Blog about Wikis...

Memory Alpha

This wiki is one of my all-time favorite wikis to kill time with. It has information anyone could possibly ever want to know about Star Trek, from plot lines to technobabble to characters. The wiki is written with an "in universe" feel, meaning that the perspective of articles aside from news items is as if they were rooted in a reality where Star Trek is real. This wiki covers all Star Trek series and movies. The wiki is run and hosted by fans, independent of holders of the intellectual property.

Battlestar Wiki

Another wiki about another sci-fi universe/TV show. This wiki has numerous articles on the critically acclaimed television series Battlestar Galactica in its latest incarnation. However, it also serves as a wiki repository for the older iterations of Battlestar Galactica as well. This wiki also appears to be run by and hosted by fans.

Glee Wiki

This is a wiki for my latest television passion, Glee. This wiki is relatively new, and is not as robust as the other two wikis due to the age of the show and the age of the wiki. Although contributions appear to be largely from fans, the wiki is hosted by Fox, the network that airs Glee. It's unclear whether this wiki and other wikis hosted by TV network websites are subject to manipulation by editors affiliated with the show or the network.

RSS Feed

1) RSS stands for really simple syndication. It aggregates new articles and items from various websites into one central location for the reader to view systematically.

2) An RSS feed can be subscribed to by clicking on any one of the many RSS icons on a webpage, or clicking the RSS button on the right side of the URL form in the browser. Additionally, an RSS feed can be obtained from a link (, or in a bundle from Google.

3) I subscribed to the Google feed sports bundle.

4) I didn’t like the cluttered interface on the left hand bar, although those user options can be customized by closing or minimizing those sub-menus. I feel that Google reader is a very simple, straightforward RSS reader. However, it is not especially simple or friendly, despite its clean organization. Additionally, I can see that RSS feeds have convenience in mind, but there is a lot of information that still has to be filtered out.

For example, I subscribed to the Google feed sports bundle, and I was inundated by NASCAR news and Jimmie Johnson. I couldn’t care less about NASCAR, I don’t think it’s a real sport and I thought Jimmie Johnson was a brand for sausage. So while Google made it easy for me to subscribe to a sports feed, there was still a lot of junk that I didn’t want. In order to customize what kind of information comes into my Google Reader, I probably have to subscribe individually to a whole lot of different subcategories, and then “set it and forget it.” I’m wary of this method as well, however, because if I made my feed the go-to source for information I would probably mentally close myself off from other new and exciting sources of information, not to mention interesting blog posts on blogs that I’m not subscribed to. RSS has an excellent intent, but I probably have to play with it more and I’m sure there are better refinements yet to come.

5) I subscribed to the Local News feed of the Mercury News RSS.

6) None of the other feeds really gave me any trouble for subscription except for the comedy central website. On that website, I looked on the sitemap page and found the RSS link.

Finally, here is my song of the week:

Close-up of rose

Close-up of rose
Originally uploaded by Nex Ninek

A blue rose?

Ginza Crossing

Ginza Crossing
Originally uploaded by /\ltus

This is a cool picture taken in Tokyo, Japan.

A bunch of pictures from my distant past...

Well, only high school. I didn't even know these existed, but it's nice to see them here.

I think Flickr is rather sophisticated for it's primary purpose as a personal photo repository (alliteration!). I like that there are many tie-ins to different things, including blogs and the colorwheel gadget. Viewing photos by tags is very interesting, and some people are quite talented at putting up pictures. On one hand, it's great that putting up pictures is so easy to do for just about anyone now, with the added bonus of being free. On the other hand, the deluge of all these pictures means that some inevitably get lost. I'm sure there are some great pictures out there that never really get seen. Also, the feature-rich options on Flickr may be overwhelming to some people, especially newbies to photo such as me.

Finally, a video to see you off until next time. And I've learned to embed it, too!

Blog Post for Credit

1. The Blogger interface is a little confusing, but I think that is due more to a lack of familiarity than anything. I'm sure the engineers at Google have done their best to make sure that it is as intuitive as possible.

I used to blog every once in a while on xanga, and I found their interface to be even more clumsy at the time. It is nice to see that blogs have become a tad bit more user friendly.

Also, I am doing this assignment from a netbook. Working on this tiny screen with a tiny trackpad doesn't help when trying to navigate the customization interface. The preview pane for the blog is at the bottom and is maybe two or three lines deep, at most.

2. I changed my theme from the default theme to one with more colors. I chose green because to me, it is easier on the eyes. I then changed some font colors so not everything on the site is green, but I left font types alone because I like Arial.

3. I enjoy reading blogs, but I often feel that I don't have enough to say to actually blog. For me, writing out what I feel takes a lot of energy and time - I have to sit down, gather my thoughts, scratch down everything that comes to mind and piece it together as I'm starting from the top. I think that my normal writing style is too neutral and academic for blog-style writing. Some people have a way with words and can weave the most mundane events into epic stories; I am not one of those people.

I probably would not use this blog outside of class. I gave it a self-descriptive name so that I know exactly what it is for. I wish I had the time to blog, but I would probably spend any extra time I had goofing off anyways.

4. I looked at several of the example blogs. Some of them have not been updated in a while, such as infodoodads, so I only skimmed through them quickly before moving on. I enjoyed copyblogger's post on writing comedically, and I will likely return to it if I ever decide to continue blogging.


Finally, I was listening to this song while writing this post. It's so bad it's good.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-EN4-QVbpQ

How do I shot web?

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