Monkinetic Weblog

Jodi, dear that she is, has been picking up my blogging slack lately over on . She's covered our visit to Paulo Soleri's Arcosanti, my mom's plans for an Ivy Family portal, as well as a site of her own, and she's reviewed X-Men 2, which we saw yesterday (hint- it rocked!). If posting seems slack here, for the latest!

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The Blogger fail-safe: pictures of your cat. In this case, Toby, our cute, lovable and ornery tabby.

I recently found a solution to a problem that had been bugging me for some time.

Conversant has this really cool email gateway - all posts to this site go out to anyone who is subscribed to the site and has the list feature turned on.

So, when I write a post like this one, the post goes out over email, and the <blockquote> tags are stripped. How do my subscribers know where the quote is?

To the rescue: Conversant&#39;s text resources. A resource is like a Manila/Radio shortcut: it&#39;s a defined piece of text that gets replaced with something else when the content gets rendered. Resources are most often used for links and images, but Conversant has a powerful resource type called a Text Resource.

A text resource can have anything in it - html, text, and Conversant template macros. So I essentially write my own no-arg macro called&#39;quote&#39;:

<-#if condition="ioInterface&#39;email&#39;"-->
----- quote --<-#else--><blockquote><-#endif-->

If the post is being rendered for email, it inserts the "----quote----" text, otherwise it renders the blockquote tag. A partner resource called&#39;endquote&#39; inserts "------" or the closing blockquote tag.

Now, when excerpting text, I start the excerpt with |quote| and close it with |endquote|, and it gets rendered legibly both on the site and in the list email.

Keola Donaghy sums up my feelings on Apple's Music Store exactly: quote...please don't ignore the greater potential of this service to level the playing field for artists and smaller labels who cannot get the attention of the major labels that are now available on your service.endquote

Random Stuff:

• Thanks to Scoble linking to this post, I'm now #41 on Popdex. I'll be gone in a couple days, but it's been fun!
• TidBITS is looking for a CMS, Zope/Plone mentioned as a possibility.
• I rode 16 miles yesterday, in 1 hour, 20 minutes. My longest ride this year.

Dave invents the whitelist.

Of course, no journey would be complete without a few choice temptations along the way.

Chris Ruzin re-arranged his archive section partly based on my work on the new calendar on this site. Cooooool.

Jodi posted last night about an Iranian woman we got to spend last evening with. She and her family survived the ten year war with Iraq, and had to flee their homes on the Iran/Iraq border when Saddam's troops came. It was fascinating to hear.

Jodi had a job interview yesterday. She's not taking it though, and she reports on that and other news on her site today.

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As someone interested in information architecture, I find the typical weblog calendar to be ill-suited to its task. Ostensibly the idea is to show the user what days have posts and let them navigate back and forth in time to view weblog posts.

Dave is talking about preparing to move across country. In October of 2001, I was doing the same thing. There's something exciting, scary, and altogether bigger than oneself about moving to a new life. All the best, Dave!

List Community #listCommunity">#

Ok, I'm on my second cup already because I got distracted. After noticing Scoble's link to Joel on Software, I decided to read Joel's most recent email article, on Building Communities with Software. It got me thinking about how the forum on this site works. I may make some changes around here but I'm not sure yet.

Yes, Clark got hisself a brand new toy. Boy am I jealous. No, I don't have a purpose for it. No, I never used the one I have (a 120) enough. No, I could not afford it, even at the low price he paid for it.

Mark put up a nifty fridge magnet poetry page and contest. Here's my entry, titled "tablet Haiku" in honor of NEC's new toy.

Robert Scoble responds to my last post:

Is Dave becoming a warblogger? -)

I find this funny.

My good friend Jim recently released a Mac OS X installer for Plone, a Zope-based CMS.