Offmessage

A while back MeFi pointed the world at Funky16Corners for his awesome Rubber Souled Beatles covers mix.  He didn’t stop there though.  What followed was installments 2 and 3 of Rubber Souled and Soul Satisfaction.  If you loves the funk (and who don’t?) you know where to point your RSS reader.

And… If that weren’t enough, he also maintains a psyche/garage blog over at Iron Leg (that persuaded me to buy Bull of the Woods).  My kind of guy.

My Father’s Olive Oil

I’ve been wondering for a while about tracking comments on blogs…. There’s a group of us who have been in electronic contact for years and years. It started out as a mailing list, but over the past few years moved through IRC to the current network of blogs.

What I’ve been feeling the lack of with this move to blogging rather than mailing lists is the conversation. If I comment on a blog I have to remember to watch that post to see the replies and possibly comment again. The minute I post more than one or two comments to one or two blogs I find it impossible to track the conversations that I’m involved in. This has meant, so far, that I’ve been pretty taciturn when it comes to commenting on other people’s blogs.

I was muttering about this today prior to a planning session with a customer (so much so that my mutterings made in to a User Story) and thought that a) I can’t be the only person with this problem, b) it’s a very web2.0 problem, and c) someone must have built something to solve it already.

And indeed they have… I’m currently trialing both coComment and co.mments.com. Apologies in advance for the possible outpourings to come…. It’s all in the name of research, obviously.

Also, my apologies to Mark for not getting it (at all) when he suggested that we built almost exactly this type of system back last summer. To be fair, we built Sleevenotez instead, so it wasn’t an /awful/ mistake, but still…

And he’s very kindly included a section entitled ‘Howe to Reade My Writinges’:

houseoffame.blogspot.com

So. People have been nagging me to add commenting to this blog. A long story cut very short is that the current software (of my own very early creation) is so unmaintainable that I can’t.

I’ve tried moving to Movable Type a few times, and for reasons too many to mention I have been unable to. My rather unprofessional opinion of MT is that it sucks. Sorry, but that’s just my impression over the few blogs that we run on it and my own attempts to use it for my own purposes.

So, I’m trying WordPress. First thoughts….

Importing is a bitch. They don’t specify a generic import file format, so you have to frig your data into one from another blogging platform (4 hours). They can only handle import files of 2MB (apparently arbitrary code limit, v. bad); offmessage in my chosen format is somewhere in the region of 5MB, so I had to chop it up into 3 files. They don’t tell you that their import routine is very memory hungry and that you should up your php.ini memory_limit from the default 8MB to somewhere more like 64MB to get your paltry 2MB file to import.

All that said, it’s actually going rather well, and so far I’m pretty pleased. And it certainly knocks MT into a cocked hat.

Paul has arrived. Lord knows it’s about time. Welcome sir!

Like a Schott’s Miscellany on the Internet. What amazes me is the guy posts 3 of these a day… Futility Closet.

I’ve been toying with the idea of a music blog based on youtube videos for a while (I even built one that I almost immediately gave up on for being actually not being how I wanted). Anyway. As always, wait long enough and someone else will do it better…

Enter No More Blank Tapes youtube videos collected around a theme… Fantastic.

Found at i like

We‘ve been muttering for ages about our food2.0 site that is going to take over the world. We’ve nearly nearly finished it, too (but not yet, go and sign up and we’ll tell you when). The lovely thing about Forkd is the combination of food and photography. Tastespotting is exactly that; and it looks gorgeous!

No really – Everybody. What a lot of hot air