escape to insanity

I’ve tweaked the code to my del.icio.us bookmarklet a bit, and thought it may be worth sharing if anyone else is interested.

The default bookmarklet is just fine as is, but many of the times I’ve saved a link, I wanted a way to auto-populate the notes field with some text from the source page, and the only way to do that was to copy and paste into the new window. This tweak lets you highlight some text on the page, and once you click the “post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet, that text will be automatically inserted in the “notes” field for del.icio.us.

It’s a very simple tweak, and I know I’m just lazy for needing or wanting it, but hey. Lifehacks are about coming up with solutions to eliminate or automate a task you do repeatedly, and this does that.

Drag this link to your bookmarks folder or toolbar: post to del.icio.us

I’ve been getting really into del.icio.us lately. If you haven’t heard of del.icio.us, well then… after you’ve extracted yourself from underneath that rock, click that link. Immediately.

The basic premise of del.icio.us is to allow you to save your bookmarks from anywhere in the world. (Well, anywhere with an internet connection. It might be a little on the difficult side to use del.icio.us from the middle of the Gobe or in an Amish village.) But that’s not the end of it - it’s a social community in a way, because you can browse other people’s bookmarks and see what other people are saving.

I recently liberated all my bookmarks from the confines of my Firefox installation using an excellent extension called, cleverly enough, “Delicious Bookmarks.” It let me export all my bookmarks from one to the other and even auto-tag them according to what other people have used.

It’s really quite amazing sometimes what you can find when you connect to other people’s interests. I’ve discovered some great links - anything and everything from recipes to try, to DIY solutions to organization, to various memes, to… whatever. As time goes on, I’d like to get more active on here again, and I think del.icio.us will be providing the fodder for most of my entries.

That is, if anyone’s still reading this.

If you’re already on del.icio.us, please feel free to join my network. If you come across a link you think I’d find interesting, by all means share it. You can suggest links for me by simply tagging them with for:tigerblade and they’ll show up on my feed.

Happy bookmarking!

Found this article by means of the same way I find all other articles on the vast wasteland that we call the Internet. Through Newsvine. From Newsvine, I got to the Movies group, to an article about movie adaptations that should be stopped, to another article on the same site that seemed to be completely unrelated.

The article itself, and the video that accompanies it, are funny by themselves. But it's the comment thread that made me actually LOL. Yes, I laughed. Out loud. For reals. I give you, A Completely Nondescript Guy Firing A Gun Really Fast.

Courtesy of Calvin Tang over at Newsvine, I came across this awesome set of pictures of tigers diving for food. Those kitties are not to be messed with.

The only comment I could summon was such:

YES, MY BRETHREN! FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!!!!!!

Ahem. I mean… these were awesome.

So today was the day that Newsvine announced its December earnings for users. If you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, I'll give you a crash course right now.

Newsvine is a community-oriented news site. Top stories are pulled directly off the major wires, such as the AP and Reuters (pronounced “roy-ters” if you're one of those people that's been calling it “rooters” all along), but the major difference between Newsvine and every other news site on the intarweb is the community. People can register as users and seed articles they find on other websites. The idea is that your local paper, or news sources not picked up by the major services, might have an article that other people would want to read but might not know where to find. You can seed that article to Newsvine – basically posting a link to the original and a quick summary – so others can enjoy it. You can also write your own articles – citizen journalism, opinion pieces, rants, whatever. Not quite like a personal blog, but better.

The kicker is the revenue model. Newsvine has a small number of ads displayed throughout the site, on each article and seed posted. Revenue from ads displayed on articles pulled from the wires obviously goes to the company. Revenue from articles and seeds that you post, however… that's a different story. You get 90% of any ad revenue generated from articles and seeds in your own column. The other 10% goes to the person who referred you (or to the company for site maintenance if no one referred you).

Basically, you get money for just submitting content — either writing your own original articles or pointing people towards other content. Now, granted, the amount of money that typically results from all this is relatively tiny. No one is making a living off of their Newsvine activity. I think the top contributers earn on average maybe around US$400 a month. Sure, that's a considerable amount, but that's for literally hundreds of thousands of articles submitted each month, and $400 a month is not really enough to let you retire.

In any case, as I said, today was the announcement of December earnings. In previous months, since I've been an active user, my earnings were nothing to brag about. My first payout was a modest 12 cents. My second month dropped below even that, to a meager 3 cents. My November distribution shocked me by being more than my total accumulated earnings up to that point, bringing me to a whopping 63 cents. With that, I couldn't even get a can of soda from the vending machine down the hall. But now… now I'm rollin' in the dough. Oh yeah. Apparently Newsvine had quite the surge in activity and visits in December — several people are reporting considerably higher-than-average earnings this time around. I made an amazing total… of… are you ready? US$3.62 for the month of December; my total accumulation is now $4.26 thus far (apparently it's rounded up). Of course, I can't actually cash out until I hit $10, but still.

I'll have more to say about this later, but I wanted to at least put the link out there for anyone who might see it here. Looks like the Bush administration is effectively using 20,000 American troops as hostages until Congress ponies up the money for “The Surge.”

This is really unbelievable. Like I said, I'll write more on this later. I'm seething.