Category: Site Info

What Did I Miss?

I’m back online after avoiding my computer for a bit. I’m going through my hundreds of e-mail messages, trying to get it all sorted out, working from home this morning as I have a friend’s wedding I’m going to this afternoon (and it seemed silly to drive all the way out to Sunriver when I’d have to come back so early).

Did I miss anything of vital importance last week?

I Love Old-School Video Games

That’s why I love this video of a Super Mario Bros. speed run visualized as one long projection, superimposed on a street-scene:

If you’re an old-school Mario fan, this site is pretty sweet and includes some whole-world maps that are pretty interesting in their scale.

Note: This will probably be the last thing I post for about at least a week or so. I’m going on a much needed vacation. Would-be crooks: I have folks staying at my house, so don’t bother — there’s nothing worth taking anyway. My plan: Avoiding technology as much as possible and enjoying sleep, sun, and sand as much as I can. Mostly sleep.

Reminders

  • Tonight is the last chance to enter to win the USB Video Card. There aren’t a load of entries, so your chances are good (and it’s a neat little product). I’ll be drawing the winner at random tomorrow morning before the concert, so make sure you get your entry in.
  • Speaking of concert, like I mentioned before, the Cascade Winds Symphonic band concert is tomorrow (Sunday). It’s free, and will be a good time. Click here for more info.

UtterlyBoring.com In Tibet

Kyle was loser of the latest UtterlyBoring.com NCAA Pick ’em, and in what has become a tradition among the losers he sent pictures of him wearing the shirt to some random places (two-time loser Dren took it to Wrigley Field and to the pool). Here’s Kyle…

In front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa:

UtterlyBoring.com In Front of Potala Palace in Lhasa

In front of a big frickin’ mountain:

UtterlyBoring.com In Front of Mt. Frickin' Everest

From the loser:

The Mt Everest picture was taken just outside of Base Camp after four days of hiking through the mountains with altitude sickness, thus the happy look on my face

Thanks for joining in the fun, Kyle. If anybody else wants to buy an utterlyboring.com shirt and take a random picture in some random place, go ahead (you can buy the NCAA loser shirt, if you want, but only The Dren and Kyle are officially losers).

Facebook Like Buttons with Dynamic URLs in PHP and JavaScript

Facebook Like buttons are popping up all over the Web as a way for people to integrate a little bit of Facebook into their site. I thought it’d be a fun experiment to try on my site here, but I wanted a dynamic URL to pass. There are a ton of blogs out there for putting a Facebook “Like” button your pages using a dynamic URL with a bit of PHP trickery. Here’s the code I ended up using for this site:

<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo 'http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];?>&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=80&action=like&font=verdana&colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:80px; height:22px" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

However, on another site I’m working on getting this implemented on, I don’t have access to the raw code, and can’t use server-side scripting or variables. So I came up with a JavaScript solution that I’m sharing here as I couldn’t find an equivalent version online:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

document.write("<iframe src=\"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/plugins\/like.php?href="+document.URL+"&layout=button_count&show_faces=false&width=80&action=like&font=verdana&colorscheme=light\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border:none; overflow:hidden; width:80px; height:22px\" allowTransparency=\"true\"><\/iframe>");

</SCRIPT>

It’s probably not the cleanest/best code in the world (I would never consider myself a programmer) and there are probably 100 different ways of doing this, but this worked for me and hopefully that will help somebody out there on the InterWebs (and feel free to “Like” this post — the button’s on the permalinked URL — just to see if it works). You also might want to adjust the width of the frame and the code a bit. I personally just wanted a small button with just the number of likes (and am considering even getting rid of that, tightening it up a bit).

And for my future reference, these two tools were very useful in doing this — escaping the code for posting here, and creating that document.write statement.

Note: I’m now using the add-this.com service for this, as it provides me better tracking and features than my code above does, but I’m leaving this here for reference.

Bend Blogs Now On Twitter

Like previously announced, Bend Blogs is on Facebook. Now all you Twitts Twitter users out there can follow Bend Blogs on Twitter as well. I just setup the twitterfeed this morning, so it doesn’t have a lot of content on it yet, but it’ll get there soon.

And one of these days, Bend Blogs will be designed so I can easily announce this stuff over on that site as well (it really just needs a redesign, which I don’t have time for).

The Pick ’em Is Now (Officially) Over

While things were pretty much wrapped up on Saturday in the pick ’em, final places could move up and down depending on whether Duke won tonight or not. They did in one helluva game, The top three stayed the same, and if BradG would’ve picked a couple games better earlier, he might have gotten a prize. Instead, a single point separated second, third, and fourth place (our winner picked Duke, so he won by 14 points).

Thanks again for playing everybody! I’ve already been in contact with the top two places, and will be e-mailing “Heather H” within the next couple days to get her contact information.

Also another big thanks to our prize providers:

Baker City Vacation Rentals

Paizano’s Pizza

SUPERAntiSpyware

Mug Revolution

Jake’s Diner

Dave Woodland at Signet Mortgage

Bend Oregon Restaurants blog.

The Pick ’em Is Over (Basically)

While a few places can still move around, the top three places in the pick ’em have been finalized (today’s spreadsheet is here):

  • First Place:: The winner of the Baker City Vacation, Flip Video Camera, and more, goes to Oregon but no forgotten (babbage). However, baggage is interested in trading some prizes with second place. I’ll put you guys in touch.
  • Second Place: Second place — with the Jake’s Diner meals, Mug, software, and more goes to Deschutesless (PeeSachs).
  • Third Place: The handful of prizes for third place goes to The Madness of March (Heather H).

Congrats to all our winners! I’ll be contacting everybody after Monday’s final game.

There are still a few places that could change around in the rest of the bracket, as a few people picked Duke to win the whole thing, while nobody picked Butler. Final scores will be posted after Monday’s final game.

Bend Blogs is Now On Facebook

So I’ve gone through the effort of creating a quick and dirty Bend Blogs fan page. My goal is to have it pulling the content from Bend Blogs, posting it into the wall of the Fan page, and potentially bring more traffic to the folks who list themselves on Bend Blogs. It’s very much in its infant stages, but if you’re wanting to become a fan, feel free (primarily so I can get enough fans to get a username).

Any suggestions on how to fully utilize the page are welcome. Really, the Bend Blogs site needs a redesign to take better advantage of the various social networking opportunities I’m working on setting up. @bendblogs will be coming soon, @utterlyboring is already here, @jakeortman will never happen. I’ve come to realize that fewer and fewer folks are reading RSS feeds anymore, getting their content via Facebook and Twitter. Thankfully, there are many apps and services out there to automatically dump RSS feeds to both of these services, so while my original feelings about twitter haven’t changed much, I obviously need to let people know when new content has been written to keep some sort of ad revenue coming in so I can pay for my server fees.

If you run a Web site, and want Bend Blogs content on your own site, I do have banners and widgets for that, and remember there is a mobile version as well.

If you’re wondering why I suddenly am getting into this more, it’s because I’m working on setting up and customizing Discover Sunriver’s Facebook and Twitter profiles and pages, so I’m also using my various experiments to figure out how to do things properly before I implement them on the Discover Sunriver pages.

Update an Hour Later: Woohoo! We have the required 25 fans for a username! You can now find Bend Blogs on Facebook at facebook.com/bendblogs

The Final Four Is Set

But the pick ’em is far from over.

I think.

Really, since I can’t get the frickin’ scenario generator on Yahoo!’s site to actually load, I have no idea how (if at all) next week’s games will affect the scoring. Just a quick glance through some of the brackets shows that it could shake up the top spots a bit, but as of right now (end of round 4), “Oregon but not forgotten” has the lead by a single point over two other folks, and other folks out of the top three could still move up to prize-winner territory. The updated spreadsheet has been posted.

Thanks again to some of our the prize providers (some of our prizes were provided by me or by folks who didn’t want credit):

Baker City Vacation Rentals

Paizano’s Pizza

SUPERAntiSpyware

Mug Revolution

Jake’s Diner

Dave Woodland at Signet Mortgage

Bend Oregon Restaurants blog