Beckism.com

And NewsFire 1.5 is released with…a larger next button.

Here is my excitement at finally seeing a new version of NewsFire. Here is my excitement comically deflating to the sounds of trumpets going wah wah waaah.

Although there isn’t a link anywhere on NewsFire’s new, information-less website, you can still see the release notes for 1.5 if you know where to look. Given that nothing substantial appears to have been changed, I guess I’ll continue to use NetNewsWire. I used to love NewsFire, but the small annoyances, coupled with the fact that David Watanabe appears to hate his customers, finally forced me to migrate to NetNewsWire.

I have to admit, though, I still kind of miss NewsFire’s all-in-one list of headlines. NetNewsWire is far more difficult to skim through. Ah well. I shall toil on.

I’ve been doing some writing exercises, and I’m finally back in the short story zone. So keep a weather eye out for the first piece of new short fiction on Beckism.com in quite a while.

Obviously, this post itself is largely pointless (”oooh, fiction is coming! Be excited or something!”), but I published it because I have a question: are people going to be totally weirded out if I publish short fiction full text, just like my non-fiction articles? I’ve got a system in place that will let me use an excerpt or teaser (Dirt Man is currently using it), but I want people to read this stuff, dammit. And I know when I’m a first-time visitor to a blog, I almost never click through a “read more” link.

Your thoughts are welcome and appreciated. And if no one speaks up, then I’ll just quietly start slipping bits of fiction onto the site, because I miss making stuff up and putting it online.

I have to admit, Garfield minus Garfield is freaking hilarious. So far, I’ve got a pretty clear favorite; basically sums up my life.

(Via Daring Fireball)

I know, I know, I’m a bit behind on the times, but I finally got around to reading Abarat and Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War by Clive Barker.

Abarat is extremely vivid, but not particularly cohesive. It’s a good read, but it reads like Clive Barker had a bunch of disparate ideas that were really cool and then had to find a plot to somehow connect them all. Although most of the characters have fascinating descriptions, they by and large don’t have much depth.

Still, well worth reading if you like fantasy, and particularly if you’re in the mood for some vividly imagined environments and creatures.

The Big Word Project was launched a couple days ago, and it’s an interesting idea. Basically, it’s just a list of a lot of English words. If you pay them $1 per letter for a word, that word will be a link to a website of your choosing henceforth (though pick wisely, because you can’t go back to change it later).

Possibly the most intriguing get-rich-quick scheme I’ve seen yet, and certainly a creative web venture. Will the site have any sort of longevity, or were the people who defined “spam” and “crap” to point straight to www.thebigwordproject.com correct? Regardless, the idea, though probably just a good way to convince people to spend money on nothing, is creative enough that I bought a word for Beckism.com. And to be honest, going through and seeing what words have been chosen for what websites is kind of fun. Props to the developers for thinking outside the box.

XKCD on in-store music and marching bands. Aside from making me laugh, this comic was quite recognizable to me (I’d be the one on the floor).

Not only was I in marching band, but I’m a percussionist. Double whammy.

I’ve been eyeing the MediaTemple hosting plans for a while, and after a weekend of being unable to edit any of my sites because of intermittent downtime and crippled FTP, I’ve finally made the switch. I’ve read lots of good reviews and a few bad ones and I’m not too happy with the downsides of shared hosting but have no need for a virtual server, so we’ll see how it goes. Given my past experience positive experiences with MediaTemple support (my employer hosts with them), I suspect that I’ll be very happy even if they can’t deliver on perfect uptime. I’ve found that quality support is better than delivering on pie-in-the-sky promises every time. Plus now I can finally use PHP 5 (and be able to run PHP 4 side-by-side if necessary), which is pretty freaking cool.

The migration was super easy (although I haven’t moved beckism.net over just yet, so there’s more to do), and hopefully you’ll be seeing better uptime and speed from my sites in the future. Because they were down so often and so sluggish before. Oh well. I’m a nerd, and a terabyte of bandwidth impresses me, even if I’ll barely use a fraction of it in a given month. At least now I can host the Things screencast myself without fear of running out of bandwidth.

The only question that remains is how to gain enough readers (even temporarily) that I’ll actually be able to use MediaTemple’s vaunted performance burst technology.

I admit that it’s unlikely. But a man can dream, right?

I bought Acorn shortly after it came out because it gave me a really easy way to snag application icons for Tagamac. Sadly, it didn’t have any web export features, and when I upgraded to Leopard the resizing starting sucking hard core (lots of black artifacts).

Enter Acorn 1.1 which includes web export, resizing bugfixes, and much more. Now perhaps I won’t have to launch Photoshop every time I want to stick some stupid image online, which was really what I was looking for when I bought Acorn in the first place. W00t!

Ever since my recent redesign (and subsequent drastic increase in activity), I’ve started using Amazon.com Affiliate links when linking to good books, games, and so forth that I am currently experiencing. I hate the idea of advertisements on Beckism.com, and since I was planning on sharing opinions on books/etc. anyway, this seems like a pretty unobtrusive way to create a small possibility of revenue. My pie-in-the-sky dream is that someday Beckism.com will pay for its own hosting costs. That will be a good day.

In any case, I’ve only recently started using Amazon.com affiliate links, and may I just say that Amazon.com has a terrible system. You have to visit their Affiliate Central. Then log in. Then view all their widgets and so forth. Then choose the Product Links option. Then search for your product. Find the product in the search results. Die of boredom.

And the URL’s hideously long. Some monstrosity like this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0525457585/104-5843009-5065550?ie=UTF8&tag=beckism-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0525457585

It makes me cringe. I’ve been searching for a way to quickly build my own Amazon.com Affiliate links; since I’m just using simple text links, I see no reason to jump through Amazon’s hoops. My goal was something that doesn’t require me to sign into Amazon and that gives me drastically shorter URLs (because long URLs make it difficult for me to read my post’s code):

These do not seem to me impossible demands. I searched for a Mac OS X Dashboard widget that would let me find products on Amazon and automatically generate an affiliate link: no love. Searched for blog posts about how to do this: Dave Taylor had some interesting advice, but it seemed outdated (given that I’ve never seen the types of URLs that he uses as examples before), and Noah Coad’s regex, while definitely good to know for non-affiliate links, doesn’t mention how to append an affiliate ID. Chris Thomson posted Using Amazon Associates Easily in MarsEdit recently, but his solution churns out hideously long URLs (and his MarsEdit macro forces you to input text; I don’t like doing that).

So here’s what I’ve come up with, which is hardly revolutionary. First step is to search for something via Amazon’s normal webpage (forget that convoluted affiliate link generating crap). You’ll get something hideous like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Neverending-Story-Michael-Ende/dp/0525457585/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203784616&sr=8-3

Yuck. The part that you want is the string of letters and numbers immediately after /dp/. This is the product ID. Copy it out of your address bar.

Now you just need to construct your shortened version. Insert the product ID into a URL that looks like this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/?tag=beckism-20

Of course, use your own Amazon.com affiliate ID instead of “beckism-20″, and stick the product ID after /dp/.

This link is the smallest format that I can find that is recommended by multiple people on the Amazon Affiliate discussion boards. I’m curious, however, if Dave Taylor is still correct about just slapping the tracking ID onto the end. If you’d like to help me test this, click here (I don’t expect you to buy Neverending Story, although it’s a classic and well worth reading, but in a day or so the affiliate reports will show that someone clicked a link, and then I’ll know for sure; currently the affiliate ID in the link hasn’t been published anywhere else).

I’m sure this is a common problem, so let me know in the comments if you’ve heard of a better way. Also, be aware that there’s the possibility that shortening your links down like this may disable some of Amazon’s fancy reporting stuff. I have no idea (or any way to test it).

Lastly, if you’re using MarsEdit, you can make the link creation process incredibly easy. Open up a post (or new post) and choose the “Markup” dropdown in the toolbar (or select Post→Text Markup→Edit). Click the + button to add a markup macro, name it whatever you like, and stick this in the opening tag:

<a href=”http://www.amazon.com/dp/#pastetext#/?tag=beckism-20″>

(Again, replace “beckism-20″ with your Amazon Affiliate tag.) The closing tag is obviously just </a>. If you like, assign a keyboard shortcut for easy access. All you need to do to use the macro is to copy the product’s ID (which follows /dp/ in the standard Amazon URL) before selecting the MarsEdit macro. The macro will deal intelligently with selected text (or lack thereof) without your needing to do a thing.

Update April 13, 2008: After a couple of other people have tested the linking in the comments (and having myself tried both the shortest method and the method I recommend in the article above), it turns out that the format http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/beckism-20 does not work. The shortest format you can use is http://www.amazon.com/dp/0525457585/?tag=beckism-20 (a similar format is additionally cited on Amazon’s own blog, so presumably it will be valid for the foreseeable future).

I’ve expressed my appreciation for Nightwatch already. Daywatch (its sequel) was pretty good, but a little inconsistent. Fortunately, Twilightwatch, the third in the series, is excellent. Not as good as Nightwatch, but it’s still well worth reading Daywatch to get to Twilightwatch.

I particularly love how Sergei Lukyanenko keeps redefining good vs. evil. It’s a great series.