cyclotram: June 2011

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

the portland, honolulu

Couple of photos of Honolulu's Portland Building. The name surprises me, and I've yet to determine whether it refers to our Portland, or to some other place, company, person, or thing. A survey of historic buildings of Hawaii mentions it briefly (all typos are theirs):

Portland Building -Constructed in 1903 at South Hotel and Union Mall in Honolulu, in the architectural style of the the Portland Building is the Late Victorian period.

Oregon has a handful of Hawaiian place names, including the Portland suburb of Aloha, and the Owyhee River in the far SE corner of the state. So I suppose it's not unreasonable to have something in Hawaii named after something in Oregon. Still seems peculiar, though.

I've finally updated the Official Map for this humble blog again. If you'd rather look at it in Google Earth, the KML file lives here. Which is part of a tiny Google Site that I just switched from private to public, for whatever that's worth.

I think I've got creation of KML files ironed out now; the next problem is going to be formatting the KML file so that the huge pile of placemarks is more manageable. I have a couple of ideas on how to address that, but I'm not quite ready to start implementing yet.
I've turned off anonymous comments for the time being, since they're almost always spam. Blogger actually does a pretty good job of filtering out spam, except that I still get email notifying me when spam comments arrive, which is almost as annoying as having to manually delete spam. If there was a setting to only send alerts for non-spam comments, or to enable captchas only for anonymous comments, that would be great. Maybe someday.
I'm still trying to think of a better way to present the Links page. Right now it's a very long, shallow tree, with plenty of wasted whitespace to the right of it. Going to a two column model might work, although that's not a style I use anywhere else right now so it might look kind of weird. I still have this vague notion that the link tree ought to be an external OPML or XOXO file that gets pulled in, so that the tree structure exists independent of formatting. Not sure how useful that would actually be, though, since OPML hasn't exactly set the world on fire, and XOXO still wants to be OPML when it grows up.
Oh, and I just noticed that the post count here is exactly 1337, not counting the post you're reading now. But that is counting 24(!) posts clogging the drafts folder, some of which I might end up deleting. Never let anyone tell you that this blog business is an exact science.

It would be kind of interesting to have a Blogger widget that gives visitors a peek at the Drafts folder so they can see what posts are in the works and (possibly) how long they've been in the works. Maybe just titles of posts or something, I dunno. I'm not an expert on writing Blogger widgets, but I suspect this isn't actually possible. Still, it sounds kind of fun to write, and I might even use it if it existed.

In lieu of that, here's a quick summary of what's on the way, maybe, someday. You'd think I'd be out of bridges by now, but no; there are seven bridge posts in Drafts right now, and another two on Willamette River ferries, which seems a bit excessive. I won't argue with you there. Four art posts, three waterfalls, two cheesy monster movies, a partridge in a pear tree, etc. In other words, there's more of the same old, same old in the works, for good or ill.