Sidingsound

Web developer and musician Jeremy Keith has posted a heartfelt, even passionate eulogy for GeoCities, the pioneering Web site hosting outfit which was quietly put to sleep by its owner Yahoo!, earlier today.

A decade ago, I had my own plot of cyberspace on GeoCities (even that turn of phrase reads to me as quaintly 1990s as GeoCities itself). It was located at /SunsetStrip/Amphitheatre/5117/—the city/geographical metaphor extended to the thematic ‘areas’ of the site, where “SunsetStrip” was devoted to music, “WallStreet” to business, and so on.

“The Hall Of The Endless Knot” was a small site devoted to my big musical interest of the time: loop-based instrumental music of the type popularised by Terry Riley, Fripp and Eno, and the like. It served mostly as a host for a “virtual album” of my own recordings with electric guitar and loop sampler (a quite exciting idea in 1998), but I also found space to link to other resources along similar lines, including Looper’s Delight (which as you can see, long outlived my own effort, and interest in the subject, for that matter).

Suffice it to say, after a few years the “Hall” was gradually abandoned, and long before Geocities departed this world, I think my own site there did too. Actually, I have no idea whether my pages survived to the end, or were swept away in one of Yahoo!’s periodic remodellings of their new acquisition, and unless the Internet Archive fortuitiously kept a copy, I may never know.

There’s much more that could be said on the subject, but I’ll content myself with observing that the Web as a service known to most of the general public, has been in existence now for over fifteen years, and as time passes, we’re running up against issues of preservation more and more.

Over time, I myself have lost most of the personal Web sites I have built since discovering the Web in 1994. The loss of some of the material, doesn’t bother me greatly—some was downright embarrassing, and most not W3C-standards-compatible—but I do regret not making more effort to save my early blogging efforts from 2001-2, and later from 2004-5. I’m fairly sure some fragments survive somewhere, either on one of my large collection of CD-Rs (which at their age, for all I know, could be disintegrating into unreadable dust as I sit here), or perhaps in the aforementioned Internet Archive (Wayback Machine).

I’m thinking seriously about starting to compile my blogging, Twittering (well, the highlights, anyway), Twitpic-ing and similar online ephemera of mine, in “yearbooks”. I would want to create them in an electronic format which could be easily read/recovered in a couple of decades’ time (or more), which to my mind means LATEX or ODT (OpenDocument), and would also think of having a copy or two printed, in the hope that the contents might be of interest to future generations. (Yes, it sounds pretentious, but who knows?)

Anyway, I have tangent-ed long enough. Farewell, GeoCities, and may a flight of sprites sing you to your rest.

(Update (11pm): Oh wow… the Wayback Machine has a 1999 cache of the “Hall”… now, how can I easily save myself a copy before that vanishes?)

The title here is a bit of an in-joke—as you probably saw if you came in via my Twitter feed, new posts here are prefixed automatically with the words “New blog post: [title]” (work it out ).However, it is actually accurate in this case, as this post really does concern a new blog, that I’ve just set up on wordpress.com.

Eee 701 Planetoid is aptly named, being (a) a “satellite” of the Sidingsound blog, and (b) devoted entirely to my latest acquisition: an Asus Eee PC 701 “netbook” computer, and my various activities with it. I’ll be using “E7P” almost like a running diary of my “Eeexploits” (sorry), with ‘hacks”, fixes, useful apps, tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way, which I think might help other owners of this small but perfectly-formed machine, to get the most out of it.

I’ve posted at the Planetoid for the first time, with a couple of initial impressions I had of the Eee, and there will be a good few more over the coming days as I get to grips with the computer and start tweaking it to my requirements. Whilst I don’t intend to cross-post between the blogs that often, I’ll add Planetoid to the “lifestream” page shortly, so you can see when updates are posted there. (My Twitter page will also be updated with new Planetoid posts, though I still have to find out how to get wordpress.com to let me use bit.ly for short URLs, so I can find out how many visitors use them.)

So, jet on over to Eee 701 Planetoid and take a look, and I hope you enjoy your stay

Steve Litchfield, the mobile technology journalist and creator/presenter of The Phones Show, made a somewhat poignant comment on his Twitter feed a few days back:

Kind of sad that in 2009, I choose my smartphone based on the premise of “Which one sucks the least” 8-(

I replied via Twitter that the net effect of finding out about the smartphones currently on the market, has been to strengthen my inclination to hang onto my venerable Nokia N95 “classic” until it falls utterly to pieces, expires in a puff of smoke or otherwise “goes to join the choir invisible”. (Obviously, I expressed that within the 140 characters allowed, but you catch my drift )

Whilst it’s no secret that I like my gadgets, I don’t feel the need to ensure that they are the “latest, greatest and up-to-datest”—put simply, if they do what I want them to do, they could look like a potato or run on clockwork as far as I care. The N95 is a case in point: it does many things, it does most of them very well, it is still working fine, the firmware (operating software) is now mature and reliable, and I am genuinely happy with it (and yes, I have watched the competition closely, as you’ll see).

I upgraded to my N95 in the summer of 2007, and whilst it has been superseded by seemingly countless models in the ensuing two years, there hasn’t been a single handset from any manufacturer in my view, which has matched the range of features (and competency at them) which the N95 offers, for a price which doesn’t leave me glancing nervously at the monthly household budget.

Oh, there have been a couple of phones which “came close”, and to name but three:

• the Nokia N82 offered most of the same features as the N95, and added a xenon flash to make it possibly the most capable cameraphone on the market;
• the Samsung i8910 packs HD (720p) video recording and a great screen, but is expensive and only available in the UK on Orange, who apparently “could’ve done better” with the software; and
• the new Nokia N900 “internet tablet” looks great, but again the price is likely to be eye-watering, and we’ll have to see if my network offers it (as I don’t want to switch).

When it comes down to basics, though: quite simply, I’m generally content with my N95, and even more so with the monthly tariff I’m on with my network, which is now really quite modest whilst suiting my needs nicely.

Of course, there’s the question of what I’d do if my N95 failed, broke beyond repair, suffered some nasty accident (dropped in the toilet, fell in a cement mixer, etc.), and I had to replace it. Assuming I couldn’t get a replacement N95 without going on eBay or the like, and I wanted a new phone, there’s only really one handset which I think would offer me similar features (though not all of them) at a fairly low cost, and that’s the Nokia E75. I would be sacrificing two megapixels of camera resolution (and the Carl Zeiss lens) and video editor of the N95, but I would be gaining a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and USB charging (and possibly more), and retaining many of the N95 features I use.

I don’t know if my network would offer the E75 at the time I would “need” it, or if there will be a better alternative by that stage. However, I’m hoping that my N95 has at least a year or two more in it, so I can make the most of possibly the best all-round smartphone Nokia has ever produced. And nearly three years on from its introduction, I think that’s no small achievement.

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!

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…

• Enjoying the kind of afternoon that it's actually quite hard to tweet about, mainly because almost nothing is going on. Which is fine by me. #
• With Naomi at the playground, determined to make the most of this time before she starts getting into High School Musical (or whatever). #
• Wondering if you wonderful 'tweeps' are all having a Sunday afternoon nap, and whether I should be trying that myself. #
• How many 'twibbons' is it possible to assign to a Twitter avatar at once, and who holds the record for the avatar with the most additions? #
• Just back from "Harry Potter" no. 6 – they did a fine job of adapting it, but did JK approve of the part not in the novel (Burrow attack)? #
• Back to something approaching normality – at least it was a good wool off. #
• Hang on – "good wool off"? Dratted predictive text – of course, it should have read "good WEEK off". Ah, it can only get better from here. #
• Lunching, and about to send out the odd e-mail, tweet, etc. while I can. Might fit in a stroll around the block too. Wow, I'm active. #
• We're just back from some twilight blackberry-hunting – I think the bushes in our area must be a variety that ripens later than others. #
• A wonderful sunny start to the day – the more the better, if it helps the blackberries ripen… that sounds like a quote from Alan Bennett. #
• Would rather like to know how large Nokia's rumoured "Rover" 3G-enabled Internet tablet is, and if T-Mobile UK will carry it. Looks great. #
• A local musc store has (gasp) a #dulcimer in stock. Tried it; not too bad for an "Ozark", and definitely better than nothing (the usual). #
• OH: "Daddy, I made the soap all soapy…" (I think she was referring to a liquid soap bottle.) #
• Did some more recording on a track for our Christmas (!) CD project last night. Want to do as much as possible now before we get too busy. #
• Wish I knew why I feel so dozy this morning – I thought I slept quite well last night. Ah well; to the day. #
• I held the chicken in the air, but my nose was too small for the deckchair. #lists (Baffled? search "Spitting Image chicken song") #
• Oh sorry – I've just 'got' the point of the #lists Twitter meme. Back in a mo'… #
• Just said goodbye to a French friend, so I can cross that off my 'adieu' list. #lists #
• "It is a folly to expect an open door to remain open forever." – Robert Fripp #quotes #
• At a "bring a book" evening with friends. Suspect I'll win the "highbrow award" of the evening (Peter Ostwald's biog of Glenn Gould). #
• "7 Reasons To Switch To Windows 7", eh? OK: (1) It's not Vista. (2) Er… (3) …that's it… oh, just install Ubuntu or get a Mac, eh? #
• Made extra-special effort to trim down the 54 RSS feeds I subscribed to in Google Reader. Now down to… er, 52. #
• Was that sleet I saw outside the window for a moment just there, or just very, very light rain which sort of floats a bit as it comes down? #
• I wonder if I'm known in the workplace, as "that guy who uses a keyboard with his mobile phone"? No-one's really asked about it before. #
• That's 3 nonsense spams I've had via my Wordpress blog's contact form in two days. If I can't reason with these dolts, can I stop them? #
• Setting off for an afternoon out with the ladies ( #
• The ladies in question being my lovely wife and daughter, naturally ( that's not the first time I've pressed "Send" in TweetS60 by mistake). #
• That's one thing I'd change in TweetS60: the right softkey is configured to "Send", where normally one would expect "Cancel" (d'oh!). #
• I can honestly say today is the first time I have ever seen a vulture sneeze. #
• In case my last tweet needs decrypting (i.e. sneezing vultures): we're at a wildlife park for the afternoon. #

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 ‘head-up’ to let you know of a new feature I’ll be testing out on the blog from this Saturday: a weekly digest of my Twitter posts (tweets) from the previous seven days.

Made possible by the Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress, the digests will be as much for archival purposes as anything else, but it can also be seen as an adjunct to my ‘lifestream‘ page, and a way of integrating my Twitterings into this blog. I don’t know how well this will work, but hope you’ll at least bear with me whilst I’m trying it out (and perhaps even find it useful!).

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