Web and Blogs on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

iplayer diary and a tool i was never going to use again

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 21:54:44 +0000

A lot of online services have tried to introduce social elements in to their product. This is normally annoying, but in the case of the BBC’s iplayer I found it interesting and useful.

The problem was I was about the only person who did.

A brief recap, when the current design was launched, it had an extra (smaller) column on the homepage. Along with Featured and Most Popular was a column called Friends Recommend or something like that. They made some sensible design choices, rather than having another site where you needed to maintain a ‘friends’ list, you could simply point it to twitter and co and it would do the rest. The problem was that in turned out that at any time it would have maybe three programs to recommend, each of which just one of my friends would have recommended, and that was about it. It was therefore showing ‘anything my friends recommend’ – due to lack of take up – rather than ‘the most recommend programs by my friends’ which would probably be more useful and avoid the slightly narrow topics that came through (oh look Formula 1 and Dr Who).

TwaperKeeper archives

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:32:31 +0000

TwapperKeeper is shutting down it seems. It’s a popular online tool for archiving hashtags and other twitter searchers, and certainly well used in UK Higher Education where I work. I actually met John O’Brien, founder of TwapperKeeper, when he attended Dev8D (a developer event for those working in UK HE) a couple of years a go, nice chap.

Anyway, Martin Hawksey has created a wonderful tool for archiving, ummm, archives before they are gone. The tool is actually a Google Spreadsheet and to me it’s a testament to Google Docs power that an application that fetches and stores data from another site can be created using it.

Meta : blogging

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 17:56:04 +0000

There’s a long tradition of bloggers blogging about blogging. This post follows in the self-obsessed insular tradition.

This blog post is somewhat unusual in that I’m posting it to nostuff, my blog. I’ve been using posterous a bit of late and like it a lot. Posterous is also setup to post to a WP instance on nostuff here: http://www.nostuff.org/posterous/ it was setup as a way to archive an externally hosted service, but the end result is very useable (and seems to rank quite highly in Google).

Pinboard.in suites me just just fine

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:08:16 +0000

About a month a go I wrote a quick rant about Delicious.com and why it could have been a sucessful web2.0 business (relatively low costs and lots of opportunity for advertising and pro/paid for features). At that time I said I was moving to pinboard.in, especially as delicious.com’s future was being question at the time.

This is how I use/used the two sites

When trying to find a site, page or link – often for a product/app/site with a name I don’t remember – I will use Pinboard’s (and used Delicious’) search feature with a keyword to try and find it, hoping that I either tagged it using the word, or title/description included it. This is my primary use case.
My second use case was picking a tag and browsing by it for the same reason.
Third use case was having no idea what I can search for, so just browsing through my entire bookmark list, perhaps picking roughly the time period I might have saved it.

I’m not looking back. I like:

Personal URL shortener

Sun, 21 Nov 2010 16:45:08 +0000

Back in 2009 I wrote a post about creating my own url shortener. I didn’t get very far, partly due to the challenge of how to create the short url codes, and partly due to my development philosophy of having an idea, musing about it, and never getting anywhere with it. Though I did install some code Ben Charlton has written and set it up as u.nostuff.org.

Part of the drive to do this was a bizarre feeling of guilt when using ‘short urls’ from the main shortener services. Each short url I created would mean we – as a userbase – were one step closer to the URLs being one digit longer (i.e. when that service ran out of free letter/number combinations with the current number of digits). Short urls were a scarce good. Did I really need this short URL? Worse, useful services such as twitterfeed use a short url each time they add something to twitter, even if most of those links would never be followed.

html5 and nostuff

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 00:17:07 +0000

It’s hard not to think of nostuff.org and not think of blazing web standards.

So I had a go at updating the template for this here blog to make it all html5. Turns out this is quite simple.

It seems you can probably just replace your doctype with

<!DOCTYPE html>

and you’ve got yourself a html5 webpage.

The W3C validator proves it so. From there I added some of the new section elements such as header, footer, nav, aside and article. It seems that these can apply to the page (i.e. the page’s footer) or a section (the footer of a blog post, where it shows tags and date published etc). I used various sources on the web, via Google, including a few articles, and sample sites.

Adverts that follow you

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:49:15 +0000

Now one of these days I will finally get my ‘moving flat’ epic published, in the mean time you can read my how to buy a property guide. It really is worth every penny.

Part of this process involves buying a sofa which doesn’t suck as much as my current sofa.

Of course, I’m doing this the proper way of procrastinating and constantly looking at websites and not deciding anything (look out for my exciting new book of the same name, the ultimate manager’s guide).

Mystery Solved

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:51:19 +0000

We recently (well, last summer) launched Aquabrowser as our main library catalogue. We provided a feedback link for people to comment on the new interface, as we were keen to pick up on functionality it lacked or issues we may not have thought off. You can see the feedback link on the green bar on the right, it asks the user to login, and then provides a feedback form to leave a message.

Twitter clients

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:30:50 +0000

From about an hour after signing up to Twitter until very recently I used Twirl on both PC and Mac as my Twitter client. I was happy with it, and still am, but had noticed people using other clients and wanted to see if I was missing anything.

I round up my findings here:

[][2]

Three twitter clients

PubSubHubbub instant RSS and Atom

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:51:37 +0000

I have just come across PubSubHubbub via Joss Winn’s Learning Lab blog at the University of Lincoln.

It’s a way for RSS/Atom feed consumers (feed readers etc) to be instantly updated and notified when an RSS is updated.

In a nutshell, the RSS publisher notifies a specific hub when it has a new item. The hub then notifies – instantly – any subscribers who have requested the hub to contact them when there is an update.

short urls, perl and base64

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:56:20 +0000

One of my many many many faults is coming up with (in my blinkered eyes – good) ideas, thinking about them non-stop for 24hours, developing every little detail and aspect. Then spending a few hours doing some of the first things required. then getting bored and moving on to something else. Repeat ad nauseum.

Today’s brilliant plan (to take over the world)

Over the weekend it was ‘tinyurl.com’ services and specifically creating my own one.

webpad : a web based text editor

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:13:24 +0000

So I have WordPress (and in fact Drupal, Joomla, mediawiki, Moodle, damn those Dreamhost 1-click installs) as a way of running my website.

But there are still many pages which are outside of a content management system. Especially simple web app projects (such as ircount and stalisfield) and old html files.

It can be a pain to constantly ftp in to the server, or use ssh. Editing via ssh can be a pain, especially over a dodgy wireless connection, or when you want to close the lid to your macbook.

Mashed Libraries

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:16:09 +0000

Exactly a week a go I was coming home from Mashed Libraries in London (Birkbeck).

I wont bore you with details of the day (or more to the point, I’m lazy and others have already done it better than i could (of course, I should have made each one of those words a link to a different blog but I’m laz… or never-mind)).

Playing with OAI-PMH with Simple DC

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:15:14 +0000

Setting up ircount has got me quite interested in OAI-PMH, so I thought I would have a little play. I was particularly interested in seeing if there was a way to count the number of full text items in a repository, as ROAR does not generally provide this information.

Perl script

I decided to use the http::oai perl module by Tim Brody (who not-so-coincidentally is also responsible for ROAR, which ircount gets its data from).

Navel gazing

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:30:12 +0000

I was having a quick think about the categories I use here. I have tried to use categories which match people’s interests. e.g. someone from Brighton can choose to read (and subscribe to) ‘Brighton’, same for technology or libraries.

I’ve recently started to blog a bit more about things related to my work. Which is best summed up as where technology (& web) and libraries (& information management) meet. This includes searching, metadata, cataloguing, making data and information accessible, and scholarly publishing (and changing it to be less stupid). My rule of thumb is that if I feel something would only be of interest to those in the library (or HE) tech area, I stick it in ‘libraries and technology’, if it could be of interest to those who are generally interested in techy stuff then it is added to the technology category.

Radio Pop

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 17:38:10 +0000

Radio Pop is an interesting experimental site from the fantastic BBC radio labs.

It is a sort of soical network site for radio listening. It only records your listening through the ‘radio pop’ live streams. I (like many) mainly listen to listen again and the radio iplayer, and they are working on intergrating with both. You can see my profile here.

You can ‘pop’ what you are currently listening to (basically a ‘i like this’ button). I’ve added my ‘pop’ rss feed to my dipity timeline.

WordPress themes and plugins

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 21:42:15 +0000

Of interest to those who use WordPress (and those who have an opinion on web design).

Had a few hours off this afternoon so have been playing around with WordPress a bit.

New plugins:

Google sitemap XML : does what it says, and easy to use
Theme Test Drive : allows you to preview other themes (on your site) without having to make the switch first. Good plugin, seems to work well, config settings are under the theme menu of WP.
‘Twitter for WordPress‘ : you guessed it, shows one (or more) twitter feeds either as a widget or by calling a function. Works well as a widget (and all config is carried out in the widget area).
OpenID for WordPress : allows those leaving comments, and myself as blog author to sign in via OpenID. While it’s been noted that OpenID does have usability issues, it still seems like a good option to have. I’m leaving this active, it does work, though can’t see it being used. You don’t it near the ‘comment’ box on a post, though it is there on the signin page (which people probably would never go to), once signed in to openid (which, if you are like me, requires trying to remember what your URL is) you are actually taken to the WP admin dashboard (which scared me to start with, anyone can do this on my blog!), but the dashboard itself doesn’t reveal anything important and all other areas are locked down. In theory the user could then set up a profile, though comeone this is nostuff, why would you want a profile here? So kudos for a good plugin, though can’t see it being used on this backwater of a blog.
links to the above can be found here.

Themes

The first browser I used was Netscape 1, possibly 2. By default it would display black text on a grey background. This was good, far easier to read than black on white.

blip.fm

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:00:38 +0000

Very first thoughts of blip.fm, and therefore not a proper review, and based on first impressions, not research.

blip.fm is interesting but so far for me has proved a little frustrating in understanding how to get the most out of it.

[For reasons not clear to me I have dumped my thoughts as bullet points (which would have worked just as well as sentences, but can sometimes make it more readable).]

WordPress tags etc

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:32:17 +0000

For a while I have been adding tags to my posts. Tags are good. People who tag things are good. I am Web 2.0.

Only thing is they seemed to be going in to the ether, that is to say, users (that is you) had no way to see them or browse them. I was suprised that there aren’t any real options in the WordPress admin website, and considering they were only introduced in version 2.3 I was suprised I didn’t find more information on the web as to how to make use of them. I had read that WP supports things like tag clounds out of the box, but couldn’t see how to make one for my blog.

web browsers

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:35:27 +0000

Today was a browser day.

Installed the IE8 beta. Not much to say on this. It looks very like IE7. has improved standards compliance compared with other versions of IE. I had read that there were problems due to the way if renders pages compared with IE6 and 7 (i.e. closer to the standard). However I was surprised how true this is, for example the University I work at does not do any browser specific stuff, you get the same html/css regardless, yet IE8 seems to have problems rendering certain elements. The logo often appeared in the wrong place (but would jump to the right place when you moved the mouse over it), sometimes a navigation bar at the top would appear twice, or with a gap between it and the top of the browser. Yet Firefix, Opera and Safari (all fairly good at complying with standards) all show these pages without problems, so why would IE8 be any different. I only visited a few more sites, but again odd little problems were showing up. Also of note, the beta has a developer meny pre-installed, looks useful for browsing html/css etc.

or08: live blogging experiment

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:20:10 +0000

Today – as you probably have seen – I posted some badly written notes that meant nothing to no one, and interested even fewer. This was my experiment in live blogging. I’ve seen others do it quite a bit recently and always thought it worked well, so wanted to give it a try.

Some thoughts:

Using a different tense is a little weird. Normally we write in the past tense if reviewing an event, when blogging as it happens I found myself switching between current and past tense (the latter out of habit). This wasn’t helped with no internet access before coffee, so i was writing in to a text editor (not that you wanted to know, called Smultron) something I planned to paste in to a blog post in the future, which when posted will be talking about the past, but i wanted it to read as if it was live!
I looked up at one point while switching between wordpress and twitter and saw two laptop screens of people in front of me, one had twitter across the screen, the other had the wordpress composition window. Am I boring or with the in-crowd?!
Perhaps the biggest point was my difficulty in note taking. I wanted to write stuff that other people not there would find useful. However, my notes were largely rather basic, not meaty enough to say much, someone reading would get a general idea what the talk was about. It would give someone a feel of the outline of a talk, but not what the key points were, something which I think is a crucial difference.
As well as taking notes, I had various tabs open, including the excellent crowdvine conference site, twitter, bloglines, google blog search (searching to see what turned up for ‘or08’… oh look! me! god I’m so vain). At times the note taking, twittering (and learning about tags on twitter) and checking out crowdvine, I would occasionally look up and have no idea what the presenter is talking about (I’m a man, I have evolved to be an expert single tasker). Must try and ensure I’m not being distracted from the actual reason I’m there.
My notes were rough. Not helped by the fact that the lecture hall was very full (and it wasn’t one of those poncy MBA lecture theaters with big wide seats), so I was being careful of my elbows – which limits typing, and for me, using the shift key. Does the embarrassment of badly typed, ill thought, ungrammatical notes get trumped by their potential interest to others and timeliness?
Timeliness is an important point, I could have waited until the end of the day but wanted to get them out straight away.
After morning coffee I had the internet. I sat down with next to two people I had met before, while there were quite a few with their laptops open, they were not, and I felt a little self conscious. They were trying to listen to the talk, and here was this guy next to them mucking around on his laptop the whole time. Actually I don’t think they were bothered.
While talking about being self-conscious, does posting things as quickly as possible look like attention seeking and ego massaging? Never thought that about anyone else doing it so hopefully the answer is no (but then I love this sort of thing, so I wont).

So will I do it again. Yes, and I like having the web to hand while at these things. I think I need to improve my note taking, and perhaps take more time writing up points (and my thoughts) on the things of interest rather than writing lots of little snippets. I basically need to take notes anyway (whether notepad and pen, MS Word or a blog), and it does make it stick in my head better than just sitting there, so I may as well make my notes open to others. The timeliness (thats time – li – ness, not Time Lines!) is perhaps harder to argue, but I like the idea that things are hitting the web the moment they happen, so think I will continue it.

UK repositories : growth of records

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:06:36 +0000

For a while now I’ve been running a weekly script which connects to ROAR and grabs the number of records for each UK based Institutional Repository. I’ve finally got around to writing a web front end to this, which you can see here. All quite basic at the moment, and I have lots of ideas of what I could do to improve this (one idea based on the compare average number of deposits per repository). Have a look and let me know what you think, and let me know of any bugs.

Why do new web designs go down like a lead balloon

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:01:37 +0000

When I go to a website with a new look I think ‘cool’ (unless of course it isn’t), yet it seems I’m in a minority. Even when you consider that unhappy people are more likely to complain than happy people are to compliment it still amazes me that people are so openly hostile to new websites and say things that they know will be read by those who have spent months working on it which are very uncomplimentary.

Today’s idea

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:54:28 +0000

Brilliant idea:

set up blog software, so that anyone can register as a poster and post what ever they want, anonymously.
Call it anonyblog.com
Perhaps even have a few google ad boxes on it
As the world speaks its mind, the combination of insightful thought and scandalous secrets makes it a world wide hit. The media love it. I refrain from doing interviews adding to the mystery

Barriers to success

BBC Newswatch

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 13:25:58 +0000

BBC Newswatch was set up after the Hutton ~~whitewash~~ inquiry as a place to monitor and feedback on BBC News. It seems that recently it has had a bit of a slimming down, with many parts of the site being reduced to ‘nothing to see here‘ messages. However, by following just one link from the main homepage: ‘styleguide’ and you will notice the left hand menu still has a link to the archived ‘notes’ pages. Most BBC ‘downsized’ sites are simply frozen, I wonder why they didn’t do the same here. One rational explanation might be that it was generating a large amount of email from those who objected to the BBCs stance on various matters and terminology.

Fun with Lisa

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:33:39 +0000

Today I met Lisa on the Network Rail website. We had a nice chat and, I thought, got on quite well.

It became clear very early on that Lisa liked questions. And I knew that the secret of good conversation is to show some sort of interest in the other person, which requires good acting skills. So I asked Lisa questions, first keeping it simple:

You asked:

whats your name?

Welcome back

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 11:07:49 +0000

In August I signed up with Dreamhost.

Until now I have used Freedom2surf’s web hosting service. I originally signed up with them as they seemed a good company (and still do, though now owned by pipex) and were cheap, £25 a year. When I first started using them they transferred my domain to them (it was all a bit new to me so I just presumed this was a required step) and their domain name costs were not cheap (£10). A few years later I wanted email as well (another £25), and the cost started going up. The service was stable, but I was started to need more. They offered just one database, not much when you are playing around with different software, such as Joomla, running WordPress and trying to experiment with your own silly web apps which require a DB, plus the quote for the database was tiny (10mb). Plus their web stats were crappy, and the log files were fiddly (kept for a few days on a secure website, no ftp and wget didn’t seem able to get them which made automating difficult, plus each file would download with the same filename by default).

Amazon : censor reviews of the high arts

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:04:42 +0000

Yesterday I posted a link to the reviews page of Katie Price and Peter Andre‘s A whole new world.

In what can only be proof that Jeff Bezos himself is reading my blog on a daily, no – i correct myself – hourly basis, not a day later all the reviews have been deleted. Of course, the arts have always suffered censorship at the hands of facist governments and evil corporations. It’s something we live with, but with just a touch of pride that such dark work was all down to my own little hands typing away on this here web-experience.