Sidingsound

Before we dive into the Christmas festivities head-on, I’d just like to take the opportunity to wish you a very happy Christmas (or whatever you may happen to celebrate at this time of year (have to say that ).

Apologies for not posting here that often in recent weeks; I’ll try and write more here as long as time allows, but if somehow you’re desperate to read more of my jottings, you can keep an eye on my “lifestream” page (which collects together my Twitter feed and other online activities), as well as Eee 701 Planetoid, my blog dedicated to my Asus Eee 701 ‘netbook’.

Have a great holiday, and I hope I’ll get back here before the New Year

Just to let you know that I’m going to try switching the automatic “lifestream digest” posts to a weekly schedule for a bit. I feel the daily digests are clogging up the blog (or at least, they look to me as if they are), and I’d like to find out if weekly updates would work “better” (whatever that may mean).

As always, please let me know via the comments (or the “contact” page, if you prefer) if you think one or the other approach works best for you. You can also follow my Twitter feed for other updates, and contact me via that route.

In the meantime: thanks for reading!

As you may have noticed, I’ve been trialling the ‘digest’ feature of the WordPress Lifestream plugin this week. This creates a new blog post at a chosen interval (I went for ‘daily’), containing my various submissions to other sites during that period.

In short: it’s a great feature, but I’m not completely sure it works for me. I don’t mean ‘works’ in the technical sense—I have no complaints at all on that front—but more in the area of how it interacts with the blog.

Basically, I post quite a bit more to (for example) my Twitter and Delicious accounts than I do to the blog, mainly because a blog post takes longer to formulate and write than a submission to the above sites. If on average, I only manage one blog post every few days, and the automatic daily lifestream digest gets published every day, then the blog (to my eyes at least) becomes mostly a ‘relay’ for my non-blog online activities, which I don’t feel entirely comfortable with.

More of a concern for me, is that I don’t want to clog up this site’s RSS feed with identikit lifestream posts, which might put off those who have been kind enough to express an interest in my witterings until now. So, where could I go from here?

One option I may try at the weekend—switching the digest to a weekly occurrence—could work. I have reservations about this too, not least that due to the amount I tend to post to my lifestream sites, each weekly digest would be a fairly hefty chunk of text. However, I think it’s worth testing, so after tonight’s daily digest, I will change the plugin option to ‘weekly’, and see what it turns out.

If that approach doesn’t ‘work’ for me, I may abandon the ‘digest’ feature altogether; however, that would not mean leaving the Lifestream plugin itself, which I have found a very useful part of this blog since I installed it a month or so ago.

Instead, I want to try some code that the plugin’s author has put forward, which I would add to the ’single post’ page template here. This would mean that if you bring up a page for an individual blog post, you would also see the lifestream entries for a period of time around when that post was published. I will need to experiment with this, but if it does the trick, I think it could replace the digests.

The only reason I can see for keeping the digest pages, is really for my own use—i.e. if I were to use the blog as an aggregator to collect all my online activities for archival purposes (say, with the WPTEX application). If I did this, I would want to find a way to retain the digests in the list of blog posts, but perhaps hide them from the home page and/or the RSS feed.

Well, there’s a lot to experiment with, I think—if you’d like to weigh in with your views, please feel free to comment below, and I’ll take your thoughts into account.

Thanks for bearing with me in the meantime

So, the August Bank Holiday has come and gone, and as we embark upon the final third of 2009, as if to mark the occasion, the British weather opened up with some pretty hefty showers this afternoon (and thankfully I was inside for most of them). Never mind: at least I got the grass cut yesterday when it was at least fairly quiet on the meteorological front…

Just a couple of items to report for today:

• Yesterday, Joy and I managed to get some work done on the Christmas CD project between us, as I’d hoped. During the day, Joy and Naomi took themselves off for a couple of hours, in which time I recorded some acoustic guitars and bass on “Joy To The World” (joining one existing electric dulcimer track, and accidentally wiping another ), and also played the same instruments to begin work on what I hope will be one of the centrepieces of the album (but don’t mind if I keep that under my proverbial hat a bit longer). Finally, to round off the afternoon, I fired up Logic and began another new track, “Silent Night”—recording some “voice” tracks to use later.
  Then, in the evening, Joy and I carried on working on this track—Joy recording the piano part into Logic, and me using the MIDI guitar to create organ, synth bass and a couple of vocoder parts (that’s why I needed the voice recordings I made earlier). I feel we have plenty more to do on these songs, but at this moment it feels as if we actually stand a chance of finishing this project in time for December… and then we can figure out what we’re going to do with it
• You may have noticed the Lifestream daily digest pages are publishing fine—I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to keep them, or perhaps move to a weekly version, so please feel free to comment on what you’d prefer. I’m also going to experiment with some code created by the Lifestream plugin’s author, which would add to a “single post” page on this blog, some entries from the Lifestream from around the time of the post. Exciting times…
• I am planning to return to last week’s post about the Nokia N900 (mainly, to answer some of the queries I myself posed), but I have to admit I am leaning away from considering the device as a phone upgrade to my venerable Nokia N95.
  It’s not that the N900 doesn’t look impressive—quite the reverse—but I’m mainly concerned that (a) T-Mobile UK is unlikely to stock it; (b) if they do, the cost of an upgrade is likely to be prohibitive and ongoing; (c) the N900 will not be a significant enough improvement for me over the N95 to justify ditching the latter; and (d) there just aren’t—and may never be—enough apps available for the N900 to do everything I’d like it to. Instead, I am thinking of keeping the N95 and looking for an “end-of-line” or refurbished older Linux “netbook” (such as an Asus Eee 701 or earlier Acer Aspire One), which would offer many of the same benefits (and others besides) for significantly less than the outlay for an N900. This all depends on many factors—finding such a machine, available funds, etc.—but for now I think the N900 is off the menu.

And no, I haven’t done any more work on the proposed “Music” page yet, but I will…

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

I noticed this morning that, as I promised the other day, late last night the Twitter Tools WordPress plugin generated its first weekly digest of my Twitter posts.

Looking at the output, the plugin “does what it says on the tin”, though I can’t help but feel that some refinement would help for the weekly digest function. At the very least, I think the date and time should be displayed next to each post—perhaps as the link text, instead of a ‘#’ symbol (which isn’t a great choice on the accessibility side of things anyway, in my view).

Certainly, I’d like to use WordPress, going forward, to archive my Twitter posts and hopefully integrate them more into the blog. I’m not sure that Twitter Tools in its present form, does this in quite the way that I have in mind (though to be fair, it’s a start). If anything, the Lifestream plugin is closer to the mark, though I don’t think my PHP skills are far enough advanced to modify it to my needs (mind you, I won’t know unless I try!).

Watch this space, as they say…

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

You may have noticed a new page link in the list at the top (next to “About me” and the others), named “Lifestream”. It’s something of a work in progress, but basically the page is an “at-a-glance” aggregation of the various contributions I make to other Web services—my Twitter feed, Flickr photos, YouTube videos and others—all arranged in chronological order.

I’ve tried setting up a ” lifestream” before, via my page at Tumblr, but for some reason I was never really satisfied with the results—probably largely due to the Tumblr template system, which I found quite hard to customise to my satisfaction.

Thankfully, I find the WordPress template system rather easier to work with, and even better, David Cramer has taken most of the “donkey-work” out of setting up a “lifestream” on a WordPress blog, thanks to his WP Lifestream plugin, which I have used to set up the new page here.

The Sidingsound lifestream is currently set up to display the most recent 200 items it collects from the various services I contribute to. The majority of the items there will most likely be Twitter posts, but there will be others if you keep reading

I’d like to figure out how to do more with the WP Lifestream plugin—and top of my list would be a daily summary of the lifestream on the main page of the blog (as on David Cramer’s own site)—but for now I think the separate page is a good start. Thanks David for a great piece of work!

Posted by Wordmobi

For some time, I’ve been aware that I really should get around to making some kind of archive of my Twitter posts—not because of some misguided belief in their significance in human history, but because I’ve realised that they are the closest I have to keeping a daily diary.

There are a number of software tools out there, intended to extract your Twitter archive and give you an output file (usually CSV or XML) containing the posts and related data. The closest I’ve yet found to what I’ve been looking for is Tweetake, which I tried out earlier in the week.

Tweetake outputs a CSV file, containing not only each post, but practically everything else you could wish to have associated with each one (associated buddy icon URI , publication status, etc.). The main problem I encountered was that I only received my Twitter posts going back to last October (2008), when I was using the service for at least six months prior to that; however, this may be an issue with the Twitter API rather than Tweetake.

I don’t yet know what I will do with the posts once I have archived them, but I am certain that I want to ensure they are preserved in some way—who knows if Twitter might one day suffer a catastrophic data loss, and this account of my humdrum daily activities be lost for good? One thing is for sure: if I ever get around to writing my memoirs, I think it’ll be more like a “lifestream”, interspersed with Twitter posts, blog articles, Flickr/Twitpic photos and the like.

Perhaps the lifestream is the memoir of the future?

Posted by Wordmobi