Spontaneous Monotony

I’ve installed a new plugin to handle Technorati Tags (see About page). As well as inserting the tags into the Atom feed for Technorati’s benefit, Jerome’s Keywords also allows me to perform several useful functions with them on the blog itself:

1. A Flickr/Technorati-style ‘tags cosmos’ is now available (top menu) showing the different tags I’ve put on posts, and, like on the aforementioned sites, each tag’s name is adjusted depending on how many posts there are under that tag
2. Posts will now display their ‘tags’- either at the bottom of the post text itself or (on single-post permalink pages) in the small paragraph after the post. Clicking on a tag will take you to that tag’s page (much like the category system)

Categories will still be used, but the Tags system gives me greater control over how I organise posts- for example if a particular subject (e.g. Sport) doesn’t get enough posts to justify a category, or will only have posts over a specific time period (e.g. General Election 2005) I can give it a Tag instead.

I did the final round of plugin re-installs today- most of them are to make my life easier, and will not alter the way you interact with the blog much.

One of them creates a Google Sitemap for the blog. I had something to do this since Google launched the protocol a week or two ago, but this one is easier to use and is configurable (it’s a Wordpress plugin rather than a PHP file that I drop into the site root). It also creates a Gzipped (.gz) sitemap, reducing bandwidth usage even further.

The idea of Sitemaps (it’s another one of those ’20% of time for personal projects’ things I think) is to give Google a better idea of how my site operates- for example, there is no point in Googlebot (as it normally does) crawling the January 2005 archive every time it visits, because the chances are that page hasn’t changed since its last visit. Whereas my homepage, and the more recent archives (categories and this month’s archive) probably will have, so I want it to check them as often as it can. This is beneficial to site owners and Google itself- for the former, it uses less bandwidth (Googlebot is currently 20% of my total bandwidth usage) as Googlebot can crawl sitemapped sites more efficiently, and for the latter, it improves the quality of search results (and also saves Google bandwidth and time on Googlebot crawls).

A study has apparently shown that an ID card is likely to cost �300. Yes, that’s three hundred pounds for every man, woman and five-year old kid in your family. In typical New Labour fashion, Charles Clarke has condemned the study as ‘a media campaign with scare stories’- and says he stands by the (already extortionate) �93 ‘unit cost’.

Except that this study was not run by the Daily Mail, or similar Tory-leaning media groups. It was conducted by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Let’s work out who is more trustworthy

• A world-renowned educational institution, which specialises in the two fields in question, or
• New Labour, who lied about not increasing tax in their 1997 manifesto, lied about not introducing top-up fees in their 2001 manifesto, and lied about Iraq

As you might be able to tell, I am having huge difficulty making up my mind! [sic]

See Also:

• BBC News: �300 price tag on ID cards ‘mad’
• Murky.org: ID Cards to cost 300 quid
• NO2ID: ID cards to cost �300 per person?
• Tim Worstall: The Cost of ID Cards

I’m not usually huge on American politics, but this one deserves a mention. Apparently the US Senate recently passed a resolution condemning the widespread lynching of blacks during the ‘Civil Rights Movement’ of the 1960s. However, 15 senators (all Republicans), including the copywrong industry lapdog Orrin Hatch, refused to sign it. Why exactly did 27% of Republican senators refuse to go on the record as being opposed to lynching?

[EDIT] Here’s the full list:

Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Robert Bennett (R-UT)
Thad Cochran (R-MS)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Michael Crapo (R-ID)
Michael Enzi (R-WY)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Trent Lott (R-MS)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Richard Shelby (R-AL)
John Sununu (R-NH)
Craig Thomas (R-WY)
George Voinovich (R-OH)

[/EDIT]

See Also:

• Well Hidden Genius: Objectively Pro-lynching

As the G8 summit draws ever closer, more people are starting to ask questions about the proposed presence of Thabo Mbeki at the summit. Yes, he is an African leader and therefore ups the political correctness points of the summit, however two main objections have been raised to this:

• South Africa is not a G8 member. This is supposed to be a G8 summit- not a UN summit, African affairs summit or anything else. This should not be changed just because Africans happen to be Blair’s chosen group of ‘special people’ at the moment. From a poverty-fighting point of view, there are plenty of developing countries that are much more important than South Africa- Brazil, China, and India to name but a few
• Why should the G8 be supporting a Mugabe apologist? He continually plays the race card as an excuse to avoid doing what is right- when Archbishop Desmond Tutu (an arch-critic of both black-supremacist Mugabe and the white-supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa) dared to question his leadership style and policies, Mbeki called him an ‘icon of the white people’ (see any parallels to Mugabe’s ‘embittered little bishop’ claim folks?)

As the group of the world’s richest countries, the G8 always attracts the attention of anti-capitalist and anarchist demonstrators, but with this unprecedented invitation to the likes of Mbeki, it loses all credibility with everyone else.

See Also:

• Amnesty International: Zimbabwe
• BBC News: Blair pressed on Zimbabwe stance
• Economist.com: Thabo Mbeki – A man of two faces
• Wikipedia: Thabo Mbeki