Sidingsound

Just thought I’d mention a couple of minor changes going on at the blog:

• I’ve been experimenting with different ways to display my Twitter updates in the blog’s sidebar. So far, I’ve gone through two different dedicated WordPress plugins for this purpose, but have now settled on the Lifestream plugin, which until now I have only used on the Lifestream page itself.
  In short, I have replaced the old “Twitter” sidebar section with a new “Lifestream” one, which will show the five most recent updates I have made to my online accounts. Twitter will still be the most frequent, but now you will see updates from Delicious, YouTube, Flickr and others there as well. The Lifestream page will be unchanged as before, and will show the most recent one hundred updates (usually about one week’s-worth).
• The Lifestream plugin has recently been updated, and now includes the option to publish a daily or weekly “lifestream digest” post to the blog. I am going to try this out over the next few days; the new digest will replace the one I tested last week (generated by the Twitter Tools plugin), as long as it is an improvement over what came before. (The Lifestream digest doesn’t appear to have an option for which day of the week to publish the weekly digest, so I’ll have to see how that works out.)
• Yet another use of the Lifestream plugin (you can tell I’m keen on this one ) which I would like to implement, is to add it to the “single post” page, so that when you view a blog post, you will also see a selection of lifestream updates from around the time the post was published. The means to do this is currently being worked on by the plugin’s author, and once a workable method is developed, I’ll be keen to add it here.
• Yes, I know I haven’t set up the long-promised “Music” section yet—it’s on my “to do and really should do” list!

Anyway, as the August Bank Holiday approaches (and with it, the end of another somewhat soggy summer), I hope you have a good one, whatever the weather!

Posted by Wordmobi

One of the couple of items on my “should add to the blog sooner or later” list, is to develop the “Contact me” page a bit more—you know, so that people who would like to get in touch with me for genuine reasons, can actually do so.

No prizes for what’s mostly stalling forward progress (well, apart from the usual ‘lack of time’): spam. It’s one of the things you learn in “Building A Web Site 101″, that you never, if it is at all possible to avoid, place your e-mail address on a Web site without some form of obfuscation, unless you wish to spend the remaining lifespan of your e-mail address fighting off hordes of unwanted junk.

Oh yes, there are ways to mitigate against the problem, most notably Hivelogic’s Enkoder (this generates a scrambled, encrypted JavaScript version of your e-mail address which supposedly fends off the automatic “spider” scripts which harvest unprotected addresses off Web pages). I’ve used this in the past, and would do so again, but it seems to me that as long as you place an e-mail address on a public-facing Web page, there is the chance that somehow it will find its way into a spammer’s address list.

The present contact form on my blog allows visitors to send me messages without exposing the e-mail address which the form uses (at least, I hope that is the case), but even then, I have received gibberish messages from the form (three in the last two days alone). These are especially annoying for me, as they are seemingly random collections of alphanumeric characters (not other languages) with dodgy-looking URLs I would have to be seriously drugged to even consider following. (I wish I could ask these dolts politely to stop insulting my intelligence and wasting their time and my bandwidth, but of course it’s not costing them anything, and if just one fool follows a link and gets his PC “0wn3d” by every virus that can squeeze onto the hard drive, then it’s 1-0 to the spammers.)

Moreover, I’ve never added my home address, phone number(s) or any really personal information to any Web site of mine in the past fifteen years, and I’m not about to start now—if I want to give this information to someone, I’ll find a “one-to-one” way which is less likely to compromise the ‘defences’.

So, I have to be honest and say that I don’t think I’ll be adding a great deal more to the “contact” page at Sidingsound, at least for the time being. It’s not that I want to keep people at arm’s length (well, aside from the spammers, obviously), and if my intention was to cut myself off totally from two-way contact on the Internet, I wouldn’t be blogging (and certainly wouldn’t allow comments here, if you think about it). For example, I have public ways for people to interact with me online ( my Twitter account , to name but one), but whilst I’m often on Skype, I’ll tend to give my ID there only to people who ask for it, and/or I would like to be contacted by via that route.

In the meantime, if you would like to reach me, there’s always the comments feature on this blog, and the good old “Contact me” form, At least, until I get fed up with all the spam from it and close it down )

Posted by Wordmobi

(Updated later on the 21st August 2009 with a couple of links and nips/tucks; wasn’t quite happy with the post, but Wordmobi doesn’t allow me to submit posts to WordPress as drafts, as far as I know.)

A quick update on the weekend ahead: according to the friends we’re staying with, the area where we’ll be going may not have 3G network coverage (or at least not as much as I’m used to), and we won’t have any WiFi.

This means that whilst I should be able to get some Twitter and blog posts out (providing there’s at least GPRS or GSM data), I may have to wait a couple of days to upload any batches of photos (and more likely, any videos) I take while we’re away. Be sure to keep an eye on my Twitter feed and this blog for updates as I have them, and hopefully I’ll have more 3G access than I’m expecting to.

Posted by Wordmobi

A quick note while I have a few moments, just to remind readers not to be too ‘thrown’ at this point in time, if they see links, sidebar items, even colour schemes (maybe) moving around, changing, disappearing, etc. The blog is still new, and I haven’t quite got everything exactly as I want it yet, though you’ll be glad to hear that I feel like I’m “close”…

In particular, I’ve set up the beginnings of a “Contact” page (at this moment, it’s just a basic e-mail form), but I’ll add a few more items there as and when I feel reasonably sure I’m not going to get “spammed” from them!

I’m also hoping within the next couple of weeks, to start the “Music” page, which may well become a section in its own right, depending on how it grows. I’ve installed an MP3 player plugin, and am looking forward to trying it out—hopefully before long, you’ll get the chance as well.

Fear not—at some stage, things will settle down a bit more here

Posted by Wordmobi

It’s coming up for two weeks since I migrated my blog site across to a new host, and to a new blog ‘platform’ (WordPress). So far, I’d say I’ve managed to realise most of my early aims, which to a great extent revolved around creating a blog with tie-ins to the various multimedia services I send stuff to, and which as far as possible I could maintain from my Nokia N95 without needing a desktop or laptop.

Whilst I’ve got a fair amount of the ‘auto-update’ functionality working (insofar as I can send something to YouTube, Qik, Flickr, etc. and it’ll appear somewhere on this site automatically), there are still a couple of ‘holes’ which I hope I can work out how to fix:

• I haven’t yet found whether it’s possible for YouTube to post automatically to WordPress, when I upload a new video. YT can update Twitter and Facebook automatically, and you can set up a WordPress blog on your YouTube account, which gives you a “blog this” feature on a video’s page. However, I have yet to try YT’s mobile site to see if the “blog this” feature is present there; if not, it’s not easy to access the “full-fat” YT pages from a Nokia N95, so some kind of totally automatic feature for posting new YT videos to a WP blog upon upload, would be useful. I’m guessing it already exists, but just haven’t tracked it down yet.
• In a previous post, I referred to my search for an audio equivalent of YouTube—i.e. a Web service where I could upload short, impromptu voice recordings which would then be cross-posted to this blog. After I posted this here and on Twitter, someone from ipadio dropped me a line—this is the service which allows you to make a voice phone call, and have the audio from that call uploaded straight to the Web (they call this “phlogging”). Apparently, ipadio is working on allowing users to upload pre-recorded MP3 audio clips, which may address my primary concern with ipadio (the limited audio quality of a phone call), so I may well be giving their service a try shortly.

Otherwise, I feel I have more or less got the whole infrastructure to where I wanted it at this stage. Other future developments I have in mind are:

• a “music” section, where you’ll be able to listen to some of my recordings (probably via an embedded Flash music player at first);
• an expansion of the “lifestream” feature, so that each day on the main blog page will carry a summary of the day’s content from the lifestream;
• the “contact” page, which I know I haven’t implemented yet, but I have to make as sure as possible that I won’t expose myself to any more spam than I already get (no offence meant, incidentally )

Anyway, I think that’s enough to be going on with for the moment, wouldn’t you agree…?

Posted by Wordmobi

At around midday today, I updated the nameservers for sidingsound.co.uk to point to my new Web/e-mail host. This means that if you’re reading this on the 7th July 2009, the nameserver change has percolated through to your corner of the Internet, and in all likelihood you’ve visited the Sidingsound home page directly.

Things may be a little ‘untidy’ for a few days while I get a few more things set up. I haven’t been able to configure our e-mail addresses yet, but will do this as soon as possible; hopefully there won’t be any messages going astray in the meantime (!).

Also, if you haven’t updated your RSS/Atom feed from the Blogger site yet (as I suggested you do in a post from last week), then you’ll need to re-point your feed reader to either the WordPress direct RSS URL, or (preferably) the FeedBurner one, which I’ll update as soon as the DNS changes have reached FeedBurner’s systems. Shortly, I’ll put up a “dummy” Atom feed at the location of the old Blogger pages, to tell anyone still using it that they need to update their feed details.

I still have to go through the blog posts I imported from Blogger, and check/correct any links pointing to other old blog posts. It may take a little time, as I have rather a lot else to do in my day (!), but I will get around to it, I promise!

In the meantime, I’ll be adding new content and features here in the coming days and weeks, so please come back every now and then and see what’s appeared. Oh, and for anyone interested: this post was entered and posted entirely using WordMobi on my Nokia N95 (with a Bluetooth keyboard; there’s no way I was going to type all this in using predictive text!). The shape of things to come?

Posted by Wordmobi

Now I’ve confirmed that the mike is working—as it were—time for my first ‘proper’ post…

So, welcome to the Sidingsound blog—the latest in a medium-sized procession of attempts by myself to start (and more to the point, maintain) a written presence on the Web. I used to maintain a personal Web site regularly for a number of years, but getting married in 2002 (despite its many compensating benefits!) has meant a reduction in the amount of time spent in front of a monitor, in favour of giving well-deserved attention to my “real-world” family. All quite commendable

So, why start a new blog? Well, partly because it may give me the impetus to build on it to revamp the rest of the www.sidingsound.co.uk webspace, as I’ve been meaning to do for the past couple of years but didn’t get around to. Also, I thought people might be interested to find out more about (particularly) my home music recording setup and activities… and yes, there’s the small matter of my brother having just started his own (very fine) blog lately, so a little good-natured sibling competitiveness could be said to have come into it!

Hopefully, before long I will find the time to apply some metaphorical WD40 to my seized-up-for-lack-of-use CSS skills and give this blog a homegrown template, instead of the mighty-fine-but-generic Dave Shea one it’s sporting as I type this. In the meantime, here’s a taste of what’s likely to be appearing here in the near future:

• Reports on the recording I’m doing in the Sidingsound studio;
• Articles on the gear in the studio, for those interested in such things;
• Pieces on the music I’m currently grooving to (OK, cringeworthy expression, but you get the idea);
• Guitar-related items (or other instrumental, as appropriate);
• Other me-and-music-related stuff;
• The odd thing which doesn’t really fit any of the above…

And this being the era of Web 2.0 and all, you might see the occasional item inserted from our Flickr photoset, YouTube and the like. Finger on the pulse of the age, you know

Incidentally, I pledge that I will try my best to post here regularly, as I repeatedly promised and failed to do with this blog’s predecessor! I’m going to try the “little and often” approach, with a mix of short and longer pieces, and see how long I can keep that going.

Here goes…