Last Sunday Teresa and I had dinner with her family … including her uncle Cal Koat, who is the creative spark behind Worldbeat Canada, “Canada’s home for contemporary global music.”
Cal does a weekly radio show on Vancouver radio station CJVB, does the Celt in a Twist top 10 list of Celtic music, and interviews world […]

Now I have a great answer for all those I-was-blogging-before-it-was-cool been-doing-that-since-1997 types:

Yup, since 1970 … two years before I was born.

I’m wondering why Wordpress can import blog entries from:

Blogger
Dotclear
LiveJournal
Movable Type
RSS
Textpattern

but not from a Wordpress blog ….
Maybe it’s just me, but this seems odd, seriously odd. I mean, all the import options (except RSS) will ask you for some configuration information, go out and grab all your articles, suck them down, and insert them into your […]

Today was fun. The site was down almost all day after a database meltdown.
Fortunately, all seems to be well now (10:30 PM) after a few hours of nail-biting. The most recent backup I had was about a week to 10 days old, so I wasn’t looking forward to having to re-create everything.
Naturally, the first thing […]

You may copy and use this image (”Link Whore”) in any non-prurient publication, as long as you give proper attribution.

I’ve been waiting for this for a while. Today I finally got my Google Analytics invite.
Installed, collecting data, and we’ll see what we see tomorrow! Right now, of course, having installed it literally a minute or two ago, I’m completely flatlining:

Astute observers of sparkplug9.com will have noticed that Zoomclouds, announced with such frisson merely a week ago, is toast.

You may have noticed the snazzy new tag cloud adorning the right-hand side of this page.
(I’m trying to be trendy and web 2-ish, and possibly get acquired by Google or Yahoo for mad money.)
I noticed the Zoomclouds link at Guy Kawasaki’s blog - he just got a new tag cloud as well. I thought […]

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been looking for ways to simplify this site.
It’s a truism, but more is not always more.
And I was really starting to feel that more was less. So I’ve been getting rid of stuff:

time of posting
related posts
Google AdWords
Chitika MiniMalls
all the “add to Google,” “add to feedburner,” “add to My Yahoo,” etc. […]

I’ve recently been considering re-doing my blog skin, and wondering about all the pieces, chunks, and components of a modern, integrated blog.
There’s a ton, at least on my site. At least 13:

header with “station identification:” name and so on
introduction to the site and author
list of categories
list of recent posts
RSS paraphernalia
[…]

I’m currently thinking of redoing my blog design, and just started another, Fish Crackers.
And I want it to be usable and cool and web 2ish and wonderful and aesthetically impressive, of course.
Here’s a great start for seeing what kind of design is hot right now. But not just hot - also good. Even great.
Here […]

Fine. I admit it. I’ve finally gone and done it - started a new blog.
On this blog, I haven’t hid that I’m a Christian. Quite the opposite.
But it hasn’t been quite the right place to develop a number of projects that I’m feeling called to work on. One, for instance, is a “translation” of the […]

Vancouver Web 2.0 forum has started a weekly blogger interview series … all featuring bloggers from Vancouver, of course.
This week, they’re featuring Jeffery Simpson, who writes at a variety of personal and multi-author blogs. Jeffery needs a new pic for his site and should apparently never venture into another elevator ever again. (Well, at least […]

I use Wordpress as my blogging software, and I recently upgraded to the new version 2.0.
The new version is excellent in most ways, wonderful for integrated comment spam blocking, it is driving me nuts with its silly image uploading problems.
I format my own images in Photoshop and (in the old version of Wordpress) customized the […]

This is months out-of-date, but I figured I should mention that I’m no longer affiliated with The Linguist.
I did some work for Mark and Steve Kaufmann as a consultant, operating under my Sparkplug corporation.
But about 4 months ago, it just became too much: work, family, home, blog, and business. Plus, I’m working on my masters […]

I just upgraded my install of Wordpress to 2.0, which is really, really, cool, and I’m typing this in the new, enhanced, updated, fantabulastic WYSIWYG web 2.0 buzzword-compliant text entry area, but there was one painful aspect to the upgrade.
One of the main reasons I upgraded is that WP 2.0 includes an Akismet plugin which […]

I’ve added a feature to my blog - related posts. You can see it at the bottom of every post.
I’ve currently titled it Possibly related posts, because I’m a little unsure of how smart the technology is. So far, so good. Most things look at least somewhat related, and those that don’t are delightful windows […]

I occasionally wander over to Technorati and weep at my woefully pitiful blog ranking: 103,499th.
Ouch.
But the other day, I had a slightly contrary thought. Sure, I’m part of the long tail of websites. Specifically, blogs.
But that long tail is really, really, really long. Incredibly long. In fact, mind-blowingly long. As Technorati now states, it is […]