Oddry is list of bookmarks which I—Chris Black—find worthy of attention. There's no set topic or posting schedule. An incomplete, unsorted sample of things that get my attention might include botany, LaTeX, statistical graphics, mountains, deserts, underdog programming languages such as Scheme and Python, singing, winemaking, maps, economics, thoughtfully composed photos, sane cultural and political analysis, and well-designed machines (N.B. my standards of well-designed
exclude most variations on the theme of steampunk. Sorry.)
In my productive
time, I study trophic interactions in molecular ecology: the details of how plants and microbes work together to make a decent meal out of air, water, light and dirt. I try to avoid flooding this feed with research minutiae, but do bear with me if I carry on about prokaryotes once in a while.
Oddry is intended as much for my own reference as for anyone else’s, so my deciding factor when I debate whether to post a particular link is very often Will I come back looking for this eventually?
. That said, I do intend it as a public resource, or at least a public amusement, and y’all readers are entirely welcome here. Poke around as much as you like, ask me questions about the system or the links or anything else, and suggest related links if you want to. I'm especially grateful for corrections of any kind and for reports when my links go dead; this is intended as a long-term archive and I’d like to fix the linkrot where I can.
The search box looks everywhere by default. To be precise, it does a case-insensitive substring match on the database fields headline,
article,
uri,
postedat,
via,
and tag
. Searching for one of those field names followed by a colon (e.g. headline:research
) will search in only that field.
Sorry, no multi-word or wildcard matching... yet.
When searching, you will by default see all of your results on one page. When you’re not searching, you’ll see only the 40 most recent posts. You can always see all posts by adding ?n=all to the URI. Use ?n=7 for the last 7, and so on.
You can see when something was posted, and what tags it's filed under, by hovering over its headline. Use ?since for everything posted after a given date.
If you have cookies enabled, see only the posts that are new since your last visit with ?freshonly, or just highlight the new stuff without hiding the old stuff by using ?markfresh. Naturally, these can all be mixed and matched at will. Want to know more? Ask, or check the PHP source and the PostgreSQL schema that feeds it.
Whew. Confused yet? Don't panic. Unless you come looking for something I posted years ago and you don’t remember any keywords for it, you'll probably never need to touch any of the query strings. But if you do, they're ready for you. If you can't bear to miss even a single exciting update!, you’ll be wanting the RSS feed.
The concept, implementation, and posting philosophy for Oddry has been heavily influenced by Charlie Vruba
Loyd’s fine link feed If and Only If. Major portions of the code for Oddry came directly from Iff, and many of the links I post here come indirectly from directions in which Vruba first pointed me. The in-post formatting is handled by Catgut, a spiffy lightweight PHP markdown engine by Panharmonicon. The prototype for the Atom feed came from Joshua Coats's excellent Scientifer.
You're welcome to use the links in Oddry for any purpose short of wholesale repackaging; credit’s nice but not necessary. Help yourself to the source, but please do give me credit for that.