A mostly technology-centric collection of links:

  • Emacs starter configuration scripts. I can’t, for the life of me, recall why I went looking for this, but last week I ended up with a whole host of basic configuration files that people have published. I’ve thought about doing this for my own files, but I’ve not had it properly cleaned up and working in a non-embarrassing way in a while. Most of these are on github, which is a phenomena that could tolerate some investigation, but no matter. Here they are, linked to by screen name: ki, elq, jonshea, larrywright, defmacro (har, just got it), jmhodges, technomancy, markhepburn, and al3x. I’d love to collect more of these, so maybe comments or the cyborg wiki.

  • Adjunct to that, a few more cool emacs and related links and points: First, paraedit which is a little tool which makes editing lisp easier, as well as an org-mode tip from Nathan Yergler about using org-rembmember with firefox and ubiquity. which might be of interest to some of you. I also have in the file [this link about yet another lisp dialect (yald?) called Lysp, but I don’t have much more than that. I, on the other hand will have more to say about this in the coming few weeks.

  • My **friend Chris Fletcher discusses his experience with contemporary blogging services** in this post. I’m not sure. Right? I mean blogging is so different today than it was when I got into it. I remember when you handed FTP credentials to blogger so they could publish your blog with their system to your site. Surely people don’t do that anymore. One of the things that I noticed at Podcamp (more on that on another post) that, frankly horrified me a bit, was that there was a whole class of bloggers who wanted to do “this thing,” but they had no interest in running their own website or making that investment of time and energy.

    And maybe that’s what blogging has become. In a lot of ways doing a blog is something anyone can do pretty easily, and having a website is no longer a big part of participating in this discourse. While I’m a big fan of independence, and I don’t think the technological burden is that high. “Doing websites,” very much made me the geek I am today, so I’m not sure. Having said that, LiveJournal has never easily fit into a niche: It was blogging before there was blogging. It was social networking before we said that. It was subculture/niche before that became the thing. If I had more time in my life I’d figure out some way to study and capture that history.

  • For all of you OS X Desktop User Interaction Geeks, there’s this thing that lets you hide unused windows baked into the window manager. I think. I have access to OS X, but I don’t really use it enough to give this a try. GNU Screen and lots (and lots) of Emacs buffers make it possible to keep a lot of irons on the fire without getting distracted.

  • A **good example of a zshrc** file if that’s your thing. I think it’s my thing. Alas. I’ll write more about this once I get more used to it and figure some things out. Mostly, I’m finding that one can use it as a pure superset of bash without ill effect.