Johnny Software Blog

Social websites, portals, and and weblogs. Many of them accept HTML, the de jure standard language of web pages as their markup language.

However, not everyone knows HTML, and not everyone wants to learn HTML! Also, HTML can be a little verbose.
So many portals and some blogging software accepts user postings in bbcode markdown format instead of HTML or XHTML.
The first 2 links below will take you to bbcode documentation for a popular television portal, and a popular music portal.

Here it is for TV.com television portal.
http://www.tv.com/support-&-user-submission-questions/unofficial-community-faq/topic/15904-50272/msgs.html

This list of bbcodes is for Last.fm - the social music portal web site. A lot of the same codes work on there too. Of course the artist, track, album codes - those only work on Last.fm. Since they are music stuff.
http://www.last.fm/forum/markup.php

Here is some generic bbcode documentation. I cannot promise it will all work on the site you are using. But a lot of it will, if the site uses bbcode.
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/faq.php?mode=bbcode

For quick reference, here are codes you will probably use the most often. At least I do:
Yipes, [i]Italitics[/i] - bbcode i puts the phrase inside it in italics
My, aren’t we [b]bold[/b] - bbcode b puts the phrase inside it in boldface
That [u]underscores[/u] my point - bbcode u underlines the phrase inside it

In general, bbcodes consist of a letter, word, or abbreviation between an open and closed bracket. There is one of these at the start of the phrase/word you want to mark up, and there is one of these at the end of the phrase/word you want to mark up. The one at the end, has a / (a slashmark, that is) right between the open/left bracket and the bbcode letters.

Hope this helps you have more fun posting. It is a lot more fun when you can style and decorate your text the way you want.

Technorati Tags:
music, blogging, social, reference, entertainment, web2.0, television

There is a new social web site that came out last week called ListsOfBests.com.

It offers the ability to very quickly assemble lists of favorites and bests. Lists of famous people, places, and things can quickly be assembled using the myriad of things already cataloged over at 4 other websites. The websites were created by the same team.

• people
• users on the site
• famous people (actors, actresses, singers, musicians, philosophers, etc.)
• places
• ones you have visited
• ones you want to visit
• things:
• books
• movies
• music

It all comes together rather well. It is pretty easy to try out and get started. One can browse around to check the place out without even bothering to create a free account. Creating an account is nice, though. It grants the ability to start building ones own lists and marking ones own favorite things.

Everything can be tagged. The lists can all be tagged with keywords. Items going in the lists can be tagged too, generally. It might be necessary to click on it and go to the site where it was created at, and add it as one of the items you are interested in or have consumed - but it can be done.

Once you have started to express what kind of things you are interested in and what things you liked - you can find other people who share similar interests. It is a fun site to find other people with your tastes. Of course, you have to put information in to get that much out of it. After all, the site is kind of smart but it is not psychic.

I recommend going over and checking it out - along with the other 4 sites it is connected to, as well. What Flickr is to photos - these sites to people and stuff.

Technorati Tags:
tagging, social, food, entertainment, movies, web2.0, ajax, books

I saw Ultraviolet a few days ago. The plot was kind of vague, weak, and sketchy - true.

The visuals were very cool. I hope they didn’t use any stuntmen in the movie because the things Ultraviolet did in that movie were insane. Anyway, I am hoping they used CGI for those scenes - not stuntmen.

If you take a look on Yahoo Movies, you will see that a bunch of individual users liked the movie. And a bunch disliked it. The critics, of course, hunted in a pack as usual, and disliked it.

I sometimes wonder if critics all get together and decide as a group whether they will like or dislike something before they write the review. Probably not. They probably really do all like and dislike the same movies.

Anyway, it seems like among real people, the ones who wanted to see a visually compelling movie were entertained. Those who wanted to see something that would stimulate their higher brain functions weren’t.

One of the things that was kind of silly was the name for people that were infected with The Virus. They called them: hemophages. A hemophage would be a blood virus - not a person infected with a blood virus. Small point, but a little annoying.

See how silly it sounds to complain about the technical aspects of an action movie? Might as well just enjoy. It’s a feast for the eyes, not health food for the brain.

Comments?

It has been tolerably warm the past few days. Which is good, because it was way too cold and dry in January and February.

The last couple days, I keep hearing really strong winds outside. Something was blowing around. Yesterday, I went out to check. Noticed the gate was open, so I closed it.

Heard it again this evening. Nothing on or right beside the house. I think it was the lawn furniture out back.

The stuff is pretty weather beaten already. I think I have had it out there for over 5 years. Unfortunately, I don’t have a shed for it. So I think I will be throwing it out on the next trash pickup day.

Then the March wind can blow all it wants, but at least it won’t be blowing anything of mine around!

The AllConsuming.net website got a big makeover today.

It has been changed to have a 1950s style appearance. Looks pretty retro. I kind of liked the old one better but since the change just happened a few minutes ago, the dust might not have settled yet.

It is pretty dramatically different-looking.

If you have never seen the site before, you are in for a treat if you go take a look.

It lets you record any new item you consume. Not every time you consume it. Just once. So, if you have some cereal, you can record the type/name and brand. You do not need to record it again tomorrow. Once is enough.

Eventually, after a month or two, you get a very good idea of what kind of stuff you are eating, drinking, reading, watching, and listening to.

They use dynamic HTML and AJAX to nice effect on the site. The site seems friendlier than a lot of sites for this reason.

I think the site is partly supported by advertising - from Google adsense words. I think I also heard somewhere that Amazon made a little investment in them.

Not 100% sure but I think the site is written in Ruby and uses the Ruby On Rails framework. A lot of the stuff that Robot Coop does is programmed in Ruby On Rails.

Technorati Tags:
advertising, tagging, rubyonrails, social, food, dining, database

They let you slather HTML into certain of parts of your Friendster profile/home page now.

Plus, they also give you the ability to change the CSS it uses. You can use one of the predefined ones, or, if you know CSS like I and a lot of web developers/programmers do - you can just directly plug in the CSS you want.

If you don’t know CSS, fear not. Friendster has a little help link you can use to get tips/tools on how to do that.

The easiest one one I found is to use the Friendster Profile Editor (Advanced) page that some kind-hearted person put up on the web for people to use.

It gives total control over the CSS that gets created, and generates decently looking CSS no less - and it makes it easy to create it too.

I changed the style and added lots of handy links in the sidebar.

I like the new features I put in the sidebar. I am not crazy about the purple shading, though.

Anybody know if there is a way I can tweak the color to something a little more masculine, without changing to another style or or layout - just the color?

There is one caveat, though. I don’t want to switch to a paid blog - I realize I can do anything if I do that. But it seems a bit pricey for what is, after all, just a fun/social blog for me.

I like the overall look. I just hate the color.

This is really strange. An hour or so ago, I was putting away some groceries in the kitchen.

My cat came in the kitchen and yowled at me or looked up expectantly while I was putting things in the fridge.

I said, with no small amount of exasperation, “Okay, okay, I’ll get it and bring it upstairs”. I was referring to her food that I had just bought at the store.

Without the slightest hesitation, she turned and walked out of the kitchen without stopping to look over her shoulder, and walked part way up the steps leading upstairs.

There I found her waiting for me a couple minutes later when I walked upstairs with the box of cans of cat food in tow.

I should find that weird, right?

Technorati Tags:
cats

Fruits and vegetables apparently aren’t what they used to be. Compared to now, fruits and vegetables a few decades back had up to 38% more of important nutrients than they do now.

A recent study on nutrition value of produce revealed:

A biochemist at the University of Texas, Austin - decided to do a little research on the nutrition value of modern produce. What he found, is it has gone downhill. He got his data from U.S. Department of Agriculture. He believes there have been decreases of up to 38 percent in various important vitamins, minerals, and protein.

So good nutrition might be getting more difficult - and expensive - to achieve.

Technorati Tags:
health, food