American English Dialects

Your Linguistic Profile:

40% General American English
35% Yankee
20% Dixie
5% Upper Midwestern
0% Midwestern
What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

I couldn’t resist taking this test when I saw it; I like to consider myself somewhat au fait with the Queen’s English and its incongruencies. But I’m probably kidding myself… 🙂

John C. Dvorak vs Creative Commons

I think John C. Dvorak, a prominent column writer for US PC Magazine missed the point of Creative Commons in his latest column. Did he even WATCH the flash animation? Has he read Free Culture? Screw him. He’s spreading FUD.

He would have learnt that Creative Commons is a way to grant everyone permission to use your works in certain ways without giving up your copyright, encouraging a world where you don’t have to hire a pack of rabid lawyers just to clear permissions. “Permission is already granted”.

Creative Commons is about encouraging creativity. Because creativity always builds on the past. But the past is wrapped up in red tape. So we have CC licences that allow those who would build upon your work to cut through that red tape.

It’s not hard to understand. Less Lawyers = Good Thing.

Sure, adding a CC licence to your blog might be ‘trendy’, and I can safely assume very few, people, if any, are going to take my blog posts and build something new and exciting from them. But what’s wrong with saying “I don’t mind if you do”, even if the chances of that happening are slim-to-none?

John C. Dvorak, I thought you were cool, working with Chris Pirillo on that book of yours and all. I do realise this is an opinion piece, but come on, it feels a bit premature. You really should do your damned research.

Week of Insanity

So several crazy things happened this week:

  1. Webfroot turned 4 years old. Ask me 4 years ago how popular Webfroot was gonna be in 4 years, I probably would have said it wouldn’t last that long. But it has, and it’s still going strong! The popularity of Webfroot _SCARES_ me. Webfroot gets around 2000 unique IP addresses visiting it every 24 hours. If I search for things we posted about only a week ago, we’re on the first page on Google!
  2. I got a new job! I start that in August, going full time the first workday in October.
  3. The day after I told work I was resigning to start a new job, my other workmate hands in his resignation too, being head-hunted for a position with a nice Wellington ISP. What’s up with that?
  4. My mum calls me and tells me that in October she’ll be moving from Napier, New Zealand to Brisbane, Australia! Wow… what a shock… I’m kinda a little sad, but I’m happy for her 🙂
  5. My post about saving any multimedia file to your hard drive got 270+ diggs on digg.com, was mentioned on Make:Blog, and then talked about by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on the diggnation podcast!
    An interesting fact is that it took over a month for it to get to the homepage on digg.com, and then everything started linking to it.

So yeah, pretty weird up and up week. It’s nice when things seem to be turning out for good!

When I was Nineteen…

Don’t you hate it when you find one of your old websites that you abandoned over 4 years ago…, just before I started Webfroot? LOL, Scary scary stuff… But I guess I could claim that I was blogging 5 years ago, back before it was even called blogging. Or not. Cos you know blogs have been the new “personal homepages” for about 3 years now… 😉

WordPress Plugin: Mycroft Search Plugin Generator

I was at work, and an idea hit me: Firefox search plugins are just text files. They also contain a lot of stuff that WordPress stores in it’s database. Why not make WordPress generate a search plugin for itself? Why not make a plugin that will work on any WordPress 1.5+ install? So I spent the rest of the day making the Mycroft Search Plugin Generator plugin!

Try it at the bottom of the sidebar on this site, or in the Meta section of the sidebar on Webfroot!