Rage Against The Mac

Get it while the gettin’s good at the GeoComments project page

I thought I had this bad boy all wrapped up, but apparently not…

I’ve spent some spare time this week on putting together a WordPress plugin that integrates Google Maps into the comments on a post. I’d intended to make this available for a WordPress Page, as well, but it seems that WordPress is lacking the needed hooks to elegantly extends Pages in the same way that you can with posts. grumble

The goal with this plugin is to enable someone who comments on the post (or Page) to also specify their location. Once the location has been collected, it will be displayed on a Google Map that’s embedded in the page, just after the content of the post. I expect this will be a good replacement for Frappr maps that some bloggers have been linking to to build up a map of their readership. But this really belongs to a Page, in my opinion, however, and that’s where I’m stymied.

Anyway, what you (should) see here is my GeoComments plugin in action. Once I’m sure it’s working outside of my own test environment, I’ll officially release it and let the teeming masses have their way with it. If you’re feeling particularly frisky, check out a working copy from my svn repository into a directory named “geocomments” in the wp-content/plugins directory.

I still have some work to do with the way the location fields are presented along with the comment form; they’re currently functional, but ugly. There are some nomenclature adjustments to be made, as well. It’s also not been tested outside of Safari on OS X 10.4.3 or FireFox 1.0.7 on the same, but I don’t think I’m doing anything browser-incompatible.

So, please, comment below, and tell me where you’re from!

update I decided to bite the bullet and release 1.0. Time for me to get on with some other things! There’s now a rudimentary project page.

Jalopnik Reviews: 2006 Jeep Commander, Part 1 – Jalopnik

The Commander is as cramped as any disco era off-roader and ugly enough to make a Veyron take a dirt road.

Wow. That’s ugly!

I love Jalopnik, and Farago in particular. When they speak the truth, it’s truly brutal, in a squirt-coffee-on-the-screen kind of way.

Hrm, I think Yahoo!’s graphic designers need to take another nip of the ol’ creativity serum…

Check out the little close button in the upper-right corner of the detail view on this page:

Look familar? It should! Aside from being a fixture of just about every OS X application that uses tabs, this one seems to come directly from FireFox!

Bad Yahoo!. No cookie!

Dear LazyWeb,

Is it too much to ask to find a Bluetooth headset that doesn’t suck?

I recently purchased a Motorola RAZR and Motorola HS820 Bluetooth headset from Amazon. They thoughtfully ran a deal that bundled the $40 HS820 with the RAZR, thus saving me the expense and humiliation of actually paying for the piece of junk (and the subsequent hassle of returning it). The volume is so low that I can barely hear anything out of it when driving at anything faster than a snail’s pace.

Every review I’ve found so far is completely contradictory; the reviewer either praises the product, only to have the readers’ ratings completely pan it, or vice versa. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Some people are like Slinkies: not really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs.

(via)

My PowerBook is once again untethered. I just finished replacing the 2nd hard drive to go to the great electronics junk yard in the sky in as many months. On the next to last day of our vacation in Hawaii in September, the 80G Toshiba I’d put in last year (completely voiding any and all warranties, mind you, AppleCare be damned) died, taking a day’s worth of pictures with it. Last week the original 40G drive crapped out. I could actually hear the spindle freeze. Creepy. I was somewhat lucky to find that my last backup was only (!) 3 weeks old. When I got back home on Monday, however, I found the frozen drive had resuscitated itself and that allowed me to make one more backup. Divine Intervention, indeed.

Maybe now I’ll figure out some kind of backup scheme…