Goodbye Blogrolling, Hello Del.icio.us (maybe)

When Tucows bought Blogrolling.com last year, everyone figured the days of free were over. I was pleasantly surprised when nothing on my account seemed to change. However, I just got a message from Blogrolling telling me I'll need to pay $20/year from now on to use the service at my current level (I have 10 blogrolls, although I only actually use about four). Um, no. The links in the sidebar (“ambivalent links”) are now coming courtesy of the del.icio.us bookmark manager. (Thanks to the RSSfeed plugin and these tips from MovableBlog.) What you see here is only a selection; it's supposed to be the links I try to visit daily, or as often as possible. Unfortunately, it appears that del.icio.us is truncating the feed. The list should contain about 4o links, but only 31 are showing up in the feed. If you understand these things and can tell me if there's a way to make del.icio.us send the whole list, please let me know. At any rate, the current list includes a few blawgs, a few blogs, a couple of news sources, and a few photoblogs. Ironically, many of the sites I visit most frequently are actually not on this list b/c I visit them directly (by typing in the URL) instead of relying on a link list to get me to my destination. As I discover more of these, I'll add them to the del.icio.us list. The new sidebar also contains separate sections for GW blawgs and Blawgcoop blawgs (obviously), all of which I try to visit on a regular basis, as well. If you miss some of the additional links that have long appeared in the “ambivalent links” sidebar on this page, you'll probably find what you're looking for on my del.icio.us page under the tags blawg or blog. If you'd like to narrow further in the law-related category, or if you'd just prefer to surf links that are all of one type (all blawgs by law students, for example), lawstudent, attorney, and professor are all subcategories of “blawg.” If you're not yet familiar w/del.icio.us, it's a bookmark service that allows you to save bookmarks and “tag” them with keywords so you can find them later and so all similar content can be grouped together. It's also a social networking tool because in addition to your own links, you can see all the links all other users have tagged with the same keywords, or you can see all the other users who have bookmarked a certain page. It's cool. It's free. And considered as a replacement for Blogrolling.com, it's even more useful b/c it makes it even easier to add, sort, and display URLs, which were all the reasons I liked Blogrolling in the first place. Of course, if del.icio.us won't send the full feed, it's not really going to do what I want, so I may have to look for a new blogroll solution. Any suggestions?

Posted 07:44 AM | Comments (2) | meta-blogging

Hunter S. Thompson, R.I.P.

Gonzo journalist and author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas apparently shot himself yesterday. Salon has a good selection of interviews with and articles about Thompson that cover fairly well the contributions he made to journalism and public perception in the last 30-40 years. Personally, I read Fear and Loathing early in college and it completely blew my mind. I'd dig up my copy but I long ago loaned it to someone and never got it back. This brief excerpt pretty well captures the flavor of it—stream of consciousness with a dark comic edge, Jack Kerouac flung headlong and screaming into the 1970s. I hope I never forget the scene in the book where Duke is sitting at a bar in a casino, high as a kite, and he becomes convinced the place is crawling with lizards. There's a bit of it here:

Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge-impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. “Order some golf shoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place alive. You notice these lizards don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck—that’s because they have claws on their feet.”

Trust me, in its proper context that bit will make you howl with laughter. If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it. I thought the movie was all right, as well. See also: The complete script from the 1998 film version of the book.

Posted 07:08 AM | Comments (3) | ai books