Adding Facebook’s link excerpt functionality to WordPress

One of the things that makes me more prone to update Facebook rather than my blog is the ease that Facebook’s user interface provides for quickly adding a link and a comment to that link. I click on the “link” box and my browser automatically loads an excerpt from the link’s page, including thumbnails from that page. I can add my commentary on the link in a few seconds and publish it to my Facebook wall.

Does anyone know if there is a WordPress plugin that implements link excerpting the way Facebook does? I often see interesting webpages and simply want to quickly share them without hassling with a WordPress editor to do so.

I’ve found plenty of plugins that implement some Facebook-ish functionality but nothing that does this exact thing. Evermore comes closest, but it excerpts one’s own blog posts, rather than something to which one is linking.

Let me know if anyone finds anything.

Update 21 June 2010: WordPress has this built in and I just now found it out. Hurray!

NBC 17 interview on Club Envy

I was interviewed by NBC 17 on an East Raleigh club with a troubled history. Club Envy was the scene of two shootings early Monday morning.

My interview ran during last evening’s news and the story can be found here.

Thanks to Justin Moss of NBC 17 for the great reporting!

After a shooting at Envy nightclub in Raleigh on Monday, there are growing calls for the business to be shut down.

“The neighbors have put up with this for years and they’ve had enough,” said Mark Turner, Chair of the Raleigh’s East Citizens Advisory Council.
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BP gulf oil spill

I’ve been watching the live feed of the BP oil spill tonight and becoming very depressed. Those submersibles seem no match for the fury of the raging gusher. It makes me think that I’m only marginally less capable of plugging the leak than BP is.

Some experts estimate 39 million gallons have spilled at this point, with little chance of stopping it soon. Frankly I wonder when this leak will ever be brought under control.

The Gulf will never be the same in my lifetime, sad to say. If ever.

Sen. Hoyle tries to block municipal internet

Sen. David Hoyle (D-Gaston)

Remember the battles against the big telecoms in the state to keep the cities’ right to own and operate their own Internet service? It’s time for round three, courtesy of Sen. David Hoyle (D-Gaston). He’s pushing a bill, S.1209 (the so-called “No Nonvoted Debt for Competing System” Act), that will hamstring North Carolina municipal Internet projects into using only general obligation bonds. Not only will this hurt municipal Internet projects, it will prevent initiatives such as Google’s 1 Gb fiber Internet. Bye bye, Google Fiber!

Previous attempts by Time Warner Cable, AT&T, CenturyLink (Embarq), and others tried to make the case that municipal Internet should not use taxpayer money. Now they’re saying these systems should use only taxpayer money, not the revenue bonds that they currently use. I think it shows their real motive is to block competition, sewing up Internet for themselves. With governments sidelined, they will be free to impose caps on Internet service, killing competition from video services such as NetFlix. The public loses.
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Raleigh Speedway

Raleigh Speedway in 1965

Did you know Raleigh once had its own NASCAR track? It’s true, though you’d never know it today. The site is now a quiet industrial park that sits next to an equally quiet neighborhood north of the Raleigh Beltline. Back in the 1950s, though, the air was filled with smoke and the sound of revving engines at this track once located a mile outside the city limits.

Raleigh Speedway opened in 1952 as the Southland Speedway (or the Dixie Speedway), when it hosted an IndyCar event. It went on to host major NASCAR events, including Grand National events every Fourth of July. Raleigh Speedway was notable in that it was the first track NASCAR sanctioned for night races.
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Triathlete!

This morning Kelly achieved a goal she’d been working on for months: she completed a triathlon! She raced in the Ramblin’ Rose triathlon at the Baileywick YMCA, in the pouring rain I might add. Her parents drove down to see her and we and the Battaglias cheered her on every time she passed us.

It was great watching her do this. Inspiring, even. I suppose there’s nothing stopping me from doing something similar.

Cheap Thoughts: funding highways through tolls

My friend Billy posed a question the other day that got me thinking. I was surprised at how such a simple question could set off an hour’s worth of pondering. His question was this: would you be willing to trade the federal taxes on gasoline in exchange for paying tolls on every interstate highway?

My first reaction was to think well, who would want to pay tolls all the time? Then I thought, wait a minute – why should everyone play for highway construction and maintenance if only some drivers use it? This led to me to conclude that if highways all had tolls, drivers would be encouraged to make more local trips.

Since the opening of the I-540 Outer Loop around Raleigh I’ve been thinking about the problem of sprawl. Traffic engineers will tell you that new roads don’t solve traffic problems: they just shift it to another place. And it’s true. If 50,000 vehicles get on a highway all 50,000 are going to get off somewhere. The traffic jam is simply shifted. The Outer Loop caught my attention because its opening encouraged lots of development where there was none before, causing sprawl and stretching the limits of vital city services.
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Carefree Highway

Carefree Highway
Gordon Lightfoot

Picking up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream
I wonder how the old folks are tonight
Her name was Ann and I’ll be damned if I recall her face
She left me not knowing what to do

Carefree highway, let me slip away on you
Carefree highway, you seen better days
The morning after blues from my head down to my shoes
Carefree highway, let me slip away, slip away on you

Turning back the pages to the times I love best
I wonder if she’ll ever do the same
Now the thing that I call living is just being satisfied
With knowing I got no one left to blame
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