The second WordPress Users Wales meet-up is on Wednesday 29th February at The Promised Land, from 6.30pm. As before, register with Eventbrite.
Apparently this is a traditional date for women to make marriage proposals, so there is the potential for the night to take an unexpected turn!
Joel Hughes will be talking about the ‘Developer as Blogger’ and Nicky Getgood ‘WordPress for Hyperlocal’ and her work at Talk About Local. Continue reading
WordPress.com have added an infinite scroll ‘feature’ to two of their primary themes, including the Twenty Eleven theme I use here.
In the quest to make visitors engage with your content as effortlessly as possible we are rolling out a new feature to your blog home pages—infinite scrolling! Instead of having to scroll and click through older-pages links we are now pulling new content automatically whenever a visitor approaches the bottom of a blog.
Best thing, it should be entirely transparent to you or your readers. The feature is enabled for blogs with the Twenty Ten or Twenty Eleven themes.
We take care of the smaller details, such as removing the older/next links, integrating with your design as smoothly as possible. Having said that, please let us know what you think by posting any feedback you may have. Thanks.
Another way of looking at this is that they have deleted my footer from the main page of my site, and given me no way to return it (short of picking another theme and undoing all the work I’ve put into this one).
I don’t have the will to add my voice to the many, many complaints already being voiced in the forums. Instead I think I’ll be creating my own self hosted WordPress blog. Continue reading
Declan Lawn hunts down racist troll Darren Burton aka Nimrod Severn.
This epic presentation by Andrew Rashbass of The Economist hypothesises that smart is the new cool, and what that means for publishing.
Debatewise.org is a site I think about every time I see an argument on Twitter or in a comment thread on some blog or other. The reality of the site falls very far short of the promise on offer:
[…] a place where the best possible arguments for one side are listed next to the best possible arguments against. These arguments aren’t created by one person, but by like-minded individuals collaborating to form the strongest case. This allows people both to easily compare the pros and cons and also to come to a decision safe in the knowledge they have the best information to hand.
This post by Robert Scoble describes the main reason why I despise Facebook. It’s not their lack of respect for user’s privacy, it’s not their amoral founder or their virtual monopoly in social media. It’s that they have provided something that satisfies the needs of most regular users so well that they’ve critically — and perhaps fatally — injured the common web.
It’s too late to save the common web. It’s why, for the past year, I’ve given up and have put most of my blogging into Google+. I should have been spending that effort on the web commons and on RSS but it’s too late.
Normal users don’t care about the argument anymore and they are addicted to Facebook and Google+ and Twitter and apps on iPhones and Android. Heck, if you are at the Super Bowl tomorrow the official app is on iOS and Android and not other platforms.
The common web isn’t just under attack, it’s been under attack for more than four years.
Why did it take so long for people to wake up?
It’s too late for Dave Winer and John Battelle to save the common web – scobleizer.com
I share a lot of suff from the web, on this blog and elsewhere. Typically I like to use a passage of text from the site I’m linking to (wrapped in a <blockquote>), followed by a link to the source (using <cite>). Then I’ll add some of my own text above or below the excerpt to add any necessary context.
I’m very particular about how I format all of this information. Only fairly recently I’ve started using the excellent TextExpander to speed up the process.
When I need to excerpt a passage that is more than just plain text (containing, for example, lots of links, lists or a table) I’ve been making use of the handy Posterous bookmarklet, which takes any selected text and formats it very much in the way described above. I’ll then modify the code it produces to suit my own needs.
The Posterous bookmarklet is fine, but it has two drawbacks:
div instead of cite).So starting with this need, I’ve produced a mockup of a bookmarklet that would be of great utility to me, and presumably to many others:
Physibles: Data objects for 3D printing.
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
(via thepiratebay.org)
I really like this suggestion from Joel Spolsky:
The internet seems to ignore legislation until somebody tries to take something away from us… then we carefully defend that one thing and never counter-attack. Then the other side says, “OK, compromise,” and gets half of what they want. That’s not the way to win… that’s the way to see a steady and continuous erosion of rights online.
The solution is to start lobbying for our own laws. It’s time to go on the offensive if we want to preserve what we’ve got. Let’s force the RIAA and MPAA to use up all their political clout just protecting what they have. Here are some ideas we should be pushing for:
- Elimination of software patents
- Legal fees paid by the loser in patent cases; non-practicing entities must post bond before they can file fishing expedition lawsuits
- Roll back length of copyright protection to the minimum necessary “to promote the useful arts.” Maybe 10 years?
- Create a legal doctrine that merely linking is protected free speech
- And ponies. We want ponies. We don’t have to get all this stuff. We merely have to tie them up fighting it, and re-center the “compromise” position.
Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it. There’s your anti-piracy plan. The big content companies are TERRIBLE at doing both of these things, so it’s no wonder they’re not doing so well in the current environment. And right now everyone’s fighting to control distribution channels, which is why I can’t watch Star Wars on Netflix or iTunes. It’s fine if you want to have that fight, but don’t yell and scream about how you’re losing business to piracy when your stuff isn’t even available in the box I have on top of my TV.
Jonathan Coulton on piracy and making money from art. Continue reading
WordPress.com are making it easy to black out your own website in protest of SOPA/PIPA. I realise that these are US bills, but the ramifications of such harmful legislation will be felt all over the world. If you are a US citizen, please take a stand!
Drew Breunig on how journalism, writing, photography and art have become “content”.
Apparently file sharing is now recognized as a religion in Sweden:
In the midst of a worldwide debate about Internet piracy, Swedish authorities have granted official religious status to the Church of Kopimism, which claims it considers CTRL+C and CTRL+V (shortcuts for copy and paste) to be sacred symbols, and that information is holy and copying is a sacrament.
Wikipedia is amazing, but I’ve come to realise that getting involved in actual editing work there is a very daunting prospect. Adding a link or fixing a typo is simple enough, but when it comes to creating a new article from scratch a new Wikipedian will discover that they have a lot to learn.
In this post I’ve listed what I think are the barriers to entry for an aspiring Wikipedia editor. This post may also be useful as a ‘getting started’ guide.[1]
I just created a special navigation page for this blog that makes pretty good use of the WordPress.com [archives] shortcode.
It looks pretty good on this Twenty Eleven theme using the full-width ‘Showcase template’, but it should work just fine on any WordPress blog. Just grab the code below and give it a try. Continue reading
People who have followed me on Twitter or this blog for a while may be aware that back in June 2009 I started a Flickr photography group called Thing a Week. The concept is quite simple: To take a picture on a different theme every week.
Now the group is under new management and has a snazzy new website, it seemed like the perfect time for me to get all nostalgic.
This is a neat Wikipedia idea that’s been getting a lot of press today.[1]
Monmouthpedia will be the first Wikipedia project to cover a whole town, creating articles on interesting and notable places, people, artefacts, flora, fauna and other things in Monmouth in as many languages as possible including Welsh.
We are very keen for local people to be involved in what ever way they would like. Computer skills are not that important, it’s the interest and the willingness to be involved, suggesting and writing articles, taking and donating photos and recommending good reference materials. If you speak another language it would be great place to practice your writing skills and learn new vocabulary and grammar. There are a lot of opportunities for community involvement including teaching and learning of I.T skills, local history, natural history, languages and people of different ages working together.[2]
I can see a couple of drawbacks however.
I’ve had a busy evening on Twitter! I recently made a Christmas cracker hat for my Twitter avatar, and I offered to do the same for any of my followers who were interested.
There were a few takers…
Social Times yesterday posted an infographic (sponsored by AssistedLivingToday – slogan: ‘Information you can trust’). They introduce it by highlighting the most interesting statistic, which will be the focus of this blog post.
According to a fascinating infographic entitled “How Social Media is Ruining Our Minds,” over the course of the last ten years the average attention span has dropped from 12 minutes to a staggeringly short 5 seconds. As a person deeply ensconced in this connected age my experience shows this to be true. These days, we give a YouTube video just a few seconds to determine if it’s worth it. So what else does social media and technology affect within our minds?
This is the relevant section of the infographic:
Shocking yes? Perhaps a little too shocking to be true?
Yup…
The infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. The sheer number of experiences I could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I'm sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live trapped in loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out before us. We see the same things every day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation on the last, every moment smoothly following the gentle curves of societal norms. We act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us.
Profundity from an old xkcd.
halfblog.net 