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MetabloggingHiatusThu, 04/02/2009 - 01:39 — deadprogrammerDeadprogrammer.com is going on hiatus. I want to concentrate on a couple of projects that I'm about to launch. Semantic WebMon, 10/13/2008 - 16:12 — deadprogrammerDeadprogrammer.com is one step closer to the brave new world of the semantic web. Over the weekend I implemented Open Calais, an auto-tagging service from Reuters. Being lazy, I haven't tagged my content very well, and now, faced with with over a thousand posts, hand-tagging them is not something that I have the time for. I thought about creating a tagging interface and asking my readers to contribute to a folksonomy, but it would probably result in two valid tags and a million "viaggggrrarr" and "vikkoddinn" ones - spammers try to enter a lot of tags for some reason. Calais is a neat web service. In a nutshell, you pass it the text of your posts and it returns an xml document containing tags in various categories. The set of categories is huge: RadioStation, MedicalTreatment, Movie, City, Person are just some of them. Unfortunately I did not set everything up correctly, and some of the more interesting categories did not get populated as I was indexing the old posts. Meanwhile, my posts are a bit better tagged now, and you can take a look at a tag cloud of people and cities mentioned in my blog. Amazon Ads in RSS FeedsThu, 10/02/2008 - 18:55 — deadprogrammerA while back I've added an advertising module to my site that allows me to inject amazon item ads both into the site content and into the rss feeds. I hand pick the items, which most of the time fall into one of the three categories: stuff that I would probably want myself, stuff that I already have, stuff that I mentioned in the post, and stuff that is just funny. Four categories. This is not "punch the monkey", not the same one ad that some bloggers stuff into their rss feeds and keep there forever until you are sick of it. From time to time the amazon items are really funny. On the other hand, at my level of readers, the princely 6% commission that I get on Amazon purchases that come through the site, it's not really a major financial incentive. The ads do cover my hosting expenses, but I do kinda feel guilty of thrusting the ads on my readers. So, tell me, what do you think about the ads? Should I just junk them? I already replaced some of the ads on the site with links and ads for products that I simply like, without getting any payment, just as a way to say "thank you" to the people who make these products. I might do the same thing with the rest of the ads.  |
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What's All this Then?
My name is Michael Krakovskiy, and this is my blog.
Here's what you might find interesting:
100 Views of the Empire State Building project: I try to take 100 interesting photos of Manhattan's (sadly) tallest building.
My Gastronomic Adventures: I eat weird food - from 13 year old New Coke to Durian and parasitic fungi.
My attempts to grow exotic plants: pineapples, coconuts, etc.
My photos, mostly of New York City.
My musings about architecture mostly illustrated with my own photos. Would you like to learn about a mental patient who died at 103 who served as a model for some very famous sculptures? How about Brooklyn's ugliest building? How about a wooden skyscraper?
I find myself frequently writing about logos. The most popular article I ever wrote is about the redesigns of the Starbucks logo.
I wrote a series of "Best Sci-Fi You Haven't Read" posts:
Psywarrior
Yes, Virginia There Is Synergy
Call Time Police - We've Got a Time Traveler
Other topics that interest me include NYPD, New York City subway system, Japan, and things made out of titanium. On top of all of that, I seem to be interested in pigeions and Rupert Murdoch.
Dear reader, please browse around. You are sure to find something interesting. I could really use some help in bringing in readership: subscribe to the rss feed, digg the stories (there's a convenient button at the bottom of every article), link to my blog from yours, write some comments. I put in a lot of effort into writing, and I really appreciate your attention.
If you don't want all this pseudo-intellectual bullshit and want some lolcats? Please don't go away. Here, I have that stuff too. Here, here's another. And another. And another. I lied about not posting cat pictures.