They were annoying, and now there’s Google Buzz, which collects all the same information. You can see all my public Buzzes, here: http://www.google.com/profiles/ericnguyen

I’ll find a way to integrate those with my blog, later.

I’ve been getting some link spam in RSS feeds for this site. Tonight, I did some deep cleaning, following advice from this thread, but when I check the site using [this tool](http://www.unmaskparasites.com/security-report/, those spam links are still being detected.

So, to make sure it’s not some sort of cache I’m running into, I’m writing a new post to see how it appears in Google Reader, where the link spam tends to appear.

UPDATE: So far, so good.

One of Amos’ new efforts at DiscoverMagazine.com is a new “journalistic mashup” blog call 80beats, which reports on scientific topics of popular interest. Here’s a screen snip of the text from an entry about new solar panels that use internal reflection to collect sunlight:

As you can see, the body of the post is made up of quotes from other news sources, colored in blue. This is a format that I really like; mashed up news from many sources. Some blogs like this are even explicit about reporting on biases; the sources themselves are sometimes a part of the story.

What 80beats is doing well is to start developing a UI around the mashup text, allowing a very natural flow of the prose. Using blue text and the occasional editorial brackets means the reader can easily ignore the sources completely and read the post as an uninterrupted piece of content. The references are there, though, for anyone who desires more context.

A couple items from my Flickr feed. The first is a photo of a landfills taped to all the trash cans at work. The second is my long-lost license got returned to me when someone simply dropped it, loose, into a mailbox.

I wonder if there’s a better way to integrate blog-like images into my actual blog…

Landfill Portal,
originally uploaded by Nargopolis.

License Reappears,
originally uploaded by Nargopolis.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade is like magic. I just upgraded two blogs (this one and snarkyninja.com) in five minutes, all without a hitch. I even got downloadable backups in the deal. Joy.