Steve McCoy shares some really great animations of Billy Collins poetry. These are well worth checking out.

This is an amazing Washington Post story about the top violinist in the world busking in D.C. Go read the story — it’s excellent.

Download it now, or take a quick tour. Note: you don’t have to uninstall the existing del.icio.us extension before installing — after restarting Firefox, it will prompt you to disable the old extension. Then if you decide you like the new extension, you can uninstall it like I did.

Just a quick shout out that it’s a girl! Her name is Catriona Jean. Children are a blessing from the Lord!

The Burns Family is awesome. It’s great that they had the first live-twittered birth!

Today I read Matt Cutts‘ post about URL Canonicalization, and decided to finalize my URL structure. I implemented my canonicalization with mod_rewrite in Apache. I found a helpful introduction to mod_rewrite.

So which is better: www.joshuamclark.com or joshuamclark.com? For some time, I preferred the former, simply because I didn’t like the way the latter looked in the address bar. But now, I have settled on the latter, simply because I feel it’s more semantic and RESTful. The subdomain www implies the web component of joshuamclark, but I want my URI to identify all of joshuamclark, not just one component. That is, I want my URI to be more semantic. This will make it easier for any user agents to access me in a representation they can understand. That is, I want your stay at joshuamclark.com to be utterly RESTful.

I then decided to disallow /index.php as well. It 301’s to /.

So I was able to implement these rules with a few simple lines in .htaccess:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on 

# Redirect /index.php to /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://joshuamclark.com/ [L,R=301]

# Redirect www.joshuamclark.com to joshuamclark.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.joshuamclark\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://joshuamclark.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I’m already experiencing the migratory potential of my OpenID. Over the last few days, when logging in with my OpenID at Highrise, WordPress would not redirect me back to Highrise. I broke down and created a backup username and password temporarily. But then I realized this was a good opportunity to test OpenID migration to a new IdP — I setup an account with MyOpenID, updated my OpenID headers at joshuamclark.com, and everything worked perfectly!

I’m also preferring MyOpenID because of their support for various personas. Nice feature.

A recent trip to Half Price Books
To buy the pick-axe tome –
Status? Delayed by second look
At book from different home:

King Ottokar’s Sceptre, most awesome of tales
From the awesome Adventures of Tintin.
With an awesome new axe and a childhood pal
The sitch, I must say it, was win-win.

And so I wrote some basic Ruby,
Meagre code, unshowy;
Then, sick of coding like a newbie,
I went and read ’bout Snowy.

JanRain, the team behind Jyte, seems to be doing some good work with OpenID. They are a free OpenID Provider and have an anti-OpenID-spam-bot captcha system. Enter your OpenID once, complete a captcha, and your non-bot status is communicated to consumers through an exposed API. Nice!

Today I cruised over to Highrise, the new contact management app developed by the 37Signals guys. I went to create an account, and saw that they, too, are supporting OpenID authentication. I decided now was a good time to get my OpenID setup.

To setup OpenID, you have to decide a) what URI you want as your identifier, and b) what OpenID Provider (OP) you want to identify with. I’ve been trying to standardize my identity around joshuamclark.com for a while now, so that was the obvious choice for my URI. For my OP, I decided to use WordPress. I looked into setting up my own OpenID Provider at openid.joshuamclark.com, but I don’t have an SSL cert yet which I would want, and WordPress was quick and easy. Plus one of the benefits of OpenID is that you can migrate to a new OP very easily, so I can setup my own OP in the future. If any of you want to set up your own OP, there are some nice libraries available to speed you on your way.

Anyhoo, to get joshuamclark.com to work with WordPress, I just had to include a couple lines of code in my head tag:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://joshuamclark.wordpress.com/?openidserver=1" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://joshuamclark.wordpress.com/" />

You can use your own URI as your OpenID identifier too — just copy those two lines in your head tag, making sure to replace ‘joshuamclark’ with your WordPress ID.

Anyhoo, once I setup the OpenID, I setup my Highrise account. It went flawlessly. My Highrise page asks for my OpenID, after entering it redirects to WordPress, I allow my identity to be passed once or always, and I’m adding contacts like a networking all-star. Read more about how OpenID works with WordPress.

“They can’t take that away from me.
Nooo, they can’t take that awaaay from me.”

Do you spend all your days in Google Reader? j-s-jjj-k- -sS.

Are you tired of reading the same thing everywhere? Want something fresh?

Well guess what, blogging ain’t dead folks. Get yourself a domain, subdomain, wordpress, blogger, whatever. Start writing! Everyone can do it. It’s fun!

Who cares if you don’t know how to market. Big deal. Write about what you want to write about, and tell your friends. Start giving a URL when you comment. Link cool articles and wait for trackback clicks. It’s all good. You may not be a huge success, but you never know unless you try eh. Plus it’s fun!

Those who can, write; those who can’t, read. Do the write thing.

What is the only complete sentence in English composed of 4 homophones?

Wright, write ‘rite’ right.

Thank you, this has been the post-inaugural post from…
Joshua M. Clark