A brief rant on defining categories in a meaningful way. More inside.

As soon as you’re born, they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all

Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all

I should really stop writing crap about everything I’m changing in the backend and start writing real, interesting stuff instead.

I’ve been poking around yet some more in the templates. I moved the entry info (date, permalink, categories et al) to the bottom of the entry instead. Makes more sense and reduced the clutter.

I made archive pages for each category. Now I’m thinking about how to define my categories… it’s really starting to get messy in that department. I need to sit down and make a better definition of the categories so I know what to put in each category. Right now it’s way too hazy distinctions between them. If I post a list of music that I’m currently listening to, should it go into Entertainment, Life or Media? Or a combination?

How do other people handle their categories? I could use some help here.

Ben Hammersley and his list of New Years’ resolutions. I wave my private parts at his aunties, as I have already done a large part of what he has on his list, namely the following:

• Validated all my RSS feeds, as well as my HTML and CSS (minor problem with my HTML, but nothing that can’t be fixed with a regular expression)
• Properly marked up my entire MP3 collection with ID3v2 tags (ID3-TagIt is an excellent utility for this)
• Licensed all my original content (what little there is) under a Creative Commons license
• Chanted “Mark Pilgrim is God” as I read Dive Into Accessibility and promptly changed parts of my site to make it more accessible

I really don’t consider it necessary to buy me a bunch of presents just because it happens to be that time of year. But if you absolutely must do it, here are some inexpensive suggestions that would make me very happy.

• A gift certificate at SF-Bokhandeln.
• Buy me a ticket to The Two Towers. Preferrably in your company.

Short list. But then again, Christmas gifts aren’t necessary for me.

Quoth Jogin:

I’ve never cared much for christmas. Sure, as a kid, getting lots of presents was pretty cool, even though my dad dressed up as Santa Claus, in robes and a particularly freaky unhumanlike mask, looked more like a crazed killer than a friendly, present-giving saint.

I’ve always thought that those freaky Santa masks look a bit like Michael Myers from the Halloween movies, only with a big fake nylon beard.

There we are, my constant nagging finally paid off. My pal Breki has installed MovableType. It’s pretty bare-bones at the moment, he’s working on his own templates. Welcome to the blogosphere!

I have, after much thinking, decided to restructure the archiving format. Unfortunately, this will have the side effects of making my permalinks, well, unpermalinks. Sorry about that, but it’s for A Good Cause™.

The new format will be “/trashcan/62/” where 62 is the MTEntryID of the entry.

This is a much better system, in my opinion. Shorter URL and easier format makes it easier to remember. I’ll rewrite the daily archive template I used to describe the change and point to the new URL – thank $deity for the powerful templates of MT. This entry will serve as a test bed before I rebuild the entire site.

For the record, I should have gone to bed an hour ago…

Update: well, it’s more or less done. All that’s left to do is to add comments and trackbacks for the individual entry archive template, but that will have to wait. After that, I’ll rebuild and we’re all set. Now, off to bed I go.

Updated update: Done. And on the seventh rebuild, he rested.

RSD info available, thanks to the template for MovableType by Ben Hammersley.

Now I’m just waiting for some applications with support for all these TLAs…

I’ve written a regular expression using Brad Choate’s nifty MT-Regex plugin for MovableType. It turns the string “100 SEK” into this: “100 SEK.” It’s easy to modify the currencies you want to change from/to. Here’s the code:

&lt;MTAddRegex name="currency"&gt;s|([0-9]+) <span style="color: red;">SEK</span>|$1 &lt;acronym title="Swedish Crowns"&gt;<span style="color: red;">SEK</span>&lt;/acronym&gt; (&lt;a href="http://www.exchangerate.com/quick_calculator.html?amount_from=$1&amp;calc_short_from_iso=<span style="color: red;">SEK</span>&amp;calc_short_to_iso=<span style="color: green;">USD</span>&amp;Submit=Convert" title="Convert from SEK to USD"&gt;convert currency&lt;/a&gt;)|g;&lt;/MTAddRegex&gt;

Replace the red part with the ISO code for the currency you want to translate from, and the green one with the ISO code for the currency to translate to. You then place it in a template module (mine is called “RegExps”), and include it in your index or archive templates with “<$MTInclude module="RegExps"$>“. Then all that is left is to activate the module for the tag you want to apply it on like this: <$MTEntryBody regex="currency"$>.” And you’re done.

Note: you can’t see it in action if you syndicate my RSS feed, this regular expression isn’t run on the XML feeds. You’ll have to view the entry to see it.

I’m looking at various low-end digital cameras. It would be really nice to have one, so I can assault people and take their pictures. Trust seems to have an interesting product line, and their cameras can double as web cams as well. Nice bonus. I’m googling for some reviews to see what the quality is like. If it doesn’t suck too much, I’ll give them a chance.

The 350 FT PowerC@m Flash looks pretty decent, despite having a lame name. Costs 899 SEK at Teknikmagasinet. For that price I’m not expecting miracles, but if it gives a decent picture quality I might buy it. The SpyC@m 300 Voice also looks interesting — smaller, but doesn’t have a flash.

…but first, I must have my iPod