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

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