comment?
permanent link
email thisIf you look into the navigation bar on the right you'll see a new section for Recent Comments. Right now it displays comments made on any entry in the past three days and puts the old colored-ball-of-updatedness next to it. I put the code together this evening so I'm sure there are bugs and/or features left to address. In the process the base code was updated to enable access to a single entry. Not that anyone should notice or care, just something I've been meaning to do for about a year. ":^)
Something to think about: most of my weblog entries don't have titles but I'm using the title for the recent comments hotlink label. I've started putting titles on new posts in anticipation of this feature, but to tell you the truth I don't like doing it. One option would be to have an invisible title, which ends up being used only for the comments thing. Or maybe I regex the text and pull out the first noun or two? What about pictures? It's tough enough to figure out ALT text for some of the pictures much less have the same text as a blazing, big font title. I guess I could move the title to the bottom of the post, in small, faint letters.
Normally this is the closest I can get to birds by the feeder. It doesn't work if I sit motionless and think peaceful thoughts...although it works for the cat (and she's NOT thinking peaceful thoughts!). It doesn't matter if I sit camouflaged under a large blanket...maybe they can hear the sweat pouring? It also doesn't work from inside the house since the camera's 3x zoom doesn't bring the birds close enough.
As I mentioned in last week's Canon A70 review the camera came with a remote control application. That gave me the idea of taking the bird pictures remotely, but the cable is only a couple feet long. So I bought a small USB hub, a ten foot cable, set the camera on a tripod, wired it to the hub, and snaked the USB cable in through a side window. Now I have complete control of the camera and, most importantly, the birds don't have to put up with me.
That's the setup, the only improvement would be a remote control pan and tilt mechanism. After taking a few snapshots I discovered a couple cool features in the software. One allows you to take a single snapshot after a predetermined time. Another let's you set a timed interval between shots along with how many shots to take. I set it up to take a picture every ten seconds until it took 60 of them.
Taking lots of random shots turned out much better than when I sat there trying to capture a perfect shot. It caught birds in mid-flight and moments that I might have seen but not been able to respond quickly enough to. Looking through a hundred some photos I noticed this funny pattern with a Mourning Dove and a Grosbeak. The photos have been re-arranged a little bit.
(It's an animated GIF in case you have that feature disabled)
Fungus among us.