Blink

[Facebook’s guide to sharing][1] 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:

> 
> 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.

 [1]: http://www.facebook.com/share_partners.php "Facebook | Share Partners"

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.

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.

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?

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.

Virgilio Cintron was the happiest corpse in the city…

Open source and the Long Tail: An interview with Chris Anderson

The shift of software from the desktop to the Web will really be the making of open-source software. The Long Tail side of software will almost certainly be Web-based because the Web lowers the barriers to adoption of software. There will always be some software best delivered as packaged bits. But the big problem with packaged software–or one big problem–is the risk associated with installation. It just might not work. The Web removes that problem.

The good news is that performance is a big goal for WP 2.4, the bad news is that it’s been delayed to the end of January at the earliest.

The Library Problem:

In March of 2006 my wife Mary and I owned about 3,500 books. We both have eclectic interests, voracious appetites for knowledge, and a great love of used bookstores. The problem was that we had no idea what books we had or where any of them were. We lost books all the time, cursed late into the night digging through piles for that one book we knew must be there, and even bought books only to find that we already owned them. There were books on random shelves, books on the floor, we were tripping over books when we walked up and down the stairs. In short, we had a mess.

(via)

Roadside Attractions Fading from Landscape:

A staple of the American road trip could be slowly disappearing from the nation’s interstates and byways. Owners of some roadside attractions are deciding that interest is waning

Dan’s instructable for custom rewrite rules in WordPress is better than the docs in the codex.

Matt has updated his site with a less blog-like front page and I just discovered Unsleepable, which is very bloggy, but seems like a good start for what I want to do next.

Eurostat 2006: Internet usage in the EU25: “Nearly half of individuals in the EU25 used the internet at least once a week in 2006 and a third of households and three-quarters of enterprises had broadband internet access.” Statistics Denmark 2007: Access to the Internet: 78% of population has home internet access.