Category: 
Just a few links to articles on various topics that I found over the past week:
From Dawud Miracle, writing on Lorelle on WordPress, a WordPress tip that will completely change the way I approach updating my blog. In Write Today, Post Tomorrow: Using Post Timestamp, Dawud explains how the “post timestamp” function in WordPress works, and — this is what I didn’t know — that future dating an article causes WordPress to hold the article in a queue and publish it at the specified date and time. Of course, I couldn’t resist trying it, so this article (written at 10:45 AM) is scheduled to appear at 1:00 PM, when I’ll be about 10 miles from here.
From Hrafn Thorri Thorisson’s fascinating Think Artificial site (a new addition to my blogroll), a great tutorial on RSS, How to Make the Most of RSS Feeds (Redux). While you’re there, take some time to browse his site, and don’t miss his articles on “artificial creativity” — especially An Overview of Artificial Creativity, Artificial Creativity, and Artificial Creativity and Common Sense in Storytelling.
From the Market-Based Management Institute team weblog, a short introduction to cognitive biases, specifically one kind of bias called anchoring. The article prompted me to learn a little more about cognitive biases by reading (or at least, starting to read) the Cognitive bias and List of cognitive biases articles on Wikipedia.
From Civil War Memory, a nice tribute to Luciano Pavarotti, who, sadly, passed away last week. Notice the quotation from Pavarotti at the end of the article, a nice way to sum up the meaning of one person’s life. For more on the great tenor, go here.
From one of my favorite sites, Steven Poole’s Unspeak, a typically sharp and appropriate deconstruction of yet another article assailing blogging as the end of civilization, Its remoteness from the cash nexus.
From if:book, a fine discussion of the state of e-book technology and the publishing industry, e-book developments at amazon, google (and rambly thoughts thereon) and a short discussion (with some excellent comments) on the place of blogs in academics, the place of blogs in the academy.
Finally, on a lighter and slightly gasping note, a breathtaking (and I don’t mean that as a cliche) photograph of Salzburg, Austria from Daily Dose of Imagery.
Happy Sunday!
UPDATE: Okay, so imagine my surprise to discover that future timestamps don’t exactly work in my version of WordPress. (Question to self: When are you going to upgrade? Yahoo! isn’t ever really going to do it for you, are they???) So after some digging around, I discovered that a plugin called WP-cron is required to use this feature in WordPress 2.0. I’ve installed the plug-in and will conduct some experiments later on. I expect it will work fine enough.
I’m not disappointed, though, that it turned out this way. I’ve had a problem all along with Yahoo! as my web host (Question to self: When are you going to switch hosts?), where Yahoo! kicks out all comment moderation e-mails with an error message (”From address not in member domain. Message not sent.”). Part of the WP-cron plugin solves that problem: includes a feature to e-mail me when there are unmoderated comments on the site, sending them from my admin e-mail address rather than the comment-writer’s domain, so Yahoo! processes them normally. It’s already worked a couple of times today. Cool.
