Dujodu Blog

OK, I decided to update my wordpress install and start blogging again. I’ll get around to customizing the theme soon, and hopefully start blogging about some of the stuff I’ve been up to recently. Stay tuned!

As I hinted at in my last post, I’m going to Tokyo! In one month I will be leaving for a two week trip to visit my pal Bowen who has been there studying for many months. I’ve been researching stuff to see, places to go, and things to do. Hopefully there will be no shortage of cool stuff to blog about in the coming month. Stay tuned for more details.

I bought a bike a couple months ago and I’ve been using it to commute to work and to get everywhere else I need to go. I think I’ve only used the bus 2 or 3 times in the past month. I might save details about the bike for another post, but right now I just wanted to point out this kind of cool website I found dedicated to custom bike routes. It’s called Bikely and there are thousands of routes for places all over the world. I actually found it while looking up bike tours in Japan (like this one. Again, I’ll save details on Japan for another post).

I made a couple routes with bikely, my daily commute (one way) and my daily commute + extras (round trip with additional common stops).

Daily Commute
Daily Commute + Extras

My desk is just on the other side of this camera. Click control to look around, but you might have some trouble looking in my direction…

http://lakeshorestatepark.com/

Is this a return to blogging? We’ll see, there may be a few things worth posting about that happened in the last year.

I know everyone probably browses digg differently, but I think my technique must be fairly common. I skim the front page for interesting articles and middle click on them (open in new tab for firefox). After I go through all the articles I haven’t seen yet I start reading them all. This is my favorite method, but there is a problem. If you want to digg one of the articles, you have to go back to digg and find the headline to digg it. I got kind of annoyed by this, so I wrote a greasemonkey script that will inject a “digg” bar at the top of each article page. Now you can read the article and digg it or not directly from the article webpage. This is version 1.0, it seems to work fairly well but it might be kind of rough around the edges. Only tested with the latest version of firefox/greasemonkey on windows XP, so results may vary!

Click here to download from userscripts.org!

If you use digg, then go here and digg it.

OK, it’s been longer than I expected. Now that even my most dedicated readers have probably stopped checking for updates I finally have some stuff worth talking about. First of all I’ve been really busy with my work with MATC/Discovery World. Things have really been picking up so I’ve been working a lot on that. In most of my spare time I’ve been playing a lot of guitar (and wasting a lot of time.. of course). Me and my pals from Secret Iris have changed our name to “Paper House” and have been working on some new material. We have a lot of stuff in the works, plenty of song fragments to spend plenty of hours developing, and that doesn’t stop us from making new ones to add to the pile. We’ve been recording some stuff as we feel the songs are ready, and as time permits, and we have a myspage page up — because Rupert Murdoch doesn’t have enough money already and we thought the advertisements might help him make fox news a better place…. oh wait, that’s not right… erggh.

Anyway, the myspage page is up and you can view it here:

http://www.myspace.com/paperhousesongs

Digg 3.0 (If you are familiar with digg skip this section!)
There was a new version of Digg.com (v3.0) launched a few weeks ago and I’ve been throughly enjoying it. It has broadend it’s topics from science & technology to pretty much everything including: health, enviornmental, political, video, and even gaming news. There is a category for everyone, or if you’re like me you want to read (at least) the headlines for everything. For anyone who doesn’t know what digg is, I highly suggest checking it out - it’s a “social bookmarking / news” site that is ruled by the users. Every item you see on the front page is user submitted and approved (via votes, or “diggs”) to the front page. I’m not 100% sure how the algorithm works but it is based on number of diggs and the frequency of diggs. I’ve seen stories get “promoted” from the queue to the front page with as little as 12 diggs, which if you ask me is pretty whack but it might just be growing pains. Anyway, enough with all that. This post is supposed to be about how to take advantage of this huge system of information.

The Digg Spy

I mentioned the “Queue” earlier. The Queue is basically a list of all the stories being submitted to digg by all the diggers (digg users). It is a pretty active list and you can view it realtime by clicking on the “Spy” link under “Digg Tools” at the bottom of the left menu. Here you can see what people are digging, commenting on, voting down (kind of like a “negative digg” for stories that are inaccurate or spam), and it’s all in real time!!! By default the Digg Spy will show activity for all submissions, including ones that are already on the front page. I find it to be MUCH more effective for catching stories by clicking on the “Only Upcoming” tab toward the top right of the page. This will only show activity for stories that aren’t already on the front page - because chances are I’ve already seen those! I also like to filter out activity for things that I don’t need real time updates on - like comments on ALL the upcoming stories and diggs on ALL the upcoming stories. When I’m in the digg spy, what I really want to see are new story submissions, so I uncheck every box at the top except for the little blue one. Now I will have a real time view of all new story submissions and promotions and nothing else - perfect. I find this to be the best way to view the most recent content. You can immediately choose to digg or “bury” the articles as they are submitted this way and really help to make digg work by actively participating in the promotion process. If you are only looking at the front page you are getting a lot of cool information - but you are missing out on one of the best aspects of digg if you don’t go into the queue from time to time to digg the things you find interesting!

Digg & RSS

You’ll notice there is an RSS feed for just about every imaginable page on Digg. I haven’t really used this yet, but I think I’m going to hook up my digg.com user profile to a diggstream on the right near the linkstream (which I’ve been neglecting recently). This will allow anyone visiting my blog to see what I’ve been digging! The RSS could also be used to get a REALLY specific virtual “topic” that you can monitor without actually trying to search for anything. There is so much news submitted to digg that if you want to monitor a certain person, event, or anything else you can possibly tie to a key word you can simply subscribe to diggs RSS feed of a search for that keyword, say for Milwaukee. This way you can have all the users of digg (a ridiculously large amount… err..) doing all the search work for you and you can just sit back and let the info come to you. Definitely a neat feature.
Coming Soon on Digg

There are some even more amazing information filters that are slated for a mid July release on digg. A new version of the digg spy (”digg spy on crack” as Kevin Rose, founder of digg.com, described it) which will be an even easier way to filter content, and some really interesting graphical views of the content and diggs will be included. If you want to check out a video highlighting some of these features and more, take a look here.