Having posted previously that all the excitement in the microformats world seems to be around publishing them, it was exciting to read that getsatisfaction.com uses microformats on its registration page. Pick a service that you've previously registered for, and the magic of microformats will copy your personal details across for you. So I wandered over to try it out.
“Hi, we’re the Pixies. We’re a rock band.”
Just watched the Pixies at Newport DVD, courtesy of Amazon DVD rental. A mellow, acoustic gig from an American folk festival. It’s good, although odd to hear subdued versions of River Euphrates and I Bleed. Reminds me of listening to Greg play Gouge Away on his acoustic guitar, back when he was living in a cabin in the woods in upstate New York.
Recent comments in Movable Type
I couldn’t seem to find this in the Movable Type manual, but here’s the code that produces a Recent Comments list in the blog sidebar:
<div class="module">
<h2 class="module-header">Recent Comments</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<ul class="module-list">
<MTComments lastn="6" sort_order="descend">
<MTCommentEntry>
<li>
<a href="<MTEntryPermalink>#c<$MTCommentID
pad="1"$>"><$MTCommentAuthor$></a>
said “<$MTCommentBody remove_html="1"
trim_to="100"$>…”
</li>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
Natural fireworks fill the sky
This coming weekend sees the peak of the Perseids meteor shower. Annual meteor showers occur when the Earth’s orbit around the Sun passes through the orbit of a comet. Dust and debris, which the comet has left along its path, burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere. We see the results as shooting stars in the night sky.
Peak activity for this year’s Perseid shower is predicted to reach 80-100 shooting stars per hour before dawn (in Europe) on Monday 13th August. Read more about the 2007 Perseids at the European Space Agency.
microformats and accessibility
A while back, Bruce Lawson and James Craig wrote hAccessibility, about the abbr design pattern and potential problems that it raises for people who browse the web with screen readers. Since then, there has been some useful discussion on how to make microformats more friendly to screen readers, which is great.
I’m working but I’m not working for you
Slack motherfucker – superchunk’s theme song, I guess. I saw them on the come pick me up tour and jumped around The Garage like a, well like a man who’d drunk too much beer, when they played this at the end. Larry Livermore bought me more beer. What a nice bloke.
Moved in
If you can see this, eat your greens has successfully moved to its new home at eukhost.
£8,890.96
£8,890.96 – the total take from yesterday’s book sale. Our highest total, ever! And this year we were actually turning donations down, since we had more books than we could handle.
Many thanks to everyone who got involved, particularly everyone who gave up their evenings and weekends over the last four weeks to get all this together.
There are many high quality books still left unsold. We’ll put those on sale later in the year. Tentative date for the second 2007 sale is 17th November.
The 33rd Amnesty book sale
Saturday 16th June 2007
Church of the Ascension, Dartmouth Row, Blackheath
Thousands of new and used books at low, low prices.
Opening the 28-inch
Last year, after @media, a group of us met up in Greenwich on Saturday morning. I gave a rough guided tour, including the history of the Royal Observatory, John Harrison’s chronometers, the adoption of standard time and ended it all by opening up the 28-inch refractor.
If there’s interest, I’ll do it again this year. Leave a comment below if you want to come along.