I love these images by Orbiting Frog:
Daily Archives: 18 September 2011
The Adventures of Boggle, the Creative Commons penguin
If you do a Google search for ‘cartoon penguin‘, one of the top results will be an old Inkscape design of mine:
He’s pretty popular too, bringing a steady stream of traffic to the site. I licensed him as Creative Commons BY-NC-SA, meaning that it’s fine to use the image for forum avatars and stuff, but not for anything commercial.
Of course, people do. Last year someone pointed out some guy selling t-shirts with a slightly modified version of the penguin.
Today, out of curiosity, I did a reverse image search and found two other clipart criminals…
WordPress.com vs. Posterous
It’s been a week since I switched this blog from Posterous to WordPress.com. I’m very happy with the change, but it is clear to me that Posterous offer very compelling features for a free service.
What follows isn’t a complete comparison of the two services, it just highlights what I consider the most important differences between the two services for a typical blogger.
| WordPress.com | Posterous | Big library of free themes (100+). Premium themes. No custom themes. | Decent library of free themes (46). No premium themes. Custom themes. |
|---|---|
| Custom domain mapping ($12 per year). | Free custom domain mapping. |
| Regular users may see ads on your blog. Signed in WordPress.com users won’t. ($29.97 to remove.) | No on-site advertising. |
| No direct HTML editing. CSS access paid upgrade ($30 per year). | Full free access to HTML and CSS. |
| Image-heavy posts are a pain to manage. | Excellent, intuitive image galleries. |
| Excellent, but expensive HD video support (VideoPress: $60 per year). | Free video uploads (100MB per video limit). |
| A basic stats tool in the dashboard. No export functionality. No Google Analytics support. | Support for Google Analytics. |
| Threaded comments. | No threaded comments. |
| Fantastic commenting and comment moderation features. | Comments can be a bit buggy for users. Poor moderation features. |
| Both services offer great customer support and have good iPhone and Android apps. | |
| Neither service permits the use of JavaScript. | |
Note that I stopped using Posterous just before it transformed into Posterous Spaces. Their blogging service remains basically unchanged, so these points are still valid, but there is now a whole social aspect you may want to consider.
Open Wales – Claire Miller’s call to action
Claire Miller, a data journalist at Media Wales, is pushing for more open data in Wales:
This page from Openly Local pretty much sums up the problem with Wales, with a grand total of no open data councils, not even any semi open ones – every other region of Great Britain at least manages a few.
(via Open Wales – clairemiller.net)
(via @cpbyers)
halfblog.net 