Sidingsound

One reason this blog has been a bit quiet for a couple of weeks, is that I’m recording again… only this time, I’m helping a promising new composer: my wife

Joy is a gifted classically-trained pianist, but until recently she has only composed occasionally. Suddenly, she has become a new music-making machine, and as the nearest person at hand with a project recording studio and arranging experience, hubby here has leapt into action as co-producer, session musician and engineer on a brace of new demos!

Once we’ve got these pieces to a certain stage, I’m hoping to lay down the remaining tracks for the Christmas mini-album we’ve been working on sporadically since the summer, and get that mixed in time to fly into friends’ and families’ festive stockings.

So, fear not if things seem a bit quiet on the blog front, but remember that I’m rather more active on Twitter and other social networks, and you can keep up with those via my Lifestream page.

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…

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

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

A very quick note (as I’m entering this on the mobile via predictive text input!) to say that the Sidingsound e-mail addresses should be back to normal now, for those who know them.

Users of mobile devices may also like to know that they can now visit the usual URL for this blog, and get a mobile-friendly version served up for them. (WordPress rules )

Posted by Wordmobi

Just in case anyone’s interested: the switchover of the sidingsound.co.uk domain name seems to have percolated through the DNS system, as I’ve just been able to update the FeedBurner RSS feed to point to the new one. (It didn’t work before now, as FeedBurner reported it couldn’t find the WordPress RSS feed, even though the feed was accessible from where I was.)

I haven’t set up our e-mail addresses yet, as I’m awaiting access to my site’s control panel; therefore, any e-mails to our ’sidingsound.co.uk’ addresses will probably be bouncing at present. Apologies for any inconvenience caused, and I’ll get this sorted as soon as I can.

At around midday today, I updated the nameservers for sidingsound.co.uk to point to my new Web/e-mail host. This means that if you’re reading this on the 7th July 2009, the nameserver change has percolated through to your corner of the Internet, and in all likelihood you’ve visited the Sidingsound home page directly.

Things may be a little ‘untidy’ for a few days while I get a few more things set up. I haven’t been able to configure our e-mail addresses yet, but will do this as soon as possible; hopefully there won’t be any messages going astray in the meantime (!).

Also, if you haven’t updated your RSS/Atom feed from the Blogger site yet (as I suggested you do in a post from last week), then you’ll need to re-point your feed reader to either the WordPress direct RSS URL, or (preferably) the FeedBurner one, which I’ll update as soon as the DNS changes have reached FeedBurner’s systems. Shortly, I’ll put up a “dummy” Atom feed at the location of the old Blogger pages, to tell anyone still using it that they need to update their feed details.

I still have to go through the blog posts I imported from Blogger, and check/correct any links pointing to other old blog posts. It may take a little time, as I have rather a lot else to do in my day (!), but I will get around to it, I promise!

In the meantime, I’ll be adding new content and features here in the coming days and weeks, so please come back every now and then and see what’s appeared. Oh, and for anyone interested: this post was entered and posted entirely using WordMobi on my Nokia N95 (with a Bluetooth keyboard; there’s no way I was going to type all this in using predictive text!). The shape of things to come?

Posted by Wordmobi