First off, I should point out that if talk of computers, hardware, software and gadgets in general, leave you cold, go over your head or that sort of thing, this is probably not the page for you, as there’s going to be plenty enough of that here…

For those still around, welcome: this page is where I get to tell you about how this site works, how I feed it with stuff, and about the people and products without whom/which I’d be somewhat stuck trying to run the place.

Let’s start with probably the biggest thank-you on offer here: to the wonderful, wonderful folk who make and maintain WordPress, the blogging application which binds this site together. WordPress takes much of the “grunt-work” out of administering content, pulling in stuff from elsewhere and generally making it look good at the end, which means less time on building works and more on moving in the furniture and pictures. Thanks Matt and co!

(Incidentally, I’m using the “self-hosted” variant of WordPress, but if you’d like to try it out for free and just want everything already set up for you, drop by WordPress.com and pick yourself up a blog of your own. Tell them I sent you :-) )

The “theme” (look, feel, etc.) for the Sidingsound site, is much modified by myself from “WP glossy theme”, designed by Nick La of N.Design Studio.

If you spotted that the blog posts before the start of July 2009 seem a bit less integrated than those afterwards, I actually imported them from the previous incarnation of this blog, which was run by Blogger. I’ve been going through them and fixing links, tweaking here and there and generally trying to ensure that the old posts fit in, but you may still find some items which don’t work as intended. I’m working on it…

I registered and started using the “sidingsound.co.uk” domain in 2003, but despite the fact I’ve been blogging on and off since 2001, I haven’t been able to recover anything prior to me starting the Blogger incarnation of the blog in 2007. I think I did try and save some material, and maybe I’ll locate it sometime, but frankly I wouldn’t hold your breath!

This being the end of the 2000s and everything, this blog also links to (and sometimes brings in) content which I contribute to other Web sites:

A word about “Digital Ramyun”: it was originally intended to be my videoblog, but I don’t often make videos regularly enough for it to be called that, so it’s more of an “umbrella title” for my moving pictures. And “ramyun”? Well, the logo gives it away: it’s the Korean name for a dish of noodles in soup. (My wife’s Korean.)

One of my aims with putting this blog/site together, was that I wanted to be able to maintain as much of it as possible from my mobile phone (at time of writing, a Nokia N95, paired with an Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard). I was aiming to see how much I could do without needing any kind of desktop or laptop computer, so that if I was away from home I could just rely on the phone to take care of adding and administering content. It actually works quite well, and here’s how:

  • Many admin tasks in WordPress itself can be carried out on a Symbian-powered mobile device (like my N95) via Wordmobi, a free WordPress blogging application written in Python for S60. Not only can Wordmobi create, edit and delete blog posts, but it can also administer comments, categories and tags, meaning that as long as the blog is all set up properly, you should be able to keep the site running nicely using just a mobile.
  • I’ve been posting to my Twitter feed from my N95 since the spring of 2008 (long before it became fashionable ;-) ), so thanks to a WordPress plugin, the blog shows the last three ‘tweets’ in the page sidebar. (And in case anyone wonders, I use both Twibble and TweetS60 as the Twitter client on the phone.)
  • The N95 makes a pretty good stills and video camera, and the ‘classic’ model which I have, also includes a video-editing application (not massively powerful, but pretty good for a mobile phone, and “does the job”), so I can ready footage for the Web without needing a Mac/PC. If I’m within reach of home, or can wait until I get back, I’ll usually use iMovie 08 on our Apple iMac to assemble videos for “Digital Ramyun”, as obviously it produces more slick results than the N95 video editor.
  • For sending both photos and videos to the Web, I use one of the Web’s best-kept secrets, Pixelpipe, as a ‘conduit’ to send pics and vids straight from the N95 (using the Nokia Share Online app) to multiple sites. Once Pixelpipe receives the items, I’ve configured my account there so that it relays photos to my accounts at Flickr, Ovi and Picasa (the last two mainly for ‘backup’), and videos to YouTube, blip.tv and Flickr. If I want to, I can also send photos via Pixelpipe to TwitPic, and one day I’ll try out a couple of other services (of which Pixelpipe supports nearly one hundred at time of writing).

So, that’s an overview of how all the stuff on this site gets here. Hope you found it of interest, and I’ll add more here as and when things change.