WordPress Mobile Themes – Fantastic

I dont even know how I missed this, I usually read the blog articles on the WordPress.com Blog, but must have been looking the other way when this one was announced. I must have even enabled it yesterday when messing around in the settings, because I had ONE HELL of a surprise when I went to my WordPress.com blog on the iPod Touch and got the new cut down theme for iPhone, Android etc. This is significant, as more and more people browse the Internet from mobile devices it is good to be ready for them when they come, and boy are they coming.

There is more on the subject here on the WordPress blog. The stuff they keep on putting into the WordPress.com blog platform is amazing.

Posted via email from Pete Gilbert

why i stopped using flickr

I was an early adopter of the photo sharing site Flickr. At the time, it offered so many things; the ability to upload many images per month without fear of running out of space, an open platform for sharing your images with a stable URL, and the ability to post images to your blog. All fantastic stuff. And it also gave me the extra bonus of making me part of a community. Many communities in fact, as we got to start and join lots and lots of groups. And the ability to comment on people’s images and also see how many people had viewed your images and made them favourites. It was pretty good and for a while it was pretty perfect too. I paid to become a member and loved it. For me the highlight of the day was logging into Flickr to see who had “faved” your image or how many hits you had gotten overnight. But then after a year or two I began to realise that this yearning to see who had said what about my pictures had become somewhat of an obsession. It became the first thing that I opened in the morning, even before I read my email or the news. And that obsession carried on throughout the day, with me checking back again and again to see if I had more fans. I seemed to be more interested in what people thought of my pictures than I thought myself.

The next problem occurred for me when I realised that there is a “Flickr style”, a type of photo that gets “faved” again and again. You probably know the sort of photo that I am taking about – heavily saturated,  high res, or “Lomo” and cross processed. I found that I was unconsciously trying to make my photos conform to a certain style, just so I could get hits and faves. The moment I realised this I was horrified, but found by then that I was too addicted to stop. I really wanted to experiment with my photography, and whilst getting feedback is always a good thing, sometimes the rule of the mob isn’t what you need when you are trying things out that might not be so popular with everyone else. I had to stop this spiral, or I would forever go on making images to make other people, my peer group of online “friends”, happy, instead of making images and exploring avenues that were of interest to me.

The other two nails in the coffin. I realised that someone was stealing my photos and re-uploading them on Flickr and claiming them as their own. I soon put a stop to that but it left a nasty taste. The the cruncher. One morning I opened my mail inbox and there was a comment from somebody I had added as a friend a week or so before. It simply said “You are the worst photographer in the world”. That’s it. Nothing else. No reason why they thought that. Had I upset them? I checked back through my comments to them – nothing. I realised that it was someone’s idea of a joke, but I didn’t find it very funny.

The only way that I could see of breaking out of this was to stop using Flickr altogether. It was a tough decision, as I had lots of contacts from all over the world, and it seemed like I was losing all of that. But I had to stop. It was helped by the fact that I ran into financial problems and it was a frivolous extra  – still is. But stop I did. In fact, for a while I stopped taking photos altogether.

Now, on the other side, I am just starting to take photos again, and this time I am being much more careful. I am taking less photos. I am thinking about what images I want to make.  The images here are amongst the last few photos that I uploaded to Flickr before I stopped. Anything after this point will be very different.

beginning ruby by peter cooper

A couple of months ago I rather rashly announced that I wanted to learn Ruby in the New Year. For those of you who don’t know, Ruby is a free programming language, and it is used for all kinds of things, but most notably these days in the web framework, Ruby on Rails (ROR).  It was a stupid resolution, because although I have knowledge of other programming languages, such as VB and Python, I am not a natural programmer. I work in IT, and have for many years, and have coded a lot of stuff, but I’m an artist at heart and find programming hard work. But I wanted to find out more about ROR, and to do that I needed to learn Ruby first.

Well, here we are nearly three months later. How did I get on? Well, I’ve got to say it, after learning Python a few years back I was convinced that it would be the language of choice for me, the mother language that I would always reach for when I had a problem that I couldn’t solve any other way. Now, after reading Peter Cooper’s book Beginning Ruby, I wont go back to Python again.

What made me change my mind? It has got to do as much with the effectiveness and good design of the Ruby language itself as the brilliant way the Beginning Ruby book is written. I have read several "how to" and introduction to programming books over the years. My problem with them is this, they start out easy. Great. Then they get a little harder as they progress. Fine. Then BAM! They hit you with a barrage of unintelligible stuff, and you think, "How did we get to here?"

Well Beginning Ruby isn’t like that. Yes it starts out gentle, although it does introduce object oriented stuff very early, which it has to considering Ruby’s got it built in everywhere. But it doesn’t then dump you floundering about in a mire of complexity. It slowly ramps up, explaining and showing as we progress. I think it is the best "beginning" programming book out there. The examples are fresh and completely usable. And it doesn’t feel "dated" like some programming books I have read in the past. This book is a breath of fresh air in programming languages.

Now as I’ve said, that might be the outcome of having a modern, well designed language to work with, but I have started books and been to several web sites that have tried to explain Ruby to me before, but they didnt succeed. So I have to assume that it is down to the writing and explaining skills of Peter Cooper that I have to thank for my new excitement with Ruby. I haven’t quite finished the book yet, but I’m getting there. A recommended read.

Disclamier: I am not an avid fan of Ruby JUST because I live in a street called Ruby Street. But that is a cool coincidence.

community spirit on twitter

There is something starting to develop on Twitter that I don’t think I’ve seen on any other social network so far. There seems to be a real growing sense of community. Now, you might say so what? We’ve seen communities online before. Stretching right from the dial-up BBS’s, through to Facebook. That’s true, they were communities, but this doesn’t seem to me to be like anything I’ve seen previously. This community has a heart. It really does care, and its growing and evolving.

My first example is the best. Connie Reece has been tirelessly campaigning on Twitter for her friend, Susan Reynolds, who Connie has never actually met in person, who has breast cancer. Connie has started a fund to collect for Susan, the frozen pea fund, so named after the frozen peas that Susan was advised to put on her breast to stop the pain. To raise awareness of this Connie suggested that people change their avatars to include peas, to stimulate the conversation. This has been a great success, with people not only changing their pictures (or pea-vatars), but showing support by pledging money to the cause. And it’s more than a fad.

The most amazing thing is that most of these people have never met Susan Reynolds. They only know her either through Connie’s efforts or through Twitter or Susan’s Blog. They have been brought together by this new medium. It’s not like reading a blog, where people often use more formal language and are careful what they write. In a blog what people have said may have happened days or weeks before. Twitter seems more like IM, where people put more of themselves into the conversation. And as it’s spread out over time, you get to experience what people are saying in their time frame. It makes it all seem more real.

As a result the sense of belonging or knowing that person or group seems to be heightened. Its not even like in Facebook, where that seems to be a few hours or so behind reality. Twitter is more, now. And Facebook has all the Web 1.0 accoutrements such as banner ads and all those annoying pirate and werewolf apps. Twitter is cleaner, makes you feel closer. And that is what a community is all about. Feeling closer to the people you know and care about, and extending that community in open and honest ways.

So please show you support for Susan Reynolds and Connie Reece’s efforts to publicize this by visiting the site http://frozenpeafund.com and making a donation, or come onto Twitter and join in the global conversation and join our community. And send some Twitter love Connie’s way as well, she has been working, from my estimation, day and night to publicize this with no financial reward for her. Well done Connie. And good luck Susan and get well soon.

learning ruby

I have wanted to play with Ruby on Rails for a while, but always shyed away because of my lack of Ruby skills. I am determined to set this right, so I am going to spend some time learning Ruby. I have given myself until the 1st of January 2008 to get up to speed and feel comfortable with hacking around in it. I don’t intend to be an expert, just learn enough so that when I look at RoR I wont be totally lost. I have some basic programming skills. I created two versions UWE’s PC build system, mostly using VBScript and VB. I have also some Python experience and some basic PHP. I wouldn’t, however, describe myself as a programming diva. It’s all basic hacking and sticking code together. I have seen several online tutorials that look good, http://rubylearning.com/ by Satish Talim is one that I am looking at right now. There is also the Pragmatic Programmers Guide. And my Twitter friend Peter Cooper says that he has a book that he can recommend

windows live writer – again

I have re-installed Windows Live Writer. I have been around practically all of the blogging software out there and whilst I have a few favourites, there always seems to be some little function that isn’t there or some thing that doesn’t work.

I really like Flock, and the blogging functions are quite good. The bit that lets it down is the support for images. I tried ScribeFire for Firefox, and that too is very good, as long as I don’t try to post stuff to http://sbaweb.co.uk, the admin there shouts at me as it produces messy code. The image management in ScribeFire is better than in Flock. I tried Word 2007, but it sometimes forgets how to connect to my blog. It actually works very well for when you are blogging to SharePoint, but as I’m on WordPress here that doesn’t help. I even tried Google Docs, which allows you to write a document and then publish it to your blog as an article. That works really well, and even manages any images for you. The problem for me is the really stupid way it handles line wrapping, like, it can’t. And then there is the problem of it messing around with styles. You can’t paste text into it from another blog to quote with messing up the styles. Big problem when you want to blog about something. So although I really like the idea of having a centrally managed blog software, it’s not to be (yet).

Now, I tried Windows Live Writer before, and was impressed (eventually, after getting it installed), but it was always let down by its general beta state. It had rough edges. Well, I’ve been around all the houses and here I am back at Windows Live Writer again to see how it has developed now it is in final release. The installer seemed to be a bit insistent that I install all kinds of Windows Live branded stuff. If I was a novice I would probably have let it install all kinds of crap and set my start pages to Windows Live etc. Its really annoying that when I asked for the download for Windows Live Writer, it bundled in all those other packages too. Microsoft, please don’t do that.

After the install woes, however, it seems to be a much improved interface, and it connected to my blog with little problem. The interface is clean and very well laid out, like a mini word processor (the company DOES have some experience in these matters). Getting images into the page seems to be very easy, although this is the first post that I have tried so far. And the editing window reflects what you will see on the finished page.

I haven’t tried the plug-ins yet, but the list of available ones seems to be fairly comprehensive. I have also yet to see the code that this puppy puts out, to see if I can use it to post to http://sbaweb.co.uk without getting yelled at by Lawrence (sorry Loz) but I’m going to look at what is produced and will report back on long term findings – as usual if I can be bothered.

Death of email

Been reading a lot today on various blogs about how teenagers are shunning email and don’t see it as being relevant. It’s certainly true for my oldest one (he’s 19 now) he hasn’t checked his email for weeks, probably months. It’s not that he doesn’t spend any time online, far from it, he spends every possible waking moment online either chatting on IM or playing WOW or even Hells Gate London or whatever it’s called. But the one thing he doesn’t use is email. Email is just a way of getting an IM account to use to chat with. Email isn’t cool, it’s not even close. It’s boring, like writing an essay or something. Apparently.

So my experiences tie up with what I am reading around the blogs. Thomas Hawk has a fine article on this subject. As does James Robertson on Smalltalk Tidbits. People are turning away, slowly, from email. Hell, I even wrote an article about this a few months ago, Replacement for email. As people have said, it’s interesting that as older people are just getting into email, the young are turning away from it to social apps like Facebook and Twitter.

To make things feel even odder, today in work I was teaching a group of academics how to use SharePoint MOSS 2007. It was about half way through when I realised that they didn’t know what a blog was. Or a wiki. Or indeed what RSS was or how you could read RSS feeds, or what RSS feeds were. They knew about email. In universities we’ve had email a looong time, way before most people had it. But people in universities are not adverse to writing the odd essay! But all students know about Facebook and wikis and blogs.

We’ve recently has a lot of ex students (alumni) coming out of the woodwork and asking if they can keep their old UWE email account or have one of the new Microsoft Live UWE accounts. Our marketing people have asked us if we can provide emails for students for life. Why? It wasn’t so they can send emails. No. It’s so they can sign up for the UWE Facebook group and keep in touch with old mates from Uni. So now we have a social networking app controlling our corporate IT strategy! That is the power of social networking in action right there!

camelot! – no, wait, test from flock

Flock 0.9.0.1 is out, and it is now quite possibly far and away the best browser out there for built-in features, certainly the best for people who “socially network” and like to hang around web 2.0 sites and blog about their experiences. There might be slightly too much information to take in at one glance, but at least you have the choice what to use and what to turn off. All in all a really good product. Its a shame they don’t have the render engine out of Safari or Opera (if they did I’d be ecstatic) but that said it renders much better than IE. Check out Flock and see what you think, especially if you have a blog and write articles often or have Flickr and regularly upload pictures.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, browser, web,

sba ning thing

sba ning thing

I created a Ning? Whats a Ning? It’s a site (http://www.ning.com) that allows you to create your own social network sites. Social networking being the hhot thing out there I created a Ning site at http://sbaweb.ning.com to act as a backup and a focus for networking for the Southbank Bristol Arts organisation. Ning looks good, it has a wealth of features and crucially for the busy non-tchnical people who just need to get something up and running quickly it doesnt need you to be a web guru. They claim you can get a site up and running in minutes, although I guarantee that you will spend longer because its actually quite fun to play around with. If you do want to delve deeper they expose all of the source code to you, so if you do have more experience or you want to do something a little bit more you can get under the hood and customise. Ning has some pre-made widgets for you to try out, and even has a wizard to allow you to expose your ning content in other sites like Facebook. If you want to spend some money with them you can buy more storage and add your own domain name. Of course if you are serious about it then I recommend that you do buy the extras. All in all a good product. Invite your friends. We are at http://sbaweb.ning.com.

google maps broken

Actually I think it’s more of a bug as they’ve just introduced the new functionality. But according to Google maps there’s a fantastic property available in LA, which unfortunately has moved to just south of Birmingham, UK. Given that we’ve just had one of the dreariest and wettest summers ever here in the UK I am sure that the resident’s of LA will be none too happy.