Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Potato pancakes (Latkes) recipe

Deb's latke recipe.

Warning: the following recipe may be bad for your health and completely
destructive of your kitchen!

From a newspaper clipping in my recipe book, much amended by me over the
years:

POTATO PANCAKES
Time: 20 minutes (More like two hours, unless you have multiple griddles)

2 large eggs
3 cups grated drained, all-purpose potatoes (see below)
1/4 cup grated onion (see below)
1 teaspoon salt, more to taste (less)
2 to 4 tablespoons matzo meal, or as needed (I used whole wheat flour;
you could also use breadcrumbs)
Canola oil, for frying
Applesauce and sour cream for serving, optional (mandatory!)

1. Put the potatoes through the food processor, using the shredding blade.
Take them out, change to the regular grinding blade, and put them through
again, adding the onion in big chunks (no need to grate!), eggs, salt and
flour. Adjust the flour to make a thick, wet batter that is neither
watery nor dry.

2. Place a large skillet (we have better luck using an ancient,
well-seasoned griddle) over medium-high heat and add 2 tablespoons oil
(more!). When oil is hot drop in heaping 1/8 cups (more!) of batter,
flattening them gently to make thick pancakes. When bottoms have browned,
after 2 or 3 minutes (more!), flip and brown on other side. Add oil as
needed. Drain on paper towels. If necessary (!), work in batches,
keeping cooked pancakes warm. Servef hot with applesauce and sour cream.

Yield: 4 servings

APPLESAUCE
Quarter and core many apples; do not peel. Cover bottom of pot with water,
put in the apples, half (or a whole) orange (pref. organic, with seeds
removed), one (or two) cinnamon sticks. Cook over gentle heat for at
least 20 minutes, up to several hours, until apples break down. Cool.
Remove cinnamon stick, scrape flesh from orange and return to pot; discard
peel. Put apple mixture through food processor; grind well, so that no
large pieces of peel remain.

Technorati Tags: recipe, latke

What does # mean in a twitter post? All about octothorpetags.

Twitter needs tags.
Twitter doesn't have tags right now.
It does have names, and if you precede a name by an @, you can follow that name.

Sometimes you want to share a conversation but not create an ID.
For instance, when San Diego was on fire, the tag #sandiegofire was used in Twitters.
That's a hashtag.
No software uses hashtags right now.
But if you are regular about using it in your posts and people catch on, maybe someone will write code.

The use of #hashtags to encode names of channels is shared by IRC.
For instance, Joi Ito is founder and op at #joiito on IRC, according to his LinkedIn.
Channel names live in the same world as hashtags and tags.

If you were to build software to use hashtags, what might it do?

Wiki + hashtags = autolink to a wiki where the name space was tags.
IRC + hashtags = autoconnect to the channel.
Google Search + hashtags = search for the tag.
Google Adwords + hashtags = display relevant ads for that tag.
Flickr + hashtags = display a page with that Flickr tag
LinkedIn + hashtags = search for someone with that tag in their profile.
Facebook + hashtags = search for someone with that tag in their profile.

So, essentially, a hashtag is a search key into a tag space, marked with a #.
Indeed, you can use any search engine that searches Twitter to search for them.
Or, at least, any search engine that doesn't ignore the punctuation.

For more about hash tags, read Chris Messina (factoryjoe).
His Twitter hashtags for emergency coordination and disaster relief describes #sandiegofire.

Chris didn't think much of #arbcamp, but we'll forgive him for that just this once.
And I don't think much of the name hashtag.

I'm going to call them octothorpetags.

Technorati Tags: arbcamp, hashtags, factoryjoe, octothorpetags

Event promotion with Twitter and Google Calendar "Quick Add"

Here's a recipe for promoting your event using a combination of Twitter and Google Calendar.

1. Make some friends on twitter. BE MY TWITTERFREND PLEEZ
2. The recipe for events is to enter "what", "who", "where" and "when".
3. You are writing for both a Twitter audience and for data entry.
4. Please test by cut and paste into Google Calendar "quick add".

What:
5. Put the URL if any in the what part of the event; that becomes event title.

6. Include a #hashtag or @reference in the text to refer to something.

Who:
7. Use both a Twitter @name and a real name in the who part for maximum visibility.

Where:
8. The where clause is preceded by the word "at".
9. If Google Calendar can't geolocate the phrase, it turns this clause into a search. Be creative.
10. You are indexing into Google Map's Community Maps and you can put more information there.

When:
10. Be careful with relative days (today, next week) to avoid confusion when these are seen later.

To be done:
11: build a bot that reads a twitter stream and autopopulates a Google Calendar with events.

UPDATE: a2events calendar via a search at Terraminds. @bkerr is threatening a public google calendar (the #11 TBD).

Technorati Tags: annarbor, arbcamp, calendar, googlecalendar, library, parser, quick-add, twitter

SEO Best Practices Guide

The E-consultancy team is selling a £150 SEO Best Practices Guide with these topics in it:

Download >> Search Engine Optimisation Best Practice Guide 2007 - contains more than 270-pages of tips and advice, to help you boost your Google rankings.

So what’s included? (actually, what isn't...?!)
- Techniques for advanced keyphrase analysis
- Developing an integrated search engine marketing strategy
- Improve your page inclusion and reporting using Google Sitemaps
- Detailed coverage of on-page optimization factors
- How to increase your click-through rate in the search engine results page
- 10 complementary SEO strategies for refining site architecture
- How to plan and execute a link-building campaign
- 10 key factors to improve landing page effectiveness
- 50 key recommendations to assess your current practice
- 50 quick win tips to improve your position
- 5 page guide to help marketers improve results from pages they maintain
- Details on how to get the most from a search agency

No link love - if they are good at what they do you'll be able to find it by searching for it :)

Technorati Tags: search, seo

How to search your Basecamp from the Firefox search plugin bar

All your basecamp are belong to us. (slacker manager)

Here's how to find something in your basecamp.

Follow the instructions on my Superpatron blog for installing a Firefox search plugin for your book finding system, and instead of adding a search to your local library, have it search the page at
https://yourbasecampnamehere.clientsection.com/search
or more generally the "Search across all project" box at the top of your browser tab.

Voila: no more navigating when you need to search for something on a project you're working on, just drop down a menu, select your Basecamp as your search engine, and type in your query. Most of the time, you'll get back an answer.

How to download all of your twitters into Excel

I'm scheming to make Twitter more productively personally useful, and as a part of that I'm finding a need to pull my archive of past twitters out into a format that's easy to parse with the tools that I have at my disposal.

A goal, then, is to write a command that generates a file which can be imported into a spreadsheet so that all of my spreadsheet-fu can be applied to it. (There isn't much spreadsheet-fu, but what there is is very handy; I'm particularly fond of interactively sorting through tables, and I long to be proficient in pivot tables.) The easiest way to write such a thing is to describe it enough detail that someone might have written it already, and then you can just use what they did.

The Google search terms would be
twitter (import OR export) (excel OR csv)
and I get 1.9 m documents, none of which are an exact hit, though there was a useful one about importing your Twitter contact list into Dopplr.

The del.icio.us tag looks like
http://del.icio.us/tag/twitter+export
but it doesn't get me what I want either, though I did discover that "social network" in German is Freundesnetzwerk.

Think a little bit, search for
Twitter API
and a few clicks later I'm at the Twitter Fan Wiki . That led me towards twitish, a Perl based shell for twitter. There's also python-twitter, a Python wrapper for the API.

that's fine but what I really just want is not to write code. Posting this as a draft, pls comment if you find it, otherwise I'll look again when next the urge hits.

Potato Leek Soup from Martha Rose Shulman's Fast Vegetarian Feasts

One of the things I love about Martha Rose Shulman's "Fast Vegetarian Feasts" is the stories that go with each recipe. About this one she writes

I once lived on a big pot of it for a week in southern France; the landlady had left use with a huge basket of potatoes, and there was only one thing to do with them.

Think of it as an unfancy version of vichyssoise (recipe from Julia Child) where you skip peeling the potatoes and use more of the leeks.

Heat 2 Tbs butter in a heavy soup pot. Add 3c sliced leeks, stir, cover and cook 5 min until tender and fragrant but not brown. Stir in 2 Tbs ww pastry flour and cook stirring 2-3 min until just beginning to brown. Beat in 2c hot vegetable broth, stir to blend thoroughly. Add remaining 6c broth and 2 lbs potatoes, UNPEELED, diced. Bring to a simmer, add salt, cover and simmer 25-30 min until potatoes are tender.

Mash the potatoes with the back of a spoon in the pot, or blend with your favorite blender (but don't blend too much). We add 1c milk; the recipe calls for 3-4 Tbs dry vermouth or sherry; I'm sure it would be delicious with half and half or cream. Reheat if necessary until warm and serve.

Served tonight with a shredded carrot salad and with edamame.

Technorati Tags: food, recipe, potatoes, leeks, soup, vichyssoise

How to create a 404 page for Typepad?

I am looking at how a few sites at work handle 404 errors - some good, some bad, some easily improved. Tried the same test on Typepad and discovered that Typepad's default 404 handling is awful. (see sample)

How do you get good 404 error handling in Typepad?

Some instances of "good" handling:

• The Perfect 404, Ian Lloyd in A List Apart from Jan 2004
• Twitter lolcats error messages
• Creating an Error 404 Page for Wordpress tutorial in the Wordpress Codex

and frustrations with "bad" handling:

• Moving blog engines is hard, about the lack of Typepad 404 support

More details as I have them!

Technorati Tags: webdev, 404, wordpress, typepad, howto

Identity swap

When Jim Benson opened up his web browser one day, he discovered that he was someone else. One of the perils of using borrowed hardware to establish a temporary identity is that if you are not really careful, you can leave quite a bit of your identity behind.

This is as good a reason as any to put your temporary identity on a thumb drive, so that you don't leave droppings behind that cause confusion (or worse). Jeremy Wagstaff's Directory of Programs Designed for USB Drives is a good place to start for mostly Windows setups; Lifehacker's Carry your life on a thumb drive is good too.

Ten ways to market your new organization's events

I'm giving a talk on May 22 (today!) at the Ann Arbor IT Zone (Ann Arbor SPARK) on "New marketing". Here are some notes from that talk, which I'm sharing here in advance of actually writing it.

So here are ten ways to market your new organization's events; or, how to grow a group one person at a time, with examples from how the a2b3 weekly bi bim bop lunch group has evolved over two years. More to the point these are mostly quotes that I hope to work in along the way.

UPDATE: here's the presentation as I gave it:

1. Start small.

Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird."

Anne Lamott, Bird By Bird

2. Establish a theme

If you are interested in a weekly bi bim bop tour of Ann Arbor, join the Yahoo group a2b3 at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a2b3 . The idea is to get a group together who would hit one B^3 place each week until the tour was complete. I'm pretty sure it would take a whole semester to make one round.

3. Build a rhythm

February is the season of small sorrows when everyone feels middle-aged even if you are 16, but there are cures for this. One is skating and another is the convivial lunch. (Garrison Keillor)

4. Start a mailing list

Welcome to an example of ridiculously easy group forming. I wanted to give a quick overview of ridiculously easy group forming. The Internet enables a relatively new thing, group forming. We're defining groups loosely as a number of people who get together persistently. That doesn't mean it's persistent over the years. A group of people might be defined by common interest. Working with groups, you might also find people that just like to hang out together. (Peter Kaminski)

5. Write about what you do

Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters. (Cory Doctorow)

6. Collect and keep supporters

My file is quite long now. Every time I think of somebody who has done something that I might need at some point, they’re written in. And that means most people I know (and I don’t necessarily have to know them well to add them - just well enough to be able to contact them). I can add “works in an office” because I might need to know about the latest gadgetry one’s likely to find in a modern office, or “is a single mum” because I might need to know how a woman with young children would go about making ends meet these days, what with nursery fees and everything. In other words, no matter how trivial something may seem, it could well be useful. In fact, it’s the trivialities that are more likely to be useful because how often am I really going to need to know what it was like to sail across the Atlantic? (Sharon Jacobsen)

7. Automate everything

I'm particularly interested in innovative, non-traditional, obscure, or weird ways to keep yourself in sync. Is it all scribbled down on a three for a dollar pocket notebook from the dollar store? Is your life planning tracked in a set of wiki pages? Does your iPod whisper soothing reminders to you in the morning as you go to work? Is your next car maintenance date encoded in intricately beaded knotwork that you carry with you? I'm sure there are more. (vacuum)

8. Keep a calendar

I know this sounds highly improbable to many, however Yahoo always
has difficulties as Mercury approaches retrograde, it usually settles
down again during the retrograde period, and then turns sour again
just before it goes direct.

I'm not pretending that there is a scientific explanation for this,
but it is surprising how often that it is the case.

For those who may be interested, Mercury turns retrograde on the 22nd.

(Rodney Smith)

9. Whatever happens is the only thing that could happen

The other story is about Harrison Owen, who spent a year producing a technical conference with keynotes, panels, white papers and poster sessions, only to fall into a funk after it was over, when he realized that the coffee breaks had been more stimulating than the structured sessions. Taking that instinct seriously, Owen designed a conference format that self-organizes, called Open Space.

Open Space sometimes freaks people out a bit, because it trusts participants so much. What do you mean, you're running a conference and you haven't laid out who is going to say what? You haven't put the leading experts on a dais? (Jerry Michalski)

10. Let the group divide to grow

"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar." Robin Dunbar, quoted in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point

Technorati Tags: 48109