Laugh Poop and Die: A Toonlet Comic that Won’t Give you Diabetes

lpd-smallIn a previous  post I blathered about defacing toonlet® graphics.  That activity was for the purpose of refining the best toons into a cohesive book.  The first edition (40pp) is now available for download! Here are samples. The ebook has about 60 strips. It’s a free download for the time being. If you like the book, I would appreciate it if you would blog or tweet about it with a link back to this blog post. Enjoy!


DOWNLOAD HERE

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OAuth: Totally!

skelkeyWhat is OAuth, and why should you care? Here’s the deal: Just like Skynet of Terminator fame, web apps have lately been doing a lot more talking to each other on the “back-end” instead of all web communication being between a human and a web app. This is a GOOD thing as long as the humans control what talks to what and what data is shared. Instead of copying and pasting a whole bunch of data from Web App A into Web App B, you can now just give Web App B permission to go get it. And if you ever change anything on Web App A, you only need to change it there: Web App B will pick it up. This makes things convenient, but in the past it required giving Web App B your password to Web App A! As a developer, I understand why they really do need this info, but you don’t need to be a paranoid security analyst like me to imagine how easily an evil person could promise an app that does something cool, suck up your credentials, and use them for nefarious purposes. And nowhere is this more true than on Twitter.
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Creative Commons License your tweets

cc-attr-nc-saThis little TweetCC Twitter App makes it very easy for you to license your tweets, according to any of the various flavors of the Creative Commons License. All you do is press the button by your chosen flavor of creative commons, it tweets the appropriate message as a reply to @tweetcc, and then they will link to your twitterstream on their webpage.

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Twitter Mosaic: Get Yours

Mosaic MugAfter two pretty cerebral hard core posts in a row I’d better have something fluffy, but in a geeky way. So here you go — A Twitter Mosaic. If you have significant friends at all it generates a pretty hefty chunk of HTML code to slap into your blog.

They will put a reduced number of avatars on a mug or a T-shirt for you if you wish. In case you are wondering, yes, on the blog the little avatars link up to friends’ profile, but I’m pretty sure that the T-Shirts and the mugs don’t work that way. Besides, I wouldn’t really appreciate people poking me in the chest to see if the T-Shirt graphic would reload to Hackszine’s profile or something. Apparently the order in which the avatars appear is somewhat correlated with the order in which these folks friended you, so the longtimers are at the top. It would be nice if you could prioritize them. You can, however, click on any you don’t want and it will just delete them and shift the rest up one and add the next one in line. I deleted all the o_O’s because they are boring looking. However that didn’t seem to alter the HTML code and there was no update button. So the o_O’s are still there. That’s either a bug or a GUI blooper.
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Retweet Rank RSS fun


For more widgets please visit www.yourminis.com

Tixrus (my Twitter moniker) gets retweeted on Twitter from time to time. According to Retweetrank, tixrus is the 84th percentile for retweets.
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Try my beta Word Press Plugin

Well, it had to happen. It is amazing that I’ve been using WordPress so long without getting into its guts. While hacking on the Tweet this plugin ever so gently, I started to get the feel for how WP plugins work. So I wrote a couple myself. The first one is  serious old school, as it’s modeled on some older plugins. The second one actually uses more object oriented methodology, and so should be easier to read, maintain, and hack on.

But I’m sure most of you don’t care about that as long as the plugins work. And probably you are wondering what they do. Continue reading Try my beta Word Press Plugin

When Monkeys Fly Out My A$$ OR My TweetThis Hack

I was recently reading Guy Kawasaki’s blog post on how he uses Twitter.   I was thinking, sure, Twitterfeed is great because it tweets my blog posts as me, but it would be even nicer if my awesome readers had a button to tweet my blog post as them in one click, i.e.  without the brain cell killing mousage/keyboardage of 1) shrinking the URL, 2) going to twitter and 3) copy/pasting the title. That’s a good thing in three ways:

  • More cred for you if someone else besides you tweets your stuff,
  • more potential reach,
  • your friend who tweets for you appears magnanimous and with it to all his followers.

It sounded like something that would be easy to automate  and useful to a lot of people, so I thought, there has to be a WordPress plugin to do that. Sure enough there is – Tweet This by Richard X Thripp.
Continue reading When Monkeys Fly Out My A$$ OR My TweetThis Hack

Map Your Tweeple (twitter friends)


This is a yahoo pipe that gets fed my twitter name, goes to the public twitter feed, finds my “friends” who have provided geographical locations, and uses that data to map them. Yahoo pipes are amazingly visual ways to build mashups. If you don’t want to build your own, not to worry. There are many many published pipes that you can just use, the same way you use RSS feeds.
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Typealyzer — Psyche out that blog

Here’s an interesting little very soft-core bit of geekery:  Typealizer.com.   Toss the URL of any blog or twitter profile into it and it analyzes the writing and tells you what type the author is.    According to Typealyzer my twitter stream is ISTP,  while both this blog  and my food blog come out  ESTP.   According to the official Meyers Briggs test, and a condensed online version,  however, I am INTP. Whence the discrepancy?
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XKCD Burma Shave

@sil tweeted this; blog post kind of an extended retweet:

This one from XKCD resonates with me. I’ll get some original content up here soon I promise. But meanwhile, this one is good. And if you’re old enough to actually have seen *REAL* burma shave signs leave me a comment about where and . . . → Read More: XKCD Burma Shave