Predicting the future
From the Newark Daily Advocate on March 25, 1893:
Every person of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of books that are not worth reading, but it is true of the books that are.
All this I take to be the result of an intellectual affranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many books printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable.
If you replace book with blog, this chap has the current state of play down to a tee. Even down to the realisation that not everyone writing something is worth reading, but also that there are so many good writers that you just can't keep up.
This totally mirrors my online reading habits at the moment. I've gone from a huge selection of websites in my rss reader to a very select few. Additionally the frequency with which I check them has dropped from checking every day to maybe once a week or fortnight. Mainly I think I have Twitter to thank for this. By selecting the right people to follow I can quickly dip into any breaking industry news or new techniques as it's guaranteed at least one of those people will tweet it. The remainder of the posts in my rss feed can now be saved for later as I know they are unlikely to be time-sensitive. Ironically, as the time I have to catch up on these posts tends to be when I'm away from my computer, I publish them into slim books (via Lulu and only for my use), but at least I know these writings are worth reading.
Posted: Mon 18 May 2009 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;
Building a blog with Flickr
About a year ago I became the proud owner of a 1979 MGB GT and began restoring it. I’d been thinking about setting up a blog about the process for a while and have finally got around to it. Luckily, over the past few months I’d been pretty good at taking photographs to document it all and had uploaded them to Flickr.
Now, I’ve used Expression Engine before and this was my first thought when I sat down to put my MG blog together. However it did seem a bit of overkill for what I wanted and I’d been there, done that and wanted to try something a bit different.
As I’d been uploading all my MG photos to Flickr and knowing that their photo description field allows a limited but totally sufficient set of html tags coupled with a nice API (even though it’s not RESTful), I decided to try using Flickr as a blog engine.
Before I go on, take a quick look at the result: IncaYellow.com.
The Flickr API is really pretty nice to work with. However, it can be a touch slow so I added in a bit of server-side caching to save visitors having to wait too long. For example, this is pulling in the individual photo information with a little bit of simple caching:
function getPhotoInfo($p) {
// build the API URL to call
$params = array(
'api_key' => 'YOUR_API_KEY',
'method' => 'flickr.photos.getInfo',
'photo_id' => $p,
);
$encoded_params = array();
foreach ($params as $k => $v){
$encoded_params[] = urlencode($k).'='.urlencode($v);
}
//call the API and decode the response
$flickrurl = "http://api.flickr.com/services/rest/?".implode('&', $encoded_params);
//set cache options
$cachefile = 'PATH_TO_CACHE_FOLDER'.$p.'photoData.xml';
$cachetimelimit = ((60 * 60) * 24); //day
//use the cache if newer than $cachetimelimit
if (file_exists($cachefile) && time() - $cachetimelimit < filemtime($cachefile)) {
$xml = file_get_contents($cachefile, true);
} else {
//get the data and save to the cache
$xml = file_get_contents($flickrurl);
// Cache the output to a file
$fp = fopen($cachefile, 'w');
fwrite($fp, $xml);
fclose($fp);
}
//dump the xml in a variable
if ( $xml ) {
$theStuff = simplexml_load_string($xml);
}
return $theStuff;
}
You can then parse the resulting xml file to pull out the required info. Using a couple of other Flickr API methods and the Delicious API meant I could pretty much reproduce a full-on blog, complete with archives and tag pages.
Now obviously this wouldn’t suit most blogs, but I knew that my posts would be pretty short and always be accompanied by a photo, so I was set.
There are a few enhancements I’ve got in mind for the next few weeks. The main one is being able to add more than one photo for a given post, especially for those more tricky mechanical jobs. This seems like a perfect opportunity to use machine tags to relate photos to each other and by adding something like:
incayellow:post:PHOTOIDto a photo, I could pull in all the other photos to do with that job. Comments are another nice-to-have, so I’ll be building that in too. I’ll also be tweaking the caching timing over time to find the optimal period to keep data for (it’d be nice to have the cache refresh for new posts). The other thing I just haven’t got around to yet is an RSS feed. I could just use the Flickr RSS feed, but that just seems lazy, so I’ll most likely roll my own. Also on the horizon is a 404 page, just because I think you should always have one.
Posted: Thu 20 Nov 2008 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;Personal ;
Podcasts
My commute means I’m in my car for a good 2 hours a day when I’m in the office, making it an ideal time to catch up on some podcasts. I find that they are ideal for the journey to work as they provide a good transition between home and the office. Sound quality on all of these is great, though with some of the shows where an interview is conducted via Skype or similar the interviewee’s volume could do with raising a touch.
I’ve now got a solid few feeds which throw up enough to keep me occupied.
Boagworld
Paul Boag from Headscape produces a pretty regular podcast aimed at the beginner developer and managers. Don’t let this put out off if you don’t count yourself as either of these as Paul covers a wide range of topics and there will generally be something to pique your interest.
dl.tv
The only one I don’t listen to on the move as it’s a video. Patrick Norton and Robert Heron cover all things gadetry from HD tvs to Vista to digital French rabbits. I’m constantly amazed by the knowledge displayed by these two.
Edgework
A great series of interviews from Brian Oberkirch with some of the web luminaries such as Ryan Carson, Jason Fried and Jeff Veen to note a few recent ones.
Live from the 101
Bryan Veloso of Avalonstar and Dan Rubin of Superfluous Banter team up to deliver a great podcast. This normally sounds a lot like a chat over a cup of coffee between two mates which makes it fantastic listening.
The Web 2.0 Show
Dont let the title of this one put you off, it was named way before the whole O’Reilly thing. Pretty irregular but a good listen as they have a good interview each episode.
Vitamin
The lovely people over at Carson post their interviews as audio files as well as a full transcript. Again great interviews with people like Dan Cederholm of Simplebits and Kevin Rose of Digg.
What’s New Now
From the same stable as dl.tv this is a general round-up of all recent technology news
What’s good about all these are that the personalities of the interviewers really comes across in the audio format, meaning that even if all of them talked to the same person it would result in quite different discussions.
Posted: Mon 4 Dec 2006 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;
webcameron
Blogs made more in-roads into the political dictionary this week with the (Beta, of course) launch of webcameron, David Cameron’s new site. It’s only been up a couple of days so posts are still a little thin on the ground and I’m sure he’s still getting used to the idea. Design firm Head London have made a pretty good job of it all, and it fairly sings web 2.0. Everything is there - count them - Tag Cloud, Flickr feed, YouTube-style videos, guest blogs, widgets, PodCasts. Unfortunately there are a couple of non-Web2.0 code issues - a double doctype, inline styles and javascript in the hrefs, but it is light years ahead of what we would normally expect from a politician’s site.
The design is nice and clean, keeping away from the oh-so-obvious party-blue, and giving us a site it is actually pleasurable to be on. There is even a video clip of a conversation between (I assume) a guy from Head London and Mr Cameron regarding the sections of the site which haven’t launched and how they were going to deal with the high volume of comments. Now I would have thought that they would have given this a bit of thought beforehand, making sure that the early adopters weren’t left hanging waiting for replies. I’m sure there are several people employed full-time just moderating the comments, which all have to be approved before publication.
I hope that this site continues to be updated and isn’t left to be another fashion-following fad. Whether this is a good movement for politics itself I’m not sure - is it heading too far towards personality-led politics - but it does make the party more human, something which many large companies have already discovered.
Posted: Tue 3 Oct 2006 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;Standards ;
Dell Starts Blogging
Dell has launched a company blog called one2one. Unfortunately for Dell, instead of talking about things the customers want to hear about through such a interactive medium, they have chosen to use it to wave the corporate flag. Product launches and back-patting seem the order of the day. That is not what a blog is about - you can have those as nice features on your company site. Blogs are about revealing the people behind the company and maybe the behind-the-scenes work they do, the reasons the company does what it does.
For a company a large as Dell a blog is a golden opportunity to connect with their customers, find out what they want or what is causing them concern - much more so than any number of feedback questionnaires would. In a blog you can go back and ask for clarification and also be seen to be acting. Dell should be addressing customer support issues which seem to be the main complaint about them. Also they need to ensure their customers can find them - I could see no links to the blog from the main Dell site, even after using their search tool.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it is a huge thing that Dell have decided to start blogging, but I hope they manage to keep it away from the in-your-face marketing people. This could do more for their reputation than their marketing dept could imagine if done right.
Posted: Wed 12 Jul 2006 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;
BBC Blogging
The BBC has launched a new news blog called The Editors. After being initially disappointed that it wasn't an editorial viewpoint on the news (though that is dealt with elsewhere), I was pleasantly surprised. The Editors comes across as an in-depth Points of View, giving a personable face to a large corporation and covering the reasons behind some of the decisions the BBC makes which impact on their customers.
Informing customers is a great reason for a company publishing a blog, especially one as large and as public as the BBC. They've also ensured that they have gathered staff from the web, TV and radio, giving a wide base of topics, each with their own RSS feed.
Posted: Mon 26 Jun 2006 ~ filed under Blogs and Blogging ;