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Recently I have made some serious changes to my homepage. SOme of those changes I have been planning from a long long time. Others were more sudden.
The central page is of course at pietrosperoni.it that leads to home.pietrosperoni.it. But then there was something that I wanted to do for a long time. Integrate my mind and thinking process directly on internet. When I think I often do that through mindmaps. I have used several type of software in the past. Starting from mindmanager (back at the time when I was on windows), then freemind. I also tried the mindmap from Buzan (which I found slow, costly and with a terrible costumer service). Recently I am using iThoughtsHD which I found do be the best mindmap tool for iPad. Also I find very good that every time I wrote them I received an answer directly from Craig Scott (the programmer of the application). I was in this way able to suggest and see implemented several ideas. In particular the only thing I really missed was the possibility to make html pages from mindmap, with nodes hosting URL links. This was possible in mindmanager, but not on any other system. So iThoughts made a release that permitted to export mindmaps in html format directly on dropbox.
At this point I organised a whole part of my public dropbox folder into a homepage for my mindmaps (in the form of a mindmap itself). Which then at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/Mind.html. But I did not like the long link. So instead I organised another subdomain: mind.pietrosperoni.it for those mindmaps. Added some rules in the .htaccess file to make sure people going there would be forwarded to my dropbox, and I was ready to rock.
Those lines were:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.html$ $1 [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.php$ $1.php [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/$1.html [R,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^$ http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/Mind.html [R,NC,L]
Those rules make sure that any requesto for mind.pietrosperoni.it/x go to http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/x.html
which is where the x map will be stored. Of course if you use it, you would have to change http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2754299/maps/ to the address where your dropbox stores your maps.
After I did all this there were still some problems with how to publish those mindmaps. One this is to make a mindmap, another is to put it on the internet, but yet another is to let people know of this mindmap, and connect it with the others. The connect part was easily done by making sure every time I made a new mindmap I would also update the general mindmap. Still there was the problem on how to make people aware of them. The best would have been an rss field. But I did not know how to make an automatic one, nor did dropbox offer an rss field of its public directories. So instead I had to set up another directory on my dropbox. Then I had to enable sharing mode (here is an explanation, here you activate it) . When you share a dropbox folder you also can get an rss field for it (here). But just going from the rss field to twitter would look lousy. So instead I took the rss field for it and used it inside yahoo pipes, and the resulting rss was then pushed in twitter using ifttt. The only thing that was missing at this point was to connect the dropbox folder where iThoughts store the mindmap with the dropbox shared folder wheich releases the rss feed. This was done using SynchTwoFolders,
The idea is:
iThoughts–>dropbox public folder–>SynchTwo Folders–>dropbox shared folder–>dropbox releases an rss–>Yahoo Pipes–>IFTTT–>Twitter.
And as a result every time I save a mindmap on my dropbox public folder (/public/maps) it gets advertised on twitter with a link to it. If you are interested in the yahoo pipe I set up in all this you can find that here.
So now I have a homepage, a series of mindmaps, a twitter account where new mindmaps are echoed; two active blogs (one in Italian and one in English), and a list of publication. What was missing? Making a page for each of my publication, and this is what I started to do. Starting to store one after the other the talks I gave at conferences on a youtube channel. What follows is the mindmap of the whole structure.
While the mindmap of the tweet the mindmap-hack is
We seem to have made it.
The website is now hosted on different servers, at dreamhost.com.
Of course what could not be done was to resurrect the wiki, which now should instead be recreated from scratch. And, much worse, the mindmapping tool. The page from which it was possible to make a mind map of a delicious account. Right now I have unfortunately no time for much, as I am in the last months of my Ph.D., yet I hope to find at least the time to put back the program to make the mindmaps. So at least people will be able to make the mindmaps themselves. Apologise to all the spammers that sent me spam in the last 2 weeks. Knowing that all the latest comments were going to be lost anyway I avoided to mark them (about a thousand messages) as spam. Please don’t feel ignored, just sent your message again and I shall trash it asap.
It is 2.30 am and I just woke up. I went to bed at 2.05 am.
I am not crazy. Not yet, not anymore, at least not more than usual. I am just trying a new sleeping technique. It is called polyphasic sleep. I actually wanted to become polyamorouse, but I got confused during the googling process, and now it is too late.
What follows is a brief intro to polyphasic sleep for the general bear audience. Continue reading Polyphasic Easter
So, here is the quest. You need to discover the password of your best friend. Although this might seem morally reprehensible you are moved by nobel and deep reasons. You need to check in his email and discover if he is having an affair with your wife. You can’t just confront him if you are not sure. Nor can you run the risk of confronting your wife before you are sure.
We will assume that you have access to your best mate computer. After all he trusts you, right. And with reasons, you would never do anything against him… normally. But this time it’s different. If he has been seducing your angel, he deserves the worse.
We will also assume that your best friend is really into security, and since firefox is a more secure system, he uses firefox. Daily. And as a final assumption we shall assume that since he keeps his mail on the web, and accesses it through the browser. Let’s assume it’s on Yahoo.
This is what you need to do:
- Get his computer, in a moment he is out for launch (with your lady, bastard!), and lock yourself for the work. You will need privacy for this. If you are confronted you can always say Continue reading Reading your mate passwords in Firefox
Finally the time has come. Although I wanted to do this from a long time, only now did I found the time and the technical knowledge to do it:
I divided the blog.
I divided all the Italian posts from the English ones. I created a new blog at http://it.pietrosperoni.it, and my italian posts will, from now on, be posted over there. And only over there. Most of the people (3) who read me (5) either read Italian or English posts. And I am sure it must have been very confusing to scroll through a page and find some posts in English and some in Italian. Plus I always had the sensation that I could not write too much in one language, or possible readers of the other language will just assume the blog contains no information at all for them, and dismiss it. This in time made me slow down posting, as I could not always follow particular threads, that would have involved to post many times, in one language.
But now all this has come to an end.
Of course if you want to read entries from both blogs you should add the rss from the italian blog too. Some topic will remain confined to this blog (like tags, for example), others will remain there (like italian politics), while other will span through both medium (like diet, which already is present in both). The wiki in this case should act like a glue, creating a space where entries from both are aggregated. Plus, being a wiki, I (and whoever wants to come and play) will use it to keep notes, aggregate extra content, and generally make some pages stand out while others will only show the blogs entries, the bookmarks, and the context (i.e. the links from delicious popular page, and from technorati).
Generally it is not a smart idea to to come here every time to see if I have written something. I tend to write when I have something to say, so many days might pass before I say something, then for some days I might make one or more post a day. The solution is to add my rss feeds to your feed reader. Bloglines is a good one. I am sure there are better ones. Feel free to suggest them (as I am always looking for ways to improve).
Now let’s get a bit more technical: making this change also meant getting my hands dirty with MySql Continue reading The Italian blog is born: reasons and technicalities
I suddenly relised I don’t have the time to do all the things I was interested in (and keep what remains of my mental sanity). So out of need I decided to make the following offer.
The technorati tag plug in gives the possibility to have technorati tags, and for each tag a different page. What instead it does not offer is the possibility to have also an rss feed for each tag. So I offer 20 € for whoever makes the necessary changes to the plugin so that side by side to the tag page (here available at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/tag/… ) I can have an rss feed of the entries in my blog with each tag (possibly at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/rsstag/…).
The changes will have to be open source, so that they can then join the mainstream wp program. And be on that plugin. I know 20€ is not a lot, but I reason that for the right person this is a simple hack that might take half an hour. For me it would take ages (mainly because I need to understand how wp is working, and it’s not that trivial).
Oh, yes, I can pay via paypal. Or buy you something via Amazon, LJ, Flickr. Whatever.
And now to comment the above:
It’s interesting how the spreading of open source software also means the opening of a whole new market of people helping each other. I could never have made the above offer if I was using blogger, or lj.
Addendum: Since the new release of wordpress 2.0 includes the possibility to use categories as tags, the above offer is no longer valid. Sorry.
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