I’m still in France; no hot news on the bird front or indeed any other front, but it’s all very pleasant.
Some kind of lizard orchid. Not the prettiest orchid I’ve found, but maybe the coolest.
There’s a gecko behind the sofa on the other side of the room.
I am in France, in a villa (or at least C17th farmhouse) in the hills behind the Côte d’Azur. Cork oak, cypresses, asphodel, thyme, broom, lavender, poppies etc etc. Scarce swallowtail butterflies, Sardinian warbler.
I’ll post some pics tomorrow. If I feel like it.
Well, I think I’ve come up with a slightly better way of getting my blog posts on Facebook. Basically I want to feed full posts to people’s feed-readers but excerpts to Facebook (because I don’t want people commenting on Facebook instead of here).
So I’ve set up the Feed Wrangler plugin to add an excerpt-only feed which I can just feed to Facebook. It’s a bit of a stupid hack but then Facebook is stupid that way. Now I’ll just have to see if it works.
EDIT: testing again. sigh.
Apologies for the lack of blogging recently. Hopefully you all use RSS readers so you haven’t been wasting time checking to see if I’ve posted anything new.
A part of the reason is that I think Twitter has been cannibalising my blog posting a bit. For example, the peregrine I saw over the park a few days ago would certainly have merited a blog post if I hadn’t already scratched that itch by tweeting about it. The fact that I could replace a blog post with 140 characters might imply that my blog posts are about 20 times longer than they should be, but never mind.
Anyway, you’re all just going to have to live without my thoughts on Manchester United, chiffchaffs, stock doves, Irish republican terrorism, Slumdog Millionaire, hay fever, the iPhone, Welsh rarebit and whatever else I’ve been not posting about lately. It’s not much of a loss.
The very observant among you may notice that my separate book page has disappeared. That’s because I’ve increasingly been blogging about all the books I read anyway, so it just meant I was duplicating the information. And since I started posting to Goodreads, the situation is even more ridiculous, with me effectively posting the same text in three different places, all formatted slightly differently.
So, with a slight twinge of regret, because even if it was a bit pointless, I was quite pleased with that page from a design/coding point of view… I have killed it.
Other bits of minor news: I have started posting to twitter as @HeracliteanFire. And if you really want to follow my every online move, all this stuff — Flickr, delicious, twitter, last.fm, Goodreads, this blog and my photoblog — gets aggregated on FriendFeed.
A not very methodical selection of about 50 links from the 300 or so I posted last year.
amazing camera — Anne of Green Gables
beachobatics — Billys and Charleys — Björk on television
cat playing the theramin — Chicago storefront churches — collapsing USA — CSS Homer — curators at work
Detroit dancing
financial meltdown — forehead wrinkles — fossil bird
Galileo’s magic trick — ghost slugs
hairy women — head-tracking 3D display — hermit in glass house — historical voting
ingenious glasses — interviewed chief — ironclad
Japanese typewriters — Jefferson’s Bible
kitten eating broccoli — knitted viscera
lakes on Titan — landscape design
male strippers — medieval watermarks
Native Americans — new Pope
photos of TV — psychology of suicide
railway signal — restless stereographs — robot dog — robotic prosthetic
search photos by colour — sheep stomach lamp — sign names — snails on face — solargraphs — spooky metronomes — springtime on Mars — a stupid name
transsexual toilets
unbuilt London
vest test — Victorian egg-diving — video editing magic
wandering oak boulder — Welsh roadsign — Wikipedia — wooden mirror