harpojaeger.com

I’ve used Wordle before, but hadn’t thought of it in a while.  After seeing David A. M. Wilensky’s last post, I decided to make my own word cloud, so here it is:

If you check out the Exquisite Corpse page, you will notice some pretty friggin’ awesome updates.  It is now ENTIRELY Ajax-based.  This means that you don’t EVER have to reload the page to get a new poem or submit lines, and there will be no more of the obnoxious thing where after someone submits a line of a poem, they click refresh a bunch of times to get a new prompt line, and then the line they entered gets added on over and over again because they’re resubmitting the POST data over and over.  No, no more!  jQuery to the rescue!

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, that’s okay.  The upshot of it for an end user is that the page is way more user-friendly, has some sizzling-hot visual effects (yes, Mr. Spinning-Gear-Progress-Indicator, and Ms. Snazzy-Awesome-Slide-Up-and-Slide-Down-to-Respectively-Hide-and-Show-Content, I’m talking about you), tracks when a poem was begun, not just when it was ended, and is just generally slicker.  Enjoy!

I’ve tested the page pretty thoroughly, and I don’t anticipate any problems.  However, if you do run across something, please let me know using the contact form.

Keep up the good work!  This project has been pretty incredible, and I hope that people will continue to contribute to it.

I’ve made a small update to the Exquisite Corpse page, one that I had been considering for a while.  All poems completed from this point onwards will display a timestamp showing when they were completed.

Activity on the page has been pretty steady recently, which is great.  I’m really pleased with how that project is going.  Please share it with your friends – it’s really becoming something pretty awesome.  Keep up the good work!

As you might have noticed, I’m making some large-ish changes to this site.  As I find that blogging is becoming a bigger and bigger part of how I think about issues, I’ve made this site much more about the blog.  Looking at some of my favorite blogs, I’ve tried to present more relevant content to people, and made the site less formally separated.  I felt that those separations weren’t doing much good, and it would be better to have more information about me, still cleanly organized (I hope) and easy-to-access.

So I think the site needs a name.  Rather than just being “harpojaeger.com”, I want to come up with something to call the blog that makes sense, that communicates the sort of things it might be about.  College, politics, religion, culture, and so on.

If you notice the site has weird names in the near future, it may just be because I’m trying things out to see how I like them.  I could imagine myself changing the name (and probably adding a subtitle) and letting it sit for a few days to see what it looks like.  I’d appreciate feedback if you have ideas or thoughts.

Stay tuned for more…

Today marks the one-year anniversary of this site’s transition to WordPress, and, thus, the one-year anniversary of my beginning to blog in earnest.  This is a good opportunity to reflect on some stuff I’ve learned and look to the future of this site and my interests.

I’ve gone through a lot of different phases with this blog.  I began by using it as sort of a journal of my actions and thoughts.  Coupled with the WordPress client for iPhone, I did a fair amount of spontaneous and short blogging, expressing ideas I had, things I saw, and so forth.  As school began, I started becoming more introverted, focusing on the way I felt (usually being under a lot of stress, as it was senior year).  In January, my iPhone was stolen, and I lost the ability to blog at anytime.  I started blogging almost compulsively when I got home every day, almost as a way to let out my feelings.  Because of everything that was going on at school, it felt good to have a place to write about what I thought it all mean.  Sometimes it’s hard to articulate that sort of stuff when you’re still in it.  You need to take a step back.  Blogging has definitely helped me do that, in other areas of my life as well.

When I got a new iPhone in early July, I started using Twitter for uses other than just tracking this blog, and shortly thereafter joined Facebook.  Now I use those as two methods of communication (they’re closely integrated), and have begun to regard this blog as more of a place for contemplative, well though-out concepts or arguments.  A lot of my writing has been inspired by the increasing amount of other blogs I’ve been reading, including Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal, Jewschool, CAP, and Climate Progress, to name a few.  In a lot of cases, doing this writing has helped me solidify my own thoughts on subjects, and opened my mind to new points of view.

In the future, I want to blog more regularly than I have been recently; at least a couple times a week.  Interestingly, it was easier for me to blog regularly during the school year than it has been now.  I’m planning to blog a couple times next week from the NHC Summer Institute about the program and some issues that I will be considering during my time there.  There’s a plan for facilitation of a dialogue about the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict (although I don’t really like calling it that), so I’m expecting to get some interesting stuff out of that.

As I begin school, I will almost definitely be undergoing some serious life changes in terms of how I spend my time and what I work on.  I intend to keep this blog an important component of my work and thoughts, and I hope to attract a wider audience as I meet new people and discover new ideas.

It’s been an incredibly rewarding year in many ways.  I look forward to many more.

I have upgraded this site and the LC(A) to WordPress 2.8.  2.8 doesn’t have as many new features as 2.7, but it’s a bunch faster, and I like it already.

I’ve made a monumental shift in my desktop computing setup.  For many many years, I have been using Namely as an application launcher.  I’ve tried LaunchBar and Quicksilver, but neither was as fast or responsive as Namely.  I have now, for the first time, found a better application.  Google Quick Search Box for Mac can launch applications with the speed of Namely (which the other two apps couldn’t), and it has more functionality as well (similar to the other apps).  It can search files on the computer, all sorts of application data, the internet (because it’s Google), and my Google account, including Gmail, Docs, Photos, Wikipedia, Google Finance, and more.  It’s incredibly useful.  It also has a somewhat under-documented and, as far as I can tell, under-utilized feature; Twitter updates.  This alone could persuade me to start Twittering, which I’ve been holding off on.  We’ll see.  Either way, QSB (for that is what they are calling it in the inter-tubes) is going to be great.

I’ve decided not to try and write about all the things I’ve been doing since I last wrote.  There are too many, and I think it would become to much of just a laundry list.  Instead, I have some stuff to say about what I’m up to now.  I have graduated, and am done with school.  Tomorrow, however, I’ll be back in my Rise and Fall of the Great Powers class, presenting my friend and me’s honors project.  We’re doing a simulation to demonstrate the creation of the gold standard, which was first instituted in England in 1816/1821, depending on how you look at it.  The next day, I’ll be back again working with the Holocaust Studies classes.  The one-act I wrote for them is going to be performed that day, and I’ll spend the first forty-five minutes of each hour-and-a-half-long class working on the play before it’s performed.  I am super excited for this; I think it’s going to be really fun and interesting.

I am SO behind on the Sonnet of the Week.  I need to write two every week for FIVE weeks.

Current events things I am thinking about and may write about soon: Sonia Sotomayor, Dick Cheney, the Northampton bike trails projects, environmentalism (as always), and food ethics.

It’s been over a week since I wrote, an uncharacteristically long time.  I’m not going to attempt to write about all the things that have happened since then right now, because I’m still in the middle of tons of stuff.  Graduation is tomorrow, and I am overloaded with stuff to do.  Sometime in the next few days I hope to write about what I’ve been doing, as well as some pretty important political and current events topics that have gone down recently.  Also, I’m pretty behind on the Sonnet of the Week (five weeks delinquent after this week).  A couple weeks ago, as the end of school started to really come close, I decided I’d have to wait until after graduation to get back to the sonneteering.

This summer, I am planning to start blogging about current events much more regularly.  I am going to have to do some serious thinking about what I want this blog to be like next year.

That’s all for now.  More to follow.

I have discovered how to make floating tooltips appear over a block of text.  Or over anything, I suppose.  The possibilities are endless.

I suppose this is a rather simple concept, but somehow I’ve never run across it before.  I am PSYCHED!  There is so much I can do with this!  I will probably start implementing it very soon on this site.  I will have to think about cool content to put there to keep people looking.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I am probably going to switch to a different web host sometime soon.  Currently, I use GoDaddy to host this site, and the harpojaeger.com domain is also registered with them.  renaissanceboy.org, my first domain, which now redirects here, is registered with DirectNic, the company I was using at the time.

The reasons I want to switch are complicated.  For a while, I’ve been impressed by GoDaddy’s low prices but dismayed by their site’s operation in a technical sense; it is confusing and slow.  In addition, I have never been fully supportive of their marketing techniques, which are frequently subtly, sometimes blatantly, sexist, base, and calculative.  I have never really devoted much thought to it, but my father mentioned to me that there was a movement afoot to ditch GoDaddy because of these tactics, and he directed me to this article.  It sums up the issues at play very well.

I was already aware of DreamHost, having worked for a client who used it, and the other hosting service the article linked to, LunarPages, looks excellent as well.  I am going to spend some time in the near future researching different services, and will probably make the switch soon.  I think I will also consolidate all of my domain names to the same registrar, ideally the same company that’s doing the hosting.  This should make stuff a lot easier.