More Mundane Meanderings.

As a means of procrastinating, I was clicking random signature links on Slashdot and came across a somewhat interesting blog post: Five Things You HAVE To Do In Order To Get My Business.

It brought to mind a general feeling that I've been having over the past few months about the need for ethical behavior and honesty in business and in life. I'm not sure I've thought everything out enough to do a decent post about it yet, but the gist of it is that if you're not honest enough to own up to your product's shortcomings or your mistakes in general, I really have no desire to do business with you. I can feel a rant about advertising building up, but since that'd be going off on a bit of a tangent, I think I'll save that for later.

Posted by Mike at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got a bug to do a quick little creative programming project this weekend, so I threw together some PHP scripts that create a visual representation of the interesting words in the most recent blog post in a given RSS or atom feed. It's pretty basic at the moment: it just parses the XML using the MagpieRSS library and creates a tag-cloud-style visualization (as seen on Flickr, del.icio.us, Amazon.com, etc.) of the top 100 most-used "interesting" words.

It hasn't been tested at all, so I'm sure it has some inherent brokeness, but it's kind of neat and gives a surprisingly quick feeling of what the blog post is about. I have a few ideas to make this a bit more interesting and possibly useful, but I'm not going to get into them at the moment, since it's time to go to bed. :)

Check it out: Interesting Words.

Posted by Mike at 09:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)