Tag: internet

Categories
Me Other

WordPress upgrade

Well, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0 – despite the fact that they’re probably about to release 2.0.1 – and so far so good. Most (all?) of the changes are things which aren’t visible to you lot. It seems generally nicer to use, though the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t like Safari. *shrug*. The new Admin pages are a bit ugly. *shrug again*.

The main reason I upgraded was because you can now create categories on the fly as you write a post, although you can’t choose a parent catgory for it at the same time. And the post preview actually shows what it would look like on your blog, rather than just testing the formatting. I’ll have to take their word for it that the underlying code is improved.

EDIT: I’ve just trued tried the wysiwyg editor on Firefox. It does seem quite nice, I must admit.

Though it does that fucking annoying thing of automatically putting white space after a newline. Don’t these people write poetry?

EDIT again:

asdsad
sdasda
asdasdasd
sad

At least it looks like the old non-wysiwyg editor still works for single returns.

Categories
Culture Other

Chihuly at Kew

I went to see the Dale Chihuly glass at Kew Gardens today. Which was pretty fab. This Flickr slideshow gives you some idea. It finishes 15th January, so if you haven’t seen it and you’re in London, go and have a look.

Categories
Culture Me Other

The Poetry Wiki, back by popular demand

Or, to be more accurate, back in the face of overwhelming public apathy except from Julie.

Since I’ve got the spare bandwidth and everything, I’ve started a new wiki to replace The Poetry Wiki. I’ve called it ‘The Poetry Wiki‘. Original, I know. It just makes more sense to have everything in the same place.

I’ve used the Mediawiki software – i.e. the same used for Wikipedia – both because I know lots of people are somewhat familiar with it, and because Wikipedia has a lot of helpful stuff about how to use the software. You could start with the Wikipedia Help Page, for example.

At the moment it’s a blank canvas, so get in at the beginning. Have a go. Tell your friends. Jump in and make suggestions about how the site should work. Try out the editing syntax. Post some poetry.

Categories
Culture Nature Other

Flickr field guide

There’s a group on Flickr called Field Guide: Birds of the World. Pretty self-explanatory, really – they’re trying to form a collection of photos that can be used to help identify birds. It’s a great idea and they’ve already got a lot entries, though it’s weighted towards European and N American birds, not surprisingly. But it quickly exposes the failings of Flickr as a content-management system. Although it’s possible to search within the group pool for photos tagged with a particular name, it’s not obvious how to do it. More crucially for a field guide, it’s not easy enough to add information to a photo in an organised way – for example, to provide a link from a species to any confusion possibilities. Or to give distribution info.

In some ways, like most reference works, it’s a good candidate for a wiki; there’s a network of people who are very enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject, it’s naturally modular and so on. The internet would allow for many pictures attached to each species, as well as audio and even video. You could easily establish a standard template for an entry, to encourage people to include all the useful information – distribution, easily confused species, call, and so on. I suppose I could set it up – the Wikimedia software which Wikipedia runs on is open-source and I think I could set it up on my server space, although I suspect there would be a bit of a learning curve to cope with. More seriously, if it ever really caught on, especially with a lot of audio and video, it would be quite bandwidth-heavy.

With mobile broadband on the verge of becoming widespread, people might even start using it in the field to complement traditional field-guides.

Categories
Other

Tomorrow’s News Today

This story from Avant News made me laugh.

Categories
Culture Other

Magnum photo-essays

Magnum in motion has photo essays with audio commentary. The only one I’ve watched is the ‘Inner-City Youth, London’ one – which I would certainly recommend. I found it via GRIMETIME. I’ve downloaded a few grime tracks recently; it was PopText that started me in that direction by posting a few tracks from the brilliant Lady Sovereign. Starting from her and clicking on Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought’ links helped me find Kano, Roll Deep, Wiley, Lethal Bizzle and of course Dizzee Rascal. All of whom are worth checking out if you like hard, fast hip-hop.

And even if you don’t give a fuck about the music, check out the Magnum photos.I expect the other photo-essays are good too, I just haven’t looked at them yet.