Well, behold, people, just what an efficient motherfucker I can become, once I actually have a powerful Mac running OSX and with a home broadband connection! I have in fact gotten just a tremendous amount of work done online this weekend, undoubtedly of varying interest to a lot of you, based on how much you interact with my content and in what way you prefer. Anyway, I have a whole bunch of it to go over today, so I better get right to it.

So first, of course, was the news I already announced on Friday, that I'm now maintaining a del.icio.us account, containing the same material as my old weekly Heterotopia Report (links to interesting things elsewhere on the internet, that is, along with a smartass comment by me about it), but updated a lot more frequently now, now that I have this broadband and desktop at my disposal. And that's really cool for me, because it literally only adds a couple of seconds to my daily routine as it is; I'm just reading my RSS feeds, after all, like I do every day, but now can right-click on any item that interests me and choose "Send to del.icio.us" (because of a Firefox extension I downloaded), which I could never do on my mobile device of course (although, man, how cool would it be if someone did invent that - support on mobile devices, that is, for such things as popup windows and AJAX). And so maybe that will interest some of you as well, and maybe it won't, which is why it's on a separate page and not run down the gutter here (which drives me crazy in other blogs, to tell the truth - all that clutter, all that clutter). And that page has an RSS feed, so that it's easy to simply subscribe to it instead and have it delivered any way you want; by news reader, by email, at the top of your page at Gmail, on one of your portal pages (like MyYahoo, MyMSN or Google Personalized), etc.

And then there's also a page just for all of you as well, who are both readers and fellow members of del.icio.us; and that way, if you stumble across something that somehow relates to a recent journal entry here, or that you think the rest of my readers would get a kick out of, or that you'd like me to review or mention at the site, you can send it to our attention without even disrupting your usual routine; simply add another tag to whatever you were already doing with the item, called 'for/jasonpettus'. (And of course, if you have tagging abilities at your blog, you can add this tag to any blog entry as well, for example if you have an opinion about a recent entry of mine.) And that gets sent straight to the page linked to above, where everyone can see it; and there's an RSS feed there as well, so that for example it runs at my own Bloglines account, and I get real-time updates about cool stuff and personal opinions you guys are sending my way. And I thought that'd be a fun way to add at least a little real-time, consumer-empowering interaction at this site, which I would really like to be able to offer, although of course I can't run commenting here because there are so many people who hate me as well, and who flood my comments with nasty little messages, whenever I've tried in the past to implement such systems here. And I could moderate them, of course, but I just don't have the 24 hours a day required to commit to that.

Oh, but I've set up another brand-new way to offer feedback as well, which I'm hoping a lot of you will find cool, and that you will take advantage of. Namely, you can now send audio comments as well, on top of the usual text emails and tagged entries at your own blogs. Cool! And you don't even need special software to do so; just a microphone either attached or built into your computer, as well as the Flash plug-in in your browser. Double cool! So say that you wanted to comment on a recent entry; or send some general thoughts; or file a short field report from your laptop at a particularly interesting place somewhere far-flung, like a beach in New Zealand, a crowded cafe in London, a courtyard in Estonia; or are drunk and having a party and want to send a silly message my way; in all cases, all you have to do is click to my account and follow the instructions that will appear on-screen. And then I get to share this with everyone else the next day! Wowee zowee!

This is sponsored by Odeo (which I recently discovered, by the way, is officially pronounced "oh-dee-oh"), a podcasting service which has been around for about a year now, which is finally starting to offer some of the powerful, slick, impressive features that they've been promising from the start. Like, they have a phone-number cellphone recording system in place there finally, like Audioblogger.com has been offering for years to Blogspot customers; and I'm not sure why it took so long, given that Evan Williams (the co-founder of Odeo) worked on the initial development of Audioblogger as well, back when he was one of the founders of Blogspot, but I'm glad that it's up and running now. And there's a lot more personalization options there now as well, and a better user interface; and they're being smart and not making it a proprietary format, either, but rather making it super easy to export it as an RSS feed (for iPodder, for example) or simply as an iTunes subscription.

But of course you can listen to it right there on the screen as well, which is the killer aspect of Odeo; that they've really exploited Flash to the maximum, and have built in a remarkable interface for listening to audio files straight through your browser, recording audio straight through your browser, even editing this audio, adding and deleting clips (like sound effects, listener comments, etc). It's very, very impressive, albeit you have to have a powerful computer with broadband access to use it (which is what kept me from using Odeo for so long, that I only had online access through a mobile device; which is a shame, I think, that Odeo doesn't have a simple HTML version as well, for mobile devices and other older, less powerful computers). Anyway, now that I do have such a setup, I'm planning on slowly moving my podcast [randommedia] over to it, which will mean better manipulation, easier subscribing, a more popular centralized service, the ability for you to leave responses, etc. Oh, and best of all, you don't even have to be a fellow member of Odeo to leave a comment; just simply have a microphone and Flash Player. Triple cool!

So what else? Well, much like how my del.icio.us tagging is now just a slight addition to my usual reading of RSS feeds, I now also have a way of quickly adding images I come across at Flickr to my Favorites page as well, simply while in the natural process of viewing them. And in this case it's because of this amazing, amazing piece of free software I downloaded called 1001, which uses the Flickr API to deliver this extremely powerful stand-alone desktop application for interacting with your account. It basically breaks into two parts; in the photo above, for example, you can see the first part, which is fetching other people's photos, how it delivers all new photos from all your contacts and all the Groups you belong to, straight to a centralized little window organizer in real time. (And you can fine-tune this if you want; have only certain contacts' or Groups' photos come in, have them checked less often than others, etc.) And as you can see, once you've highlighted a photo, you have a number of options immediately at your disposal (also available by right-clicking on the image): viewing it immediately in its full size (and then even saving it to your hard drive if you want); tagging it immediately as one of your Favorites; opening the full page at Flickr for it in your default browser; copying its URL; setting the image as your new Desktop; etc. (And even more goodies in the pulldown menus; the ability to create a screensaver out of a live feed of your streams, a chance for an animated Dock icon made out of new images, etc.) And then part 2 of the program is an extremely easy way to upload new images from your hard drive to your account, automatically adding it to certain photosets, automatically adding certain tags, etc. But that's not as important for you guys, so I won't go into that part in detail.

My point is that I now have new photos from trusted sources arriving in this extremely inventive, extremely easy-to-use way; which means, for example, that I can easily tag lots of cool new ones as my Favorites, which of course get automatically sent to the Favorites page at my account. And so this in effect turns me into the curator of a virtual art gallery, where I am hand-picking what I think are the absolute best things at Flickr I'm seeing, out of the daily-growing volume of raw feeds I'm now having delivered in real time to my home. And now that I have this software, I can tremendously increase the amount of new feeds I get exposed to; dozens and dozens of individuals and groups, that is. So good news for me, because I can start keeping track of talented Chicago photographers, for when it comes time to start implementing some of the photography elements of my new arts center, opening in September, and have a permanent record of that tracking online, so that I can go back and look up certain photographers. And this is good news for you, too, or for anyone who likes my visual style, anyway, because you too can go to the page and see what I think is the best stuff out there on Flickr, and avoid a lot of the crap that comes with tracking dozens and dozens of individuals and Groups. (And of course, from a personal standpoint, this also means daily updates at my own account instead of monthly, which means you might want to subscribe to the feed there instead; and of course real-time updates of the "Random shots" photoset for the current month as well.)

Oh, but well, the work I did this weekend doesn't stop there. In fact, another thing I'm going to start rapidly doing a lot more often from now on is leaving comments at other blogs, since it's so much easier to do so from my desktop broadband connection. And I've signed up with this brand-new free service, too, called CoComment, that has the ability now to actually track your comments from about two-thirds of the different types of systems that now exist out there (including all Blogger pages, all Flickr pages, all Typepad pages, etc). Wow, that's fucking cool! So I now have a public page at their account, for example, where all the comments I leave all over the web are tracked; great for me because I can instantly see who has left a response to one of my many comments floating around out there, good for you because you can see as well what stuff has recently caught my eye. And then they even have this little Javascript snippet, which desktop visitors are seeing displayed right now on the left side of the page, where my three latest comments left around the blogosphere are reprinted on the front page of my site, along with links to the original posts in question, and a link to my account page. I'm predicting this to be a very, very popular service, very quickly, so make sure to get in on the ground floor while you can.

And let's see, what else... Oh, I think I figured out how OPML works! So I've set up what I'm calling the OPML Monster List, a master collection of each and every goddamn thing I just mentioned: my main journal, the Instant Locator, my Flickr images, my del.icio.us links, readers' del.icio.us links, my podcast, and my comments at other people's blogs. And if it works the way it's supposed to work, you can import the whole thing as a group to anything that understands OPML, and then customize it yourself, have all new items display under one unified link, etc. But I've never actually used OPML myself (and am in fact still mightily confused by it), so at this point I'm just basically hoping that it works. So, all you OPML geeks, try it out and tell me what happened.

Oh, and of course, lots of nitpicky little tweaking here at the website this weekend; feel free to skip to the next paragraph if you're not a geeky little designer like myself, and don't care. Changes include: removal of "sitemap" link from black menu, both desktop and mobile (since it's ultimately not needed, because of my category list being so pervasive); addition of all these new options into the "other sites" sidebox, both desktop and mobile; addition of "Send Me an Odeo" sidebox, desktop; push of "Repository" title to the left, to match up with body text; "Recent photosets" content replaced with direct links to my current Flickr photosets, both desktop and mobile (to more accurately reflect just the newest photos I have online); lighter gray color for "Repository" body text, for greater legibility; new suggestions in the "Jason recommends" box; new options in the "Subscribe" box; a new "CoComments" box; new categories and sub-categories; a switch back to single entries appearing on the front page, since I will be updating from home from now on, and can make entries be as long as I want; finally, a standalone page containing direct links to my CSS stylesheets, for fellow designers who are curious (or who want to steal, with my permission); and of course lots of cleaning-up of old entries - consolidation back into single posts, new summaries, full keyword tagging, full categorizations.

And so that means, for example, that all entries now posted in 2006 finally have their full metadata, are complete and don't have to be messed with again. Hooray, man. And I'm getting through, what, 10 or 20 old posts a day right now, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get the last seven months of posts in their final form (which is how much of my journal currently exists online here). And a lot more importing, very quickly, of course, which might make the entire importation of all my old archvies (somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 individual items) be finished by July 4th, instead of the Labor Day I'm predicting.

Whew, so I think that's finally it, as far as what I got accomplished this weekend. (Plus other stuff; getting a lot of emails out, setting up my chat software, updating all my desktop applications, etc.) And so that brings us up to what I'll be doing the rest of today, after I get this journal entry posted; which is working more on learning desktop widgets, so that I'll have this extremely, extremely cool one that all you Mac OSX users can download and use, with this little box with a static window, that will hop back and forth between all my online content (the journal, the Instant Locator, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc), by you clicking on menu buttons on the top of the widget. Real-time updates, too! So very, very cool! And then if I can figure it out, a Yahoo widget as well, for all you Windows users (er, the other 92 percent of you online people, that is). Plus, what else? Well, some extended thoughts on online tools soon too, everything from Firefox to Google Video, AJAX to Flash - what I think, what I've now experienced, the pluses and minuses of them all, etc. Oh, and getting my Skype account set up too. Ever onward and ever upward, my friends! Into the Great Mysterious Web 2.0 we go!