the year, so even if it did shuffle its way off this mortal coil, I’m sure it’s being appreciated in some flower afterlife. It’s going would be better than being a hot house rose stuffed in with eleven others, all cloned identically through careful genetic manipulation, roots rudely sawed off, trying to drink water laced with chemicals–just so some guy can score points with some girl, or some girl score points with some guy. Chocolates are better, and roses should be imperfect but smell really good.

I think I’ll head out for another walk today, just to see if the little purple crocus made it, and the false Spring gave way to true.

Categories
Weblogging

WordPress 1.5 interview

This is one I missed. Craig from Nuclear Moose–great header graphic, BTW–did an interview with Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Boren about the upcoming candidate release of WordPress 1.5.

It would seem that rel=nofollow has been implemented by default in WP 1.5, so I’ll be posting instructions on how to remove this for those who aren’t interested. But of all the responses I’ve read to this new attribute, I like Ryan’s the best:

Hot stove. Hot stove. Don’t touch.

But then, I also liked what Craig had to say about nofollow. If you haven’t read Craig’s weblog before, I would suggest you spend some time there. He’s a kick-in-the-butt Canadian with a sense of humor, and that’s a goodly combination.

Categories
Technology

Don’t link to this

Never attempt to write anything as long as my previous post, directly in the weblogging tool. If you do, you will go mad, and most likely cause harm to your computer or cat, whichever is closer.

I did want to point out that after my experiment in the earlier post–and did you all have to click that link that said “don’t click”? Is that the key to popularity? Name your weblog, “Don’t Read Me”?–I did confirm what Kevin Marks wrote earlier, in that you can use your own URL as the feed for a Technorati tag, rather than have to point to Technorati directly.

As long as the rel=”tag” attribute is in the link, Technorati pulls the filename from the URL and uses this as the tag name. This should reassure folks who are concerned about putting too much juice into Technorati, because any tool, now, can do the same: look for the attribute and derive the tag name from the file name, and create it’s own ‘tagback’ page. And since I point the link at my URL, even if the Technorati tagback page disappears, my link is still valid; I control the data, and the tagback still exists.

Kevin also confirmed that search bots are being denied access to the tags page, through the use of the META tag. Google honors this, so no pagerank. No pagerank, no reason for spamming.