The description to David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin raises more questions than it answers:

Given a URL, the url_cache() function will attempt to download the file it represents and return a URL pointing to this locally cached version.

Where did he plan to use it? Does he envision the cache as an archive, or for performance? Why hasn’t it been updated since 2005?

It caught my interest because I’ve long been interested in a solution to link rot in my blog. A real “perma-permalink” would be very useful.

The Hanzo Archives Wordpress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):

We’ve released a Wordpress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.

An Amazon Web Services case study put me on to Hanzo a while ago, and in May 2008 I actually spoke with Mark Middleton (the markm who posted the entry above). Mark revealed that community take-up on the plugin and other general purpose web archiving services was below expectations. The company has since refocused on legal matters (even their blog tag-line has changed to “web archiving for compliance and e-discovery”).

I wonder if, now that the number of people and companies that have been blogging for years has grown, there might be more of a market for such a service.

Lorelle is a big fan of Scott Reilly’s Customizable Post Listings:

Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post, page, or draft listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner. You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.

[I]n theory, I should be able to issue one command to VLC and have it receive the MPEG4-ES stream from the camera, transcode it to h.264, and stream it to the Wowza, which would handle the rest.

via John Beales.

In line with yesterday’s discovery of the Viddler WP plugin, Riffly Webcam Video Comments also supports video or audio comments within WordPress:

Riffly is a free service that easily plugs into your site allowing visitors to create video and audio comments.

The service is advertising supported. We cover all the costs for bandwidth, servers, and maintenance. Optionally, we also offer Premium Riffly accounts that provide you with additional benefits, such as advertising removal, control panel access, analytics, and much more.

The Viddler Wordpress plugin promises to “Enrich your site’s commenting experience by enabling video comments….” Users can record direcly from a web cam or choose a video they’ve previously uploaded to Viddler.com.

Viddler evangelist Colin Devroe has it on his site, where I can see it requires would-be commenters have a Viddler account. That last bit is too bad. I like Viddler, but I can’t force my readers to like it and get accounts as a prerequisite to commenting.

Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m tempted to try TuneUp on my collection of MP3s downloaded as podcasts (and without good ID3 tags) from places like the KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune. The story is that the iTunes plugin automatically identifies your tracks, can fix the tags, and add album art.

When it comes to “shall” and “will,” Strunk and White gives the following example: “A swimmer in distress cries, ‘I shall drown; no one will save me!’ ” But a suicide says, “I will drown; no one shall save me!” And I say, “You two (pedantic) know-it-alls deserve to drown.” I mean, what about “Help!”

via Who Needs A Manual To Write Real Good?.

Facebook’s guide to sharing details some meta tags to make that sharing work better:

In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to your html. An example news story could have the following:

<meta name="title" content="Smith hails 'unique' Wable legacy" />
<meta name="description" content="John Smith claims beautiful football is the main legacy of Akhil Wable's decade at the club. " />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://www.onjd.com/design05/images/PH2/WableAFC205.jpg" />

As shown, title contains the preview title, description contains the preview summary and image_src contains the preview image. Please make sure that none of the content fields contain any html markup because it will be stripped out. For consistency’s sake, please use the <meta> tag to provide text data for the preview, and the <link> tag for any source urls.

The title and summary tags are the minimum requirements for any preview, so make sure to include these two.

If you remember Ask.com, you probably remember Jeeves. Now he’s back on the UK site. It turns out that people liked the old chap, and in this age of social media, it’s probably prudent to have a corporate avatar (it looks a lot better on Facebook, anyway). There’s more about the resurrection at Search Engine Land.

Option GlobeSurfer X•1 router: “a new product that transforms any USB wireless modem into an instant Internet-connected WiFi network capable of supporting multiple users.” Too bad I can’t figure out where to buy it.

Also too bad that I can’t simply do this with a jail-broked iPhone. I mean, doesn’t an iPhone have everything it needs built-in: a cell-phone modem, WiFi hardware, and enough unixy goodness to support NAT and routing?

BumpTop:

a fun, intuitive 3D desktop that keeps you organized and makes you more productive. Like a real desk, but better. Your desktop doesn’t have to be a boring graveyard for lost and forgotten files anymore! Transform it with BumpTop. Create the desktop that suits your needs and style.

Recently reviewed in ArsTechnica.

Mac OS X doesn’t ship with unrar, the common Linux utility, but you can easily get it bundled in UnRarX, a convenient Mac OS X utility. Dig around and you’ll find it in UnRarX.app/Contents/Resources.

Two interesting submissions to the Core77 Business Card Hacks Challenge: earbud speakers and a cord winder.

Here’s a simple way to tell whether the star you’re following is the real thing. Are the alleged celebrity’s tweets funny and entertaining, with a palpable sense of self-awareness and wit? Full on fake then, and by default, well worth following. Oh, and Twitter, if you’re still confused, the fake celebs are the ones who cannot afford a publicist to announce that the @fakeAccount everyone’s following isn’t really them.

via On Twitter, you’re nobody unless you’re fake – Technotica- msnbc.com.

PHP iCalendar can parse and render iCal formatted files. Apple’s developer docs, amusingly enough, offer a few more hints along those lines.

From The Economist in 2006: Open-source business: Open, but not as usual.

Perian: “The swiss-army knife of QuickTime components”

• File formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW
• Video types: MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture, DosBox Capture

The LGPL-licensed QuickTime plugin installs easily on Mac OS X 10.5 and does what it promises. FLV videos (such as those you’d sneakily download from YouTube) open just like any other QuickTime vid, and you can easily export them to other types.

You can get a carved wood replica Macintosh 128 or faux-wood vinyl wrap for your Mac Mini, but ASUS is demoing a series of bamboo-covered computers and Fujitsu is showing their Cedar concept. And then Miniot has a series of wooden cases for your iPhone and iPod touch.

Maslow without the pyramid, found at Jessica Hagy’s “Indexed”. She posts new explanations of the world daily. More available in her book.

This handful of business cards is good for a little design inspiration. And here’s 70 more if you need an extra shot. Thanks to Frank for the tip.

hmm-citation-extractor, ParsCit and FreeCite (not to be confused with FreeCite, the F/OSS EndNote-like app). FreeCite is available as a service and a download.

Still, wouldn’t a simple URL be easier than all these unstructured citation formats?

OLPC Origins: US and Taiwan’s Hardware Lovechild
A deeper than expected history of the OLPC’s development. Part two of a three part series.

This thread says you can get booze and ice cream in the same joint! Places to know in NYC: Otto, The Chocolate Room (beer & wine only?), ChikaLicious, Clinton Street Baking Company, BLT Burger, Homer’s, and Liquor & Ice Cream.

You’ll feel better after signing the petition.