Ben Shoemate

I love scribefire – it is a firefox plugin that gives you almost complete control over your blog. In fact, I have grown addicted to it and won’t even consider a content management system that it doesn’t work with for personal sites.

But it stopped working for me the other day… and I just figured out why. My theme was causing it.

This was the error I was getting from Scribefire when I clicked on my blog.

The issue is malformed XML – so to look at the XML I logged into wordpress admin (this should work with any software that works with scribefire like Drupal for example) and exported the site as xml –

Once you have it downloaded – open the xml in IE or Firefox – it will tell you where the error is in my case, firefox said the error was on line 1 and showed the bad code which I recognized because I remember seeing it in the theme. I then opened the xml in notepad to make sure:

That fist line is a line of code I commented out in the theme. Somehow, wordpress was putting that commented line into the xml feed. So – I went to the theme editor, found the comment, and deleted it – problem solved.

You may need to look through all the files in your theme for the bad code, or it could be that you have bad code or charicters in a post. In any case, opening the xml and looking for the error will give you a clue.

Good luck.

Since Google and Microsoft have basically photography and build 3 models of the entire planet, you can now do something pretty amazing with your photos – zoom, look around, look around the corners and see the stuff you didn’t photograph that day. In other words, you can locate your the subject of you photo in the vast online database of millions of other photos and recreate the surrounding. If you can dream it, you can make it happen.

Watch the video (updated – I had the live feed instead of the show – fixed it now)

Sometimes I sit stupified by this kind of progress. Its a solution to a problem I never thought about, a dream I never knew I had, made real…its almost frightening…and this is just one of millions of innovations being demoed everyday. How useful is it? I don’t think that question even matters. The point is that 10 years from know you will be in a totally different world where every thing you see and touch is endowed with a level of technology enhancement that makes it magical. Every photo you take (if you even have to take photos anymore – maybe they will just be auto-recordings of you line-of sight that you can browse through at will) will be endowed with a magical quality. No knowledge out of reach…and the journey man started in the garden of Eden, that quest that began with the first bite of knowledge, that first lesson learned, will be at an end. We will not know everything, but everything we know will be known by everybody. Our species and the machines that support us will act as a single, conscious entity. With no one and everyone at the helm…

I created this playlist a few months ago when I first started running. Over time I have refined it to my taste and pace. Tell me what you think.

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

- Douglas Adams

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well.”
– Albert Einstein

Besides being a genius, Einstein was a very public face for science. He used his fame and popularity to his push political issues and other scientists came to him when something needed to be communicated to the public. This quote seems both appropriate coming from him considering his role as a communicator in an field where many are not, but also surprising since it we tend to put Einstein on a pedestal to the degree that it seems odd that he would have any experience at all with not understanding things.

Wow…

So, today we’re making a homepage change by adding a link to our privacy overview and policies.

How does privacy relate to homepage word count? Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage if we took a word away – keeping the “weight” of the homepage unchanged at 28. Given that the new Privacy link fit best with legal disclaimers on the page, I looked to the copyright line. There, we dropped the word “Google” (realizing it was implied, obviously) and added the new privacy link alongside it.

[via Google Blog]

via http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/126/special-report-china-in-africa.html

via http://shigesa.tumblr.com/post/33377399

Information architecture (or lack thereof) in the real world.
Here’s the location on Google Maps.

http://www.glynmacdonald.com/fallingwater2.jpg

Cape Shank House, Australia, by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects : Design Milk

via http://design-milk.com/cape-shank-house-australia-by-jackson-clements-burrows-architects/