Hot Dorkage

Feedburner will create an animated banner that cycles through the five most recent items on any RSS feed. I used it to create an IAB standard 468×60 banner promoting my tweets. There are excrutiatingly detailed instructions with screendumps over on my companion hub at hubpages (let them host the frakkin’ screendumps) but in a nutshell:

• Get your feed from wherever
• Burn it at feedburner
• Choose the publicise tag
• Choose Headline Animator option
• Configure your banner, if you use a custom background it must be a GIF hosted on the web somewhere (your blog would be fine)
• Activate, save and grab the code.

Here is my promotional banner for my twitter microblog:

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

It is a very good idea, and often overlooked, to create a table comment when creating a table. Months later when you’ve forgotten what eggs_x_chickens was for, the comment will be extremely useful. It is especially useful if multiple people will be accessing the database, but you should go to the effort to do it even if the table is for your private consumption.

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I was just surfing around the startupalooza website for who’s coming to Portland and I ran across the toonlet site. I remember writing a Mr. Potato head stack in Hypercard many years ago and it was a lot of fun. I’d seen others as well, desktop toys for Windoze and Mac, all along the same line. Well, toonlet lets you give them moods and write captions and publish them for posterity, which is a step further. So I got into toonlet and created Calendargeek, an alterego for myself.
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