Tong Family (richtong.org sync)

Blog HOT or NOT. Another cool artifact of blogging. Rating others. There is an entire site devoted to it. I signed up all our sites. FWIW.

The W3C MarkUp Validation Service. How valuable. A free utility from the w3c to see if your html is OK. Interesting to see how well most sites do. Learned a bunch

Andromeda Streaming Jukebox: MP3 server for PHP & ASP

Clean up your Web pages with HTML TIDY. I keep making html ugly. Here is a beautifier.

Brad Silverberg. Another incredible site. PIR apparently mines information and trys to cross reference people. Does an amazing job with Brad Silverberg of course, but I’m not listed. Interesting idea. Basically it looks at citations in books and other periodicals to build a database of related folks. Cool.

AvaQuest People Mine. Wow interesting to see how Google information can be datamined. First example I’ve seen of a third party build on top of Google. Fun to run a query on your own name. It found Rich Tong and John Ludwig correctly!

Google Weblog. If you can believe it , an entire blog on what’s going on a Google. Again, thanks to blo.gs for helping. Blo.gs is really the google of blogs. Makes me wonder what google is in the world of blogs. There is lots more semantic information than links.

dive into mark. The most watched site on blo.gs. Very beautiful too. I like how he does his site map and also his graphics are very clean. Good thoughts on RSS, etc. as well. His titles for his navigation pane are great too. I must be getting to be more of blogger, I recognize more…

blo.gs: most watched blogs. Pretty useful, here’s a list of the top twenty most “added to your favorites” blogs. You need that pesky fix blo.gs thing to get the nice + sign after them to add them. Next step is to use blogrolling to add them dynamically to the site.

phil ringnalda dot com: blo.gs microtools. This is one of those favorites in the sky. Some cool tools here, although the blo.gs site doesn’t actually have an add link to favorite interface for some reason.

tb-standalone – Standalone TrackBack Just what I need to get blogger version of tongfamily.com to understand trackbacks purposes: 1) it allows non-Movable Type users to use TrackBack with the tool of their choice, provided they meet the installation requirements; 2) it serves as a reference point to aid developers in implementing TrackBack in their own…

The Game of Risk Been playing this with the kids since Alex got it for his birthday. Naturally Connie, being a living buddha and a hard core game player since 5 years of age, always wins. So, here are some places to get some strategy help. Like chess, I only win because of the Internet:…

Christmas is coming, time to look at bikes MTBReviews 2003 Kid Bikes. Has the best listing of kids bikes. Shopping for bike is starting. They need a good 20 inch wheel mountain bike with gears. Here’s a quick review of some of the major ones. I’m looking for aluminum frame, 7-speed, 20 inch wheels in…

quartzified.NET :: halo [Disappear the light is fading]. Weblo.gs produces a great what logs have been updated in the last day list. Great for just getting a sense. Here’s good insight into a 17-year-old’s life and how these online diaries work. I love the look and also the fact it is hard coded as a…

Web Hosting, Web Host Buyer’s Guide and Directory of top hosts and reviews. More on Ensim and also about Rackshack, the underlying hoster for Tranquil. Interesting how hosting is now tiered in terms of distribution. Rackshack. It is like the .com revolution never started when I look at a page like this. It is also…

Dynacenter. Other note is that even with this great service, you still need some local backing store if you have any digital photos at all. Even 300MB for $12/month from Tranquil can’t begin to store any reasonable number of 1MB+ print quality JPEGs.

Had a great turkey dinner today. The brined turkey really works well, although it makes the dark meat taste almost cured. The white meat really comes out super well. Did it on the Rotisserie that we got. Took 2 1/2 hours for a 12 lb bird. Best tip of all. Connie cuts a little hole…

CSS Introduction. Ok, I’m finally going to make my sites look good and to do that I need to learn CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). AGain, thanks to google, here is the top CSS tutorial. Wish me luck!

blo.gs. This is the second biggest blog trakcing site. It is amazing, There are currently 54,661 weblogs being tracked for 886 users. Wow! I like this site because it shows what is being updated in real time. And you can see the whole community there. Plus there is a neat ie5 pane that you can…

Sage, Orange, and Clove Rotisserie Turkey BBQ Recipe It’s Thanksgiving Time, so it is time to try some new recipes, I’ve got a new gas grill. Never thought I’d cave on that, but now I can rotisserie, here’s a recipe I’ll adapt to the event. I’m doing a brined turkey with this, but the rub…

Using Blogrolling’s PHP option on your PHP enabled weblog. I’m converting to using PHP so that the blogrolling stuff can be read by google. This works on all the geekfishing.net related sites, but not for my current tongfamily.com since it doesn’t have PHP 🙁 If your blog supports PHP and allow_url_fopen you can call the…

Rss Readers. Another thing to study are RSS readers. Since all these blogs we now have generate RSS, it would be kind of nice to consume them as well.

lgf: the lowest of the low. A great site and also has a nice PHP script to show you dynamically where people are coming from to get to your site. I’ll slam into tongfamily, geekfishing, etc. soon.

hitormiss.org : Daily Crawl. Another incredibly cool cgi script thing that I found on Anita’s blog. This lets you know where you’ve been by the time that you visited. Blogrolling is great, but this is even cooler. This is basically blogrolling, but happens on your server, not in some meta-server. The most incredibly thing about…

Converting to Movable Type Just a note to folks, I’m converting this blog over to MovableType. I’m not going to be updating this as much over the next week before I do the full flip. If you want to see the upcoming blog, checkout New Tong Family. For a while I’ll run the posts in…

Random Thanksgiving Thoughts We all have much to be thankful for. My biggest this year is that I can sit and think with guys like Ludwig about what the next big thing is. Here are a couple of observations, just an outline, I’ll fill in later, but wanted to get thoughts down. The miracle of…

Gallery :: your photos on your website. On geekfishing, we are using Gallery now for photos. Seems like a nice applications. Here’s a note on how to password protect individual albums, so some can be public and others require registration and only certain people are allowed to see it. See the very last post as…

Geek Fishing. Finally got this master site up and running. For those of you who are wondering about the name. It refers to our boating trips on Lake Washington. Instead of fishing for, well fish, we go looking for errant 802.11 wireless signals. It is amazing what you can see on a cruise on the…

More on getting photo gallery to work right: Gallery Right now I’ll stay focused on getting a decent photo gallery thing running. Went through the basic MovableType File Upload stuff. it is OK for a few photos, but it wouldn’t really scale to larger sets. I need something that will take my c:\pictures directory and…

Tong Family gets a slight update Did you notice that lots of the starter junk is gone from the front, And also search moved to the menu pane. Most current blogs have a tighter format than mine, so I’m gradually switching over. Next step is to start using (and learning CSS), so that I can…