Sidingsound

It’s been a little quiet here the past week or two—partly due to general busy-ness, but also because I’ve been writing posts for Eee 701 Planetoid, the new blog I launched about a fortnight ago.

In case this is new, E7P is dedicated to my experiences with my Asus Eee PC 701 “netbook”, and amongst other things, I have just posted my first ’screencast’ of the machine ‘in action’. I add tips, tricks, howtos and links to useful resources as I go along, and I hope the blog will be of use to other 701 owners, who might be wondering how to squeeze a bit more out of the tiny laptop.

Anyway, feel free to wander on over, and in the meantime, I should be posting here again shortly…

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

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

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 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

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