Google AdSense widget + hosting updates

I've been hooked on Yahoo! Widgets (formery Konfabulator) for a month or so. One particularly handy third-party widget is Jehiah Czebotar's Google AdSense Widget, which I keep in "heads up" mode and flip over to occasionally to see if I've made enough to cover my hosting each month (this month I have--thanks!). Something must have changed in the Google API, because v1.1 quit working all of a sudden (the variables it fetches started coming back "undefined). But the new 1.2 version fixes the problem (even though Jehiah.com still lists 1.1 as the current version).

Speaking of hosting, my hosting providor is upgrading soon to include lots of new features including Ruby on Rails. I have been fairly burned out on web development in general of late. But learning a new language is always fun. So I've thought about taking the dive and recoding a few of my projects in Ruby. Right now, I'm just learning the ropes of the language itself. To that end (on Windows anyway), the Ruby One-Click Installer has been handy. It includes FreeRIDE, a handy IDE that makes coding up and working through demos and such very simple.

Duly noted

Just a few things going on that might be of interest to some of you. First, Paul at onfocus.com has a nice post about using Google Calendar which illustrates some best practices I intend to emulate. I think that Google Calendar the big G one step closer to world domination (it's still beta, so go cautiously. Mine just ate the dozen or so appointments I had put in last week). I'm still waiting for Google Word and Google Excel (or, hell, why not Google OS).

John, of Daring Fireball fame is the second person I know of to try a hand a being an independent, full-time blogger. I've really been enjoying his blog of late, so I wish him well. If you dig his site and want to fuel his passion for Mac punditry, buy a t-shirt and support the cause.

I discovered that bloglines has a handy feature that lets you embed your blogroll very easily into your site, so I worked one up. If you use folders to organize your feeds, those turn into column headings. Putting an empty folder anywhere in the list will also create an arbitrary header. So it's fairly easy to control the output without any serious tweaking.

David Sedaris + movie roundup

Okay, I haven't posted in a while, so here's the roundup:

Gina and I caught David Sedaris on Tuesday night. He played the North Charleston Performing Arts Center (it's a nice room, though I don't forgive them for their non-standard coding that makes the navigation system hard to use if you're using Firefox). The show was great. This was our first time to catch him live. Now I'm eager to check out some of his books.

We've also run though quite a few movies of late. There's no time for a full review of each, but I want to jot them down here, with a brief comment or two, so I don't forget them: The Constant Gardener (beautifully shot, great acting from Ralph Fines, a little political for my tastes--which is saying something, as I enjoy political movies), Waiting (silly gross out comedy about working in restaurants--not bad, especially in that it pegs a lot of things about those sorts of jobs), Wedding Crashers (what you'd expect from Vaughn + Owens), Crash (really good writing, though a bit contrived in places. Beautifully shot. Don Cheadle is amazing, as always, but every actor puts in an amazing performance here), Derailed (starts off great, then starts to turn into one of those horrible evil genius villian movies, then saves itself a bit toward the end. Still, I wouldn't recommend it. I love Clive Owen. And Jennifer Aniston is a guilty pleasure, but this didn't work for me), Walk the Line (second time for me: it holds up very well).

del.icio.us gets even better

Everyone's favorite social bookmarking tool, del.icio.us, has been a handy gadget for a long time. But recently, two new additions have made it even better. You can now import bookmarks from your favorite browser. It supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and "anything that supports the traditional Netscape bookmark file format." You can now also mark bookmarks as private and anything imported is marked private by default. I've also been impressed with the URL history pages, which show you the bookmarking history of a particular link and put all the comments in one place (is this a graduate thesis in sociology waiting to happen, or what?).