I’ve edited my feeds (RSS, RSS2, RDF, and atom) such that posts generated by the Twitter Tools plugin are excluded from my feeds. Let me know if you spot anything odd…

What I was tinkering with yesterday was Twitter Tools, a plugin for WordPress that connects your blog and your Twitter account, allowing you do a range of things like have your twitterings (I really can’t bring myself to use the word “tweets”) appear in your sidebar, notify Twitter when you post something to the blog, etc. What I’ve done is create a special category, “twitter,” which gathers my twitterings and posts them to the front page, but in a special format that sets them a bit apart. I’m going to let this run a while and see how I feel about it; if it’s too annoying, I may move to a daily digest posting.

Now to pretend to real productivity.

Doing a bit of tinkering in the background here, so things may look a bit odd at moments. Carry on.

Of which there are several:

• While I was on my last trip (to New Orleans), I discovered that the 12-inch Powerbook G4 that I’ve been attached to for the last three years suddenly had a battery life of about 20 minutes. I’d been planning on replacing it before this summer’s travels anyhow, so I stepped up the timeline a bit, and this Sunday came home from the Apple store with one of these. I’m almost completely, perfectly in love.
• I’m running a bit of an experiment on that machine, trying to see how long I can go before I’m forced to install anything related to this. I’ve left instructions for those files to open in this; we’ll see how long that works.
• This weekend, I’m in San Francisco. Yesterday, Bryan Alexander actually managed to convince me to start doing this. I’m as surprised as anyone; I was convinced that this was one of the two recent technologies that I’d never see the value in. (I’ll save the other one for another time.)
• This morning, I upgraded my system to the new version of this. So far, I really like the look and feel of it, though I’ve got the sense that it’s going to take me a while to find everything.

I think that’s all of them, for now, at least…

But no actual cats. I saw this animation the other day, and something in it resonated so deeply that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s viral, I think, in an infectious way. The only thing that’s left is for me to pass it on.

(Crossposted from MediaCommons.)

I’ve hinted over the last several months that big things were afoot for MediaCommons, but haven’t been able to be terribly specific; at last, however, the haps:

Our friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book have today announced their new institutional partnership with New York University (which NYU likewise announced recently).

Happily, the first fruits of this partnership directly benefit MediaCommons; working with the NYU digital library team, we have received an NEH Digital Startup Grant that will enable us to build the social networking backend for the fully-functional MediaCommons network we’ve been planning.

As Ben notes at if:book, we’re all enormously excited, and we’ll be looking forward to announcing more such developments in the future.