blogging
WordCamp UK is coming 19th — 20th July
POSTED IN blogging, Conferences & Talks | TAGS : birminghamuk, wordcamp, wordpress 11 July 2008
If you’re interested in the super, open source, thingy WordPress — I hate to call it a blogging platform as you can do so much else too — you could do a lot worse than come to WordCamp UK next weekend. There are a host of talks, but it’ll be a great opportunity just to hang out with WP affictionardos and bloggers.
I’m planning on spending a lot of the weekend “broke out” around and about the venue, and I’ve organised a meet-up on the Friday and also a proper do (with a geeky quiz, prizes to be won) on the Saturday (I may even do some stand-up 
).
And a word from the sponsors…
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Practising what I preach
POSTED IN blogging, del.icio.us, good practice, microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : crossposting, del.icio.us, noise, site news, social media, twitter, wordpress 10 July 2008
Prompted by Mark Steadman‘s comment on one of my many blog posts on the evils of crossposting, I’ve turned off the tweet digests that were (to be honest) overwhelming the nonsense blog of mine that is /ramblings.
Mark said:
“What’s your opinion then of WordPress plugins – like the ones on your own site – that post a digest of your Twitter and del.icio.us activity each day? Thankfully you’re not the kind of guy to tweet that stuff, but isn’t that just the same kind of cross-posting?”
With delicious digests or link dumps I can see added value; the posts give time based (and theme based when you’ve been surfing around a subject) context. This can mean that they mean more when posted to a blog rather than as separate links.
That said if a blog does nothing but republish delicious links then it’s worthless.
The delicious feeds and links that you see on this site are carefully (as much as one does) chosen to be in context — and aren’t by any means everything I save. You could subscribe to my entire delicious feed, but unless you’re my mother or my psychiatrist I think you’d be bored (and my mother would be bored anyway). I wouldn’t advise anyone to subscribe to my delicious feed en masse — I use it for a wide variety of destinations (as well as to store links for myself); things tagged “work” come here, those tagged “birminghamuk” go to BiNS, I occasionally do link collections on a subject, and others links go to other places too. It’s just a mash of my surfing mind, not useful to others.
As for the Twitter digests posts, I can see the point of a post (for your own records as much as anything) but it needs to be carefully positioned so as not to swap the point of your blog. Of course I first set it up “because I could”, I don’t think I would these days if I hadn’t already.
In fact, I’ve turned it off and switched to archiving to my email, thanks Mark for making me think about that.
Got one!
POSTED IN blogging, social media 15 March 2008
I’ve been searching for the Holy Grail of social media crossposting – a Facebook status that is a tweet announcing a blog post auto-generated from del.icio.us links – and here is one:
I vow not to ‘crosspost’ with social media
POSTED IN blogging, good practice, microblogging, social media, twitter | TAGS : tumblr 10 March 2008
I will not use twitter, tumblr or my facebook news feed to announce a new blog post.
Who’s with me?
[EDIT] I also vow to keep twitter and Facebook statues separate. (Thanks Si, although that’s a harder one).
The reason is that I don’t want to contibute to the “background noise” I describe here.
Going mainstream
POSTED IN blogging | TAGS : my projects, website 29 February 2008
I was pleased to be asked, and am now one of the Birmingham Post‘s bloggers on its newly relaunched website. Despite the hallowed environs of the mainstream press it’s not a paid gig – so why am I doing it? And more to the point what am I doing in the Lifestyle section?
Adding another blog to write for wasn’t really the aim, hell I could start another in a second on any topic I wanted. there was, however, something exciting about writing for a different audience. The Post as a local broadsheet is quite an odd beast, one that I’ve admired but never really engaged with because of how poor their web-outing was (a man can only read so many papers without a commute). I’m guessing that the new site will introduce a fair number of people to blogs, people who– rightly – aren’t excited by the “a kind of online diary” thing that sections of the media still use.
So, Lifestyle? Well, I won’t be writing about alternative medicine, or shoes (except maybe the odd fantastic pair of pumps), I’m currently thinking that my aim here is to write more informed pieces about the stuff I normally go on about. Something halfway between here and BiNS, intelligent, modern, culture stuff with an interweb slant. I don’t intend to modify my style, or re-hash other stuff. The first post was a odd one, as it had to be written before the site was live, I’m not sure how reading the other blogs on the site will affect future stuff.
It’s also exciting that the people working on the Post, and the site, have really taken the internet to be something different to the paper. Joanna Geary was terrified of blogging only a couple of months ago, but she’s recruited and started off a whole host of bloggers for the section.
Oh, and they use Movable Type, something I’ve never had a go of before, which is nice.
This is what I’m reading in 2008
POSTED IN blogging | TAGS : broadcast., television 26 February 2008
I spent an enjoyable hour or so today talking about blogs in a way I hadn’t really considered before. A TV company are hoping to make a programme or programmes based around Reading (no not the Berkshire town) – and had for some reason asked me to contribute to a ‘taster’ version (I’m, guessing a short non-broadcast pilot to show commissioning types).
I knew it was aimed at children, so went through my Google Reader looking for blogs that might be relevant to kids – some animal nonsense, music and sport mainly – but really thought that I’d be trotting out the usual stuff about democracy, speed, obsessions, the usual “why do people blog?” stuff. Maybe in a slightly more simple way.
It turned out the way the programme is structured is to encourage people to read, and it doesn’t matter what (within some reason I suppose), and so after a very quick introduction I spent time reading from a few favourite blogs (Cute Overload, Oh and Flying Saucer) that might appeal to kids. And then saying “this is what I’m reading in 2008″.
It was an odd experience to think of blogs divorced, almost, from their context and as pieces of writing alone. The two more text based blogs stood up well, CO not such much – although it was fun to say “snorgling” to a TV camera – but I realised that I don’t think of blogs so much as pieces of writing – more as information.
Information that I can get quickly, information that I understand the context of, information from sources I either trust or know exactly how I don’t. There are blogs that I don’t have much interest in subject-wise, but enjoy the writing – Flying Saucer a case in point there – but they’re not what I immediately espouse as the value of the blog.
Just something I found interesting really, and I will ponder more on.
How local are you?
POSTED IN blogging, Conferences & Talks | TAGS : tagging 12 January 2008
I spend a very interesting and informative night at the first Birmingham Bloggers meet-up. It was interesting as the people who turned up were connected only in that they wrote (or really liked) blogs and they lived near enough to Birmingham.
So blogs and Birmingham was the main conversation that seemed to emerge. Which kind of alienates those that blog, but not about Brum – of course not all bloggers blog directly about their lives or the place that they live, most have an angle or a subject.
Everyone seemed interested in somehow improving the visibility of Brum blogging tho – to wit Dave decided to build Brum Search (based on Google), and over at nunovo there’s much talk of Rivers of Brum. There was also much general consensus over the use of “birminghamUK” as a more general tag – so I’ve expanded the scope of upyerbrum to bring through anything tagged that onto its front page (although only items tagged “upyerbrum” get automatically added to the digg-style voting pages).
Two point three update
POSTED IN blogging, social media | TAGS : blog, my projects, wordpress 29 September 2007
I’ve just spent an hour or two (Saturday morning would be the quietest time for traffic to my blogs) updating this blog, BiNS and The Kitten Channel to the new WordPress release 2.3. No major problems, but it is still squeaky bum time.
The Google sitemap generator plugin requires an upgrade to verion 3.0, and and plugins or themes that use the old catergories database tables directly (and not the recommended API) will fail. Unfortunately that, at least for the moment, includes the map function of the GeoMashup plugin I’ve been using on BiNS. I think I could fix it, but as it is well supported by the author I’ll wait for the official fix.
Haven’t noticed anything else wrong tho’, and the plugin update checker in the new version will be great.
Up your end – how to geotag your blog posts (and what you can do with the information)
POSTED IN blogging, geodata | TAGS : geotagging, my projects 23 September 2007
I’ve just let other people see my new project up your end, (amazing what popping a url in your facebook status can do) which is a little toy for geographically mapping Birmingham things on the interweb. It uses geotagging, and here’s a little explanation of how it works.
Other people’s feeds
Although some sites, such as Flickr, will pump out geotagged feeds they aren’t necessarily in the correct format for overlaying on a Google map (there are three competing geotag XML formats for a start). Luckily, the Location Extractor operator in Yahoo Pipes will sort that out, as well as generating geo information from posts in feeds that don’t expressly geotag (upcoming.org’s feeds are a good one for this as venues have addresses). While you’re Yahoo Piping, you mas as well filter in some other ways: I restrict some of the longer feeds to ten posts, and the Flickr pictures to those that contain a Latitude of 52 (Birmingham in the UK is at 52°N, the many other Birminghams aren’t).
Your own feed (if you use WordPress)
You can dispense with the whole fiddle of Piping your feeds if you are creating them of course, and you can geotag items accurately without having to oddly list the full address of what you’re talking about. Birmingham: It’s Not Shit is based on WordPress, and as such there are plugins to do the job for you. I’m using Geo and GeoMashup (which will generate Google Maps with your posts on with just a quick inline tag, see BiNS). I first tried the seemingly more powerful GeoPress plugin (also available for Moveable Type blogs), but despite working well as a tool to use it wasn’t generating valid XML for me.
Geo places Latitude and Longitude boxes just below your post editor, but also allows you to store locations and select them from a drop-down menu. Locations are stored in the plugin options page (which will also set a default location – your house? The centre of town? – for posts you don’t expressly tag):
The only problem with this is that until you build up a database you’ll be spending ages finding the geolocation for each post – and there aren’t really any simple web-tools that do it for you.
Although, GeoMashup will place a handy Google map on your post editing page, as well as a Find location box – you’ll have to click on the map to reveal the lat and long for the position you find and then copy and paste them into the Location fields higher up.
Fill your stored location database, you’ll need it!
Building the map
Pop over to Google Maps and get yourself an API key, you’ll also find plenty of example code. View Source at this page to see the bare bones of the code up your end uses. For overlaying RSS feed information it’s quite simple:
Use GGeoVml to load the feed:
var geoXml = new GGeoXml("http://www.birminghamitsnotshit.co.uk/feed/");
And then add.Overlay to place it on the map as you draw it:
map.addOverlay(geoXml);
You can add as many overlays as you like, although it is slow to draw too many – that’s why the toggle buttons are handy. You also waste processing power and time by placing markers off the viewable map – that’s why filtering the feeds was useful earlier.
And so…
I’m not sure how useful it is at the moment, adding all the feeds at once is a little slow and the Pipes are sometimes flaky. In fact it doesn’t have a great deal of practical use at all. It’s still an interesting visualisation, though and I feel that the real killer application for geotagging is about to hit us – so anything you do to make your work tagged correctly will give you a leg-up as soon as it hits.
If you’ve got a Birmingham based feed and geotag the entries, let me know (email up the right) and I’ll add it to the map.
A difference between blogging and journalism?
POSTED IN blogging 19 August 2007
In this post on the Guardian technology blog – Ad blocking is theft, so block Firefox instead | Technology | Guardian Unlimited – the computer editor Jack Schofield not only admits to not having any corroboration for the story “it seems some site owners are retaliating by blocking Firefox. (I’ve not found one myself.)” and that he can’t be bothered to research something on the Guardian’s own website “we sell a Guardian Unlimited Ad-free version, but I don’t expect many people pay for it”. That said he’s happy to say that about the Ad-free version, biting the hand that feeds and all that. Freedom from two parts of journalism there I reckon.
And as an aside the “block firefox” people seem absolutle loons – a click on their main navigation links lead to a site that promotes the idea of “the man made climate change myth”.
