Anthology of Ideas

Drama, drama, drama. Sometimes you are amazed at the internet and its ability to bring the word together and coalesce the sum of humanities accomplishments into a single information source. Other times you start to wonder if the internet is filled with pre-pubescent children running around whacking each other over the head with inflatable hammers. Yet again, we have another of the latter. This time the wounded parties are theme designers who sell links to websites, embed them into their themes, and distributed freely across the internet–sometimes, according to Matt, these links are even sold to the same people who spam blogs.

On this lovely Friday the 13th, Inline Ajax Page version 2.4 has finally been released. If you are upgrading or have ever installed INAP before follow the upgrade instructions here. Please report bugs as soon as you find them, as I will be making bug-fixing releases as they are fixed. I am also specifically asking for feature ideas for the next version, so drop a note on the main page if you have any.

INAP will be officially updated by the end of the week. I am currently running final tests on this version. Most known bugs have been fixed, the Admin panel has been re-written to be easier and less confusing, and many features critical to the success of this plugin have been added. (A omplete list can be found on the INAP page.) If you would like to help me test or would like a sneak peak, the current developmental release is available here please read the INAP readme for installation instructions.

In February of 1990, Voyager 1 turned away from its primary mission and took a picture of the Earth from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles.) This picture featured the earth as a single small dot. A crumb on the surface of space, just lucky enough to rest inside one of many sunbeams many times its size. It demonstrated, graphically and irrefutably, what many people had believed for centuries: the earth is not special, and petty human conflicts were less important to the universe than an single ant’s life is to the earth.

Carl Sagan believed this wholeheartedly and this image inspired his book Pale Blue Dot. In response to this image he made the speech that is presented in the video in the next section. This video overlays Carl Sagan’s thoughts with images from movies that most people believe to represent themselves and their history. The power of the words combined with the visuals is stunning and well worth your time.

I have tried to avoid internet memes and their quixotic ideals because their constant ubiquitous nature leaves you feeling like a yo-yo always having to perform some trick while being jerked back and forth until you you get to the point where, for all intents and purposes, you begin to perform them with a perfunctory attitude. Well today I have decided to abrogate my prior feelings and, for those that offer me a quid pro quo benefit, I will stop hiding under a dresser like a I have tried to avoid internet memes and their quixotic ideals because their constant ubiquitous nature leaves you feeling like a yo-yo always having to perform some trick while being jerked back and forth until you you get to the point where, for all intents and purposes, you begin to perform them with a perfunctory attitude.

Or at least odder. In a post subtly titled “Why it is good to link to LZZR” LZZR suggests that it is advantageous for you to link to their site, and argues (rather ineloquently) an interesting technique to raise PR and and raise SERP placement. However, it seems that the idea is black hat (or at least grey) and more likely to cause trouble in the long run. Linking should be mutually beneficial for both the linking site and the linked one and more these benefits must be obvious and immediate.