Writing Javascript bookmarklets is not the most enjoyable thing in the world. They're cool once they work, but before that it can be pretty painful to try and test them. So since I had to write another one the other day, I decided to fix that as best I could. With a little PHP magic I made a page where you can write/edit bookmarklets, and it does all the conversions required to spit out an ugly one-line bookmarklet.

It doesn't actually do all that much, but I found it incredibly convenient so maybe you will as well. You can try it out here, and if you want to run your own then help yourself to the PHP source.
It uses a cookie to store the last script you generated, so if you accidentally crash the browser when testing a script you can just go back to the page and you won't have lost your script.

Video blogging (or "vlogging", as some insist on calling it) is a lot like podcasting, but (surprise!) with videos. Basically you subscribe to a feed containing links to video files, which your podcasting software downloads for you to have a look at whenever you want. FireANT is software dedicated to viewing video blogs, but it didn't work for me (it couldn't seem to update the list of videos, even when i told it to manually).

So the other day the new iTunes came out with podcasting as the major new feature, and it works equally well for video blogs as it does for podcasts (although I assume it only handles .mov, which could be a problem). I gave it a try, subscribing to the special del.icio.us video feed. So far it's gone pretty smoothly; I've seen some good stuff and some utter crap (as is to be expected since anyone can add anything to that list). The best thing I've found so far is this short video about George Bush's Speechalist, it's quite hilarious and well done.

Of course, the idea that anyone can sign up to del.icio.us and add something to this feed is both good and bad. It's good because of the whole "grass roots" approach - it doesn't take much to get your video seen by potentially thousands of people across the world. But it can also be bad that there is no moderation - if you want to subscribe, you are at the mercy of downloading whatever anyone tells you to. For the moment at least, I'm happy with that tradeoff - it's pretty easy to ignore the crap, and it's a great way of finding new stuff. I look forward to more advanced systems which let me better control what sort of content I want to see though, perhaps I might even try writing one...

I really should think up better titles for my posts. Anyways, today I updated my gallery yet again! This is good news, since I hadn't done so for pretty much a year, so I might be getting back into it a little bit.

On the way back from the train station last night I was shocked by the amount of fog in the air. It looked pretty cool, so when I got home (after driving at a riduculously show speed since I could barely see 10 metres in front of me at times) I took the camera outside and tried to get some long exposure shots. This one was the best of the lot, so here ya go :)