learning the ropes

What happens if I delete a post that was syndicated? Does it still stay in the recipient’s blog?

In order for Wendy and I to maintain a shared information space as we work on the installation at the University of California at San Diego, I’m configuring both of our blogs to utilize the FeedWordPress plugin which acts as a content aggregator (and cross posts between our blogs).  What I want to happen is anytime I post items to my “collaborations->overheard” category, they will automatically be posted into Wendy’s blog and vis-a-versa.  We’ll still need to figure out what she wants to name her categories.

The other potentially tricky bit is that we may end up with some sort of circular reference if her posts and my posts are mutually syndicated.  If her blog is pulling in posts from my “collaborations->overheard” category and publishing them to the same category that my blog is pulling out of, won’t we end up with an endless loop?

A quick brainstorm of how to solve the problem if mutually syndicating the feeds does indeed cause an endless loop…

• take a look at the “remove duplicates” plugin for FeedWordPress
• investigate whether categories can be hidden in Wordpress and whether it is possible to make categories which are the union of other categories.  If these are possible, I could write my shared posts using a hidden category  Collaborations->Overheard.outbound (which Wendy’s blog subscribes to).  I could categorize (on my blothe posts that Wendy writes on her blog as a hidden category Collaborations->Overheard.inbound.  At the same time, I would create a third visible category Collaborations->Overheard which is the union of both Collaborations->Overheard.inbound and Collaborations->Overheard.outbound which will be displayed on my site.  This composite category will allow me to display both the inbound and outbound posts as a single category on my blog and prevent a loop between our two blogs.
• Yahoo Pipes could be used to generate the composite feed…

Thank you Michael!

Yesterday I was trying to put a digital frame inside a trash barrel to show Michael a Bill Viola-like thing- the monitor at the bottom of a barrel of water… and the frame did not quite fit, so it was at an angle and it was so cool, bc it reflected on the side, and it was so off hand, casual, DISCARDED. Hmm, just like words of these halves of cell phone conversations are so un-precious, so discarded. Wow, words in a trash can. The words are discarded, thrown away. Words are heavy, words are light, so is all about words now. The words we throw around and away so casually… so unprotected.

For the past month I’ve been working on a hand-cranked beat sequencer.  This device grew out of a bunch of ideas I’ve had while working on my residency at DPI.

In short, the sequencer consists of two large, concentrically-mounted wooden wheels.  One of the wheels rotates on an axle and the other which has sixteen sliding levers attached to its face remains stationary.  As the front wheel rotates, a switch mounted on its back is depressed by levers on the back wheel which have been pushed toward the wheel’s center.  Each time the rotating switch strikes a lever, a sample is triggered on the attached computer.  It is possible to play repeating sequences of samples by rotating the wheel at a constant rate.

The following video shows the operation of an early cardboard prototype:

Since shooting this video almost a month ago, I have been building a more substantial prototype out of wood.

Tonight, I’ll be testing out the wheel with the software I wrote before I made the cardboard prototype.