blogging on Tales from the Bitface

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 08:19:52 +0000

I opened a file where I had made some notes for a possible post. It had a link to something I might comment on. I clicked the link. Not only was the post gone, but the whole site; the whole Substack.

I created the file in March.

Own your stuff. Use your own site.

Blog Stats 2020

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 16:24:42 +0000

As convention dictates, a summary of 2020’s posts. 173 in total, which is up on 2019’s total of 130. No SQL needed, unlike previous years. I just have to look at the archive pages.

Month	Posts
Jan	18
Feb	13
Mar	14
Apr	14
May	19
Jun	15
Jul	18
Aug	18
Sep	6
Oct	9
Nov	18
Dec	11

2018’s post; and 2017’s

How to Make Sure You See My Posts

Sun, 29 Nov 2020 17:50:10 +0000

If you’re reading this, it may not apply to you, but I want to let you know that there are a number of ways to make sure that you see all of my posts. Should you wish to.

Now With Added Email

If you follow that link on the left labelled ‘Subscribe,’ you’ll see all the ways.

RSS, Twitter, Micro.blog, WordPress.com; no surprises there.

But if you prefer to use the oldest protocol of all (at least for these purposes), there’s a form on that page that will let you sign up to get the posts by email.

So now you never have to miss a post again.

Site Update

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 17:18:34 +0000

As you might notice if you look around here, I’ve made some changes to the layout and presentation of the site. Nothing very dramatic, but the header and sidebar look a bit different.

I’m open to – and seeking – constructive criticism. How does it look? Is anything misaligned, or confusingly laid out, or hard to find?

Let me know in the comments, or on Twitter.

Returning Blogs

Wed, 06 May 2020 18:41:36 +0000

Here’s a reason (another reason) why feed readers are great: Tom Coates of PlasticBag.org has written his first post in seven years. There’s no reason to unsubscribe from blogs that haven’t posted for a while – no reason even to notice that fact normally – so up it pops in NetNewsWire¹ today.

The post itself is good – a bit meta (entirely meta) – but there’s nothing wrong with that.

I keep seeing suggestions that blogging is undergoing a renaissance, and I think it might be true. Of course, lots of us never went away, either as readers or writers. But it’s good to welcome Tom back.

Other feed readers are available. ↩︎

2019 in Bloggery

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 17:02:02 +0000

Only 130 posts in 2019. That’s disappointing after 261 and 163 in the previous two years.

Month	Posts
Jan	15
Feb	7
Mar	22
Apr	8
May	10
Jun	4
Jul	6
Aug	5
Sep	11
Oct	7
Nov	11
Dec	24

Blogging the Bitface, 2018 Style

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 22:31:52 +0000

Like last year, I present the figures for my blogging in 2018. 163 posts in total, counting this one, broken up as follows.

Month	Posts
Jan	20
Feb	13
Mar	11
Apr	15
May	23
Jun	16
Jul	11
Aug	8
Sep	9
Oct	13
Nov	12
Dec	12

The formatting has improved, as I mentioned last time. I’m not sure what I did that made it better. The SQL is the same as before, with the obvious year change.

100 posts less¹ than last year, but not bad. I’ll try for something closer to daily in 2019.

Some would say that should be “fewer,” but it turns out that was never a real rule, just some guy’s choice that got locked into style guides. ↩

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 19:07:47 +0000

I’m not at all sure about this new “Gutenberg” editor they’re adding to WordPress. I’ve installed the plugin version to try it out. Gutenberg is a change to the web-based editor in the WordPress dashboard, not a separate app. I typed up my previous post in MarsEdit, as is my wont, and uploaded it. The Gutenberg plugin imported it nicely and displayed everything as you’d expect. But it turned all my Markdown into HTML.

That’s not what I want, and it’s not how most Markdown-processing plugins — notably WordPress’s own Jetpack — handle Markdown. Instead they keep the source document as Markdown and only convert it to HTML when the page is requested. That’s what using a dynamic CMS means, after all.

It appears that you can get Gutenberg to keep the Markdown as it is, if you type it into what they call a Code Block. So I’ll have to hope that [@danielpunkass](https://micro.blog/danielpunkass) updates MarsEdit to send posts to that kind of block once Gutenberg is the default. Assuming the WordPress API lets you do that, of course.

2017 in Bitface Blogging

Thu, 04 Jan 2018 23:24:24 +0000

Well hello. It’s been a while. That daily posting thing didn’t work too well in the latter part of the year, and was particularly weak in the last couple of weeks. Weak weeks.

In fact I posted 261 times in 2017. It’s surprisingly hard to find that kind of thing out from Wordpress itself. I had to dig into the database and run some simple SQL:

select count(*) from devilgate_posts
  where  post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%';

261 is 72% of the days of the year, which is not too bad. Certainly the most posts in any year out of the past fifteen(!)

Here’s the monthly breakdown:

Month	Posts
Jan	32
Feb	33
Mar	33
Apr	18
May	27
Jun	15
Jul	21
Aug	17
Sep	18
Oct	18
Nov	23
Dec	6

A strong start, tapering off in the middle, with a rally in November and then a complete collapse in December. I suspect the last is from a combination of post-nano slump and the festive season.

If you’re interested, here’s the SQL that got me that table:

select
  date_format(post_date_gmt, '%b') as Month,
  count(*) as Posts
  from devilgate_posts
  where post_status = 'publish'
  and post_type = 'post'
  and post_date_gmt like '2017%'
  group by date_format(post_date_gmt, '%m');

As to this year, we’ll see how it goes. I hope at least to keep the frequency reasonably high. And improve both code and table formatting.

Micro.blog iOS Going Universal | Manton Reece

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 23:36:11 +0000

I’d like to be able to use Micro.blog from the iPad — well, I can, but it’s iPhone sized scaled up (or tiny in the middle of the screen) and doesn’t rotate to landscape, so I can’t use it with the keyboard. Manton tells us he’s going to fix all that, which will be great.

Holding Pattern

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 23:55:22 +0000

I’ve been working on a more substantial piece about music and gigs and nostalgia and my gig-going plans for the year, but it’s getting long, and possibly out of hand. So I’m going to delay it till later.

Consider this a placeholder.

And so it’s got some content of value, let me just draw your attention to the National March to Parliament next Saturday, 25th March. Meet from 11:00 in Park Lane.

I don’t know if it can do any good, but if you believe, as I do, that Brexit must be stopped, then you should try to be there.

And Then it Was All That

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 23:06:54 +0000

One of the blogs I follow is called And now it’s all this, by the mysterious Dr Drang. He writes mainly on engineering and provides lots of interesting Python scripts.

What I’m interested in his blog’s title and subtitle, though. “And now it’s all this”; and “I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or was taken wrong.” I’ve been reading it for years, and had only idly wondered about why it was called that, or what it really meant.

I’ve also been listening to, and reading about, The Beatles for years — for a great many more years. And so I was very familiar with John Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” line, and the subsequent furore.

But not that familiar, it turns out. Or not with his apology, at least.

We recently watched the excellent Eight Days a Week film, which has lots of Beatles footage I’d never seen before, and puts it all together into a compelling narrative.

Of course, it covers the “Jesus” period. So there was John, at a press conference, making an apology of sorts. And out pops:

I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or was taken wrong. And now it’s all this.

Oh. OK. Right. I should have seen that years ago.

Of course there are two remaining questions:

Why did the good doctor choose to name his blog that?
And what does the “leancrew” mean in his domain name?

Misbehaviour Again

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:29:04 +0000

I'm sure you all pay great attention to the goings on at this here blog. You'll almost certainly have noticed things going very strange yesterday, with the same post being repeated three or four times, in various forms and ways.

No? Well, in case: what we had is (probably) a glitch caused by a Wordpress plugin. Or maybe not. Maybe it was something else entirely. Really, we’ll have to see what happens when this one posts.

But I’ve turned off some of the sharing features for now. So you might not even see this if you’re used to being notified via Facebook or Twitter.

Actually since that’s where most of the interaction comes from, it would be interesting to know who if anyone is not reading it that way. Is anyone subscribed to the feed? that’s how I still do most of my blog reading.

Whether You Want To Or Not

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:15:26 +0000

Note: If you've seen multiple copies of this post, it's because I had trouble with accidentally posting it in the wrong format, and then Wordpress refusing to let me change it. Hopefully be all right now.

“Write even when you don’t want to,” say some people encouraging us to write every day. That would be me right now. The “don’t want to” part, not the “encouraging” part. It’s late and I haven’t written anything yet and I’ve made this daily rod for my own back.

On the other hand, I do love to write, and I can’t deny that I’ve done more of it in this last couple of months.

Though, not, as I hoped I might, any more fiction. I’m still stalled in the middle of the novel which in idea, at least is nearly five years old. It’ll be starting school soon!

And I need to get round to submitting some of the other, finished, things I have. Because they’re no use just sitting here on my ~~hard~~ solid-state drive.

Maybe

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 23:55:39 +0000

Sometimes you just want to write something. Maybe you have something specific to say, maybe not. Maybe you have nothing to say at all, but just want to get something out there.

Maybe you’ve set yourself a target, and having missed a day (and being aware that you’ll doubtless miss others) you’ve decided you want to keep the average up. So that at the end of 2017 you’ll be able to look back at at least 365 posts in the year.

Maybe at the start of the year, that was about as many posts as were on your blog in its whole history. So it’s a major challenge. But maybe you keep going, even with nothing to say.

Whoops!

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 09:07:41 +0000

OK, I missed a day. Obviously it had to happen sooner or later. But yesterday I just totally forgot.

Oh well. We pick up and keep going.

Daily Posting Harder When You're Away

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 12:39:44 +0000

I may not get to do a proper post today, as I’m in Edinburgh visiting friends. As well, my phone’s battery has become increasingly erratic, so it could go down at any moment.

So this is my post for today, unless I get round to writing more.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

"Thread" Dread

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 19:59:38 +0000

I don’t mind people posting a tweetstorm, wherein they have a lot to say and do so via a series of linked tweets. I think there are better ways to do it; better places to host medium-length pieces of writing,¹ but whatever works for you.

And of course I don’t mind other people tweeting a link to the top of the thread and urging others to read it.

But I really don’t care for the habit of doing so while saying nothing other than, “Thread.”

I mean, come on, people: if it’s worth linking to, it’s worth writing few words to tell us why you think we should read it.

This post could fit in five or six tweets. I suppose I should have posted it that way. Except #OwnYourContent.

Actually the typical tweetstorm is probably still quite short. ↩︎

Should a Blog Have a Theme?

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 23:34:00 +0000

Yes, yes, it’s all very meta: all I ever write about is blogging.¹ But that is exactly what I want to talk about today: is a blog better if it is only on one subject?²

I suspect that the most successful blogs in terms of size of readership are fairly closely focused on a single subject. I read several technology blogs, such as Daring Fireball, Six Colours and MacStories, which all write mainly about technology with an Apple slant. They have all achieved success by keeping that focus.³

On the other hand, there are some highly enjoyable ones that take a broader scope: Tim Bray’s Ongoing, John Scalzi’s Whatever, or Wil Wheaton‘s blog; those authors write about whatever⁴ takes their fancy.

I, as you’ll have noticed, take the latter tack. But the question is, should I be more focused? Should I concentrate on writing about politics, say?⁵

It’s worth considering, certainly, but here’s the thing: I’m not actually sure what I would focus on. I don’t think I have the single-mindedness to keep to the same subject. I value the flexibility of the old-school, personal blog.

Which is just as well, since that’s what I seem to be writing. So there you go.

Or politics. ↩︎
However broad that may be. ↩︎
Though it’s worth noting that recent world events have caused some of them to get a bit more political than previously. ↩︎
The clue is even in one of the names. ↩︎
Some would say that wouldn’t be so very different from now. ↩︎

Some More Bitface Thoughts

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 15:11:05 +0000

Something I forgot to mention yesterday was that I thought the “bitface” term was useful not just to refer to people who manipulate bits for a living (or hobby) — programmers, like myself. It can also work to discuss anyone who makes digital content: websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, photos, and so on.

We’re all moving bits around. We’re all labourers at the bitface.

The Origin of the Bitface

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 18:58:11 +0000

Things go quicker than you think. This ~~tweet~~ post¹ was inspired by a tweet, and I thought it wasn’t too long ago. But in fact it was April last year.

My friend Yusuf’s tweet inspired me to finally write about the term “biftace” and why I chose it and what it means. Actually I thought I had written this before, but it seems not.

So a long time ago, when I was first thinking of a name for my blog — before it even existed, indeed — I thought about the way the press used to refer to teachers working “at the chalkface.” The analogy with miners at the coalface was probably originally meant to disparage the labour of teachers as being less than that of miners. I’m guessing here, but considering the term seems to have originated in tabloid journalism, and tabloids tend to be disparaging of anything intellectual — though to be fair, they haven’t exactly been friends to miners either, over the years.

Anyway, I quite liked the term, and wanted to come up with something similar to refer to my own industry, that of programming. I tried out one or two for size, at least in my head. “Byteface” felt more accurate (it’s rare for an application programmer to care to much about bit-level things, and I mainly write Java, which compiles to bytecode); but it didn’t feel right.”Codeface” would have been another, but again, didn’t feel right.

“Bitface” did feel right, and so an early version became “The Bitface Diaries.” I don’t think I ever made that live.

When I started my Livejournal (which nowadays is just one of my syndication targets) I went with “Tales from the Bitface,” which I still like. And then when I decided to set up my own site I went with “A Labourer at the Bitface,” which harked back to the original impetus for inventing the word, and also alluded to my support for the Labour Party.

Which means I’m considering a rename now, as I consider my future in said party. But that’s another blog entry.

The conversation with with Yusuf was about hardware, which is not what the term was about. But I never worked out what we should call working with hardware in similar terminology.

Post! This post, not this tweet. ↩︎

Success for Micro.blog

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 20:12:37 +0000

Manton Reece’s Kickstarter campaign for Micro.blog, which I wrote about before, was successful. In fact very successful. He made his stretch goal, which means he’ll be able to employ a part-time Community Manager for the service, which should help with the kind of abuse that we’ve seen on Twitter over the years.

So congratulations to him. And as a backer I look forward to getting the devilgate username shortly.

Not that I’ll actually need a username on the site, I don’t think, as I expect to be using it to post short entries here, syndicated to Twitter. But it won’t hurt to have it. If only to stop someone else masquerading as me, like on Ebay.¹

OK, they’re not actually masquerading, but last time I looked (a long time ago) there was a more-or-less dormant account called devilgate, which wasn’t me. I mean, unless it was, and I had somehow set it up using an email address that I no longer have, or something. ↩︎

One Month Gone

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 22:53:36 +0000

As you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention, I’ve challenged myself to blog every day this year. Well, the first twelfth of the year (approximately) has gone, and I’ve succeeded so far (my problems posting last Saturday notwithstanding).

One or two posts were extremely short, maybe just a link and a few words. But most of them have been more substantial. So I’m quite pleased with my progress so far. I’m not sure that it’s making me write more — well, by definition it is, as I have to write something every day.¹

So: blogging about blogging. It’s a fine tradition. And thirty-two days in a row now.

I could write posts in advance and set them to publish on a future day, but there’s no need for that. Maybe when I go on holiday I’ll have to do that. ↩︎

Lost Drafts

Sun, 29 Jan 2017 19:31:02 +0000

You may think my last post was late, in that I didn’t post it on Saturday, but rather today, Sunday. And that is literally true. However, I wrote the original draft of it on Saturday morning. I then saved it as a draft in WordPress (or so I thought).

Later that day, while I was out and about, I tried to put the finishing touches to it and post it. But I couldn’t find it. It didn’t appear in the list of posts in WordPress.

And it was nowhere to be found. Luckily I had written most of the draft in a text editor (Bear, to be specific), and that was still there. So I was able to recover it. And WordPress lets you override today’s date when you post an entry, so I was able to make it be dated on the day it was actually written. I’m giving myself that one, as meeting my challenge. I wrote it on the day, even if I didn’t post it till the day after.

But ths is the second time recently that I’ve lost a draft. An email the last time, but it feels like a worrying trend. I’m going to have to be more careful with things.

On the positive side, today’s post just wrote itself.

Social Media is Like the Railways?

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 20:59:15 +0000

There’s a piece in the Guardian entitled “Why social media is like the railways – and must be saved. I’m not sure about the title, but it’s a good piece, by Paul Mason (in fact, looking at the URL I suspect that wasn’t the original title).

He starts by talking about SoundCloud, which is, for me at least, one of those sites that you would never think of going to; you just follow a link to something on it. Mind you, increasingly many sites are like that, and have been since perhaps the early days of blogging. Anyway, Mason says:

The Berlin-based music service started as a super-cool platform for people who made music and wanted to share it. Last week, its owners admitted it was losing a million dollars a week, and could run out of cash before the end of the year.

…

The whole future of the little orange cloud now rests on whether it can get people to subscribe – for money.

Which is interesting, and it’s one of those things that the net is a better place for it existing, and I’d be sad to see go away — but I can’t imagine ever subscribing to it.

In the same week, another achingly cool online publisher, this time of blogs, Medium, also hit trouble.

“Achingly cool”? Medium? I’m not convinced (disclaimer: for what it’s worth, my posts are automatically crossposted to Medium, among other places).

He goes on to talk about how none of the social media sites is profitable, except of course for Facebook. He refers to

the ailing internet platforms – not just Soundcloud and Medium but Ello, a wannabe rival to Facebook, and Tumblr

Tumblr is ailing? that seems surprising, considering how popular it is. But who knows (it’s also one of the other places I mentioned above). He goes on to exhort us to return to these sites, dust off our old user IDs and so on, and enjoy them again:

It will feel a bit like time travel – back to the period around 2010-12, when social media was associated with postmodernity, self-produced music and revolt, not fake news, white supremacy and rule by old men. But usage alone will not save the collaborative tools. We need new, cooperative ownership models. If basic word processors are effectively now shipped free with every device, so too could be a nonprofit music-sharing service, a free blogging platform and a place to keep in contact with our friends, without intrusive data-farming and a deluge of ads.

As to that, a free blogging platform — while not “shipped”, is easily available: Wordpress. And there are others, of course. But it links back to what I was saying the other day: you’ve got to own your own content if you want it to be safe from services disappearing.

As to that “railways” reference in the title, here’s how he finishes:

Medium, Soundcloud and ultimately Twitter are – like the railways – worth saving even if they cannot be run at a profit. 2017 can and should be a year in which the users of platforms reclaim these freedoms not as privileges but as rights.

I’ve got a lot of time for that view, actually, but those sites are mostly set up on a capitalist model (even if they have a community spirit), and I can’t see that changing any time soon.

Blog Misbehaviour

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 23:20:25 +0000

This blog runs, like so many others, on Wordpress. Recently I’ve noticed some strange behaviour.

When I posted an entry, it wouldn’t show up. Not at first, and sometimes not for a long time afterwards. The entry was there: you could see it if you followed the link, for example if you came from Facebook or Twitter, to both of which I automatically distribute.

Eventually I did a bit of googling, and it turns out that caching plugins can have this effect. I had caching plugins installed. I disabled them, and suddenly everything was displaying normally.

You want to cache your content to help with the site’s performance. Cached pages should be served from the webserver’s filesystem, rather than generated from the content in the database each time they’re requested.

So I’ll need to investigate getting a plugin that isn’t problematic, but for now, if you’ve noticed anything odd about the site, it should all be be OK again.

Independent Microblogging

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 19:27:16 +0000

Twitter is great in many ways, but it’s far from problem-free. (Thought experiment: if Twitter hadn’t existed, would Trump have got elected?)

The abuse and lack of tools to combat it are of course the major ones. Lindy West’s Guardian article on leaving Twitter is only the latest such.

But another problem is the old one of owning your own words. Of controlling the platform on which you publish. I’ve posted briefly about this before (though that was Google, rather than Twitter). Sure, Twitter isn’t likely to go bust and delete everyone’s tweets without any warning. But you never know when they’re going to change a policy, or change ownership, or make some other change that — deliberately or not — shuts down your access, removes your entire history, or otherwise lessens or removes the experience.

There have been attempts to build open alternatives, such as Diaspora, but I confess that I’ve only ever come away from it confused.

It would be better if there were a simple way we could all publish to our own sites, but still get the benefit of Twitter’s network. Say hello to Micro.blog, a new approach from Manton Reece, blogger, podcaster and developer.

It should allow us to post Tweet-style short posts on our own sites, and also send them to Twitter. Which may give us the best of both worlds.

As well as developing the service and the app, he’s writing a book about the subject of indie microblogging, and has a Kickstarter going to help him out. It’s worth offering a few bucks if you’re at all interested in the matter.

Content Provider

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 18:24:38 +0000

I may not get to write a proper post today, as I haven’t yet and we’re about to go and see Stewart Lee: Content Provider, so I probably won’t manage to later.

So this is by way of meeting my challenge.

The Year Turns Again

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 23:48:30 +0000

New Year’s Day, by all the fates. Another trip round the sun, another twelve months have passed. As usual I wonder, “Where did that year go?”

I’ve been fairly consistent in blogging over the last year, I think: consistently lightweight, that is. I only missed one entire month, by the looks of it (March). But it’s been infrequent at best.

So as a kind of New Year’s resolution (I don’t really go in for them normally) I’m planning — no, thats probably too strong; proposing, let’s say — to make 2017 the year of blogging every day.

Every day. It’s a big challenge, I know. But I think that it’s only if I put it out there publicly that there’s any chance I’ll carry through with it.

Or not. We’ll see. My thinking is that even a traditional link post will count, since I write at least a few words with those.

Anyway, Happy New Year, if you’re reading this and I haven’t wished you it already.

Self-Hosting

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 23:52:33 +0000

One very good reason why you should post at your own site, and not necessarily trust big companies to look after your stuff: Why Did Google Erase Dennis Cooper’s Beloved Literary Blog? – The New Yorker.

Another Lost Month, and Unpublished Posts

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 23:50:59 +0000

OK, so not content with the last post celebrating the fact that I missed a whole month, I then went on and missed February, too. These months just go by so fast.

Anyway, a couple of things. I noticed that I have a few posts sitting in draft form but that are more-or-less complete, so you may shortly see some slightly-non-timely things.

And I’m thinking I might have another go at blogging about the books I read. I appear not to have done that regularly since 2009 (these years go by so fast…) I might not give every book its own post, but put a few into a summary. As I’ve only read three so far this year (one of them was Stephen King’s 1300-page behemoth It, so I don’t feel too bad about the count) I’ll start with those.

This might just encourage me to post regularly, if not frequently.

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of Arthur’s Seat to keep things visual.

Strange Blog Behaviour

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:56:48 +0000

For some reason WordPress decided to repost the two posts that currently appear immediately below this one. I have no idea why. They have in common that they are both of the “Link” format (“Format” here is a WordPress concept denoting types of post).

The mildly annoying thing is that I haven’t posted here yet this year, and now I seem to have started the year with two reposts. I could, of course, delete them, but then the above paragraph would be wrong.

Anyway, this is the true first post of the year, even if it was triggered by an aberration.

Hello. Happy New Year.

Without Twitter, how will we know what's happening?

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 23:41:14 +0000

[Twitter](http://twitter.com/) seems to be down at the moment - or at least, it's not accepting tweets, and I can't log in at the website. But how do we know what's happening without Twitter to tell us?

Edit: back to normal now. I’m @devilgate, of course.

Too long gone

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 11:52:08 +0000

Man, it's been a long time since I posted. I blame Twitter.

You could always follow me there, if you don’t already.

Also my OU course. Which, ironically or not, is on Creative Writing.

Incidentally, if brevity is the soul of wit, then Twitter ought to be hilarious.

Trying out Drivel

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:52:55 +0000

I'm trying out an offline blogging client that runs on Linux (these things are not that easy to come by). It's called Drivel, and it seems to work OK, as long as you tell it that your WordPress installation is actually Movable Type.

Oh, and it looks like it only supports one category per post, and no native tags. Not very impressive, really.

Since I tend to draft in jEdit, I’ve often thought that what I need is a blogging plugin for that, and been surprised that it doesn’t exist. One of these days I’ll have to write it…

(ETA: tags added later via the web interface. Far from satisfactory, really.)

(E further TA: damn, it looks like this theme isn’t showing native WordPress tags, anyway.)

Messing around with the blog

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:58:30 +0000

I'm trying out a different theme on here for a while, along with a Wordpress Plugin called QuickPost .

Both the plugin and the theme are supposed to make WordPress be usable a bit like Tumblr. There are a number of flaws, though. The theme (Tumble-Hybrid by Tribe) is perhaps a bit too simple. I’m all for a clean, simple look, but this might have gone too far.

And the plugin doesn’t allow for a preview before posting (as well as not working properly with Flickr, though presumably that will be fixed in due course).

Edit: No, that won’t do at all. One or other of them disabled comments and lost the title (even though “Allow Comments” is ticked, and the title appears, in the main editor.

I suppose the thinking is that, for something quick and dirty you don’t want comments or titles, but I do. Even Tumblr has titles, if not comments.

Edit 2: Well, a bit of CSS hacking sorted that out. But posting photos isn’t working at all as I would expect. That may be to do with the fact that I’ve never really dealt with posting images before, though, rather than the plugin or theme.

... And a Happy New Year to All My Reader

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 13:44:26 +0000

Well, clearly no blogging happens over the Christmas and New Year period in the Devilgate household. In fact I didn't even switch the computer on.

So we start the year without having done a review of the last one, and without even having posted all of last year’s Book Notes. I have nine (nine!) written or partially written, but unposted, mini book reviews, that I’ll try to put up over the next few days. Perhaps I should slap them all together into one, but that would really be too big, and would make it harder to find things in future. So Book Notes 2006 entries will keep on appearing for a while yet.

And since I’ve made myself a New Year’s resolution to write every day, I hope to be making considerably more posts in general than last year. We’ll see.

I hope everyone had a fine Christmas or other winter festival, and an equally good start to the New Year.

My "Big England" piece is up at Temperama

Tue, 22 Aug 2006 13:59:01 +0000

The lovely Dave Hill has posted my piece in his Big England series.

Such is Dave’s posting frequency that it has already rolled off his front page. But such is his site’s popularity that it went straight in at number 10 on a Google search for my name; and it has now risen to number 3, I see.

Ironically, since I close the piece by being cruel and dismissive about cricket, yesterday’s news made cricket interesting. Who ever thought that I would know the name of a cricket umpire?

Dave himself has some thoughts inspired by the matter in The Guardian‘s Comment is Free blog.

But pop over and read my ‘This Is England‘. Oh yes, and: you need to scroll down to my comment to get a correction to the intro.

On Countries, Nationhood, and Being Invited to Write a Guest Spot

Fri, 04 Aug 2006 12:59:49 +0000

Dave Hill is a novelist, Guardian writer and prolific blogger. He is running a series of guest pieces on his blog. They're on the theme of "What I Like About England (or not, as the case may be)." He was inspired to do this mainly by all the flag-waving furore during the World Cup (with maybe some influence from Andy Murray's attire at Wimbledon).

I’m pleased to say that he has asked me to contribute. I’ll post here, of course, when my piece is up. In the meantime I’ve been thrashing out some of what I might say in the comments thread of one of the earlier pieces.

Dave’s overall title for this project is ‘Big England’. You can see all the pieces to date here

WordPress, this blog, and the Google cache

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 11:19:34 +0000

I doubt that anybody noticed, but my last entry has been missing a bit — in fact, missing most of itself — for a week or more. I don’t know how it happened. I did make a minor edit to it a few days after initially posting it, and I can only suppose that either I or WordPress somehow messed something up.

Unfortunately I had already deleted the draft from my PDA where I composed it. Fortunately there is a behemoth in California that looks after the careless blogger. A bit of obscure Google-diving and my post is back.

Thanks, Google. In future I’ll keep everything in text files.

Cafe culture

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:10:33 +0000

Well, I feel like a proper 21st-century blogger at the moment: I’m sitting typing this in a cafe. Specifically, the Clissold House Cafe, in Clissold Park in Stoke Newington, North London. The kids are currently at a tennis ‘camp’ (two hours’ intensive training a day for four days this week). It being the school holidays, I’ve taken the week off work to look after them.

So with two hours to fill, I went for a wander round the shops of Church Street (only bought two books in a second-hand bookshop) and now I’m back at the park, waiting for the tennis to finish. I’m typing this on my Palm with folding keyboard setup. It doesn’t have anything fancy like WiFi or Bluetooth, so by the time you read this it will be (at least) several hours later, when I upload it to the PC and post.

The coffee’s not very good, either. Their specialty is more cakes here, but I’m holding off until lunchtime.

I’m am reminded as I type of the existence of John Scalzi‘s book on writing, You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing. Still, I’m not trying to impress (or, indeed, fool) anyone (nor, I imagine, succeeding in doing so).

At the same time I’m listening to Radio 4, where there’s a program about ‘battleaxes’, which is kind of bollocks, as all such stereotypes are. It isn’t annoying me enough to switch it off yet, though.

Curiously, they just played an extract from Fawlty Towers that I don’t remember ever hearing. There’s only about twelve episodes, so it’s hard to imagine that there’s one I’ve never seen. Then they’ve been talking about Thatcher as a battleaxe, which is an interesting one that I won’t go into here.

I sat down to write fiction, but ended up doing this. It doesn’t make for the greatest of blog entries, but I suppose it serves as slight relief from bleak political posts.

Damn, nearly made it without mentioning politics.

Meet the new blog...

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 23:22:52 +0000

… same as the old blog.

Well, not quite the same. This one is on my own site, for one thing.

A new blog, though: just what the world needs, don’t you think?

As this is the first entry here, I can’t help but feel a certain… pressure, let’s say. Because, after all, in years to come, when this blog is one of the most popular sites on the internet¹, millions of people will look back through the entries, and pay special attention to the first one. Obviously its content is critically important. Unfortunately, its content is rubbish.

Well, its content was going to be rubbish: or rather, about rubbish; about the guy who was fined for dropping rubbish into a bin.

But many people have written about the stupidity of that, and in any case, the council in question have already, and predictably, gone back on their foolish decision.

Instead I thought I might write about the hat woman. But actually that’s too boring to go into. Pubs with “no-hat” rules, though: truly madness walks among us. Actually, the scary thing about that story is that there are pubs with CCTV cameras inside them. Truly we are the most watched society in the world.

Maybe that should be the theme of this blog, if it needs one: the madness of modern society.

I’d hate to come over like some old grouch, though, railing against modernity: “It wisnae like that when ah wuz a wean, by the way jimmy.”

Or not too often, at least. No, instead, like most blogs — like all the best ones — I’ll just write about whatever the hell I feel like.

Modern weirdness, though: I just heard about the recent trends for “internet suicides” in Japan; and the fact that the US Nasdaq exchange has made an offer to buy the London Stock Exchange. Apparently there are shares in the Stock Exchange: it’s a company. For some reason I find this immensely surprising. I would have thought (if I had ever thought of such a thing) that it was some kind of public body, like the Bank of England. Apparently not, though. Life’s strangenesses, I think, will be a recurring feature here.

1. this is meant to be humorous, by the way.

On the ethics of modifying blog posts

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 13:51:00 +0000

What, I’m wondering, is the etiquette for this? I looked over my last post, on literary deja vu, and I realised that the second-last paragraph was so scrambled together as to be practically unreadable. So I’ve just edited it, from the frankly execrable:

I did have an experience a bit like this before, though: a few years back I read one of Paul McAuley’s; Eternal Light, I think it was, but it is perhaps telling that I can’t remember for sure, even having looked over some reviews. It seems I still can’t remember it. It became familar to me in a much more gradual way, and I realised I had read it before. In that case I had the book out of the library, and I figured out that I had had it out before. In this case, with the Cadigan, I have no idea where I got the copy that I originally read. Library? Maybe. Borrowed a friend’s? Always possible. Or did I buy it, and forget? is there a copy filed away in the attic somewhere? I just have no idea.

to the slightly more readable:

But it’s not the first time. A few years back I read one of Paul McAuley’s novels. It is perhaps telling that I can’t remember for sure which one, despite having looked over some reviews. I think it was Eternal Light, but it seems I still can’t remember it.

In any case, it very gradually became familar to me, and I realised I had read it before. The copy I was reading at the time came from the library, and I figured out that I had taken it out before.

In this case, with the Cadigan, I have no idea where I got the copy that I originally read. Library? Maybe. Borrowed a friend’s? Always possible. Or did I buy it, and forget? is there a copy filed away in the attic somewhere? I just have no idea.

But the question is, should we update a blog post (or a LiveJournal post, if you see a difference) after it has been out there for a while? Obviously in the first few minutes after posting, when you notice the typoes, it’s fine (and I often wonder about people who don’t correct their typoes; don’t they read their posts?) Similarly, if it has been up for months, then you should not edit it in any significant way: it’s part of the fabric of the internet (at the risk of sounding pompous). My concern is when it’s been out for a day or two.

I’m not really concerned in this case: it’s not as if I’ve changed the meaning, and nobody has commented on it, so there’s no concern about comments becoming confusing or misleading. But in general, I’d be interested to know what people think about changing posts after the fact.

I claim this blog for Technorati...

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 13:48:00 +0000

Or is it that I claim Technorati for this blog? In any case, I’ve just set up a Technorati Profile, and I need to post this code here to “claim” my blog. So there we are.