Blog Roundup ...

• Jonathan writes about an awfully big adventure, the end of one journey and the start of another ..

• Francis goes to a bröllop, eats cheese, watches socks cut up and finds himself in another world

• Ingrid makes me reach for my passport and check my airmiles as she books a trip

• Wanderlust gets all Christmassy and plans a trip to the German markets

• The New York Times tells us that finally Blade Runner is as Ridley Scott wanted it in yet another release of this classic movie.

One Thousand Not Out ...

To celebrate the one thousandth post here I’m bringing in a new look and some new features.

As you can see as with most things which get old we’ve spread a little around the middle to a three column layout.

There are now three RSS feeds to subscribe to : the full site feed gives you all of the postings from the blog; the photo feed shows all the pictures posted in the gallery and my Flickr feed shows all the pictures I’m sharing on Flickr.

I’ve moved from categories to tags to sort entries and in the right hand sidebar you see the new sparkly tag cloud grow.

Comments on things I’ve written have been moved up to make them easier to read and I’m now sharing items I’ve read in Google Reader and think are interesting in the left hand sidebar.

I’ll be rolling out this new layout to the archives over the next few days.

Here’s to the next thousand posts !

Upgrades Ahead ...

When I started this blog some four years ago Movable Type was the premier blogging platform.

In the heady days of MT2 it was all very exciting. After a quick download and upload (but not as quick as today - the increasing speed of Internet connections now being added to those other sure things of death and taxes) I was left wondering just who Melody Nelson was (there’s an explanation here if you’re still wondering) and why the first thing I had to do was delete her account.

It seemed amazing that you could take a single download and with it write and publish your own web pages quickly and easily with no knowledge of HTML or CSS. Add to that the kudos that you were doing something so cutting edge it had a new name : blogging.

Being a creature of habit, and because I still believe in the product, I’ve stuck with them ever since. Which is odd as I like to tinker with things in the hope that I can make myself believe that I still work in IT and I can still do technical things.

I have to admit that my loyalty was rocked, along with many others, when in 2004 Six Apart decided to charge for versions of it’s product. Many bloggers turned their backs on MT and embraced the world of Matt Mullenweg’s Wordpress.

Now, Six Apart are trying to regain that lost ground and those lost bloggers. In the last few days Movable Type 4 has moved into beta release.

MT4 offers 50 new features to capture those long lost days of excitement including :

• new dashboard look
• WYSIWYG editing
• Built-in member registration system for reader and comment authentication
• Open Id support (sadly needed more and more today to stop people trolling and stop spam)
• User group management and publishing
• better scalability

In addition to all these goodies Six Apart have also announced their intention to release an Open Source version of the product to give people “a version of Movable Type that they were free to modify for their own needs”.

So is this an attempt to kiss and make up with the blogging community or is there something else going on here ?

There’s a clue in this statement :

“There are new features in Movable Type 4 which make it easier to grow and manage large blogs, sites and communities.”

Movable Type Blogging Platform Beta Release Questions & Answers

What that means is that bloggers using MT4 can allow people to join their sites and permit them to upload their own “assets” (which seems to be the new term for photos, videos and audio) and create posts on your blog.

For me the jury is still out on this feature. Most bloggers work alone but welcome comments (subtle hint there - did ya notice?). We “exist” in a community by creating links and trackbacks (another hint) to each others work and we have that now and it works very well. In my mind if we wanted to build communities we would be running something like Joomla! which deals well with communities, user accounts and “assets” and has an extensive army of people supporting it and making it extensible via Open Source authors such as Troozers.

To celebrate the new template management features in MT4 I fixed all the issues with my templates today and, despite my concerns, I am playing around with the beta to see what all the fuss is about and because I can do something technical - honest.

Bloggies ...

It’s that time again …

Head on over to the Bloggies to vote.

There’s some excellent blogs and some talented people represented here this year and, in no particular order, I’d recommend :

• Girl with a One Track Mind
• Dooce
• Daily Dose of Imagery
• Boing Boing
• Stuck in Customs
• Going Underground

Next time I start a blog I seriously need a better name for it ….

On Journalism

Imagine receiving this email from a person who you have never met or communicated with :

“We intend to publish a prominent news story in this weekend’s paper, revealing your identity

We know what you do at work, we have your birth certificate and educational details.

We will tell the world where you live, your age. In addition we have the same detail on your mother and will publish these as well.”

That’s what happened to Abby Lee, the writer of Girl With A One Track Mind. She recently published the summary of the email from Nicholas Hellen, who along with Anna Mikhailova, decided that it was more in the public interest for us to all know the name of an anonymous blogger than allow this person some basic rights.

It’s a matter I’ve written about before here but this evening two things caught my eye about this.

The first was the appearance of Kelvin MacKenzie on tonight’s Question Time. I found his statement that he wasn’t sorry for his coverage of the Hillsborough disaster amazing. Unlike his reported statement in The Guardian :

“The Daily Post claims a source told them Mr MacKenzie had said: “All I did wrong was tell the truth.”

The source also alleged Mr MacKenzie said: “I went on The World at One the next day and apologised. I only did that because Rupert Murdoch told me to. I wasn’t sorry then and I’m not sorry now because we told the truth.””

Media Guardian : MacKenzie ‘reignites Hillsborough row’

Tonight MacKenzie seemed a little unsure about the voracity of some of the more lurid details that he has published. Whilst he said he was forced to apologise by Rupert Murdoch he is now unclear that fans urinated on one another or that the pick-pocketed the dead.

Browsing through my Google subscriptions I came across this item from Zinnia at Real E Fun which has an excellent discussion of Hellen’s attitude to standards of journalism. She also makes the point that The Girl’s identity wasn’t known a long time before her recent book (available here at Amazon) so the main premis of his argument is somewhat flawed.

Add to that the fact that The Times managed to preserve the identity of the author of The Policeman’s Blog in this article as Zennia points out.

I really do wonder what has happened to standards of journalism in this country. Perhaps William Butler Yeats was right :

“I hate journalists. There is nothing in them but tittering jeering emptiness. They have all made what Dante calls the Great Refusal… . The shallowest people on the ridge of the earth.”

The Good, The Bad and The Posts

Here’s a review of the past year : the good, the bad and a few of my favourite posts.

Happy New Year !

The Good

•Watching people grow up.

•The world of digital radio

•Using Open Source products to get people sharing information.

•Making not a bad attempt at HDR, cross processing and lomography

•Amsterdam

•A reunion, of sorts, with my family.

•Some great days out

•The Sultan’s Elephant

•Michael and Cassara

•Richard Hawley

•A new car

•Dave and Mouse

•Oysters

•Robbie Williams

•Returning to the Palladium

The Bad

•Loosing people at work : some who were just part of the landscape, some who were meant a lot more

•Wasting rather a lot of time on someone.

•Failing to do what I intended with this blog

•Continually saying I will travel and not going …

•Not fixing the camera …

•All the stress of work

•The dangers of blogging

•White goods stress

The Posts

•Sand
•Forgotten and discarded
•25 ASA
•A Good Decision
•Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Knight …
•Behind the Curtain …

How We Got To Be Here...

Three years ago I was sitting reading a posting on a website about something called blogging and , after reading a selection of the few blogs available then, I decided to have a go

So, on a domain far, far away (and after installing Moveable Type) this post was born.

After a few hesitant starts I ended up making this promise and then in October 2004 standing in Trafalgar Square I had a moment of revelation and decided to put photography and words on the same page.

As a result, and with the odd few gaps, we’ve been here two years. I still find it fun and challenging, often frustrating as I struggle to find the right words or simply to remember what I actually did but as I look back and read on the whole I smile and I hope it’s the same for you.

I still read other people’s blogs and I’m still amazed by the quality of the writing and photography and that’s what pushes me on.

We (I) got here thanks to these people and others so please take a moment to visit them as well :

• Mike Pugh, whose travel blog made me want to travel, write and film then have the ability to put it all online
• Francis Strand’s award winning blog with a linguistic twist writing about a city I love
• Meg Hourihan who started as geek here and ended up a foodie there
• Tonya Poole blogger and photographer and a whole lot more…
• David Nightingale who slowly taught me the value of Photoshop and that it’s not simply for turning the picture around

Happy Birthday weblog !

The Biggest Blog Ever ...

Telegraph | News | Why Oct 17th is an important date for your diary

For most of us, next Tuesday will be another day to tick off on our personal calendars, one day closer to Christmas or one day further away from the summer holidays.

But a group of charities headed by the National Trust and English Heritage hope that it will become a moment of history unlike any other with the launch of the greatest mass “blog” ever.

Fry used a line from Shakespeare to urge people to take part in the “One Day in History” blog: “As Henry V would say: ‘Gentlemen in England now abed will hold themselves accursed they were not here’”

The blogs should contain a reflection on how history affected the person writing on that particular day, but this could be something as simple as describing an old building they walk past on the way to school or a discussion with a relative about the family tree.

Even the repeat of an old television programme and reflections on how fast our world is changing would fit the bill, the organisers said.

So, head on over to the History Matters website and upload your diary for today and contribute to biggest blog ever, to be stored at the British Museum….

Deluges

Two happened today : one outside and one inside.

Outside the rain came again in monsoon like quantities putting paid to drying the washing outside or sitting out with a book.

Inside the deluge was email as people got ready for the weekend or for the week, or more, off next week.

I still have the three pages stuck to the wall with the same things on, possible on balance a few more than I had. I know I will need to work tomorrow as well as try to catch up with the chores I hoped to do (pictures, video, buying presents etc).

Tonight, oddly, I’m alone and playing around with the blog. I’ve made a few changes recently and tried to add things like callouts now the goal is better tagging and indexing. It’s simple work with a challenge to it and reminds me that I was, once, a technical person.

About a Girl ...

I have a car which can do over 156 miles an hour. Somewhere in the attic I have a First World War Italian Bayonet which would probably kill someone if I had the mind to use it. In the shed I have a large tin of paint stripper which would leave a nasty mark on the smart car parked opposite.

So, what prevents me from doing all of those things ? Probably the same thing as you : a desire and motivation to be governed by the rules of society and the precepts of law. It’s the fact that we respect and adhere to that which means we live in a relatively safe society with respect for other people.

Imagine doing something which means that photographer’s are “camped outside my home, and also my parents home”. Where people from your past are contacted and offered money to talk about you. Imagine having your birth certificate, where you live, where you went to school, your mother’s name and where she lives emailed to you by someone who you don’t know.

It sounds like stalking but it is in fact the situation which Abby Lee of the successful blog, Girl with a One Track Mind, finds herself in courtesy of the Sunday Times and their decision to expose her real name.

Anna Mikhailova, the reporter who wrote the piece, would be well advised to consult the Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Conduct and this recommendation in particular :

Everyone is entitled to respect for his or her private and family life, home, health and correspondence. A publication will be expected to justify intrusions into any individual’s private life without consent

I hope she has a long and successful career in journalism. I hope that she uncovers something which justifies breaking that specific line in the code, some exposé of drug running or government scandal. Outing someone who writes under an assumed name about their private life isn’t such a case. It’s intrusive. She would be better advised to leave the time to break rules for something more warranted and live up the more noble examples of journalism such as Bernstein and Woodward.

Steady As She Goes

As I didn’t win a Bloggie for best designed weblog I’m trying a make over with some template changes. The only problem is I seem to keep loosing the sidebar. This seems to be a common thing with the new release of MT so don’t suprised if I give up on the investigations into HTML and CSS and put it all back as it was. Well at least for now …

Blog Resolutions

Blog Tips at ProBlogger

There’s an interesting article reposted from Evan Schaeffers Legal Underground blog which I perhaps need to read and apply to make this a little fresher….

• Resolution 1: Mix It Up
• Resolution 2: Prove You Have a Personality
• Resolution 3: Be a Better Writer
• Resolution 4: Write for the Computer Screen
• Resolution 5: Use Photos
• Resolution 6: Don’t Be Obscure
• Resolution 7: Build a Community
• Resolution 8: Experiment with New Weblogging Ideas
• Resolution 9: Don’t Let Your Weblog Make You Crazy
• Resolution 10: Learn from Other Weblogs

10 More Tips

10 more blogging tips.

I need to spend a little more time sorting these out …

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/11/ten_blogging_ha.html

On Conciseness

Elements of Style: Rules of Usage & Composition

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

For more on writing, especially for the web, check out the Geek to Live: Write effectively for the Web article at lifehacker.com.

One Year

Today is special for me and for this place.

I tend to think of this entry as being somewhat defining in how I used this weblog. It’s not a great entry and there were a few months of sporadic entries before it.

For me, however, it was the start of trying to keep a weblog for a year. I did it partly to record what I was doing, as a way of proving to myself that life was moving forwards : partly it was a means of “improving” my writing and photography and exploring new media formats like podcasting and video blogging. It was also a record I could leave behind me, at least for a while, to perhaps make some sense to people of what was going on in my life and in my head.

So, one year on here we are.

If you stuck with it and read it I’d like to thank you. If you commented and encouraged you have no idea how important that was to me.

Thank you all.

Birthday...

I can't decide when the birthday of all this actually is.

Is it June 2003 when I first installed Movabletype in an attempt to not clutter up someone's inbox or October 2004 when I got brave and added in pictures and started to really write for me, or for you, but definately with a different motivation from when I started ....

What do you think ?

Blog by Mail

I've added a new widget here to let me update this via email. It doesn't do everything, categories are a little missing absent from it, but it does mean that as long as I have email I can update things here.

Blogs in all Sorts of Forms

I'm always suprised at how people use their weblogs. From straight writing, photoblogs, moblogs, video blogs and audio blogs each is a little different and pushes the form in new directions.

I was looking over at the Six Apart site today and found the blog of Danny Gregory. As well as having a great site he has a neat weblog.

Check out the wonder illustrations which make this a kind of online sketchbook. The kind of thing I wish my Moleskin notebook would look like.

More Awards...

One thing I can't decide about is what this should be. Weblog, photoblog, vlog all seem to get messed up here in what feels like an unhappy mix sometimes. I guess I'm stuck with a bunch of things I "do" and none of them I do well.

There's more awards on the horizon and this time for photoblogs. I'm really pleased to see Kathleen Connally's A Walk Through Durham Township mentioned in so many categories as well as Chromasia.

I don't know about you but this has to win photo of the year.

Go check them all out, and vote, at the Photobloggies 2005.

Biography

I told you I had to up my game.

I've added a biography so you can all learn a little more about me.

It's a work in progress...

Comments...

Guardian Unlimited | Onlineblog

“If you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by submitting linked blog comments like “Visit my discount pharmaceuticals site.” This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists,” says Google’s blog.

“We hope the web software community will quickly adopt this attribute and we’re pleased that a number of blog software makers have already signed on.”

Hooray! At last an end to the spam comments…

Yet More Maintenance

More tinkering here to :

• add an Atom feed
• setup ping and syndication to Technorati
• credit the other components I use for this site in the Powered By section, which I have also reformatted
• add in some new categories for entries
• updated the sideblog with whats new in listening, reading and watching

It’s well worth dropping by Technorati to see what they are doing with Tags which reminds me a little of Newsmap. With a listing on Technorati and Moreover we seem syndicated, at least for now.