Friday, October 27, 2006

Watch out, Lucas L. Johnson!

I payed a hosting service, DreamHost.com or .org or something, to make things easy for me. I got my domain name, lucasjohnson.net. I linked to it from this site. (I'd always wondered why my blogger page said Edit Me, under Google News. Now I know!) I finally learned what RSS means: Really Simple Syndication. I plan to make my websites like that. (If anyone knows about this, please offer your tips.) I learned about XFN, the XHTML Friends Network. This seems to be some progressive, democratic way to connect with people. The scared, skeptical part of me wants to find out more about it before I use it on my sites. It seems like it would be an easy way for Big Brother to hunt down and destroy birds who flock together. But I decided to go ahead and use it. It's a bold experiment. Maybe I'll let you know how it turns out for me.

XFN's site gave an interesting example of how it might be used. Say you link to different pages from your website. Embedded in each link, if you put it there, is how you're related to that person. (It only works for people, not abstract companies, like Metafilter.) So you might link to Emily's site, and in the link, you would put rel: "sweetheart met colleague". Which means she's your girlfriend, you've met her in person, and you're colleagues. You could also put rel: "crush", which means you have a crush on that person. Say that person links to your site from their site, and they use XFN in that link that says they have a crush on you. Then perhaps some third party could let both of you know that you have a crush on each other.

Yeah, it sounds weird, a little creepy, but it might be a brilliant idea. Maybe it will catch on. I should probably be getting paid by XFN for this post, but I'm not. Hm...

Oh yeah, so I considered putting Google ads on my page, because Adam said he was getting some money from his. And maybe that could increase my status on Google? I don't know. Can you do a deal with them where instead of money you get in-kind advertising?

But then I noticed a heading on the EMAC web log about Google possibly being hideously evil? So maybe I don't want Google ads, but now the only way to get them off of there is to go in to the XHTML myself and remove it! Well, it's exciting to play with that stuff, like when I inserted a link to my other page! What a rush! :)

I'm only kind of kidding.

Oh, I'll also link to my band's website. If we're still together (we've been having some rough times lately) we have some shows coming up, and we'd sure love to see y'all out there!
Link

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

I'm excited that my video has a home at ourmedia.org and archive.org. It took me a while to figure out how to do it, but now I feel a wonderful sense of accomplishment!
You can look at it here: http://www.ourmedia.org/ia/details/LucasJohnsonPollyandFrancescoonaGiantGuitar/
You'll soon be able to see it in my Second Life studio, hopefully.