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

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?)

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

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…

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!).

When we last left the question of how I could record and upload short audio clips from my N95, you may recall that I’d hit a snag: being, that the N95’s built-in voice recorder doesn’t save to MP3 format (only “full-fat” yet poor-quality WAV, or patent-encumbered and poorly-supported AMR), and that the few MP3-capable, third-party audio-recording apps for S60 3rd Edition (and I stress the word “few”), are either expensive, phone-quality audio, or both.

I could have a moan about this (i.e. “how come there is such a gaping hole in the range of software available for S60 devices?”), but instead, I prefer to reveal that I think I have hit upon a solution to audioblogging with the N95. It’s not ideal, because it involves an extra piece of equipment, but for now it will do the job.

The extra item in question, is my iRiver H320—a circa-2005 hard disk-based digital music player, which was referred to in one review as the “Soviet iPod” (due to its bulky nature and somewhat clunky interface), though it actually does quite a few things that even the latest iPods don’t. The relevant features here from that list are:

• it has a built-in microphone, or can take an external one;
• it records to MP3 format (at various bitrates); and
• it has a USB host function (also known as USB OTG).

That last feature, in case you wondered, means that one can connect a USB mass storage device (e.g. a USB flash or hard drive) to the H320, as if the latter were a PC. As the N95 can act as a mass storage device, it means I can transfer recordings made on the H320 over to the N95, and then upload the file(s) from the N95 as normal—all without needing another computer.

At least, that’s the theory, and I’ll need to try it out sometime, but this sounds like a solution to the problem of audioblogging from the N95, at least until someone wonderful comes up with an equivalent of Audacity for S60…

Who would’ve thought it—I go away on holiday with my family for a week, ready to photo/video/audio-blog the whole proceedings with my N95, and… well, knock me down with a pot of Mumbles’ legendary ice cream parlour’s finest, if I wasn’t so busy having fun with everyone that I didn’t have time to upload more than a couple of photos to Twitpic. (Incidentally, if you’re ever in the Swansea area and have a bit of a ’sweet tooth’, Joe’s ice cream parlour in Mumbles is an absolute must-visit. Just take our friends’ advice and go for the ‘plain’ vanilla one first, then work your way through the menu…)

So, how did it go? Well, we had a pretty good time, I think, topped off by my (impossible-odds-defying) unexpectedly meeting one of my favourite musician/composers in a folk music instrument store… oh, you mean how the N95 content uploads went? Well, pretty good overall, although I did encounter two “flies in the ointment” with the system:

• Perhaps a bit obvious, but even where you’re fortunate enough (as I am) to be on a 3G network with an “all you can eat” usage policy, that still doesn’t help if the area you’re going to has a low or variable signal strength. I’d almost forgotten the frustration (from my 56k modem-using days) of having a long upload fail almost at the end, because the sputtering mobile data connection gave out at the last minute; clearly, a good WiFi connection is useful here, if you can find one and (if appropriate) don’t mind paying for it.
• Pixelpipe seems to have its fair share of quirks when uploading the same content to multiple different content sites (which is basically the point of the service), using the Nokia Share Online utility on the N95. There’s probably a whole post I could write about these in detail, but in a nutshell, the items you fill out for a new NSO upload (tags, summary, etc.) don’t always appear where you would expect them, when you check your content sites later. For instance, when you upload a video to YouTube, your ’summary’ text doesn’t appear for the uploaded video—YouTube just shows the title of your video where the summary should be.
  To be fair, the problems are almost certainly as much (if not more) due to the content services’ application interfaces (i.e. how Pixelpipe interacts with them), but I have to keep a mental note of what works well and what doesn’t, so I can correct the glitches later.

Oh, and I’m pleased to report that I finally invested in a new 8Gb Sandisk Mobile Ultra MicroSD memory card for the N95 (four times more capacity than the previous card), so no more mad scrambles to find more storage space on long trips where I’m taking lots of video (and perhaps more room for the odd movie or three!).

Must go—I’m installing Xubuntu on an old PC for Naomi. Lots of fun…