Tag Archive for 'binary bonsai'
I know, I know, it’s starting to look more and more as if Binary Bonsai was reborn as a Star Wars and Droidmaker-reblog site after its hiatus, but if I merely updated the older entries with this information, it wouldn’t propagate, and dammit, when I have something to take credit for I’ll damn well use every excuse in the book to take it!
Then there happened to be an unusual series of events at the end of June, 2009, when a couple interesting Lucas stories were emerging. An old home movie from ILM in 1977. An older interview with young George Lucas from the BBC in 1972. My book gives some context to these items.
On June 30 I got a wild hare and generated a PDF of the entire book. I posted it on my blog and I made two public-ish announcements: I posted it on my Facebook page, and I emailed a note about it to a blogger in Europe who had just written something nice about Droidmaker a few days earlier. So I emailed “Binary Bonsai” – he posted it. And that was it.
The word spread globally in a few moments, and in 24 hours there were around 2,000 downloads of the book. A few weeks later there was another spike of interst, bringing the total downloads to about 13,000. In 14 days, more people have read my book than in the prior 4 years. And I finally feel like my work with this is done. #
Exciting for me, as I’ve been a fan of Droidmaker since it came out. I plowed through it in a few days, which is honestly rather rare for me. I hope to have the chance to meet Michael when we’re in California; a fitting encounter on a trip which is already taking us to see Pixar, Skywalker Ranch and a John Williams concert.
I honestly don’t know how all of this could get much better…
It’s not that I’m embarrassed by my younger self, but… I’d prefer it if my blog continually contained mostly things that feel contemporary to me. Thus, employing government-sanctioned reality distortion field technology, I once again got Brian to do the heavy lifting and build me The Amazing ContemporizerOther names suggested were ‘I was young, I needed the money’, ‘It’s not that I’m embarrassed, but…’ ‘Youthful Folly’ and ‘The Ice Floe’. while I kicked back, drank piña colada’s and cackled at my cat.
The Amazing Contemporizer is a plugin for WordPress which automatically sets posts older than X to private, causing a wave of privacy to flow over your older and perhaps less… refined, past as a blogger.
PS: Backup you blog before using. Seriously. No… Seriously!
The holidays bring the amazing wonder of a fixed feed (no more raw textile markup), non-invisible pages, working search, a lifestream and some polish on the theme here and there. Hell, the about page even has my e-mail address on it, so people can go ahead and contact me directly, instead of having to go through flickr.
Now, speaking of flickr, it has now been two weeks since my sizable Star Wars collection was removed from flickr.
Continue reading ‘A Copyright Infringement Claim, Flickr and Me’
I’m not going to make a big splash here, but I’ve activated ahead of time, the design I’ve been working on, mostly because I grew bored with the previous one faster than I thought I would. As you can see, this one is quite low-key and set entirely in Helvetica Neue, with exception of the header logo of course, which I drew in Photoshop one sunny sunday a couple of weeks back.
I wanted a more ‘serious’, almost book-like feel for the site, to complement my writing — and to be honest, to lend it some seriousness I can’t manage to bring to the table on my own — and hopefully this design manages to do something along those lines.
It is however a work in progress, but as usual I don’t have the time just now to get everything up and running as I want it; yet another case of me being better at dreaming up ideas than coding them up. And as such, it’s got plenty of errors, and some of the recent entries have hardcoded widths for videos and what not (thanks Flash), don’t worry, life goes on.
I hope you like it.
I’m sorry for this past week’s permission-problem-outage, but despite having vacation, it’s been everything but quiet around here. And before we get on to other business, let me just take one more opportunity to congratulate Rasmus and Anna-Vera on their wedding this weekend, it was fantastic!
Yeah, I forgot, once again, to renew my domain name. You’d think I’d have learned it the first or second time it happened, right? I’m thick like that.
I don’t give them all the love they really deserve, so I thought it was time again for me to drop some love for the Media Temple servers, on which Binary Bonsai is hosted.
I don’t believe in marriage at such, but if I was forced into a marriage, I would want it to be with Media Temple.
Media Temple is a good kisser.
Though hecticly so, the podcast has been recorded. I just need to post-process it and upload it. Unfortunately time is a meager resource these days, so I’ll get back to you on that ASAP.
I’m planning on recording podcast #10 on thursday; only a year late. I already have a topic, but if you otherwise have anything, let me know.
Figured out why my RSS feed isn’t displaying the full post anymore. Apparently WordPress now truncates posts that use the <
more> tag in RSS feeds. Funny, it never did that before. I am, now, quite pissed. #
Amen brother. Amen.
I would have written a rant about this, but I just could not be bothered. But anything Christopher says, I agree with 100%. Why would you change core functionality in a point update? It doesn’t make any sense at all. Especially since it actually removes the choice between excerpts and full-length feeds…
I’ve always proudly served full-length feeds, since I firmly believe that excerpted feeds are lame. And now, with this new functionality, I no longer have the choice.
Adding injury to injury, the new ‘excerpt’ doesn’t even indicate to the reader of the feed that they are only seeing the tip of the iceberg!…
First forced rel=nofollow. Then snap. Now this?
Seriously.
Dear reader, meet Invader60; Invader60 meet one of the people who will be using you. Great, now that we have that out of the way, allow me to explain to you what exactly is going on.
Invader60 is the 60% mark of Invader. You will no doubt have noticed that it is considerably slimmer than earlier versions of Invader, or indeed any layout previously seen on Binary Bonsai, which is actually quite contrary to what I had originally planned (which was a layout which would be considerably wider than anything before it).
The implementation is filled to the brim with bugs at the moment, but I’ll be hammering most of them out today; I just wanted to make sure I actually managed to publish this today instead of letting it slide.
There are quite a few ideas behind the way this new layout is structured, some are evident some aren’t quite as evident yet. Most importantly is the use of AJAX and fancy schmancy effects, all of which I’ll also want to talk more about as soon as it’s all working as it’s supposed to.
Order of business: Fix the currently slightly broken functionality, then order the content properly, then fix the styling.
Now if you’ll excuse me.
PS: Oh yeah, in the midst of all of this, I forgot to tell you that this is another Bachelor Weekend! :)
Turn page. Big bold letters: YEAR THREE
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, friends, family, geeks, freaks, 1337’s and fellow bloggers. Today marks the beginning of Binary Bonsai’s third year as part of the blogosphere. What a ride this last year has been. Holy crap.
Let’s take it from the top
As chronicled in the 5-part ‘nostalgia’ series (which I might add is way overdue for a hardcore editing procedure), I got my first modem quite early – possibly around 1994 or so – on loan from my grandad (a 1200 baud beauty). Back then, everything was gopher and Telnet. Pretty boring if you’re a teenager with a vivid imagination and Neuromancer on the nightstand…
Weee, I won Chris’s 2004 weblog awards! Ph34r my design-foo! I would like to thank Rikke, and her ever-lasting patience with me and this damned blog :)
Great stuff, thank you everyone! Though it feels awkward coming out on top of all these great bloggers and their sites. Might I suggest a new, broader scoped award some time in spring? Where we really get the word out to everyone we can, line up all the coolest sites out there and see what’s what. I am honored and happy that Freya has been met with such a warm welcome. But I must admit to feeling unworthy :)
Regardless, bring on the design-foo belt!
Well, as promised when I launched Freya, I have finally gotten down to segregating comments from ping– and trackbacks. Something I might add, that I believe WordPress should do by default. The Livesearch Entry is a good example of how a list of pings will look like. Either way, I’ll probably post some code soon for those of you interested in something like that. I’m about to send off the latest version of the Latest Comments plugin that Brian wrote, after doing some 1.3 compatibilitization (so a word!) to it, and once Brian gets the time, he’ll put it up on his site for everyone to download.
In other news, I sent in my iPod for repairs today. I’ve also got the box for my Powerbook down at the office, just need to backup the harddrive and it’ll go in too. I hope the wait won’t be too long.
Either way, I think I have most of the things I need to run the world without it, but in case I disappear from the surface of the Earth; well now you know who to lynch.
When I, in preparation for Freya, upgraded to WordPress 1.3, I didn’t have any spammer countermeasures in place for a few days. Which was of course just plain foolish! So the other day, after having heard reports of people getting hit with large amounts of casino and poker spam, I decided to install Kitten’s Spaminator (as well as a few other minor countermeasures), and I’m here to tell you it is teh g00dn3zz, as we say.
Today it’s been stopping a minor wave of spam dead in its tracks. Now I’m not entirely sure what it’s doing, but it’s doing it well.