Also: awesome news.
Fixing Social Media
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Tag: blogging
Still Blogging in 2017
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
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On a blog, I can write about blogging and whimsically toss in self-indulgent pictures of May’s budding azaleas.
I can end my career, right here, in a flash. I can rant about the perfidy and corruption of my local governing party, who I devoutly hope are about to be turfed by the voters. I can discuss the difference between O(1) and O(log(N)), which can usually be safely ignored.
On blogs, I can read most of the long-form writing that’s worth reading about the art and craft of programming computers. Or I can follow most of the economists’ debates that are worth having. Or I can check out a new photographer every day and see new a way of seeing the world.
Having said that, it seems sad that most of the traffic these days goes to BigPubs. That the advertising dollars are being sucked inexorably into Facebook/Google and away from anyone else. That these days, I feel good over a piece that gets more than twenty thousand reads (only one so far this year).
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When I wrote about 20 years of blogging, this was the kind of thing I meant when I talked about why it’s important, to me. But Tim says it better.
20 Years Of Blogging
As of next week, I’ll have been blogging for 20 years, or about 54% of my life. How did that happen?
The mid-1990s were a very different time for the World Wide Web (yes, we still called it that, and sometimes we even described its use as “surfing”). Going “on the Internet” was a calculated and deliberate action requiring tying up your phone line, minutes of “connecting” along with all of the associated screeching sounds if you hadn’t turned off your modem’s loudspeaker, and you’d typically be paying twice for the experience: both a monthly fee to your ISP for the service and a per-minute charge to your phone company for the call.
It was into this environment that in 1994 I published my first web pages: as far as I know, nothing remains of them now. It wasn’t until 1998 that I signed up an account with UserActive (whose website looks almost the same today as it did then) who offered economical subdomain hosting with shell and CGI support and launched “Castle of the Four Winds”, a set of vanity pages that included my first blog.
Except I didn’t call it a “blog”, of course, because it wasn’t until the following year that Peter Merholz invented the word (he also commemorated 20 years of blogging, this year). I didn’t even call it a “weblog”, because that word was still relatively new and I wasn’t hip enough to be around people who said it, yet. It was self-described as an “online diary”, a name which only served to reinforce the notion that I was writing principally for myself. In fact, it wasn’t until mid-1999 that I discovered that it was being more-widely read than just by me and my circle of friends when I attracted a stalker who travelled across the UK to try to “surprise” me by turning up at places she expected to find me, based on what I’d written online… which was exactly as creepy as it sounds.
While the world began to panic that the coming millennium was going to break all of the computers, I migrated Castle of the Four Winds’ content into AvAngel.com, a joint vanity site venture with my friend Andy. Aside from its additional content (purity tests, funny stuff, risqué e-cards), what we hosted was mostly the same old stuff, and I continued to write snippets about my life in what was now quite-clearly a “blog-like” format, with the most-recent posts at the top and separate pages for content too old for the front page. Looking back, there’s still a certain naivety to these posts which exemplify the youth of the Web. For example, posts routinely referenced my friends by their email addresses, because spam was yet to become a big enough problem that people didn’t much mind if you put their email address on a public webpage somewhere, and because email addresses still carried with them a feeling of anonymity that ceased to be the case when we started using them for important things.
Technologically-speaking, too, this was a simpler time. Neither Javascript nor CSS support was widespread (nor consistently-standardised) enough to rely upon for anything other than the simplest progressive enhancement unless you were willing to “pick a side” in what we’d subsequently call the first browser war and put one of those apalling “best viewed in Internet Explorer” or “best viewed in Netscape Navigator” banners on your site. I’ve always been a believer in a universal web (and my primary browser at the time was Opera, anyway, as it mostly-remained until Opera went wrong in 2013), and I didn’t have the energy to write everything twice, so our cool/dynamic functionality came mostly from back-end (e.g. Perl, PHP) technologies.
Meanwhile, during my initial months as a student in Aberystwyth, I wrote a series of emails to friends back home entitled “Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth”, and put copies of each onto my student webspace; I’ve since recovered these and integrated them into my unified blog.
In 2002 I’d bought the domain name scatmania.org – a reference to my university halls of residence nickname “Scatman Dan”; I genuinely didn’t consider the possibility that the name might be considered scatalogical until later on. As I wanted to continue my blogging at an address that felt like it was solely mine (AvAngel.com having been originally shared with a friend, although in practice over time it became associated only with me), this seemed like a good domain upon which to relaunch. And so, in mid-2003 and powered by a short-lived and ill-fated blogging engine called Flip I did exactly that. WordPress, to which I’d subsequently migrate, hadn’t been invented yet and it wasn’t clear whether its predecessor, b2/cafelog, would survive the troubles its author was experiencing.
From this point on, any web address for any post made to my blog still works to this day, despite multiple technological and infrastructural changes to my blog (and some domain name shenanigans!) in the meantime. I’d come to be a big believer in the mantra that cool URIs don’t change: something that as far as possible I’ve committed to trying to upload in my blogging, my archiving, and my paid work since then. I’m moderately confident that all extant links on the web that point to earlier posts are all under my control so they can (and in most cases have) been fixed already, so I’m pretty close to having all my permalink URIs be “cool”, for now. You might hit a short chain of redirects, but you’ll get to where you’re going.
And everything was fine, until one day in 2004 when it wasn’t. The server hosting scatmania.org died in a very bad way, and because my backup strategy was woefully inadequate, I lost a lot of content. I’ve recovered quite a lot of it and put it back in-place, but some is probably gone forever.
The resurrected site was powered by WordPress, and this was the first time that live database queries had been used to power my blog. Occasionally, these days, when talking to younger, cooler developers, I’m tempted to follow the hip trend of reimplementing my blog as a static site, compiling a stack of host-anywhere HTML files based upon whatever-structure-I-like at the “backend”… but then I remember that I basically did that already for six years and I’m far happier with my web presence today. I’ve nothing against static site systems (I’m quite partial to Middleman, myself, although I’m also fond of Hugo) but they’re not right for this site, right now.
IndieAuth hadn’t been invented yet, but I was quite keen on the ideals of OpenID (I still am, really), and so I implemented what was probably the first viable “install-anywhere” implementation of OpenID for WordPress – you can see part of it functioning in the top-right of the screenshot above, where my (copious, at that time) LiveJournal-using friends were encouraged to sign in to my blog using their LiveJournal identity. Nowadays, the majority of the WordPress plugins I use are ones I’ve written myself: my blog is powered by a CMS that’s more “mine” than not!
Over the course of the first decade of my blogging, a few trends had become apparent in my technical choices. For example:
- I’ve always self-hosted my blog, rather than relying on a “blog as a service” or siloed social media platform like WordPress.com, Blogger, or LiveJournal.
- I’ve preferred an approach of storing the “master” copy of my content on my own site and then (sometimes) syndicating it elsewhere: for example, for the benefit of my friends who during their University years maintained a LiveJournal, for many years I had my blog cross-post to a LiveJournal account (and backfeed copies of comments back to my site).
- I’ve favoured web standards that provided maximum interoperability (e.g. RSS with full content) and longevity (serving HTML pages from permanent URLs, adding “extra” functionality via progressive enhancement so as to ensure that content functioned e.g. without Javascript, with CSS disabled or the specification evolved, etc.).
These were deliberate choices, but they didn’t require much consideration: growing up with a Web far less-sophisticated than today’s (e.g. truly stateless prior to the advent of HTTP cookies) and seeing the chaos caused during the first browser war and the period of stagnation that followed, these choices seemed intuitive.
(Perhaps it’s not so much of a coincidence that I’ve found myself working at a library: maybe I’ve secretly been a hobbyist archivist all along!)
As you’d expect from a blog covering a period from somebody’s teen years through to their late thirties, there’ve been significant changes in the kinds of content I’ve posted (and the tone with which I’ve done so) over the years, too. If you dip into 2003, for example, you’ll see the results of quiz memes and unqualified daily minutiae alongside actual considered content. Go back further, to early 1999, and it is (at best) meaningless wittering about the day-to-day life of a teenage student. It took until around 2009/2010 before I actually started focussing on writing content that specifically might be enjoyable for others to read (even where that content was frankly silly) and only far more-recently-still that I’ve committed to the “mostly technical stuff, ocassional bits of ‘life’ stuff” focus that I have today.
I say “committed”, but of course I’m fully aware that whatever this blog is now, it’ll doubtless be something somewhat different if I’m still writing it in another two decades…
Once I reached the 2010s I started actually taking the time to think about the design of my blog and its meaning. Conceptually, all of my content is data-driven: database tables full of different “kinds” of content and associated metadata, and that’s pretty-much ideal – it provides a strong separation between content and presentation and makes it possible to make significant design changes with less work than might otherwise be expected. I’ve also always generally favoured a separation of concerns in web development and so I’m not a fan of CSS design methodologies that encourage class names describing how things should appear, like Atomic CSS. Even where it results in a performance hit, I’d far rather use CSS classes to describe what things are or represent. The single biggest problem with this approach, to my mind, is that it violates the DRY principle… but that’s something that your CSS preprocessor’s there to fix for you, isn’t it?
But despite this philosophical outlook on the appropriate gap between content and presentation, it took until about 2010 before I actually attached any real significance to the presentation at all! Until this point, I’d considered myself to have been more of a back-end than a front-end engineer, and felt that the most-important thing was to get the content out there via an appropriate medium. After all, a site without content isn’t a site at all, but a site without design is (or at least should be) still intelligible thanks to browser defaults! Remember, again, that I started web development at a time when stylesheets didn’t exist at all.
My previous implementations of my blog design had used simple designs, often adapted from open-source templates, in an effort to get them deployed as quickly as possible and move on to the next task, but now, I felt, it was time to do a little more.
For a few years, I was producing a new theme once per year. I experimented with different colours, fonts, and layouts, and decided (after some ad-hoc A/B testing) that my audience was better-served by a “front” page than by being dropped directly into my blog archives as had previously been the case. Highlighting the latest few – and especially the very-latest – post and other recent content increased the number of posts that a visitor would be likely to engage with in a single visit. I’ve always presumed that the reason for this is that regular (but non-subscribing) readers are more-likely to be able to work out what they have and haven’t read already from summary text than from trying to decipher an entire post: possibly because my blogging had (has!) become rather verbose.
I went through a bit of a lull in blogging: I’ve joked that I spent more time on my 2010 and 2011 designs than I did on the sum total of the content that was published in between the pair of them (which isn’t true… at least, not quite!). In the month I left Aberystwyth for Oxford, for example, I was doing all kinds of exciting and new things… and yet I only wrote a total of two blog posts.
With RSS waning in popularity – which I can’t understand: RSS is amazing! – I began to crosspost to social networks like Twitter and Google+ (although no longer to Google+, following the news of its imminent demise) to help those readers who prefer to get their content via these media, but because I wasn’t producing much content, it probably didn’t make a significant difference anyway: the chance of a regular reader “missing” something must have been remarkably slim.
Nobody calls me “Scatman Dan” any more, and hadn’t for a long, long time. Given that my name is already awesome and unique all by itself (having changed to be so during the era in which scatmania.org was my primary personal domain name), it felt like I had the opportunity to rebrand.
I moved my blog to a new domain, DanQ.me (which is nice and short, too) and came up with a new collection of colours, fonts, and layout choices that I felt better-reflected my identity… and the fact that my blog was becoming less a place to record the mundane details of my daily life and more a place where I talk about (principally-web) technology, security, and GPS games… and just occasionally about other topics like breadmaking and books. Also, it gave me a chance to get on top of the current trend in web design for big, clean, empty spaces, square corners, and using pictures as the hook to a story.
I’ve been working harder this last year or two to re-integrate (in a PESOS-like way) into my blog content that I’ve published elsewhere, mostly geocaching logs and geohashing expedition records, and I’ve also done so retroactively, so in addition to my first blog article on the subject of geocaching, you can read my first ever cache log without switching to a different site nor relying upon the continued existence and accessibility of that site. I’ve been working at being increasingly mindful of where my content is siloed outside of my control and reclaiming it by hosting it here, on my blog.
Particular areas in which I produce content elsewhere but would like to at-least maintain a copy here, and would ideally publish here first and syndicate elsewhere, although I appreciate that this is difficult, are:
- GPS games like geocaching and geohashing – I’ve mostly got this under control, but could enjoy streamlining the process or pushing towards POSSE
- Reddit, where I’ve written tens of thousands of words under a variety of accounts, but I don’t really pay attention to the site any more
- I left Facebook in 2011 but I still have a backup of what was on my “Wall” at that point, which I could look into reintegrating into my blog
- I share a lot of the source code I write via my GitHub account, but I’m painfully aware that this is yet-another-silo that I ought to learn not to depend upon (and it ought to be simple enough to mirror my repos on my own site!)
- I’ve got a reasonable number of videos on two YouTube channels which are online by Google’s good graces (and potential for advertising revenue); for a handful of technical reasons they’re a bit of a pain to self-host, but perhaps my blog could act as a secondary source to my own video content
- I write business reviews on Google Maps which I should probably look into recovering from the hivemind and hosting here… in fact, I’ve probably written plenty of reviews on other sites, too, like Amazon for example…
- On two previous occasions I’ve maintained an online photo gallery; I might someday resurrect the concept, at least for the photos that used to be published on them
- I’ve dabbled on a handful of other, often weirder, social networks before like Scuttlebutt (which has a genius concept, by the way) and Ello, and ought to check if there’s anything “original” on there I should reintegrate
- Going way, way back, there are a good number of usenet postings I’ve made over the last twenty-something years that I could reclaim, if I can find them…
(if you’re asking why I’m inclined to do all of these things: here’s why)
20 years and around 717,000 words worth of blogging down, it’s interesting to look back and see how things have changed: in my life, on the Web, and in the world in general. I’ve seen many friends’ blogs come and go: they move into a new phase of their life and don’t feel like what they wrote before reflects them today, most often, and so they delete them… which is fine, of course: it’s their content! But for me it’s always felt wrong to do so, for two reasons: firstly, it feels false to do so given that once something’s been put on the Web, it might well be online forever – you can’t put the genie back in the bottle! And secondly: for me, it’s valuable to own everything I wrote before. Even the cringeworthy things I wrote as a teenager who thought they knew everything and the antagonistic stuff I wrote in my early 20s but that I clearly wouldn’t stand by today is part of my history, and hiding that would be a disservice to myself.
The 17-year-old who wrote my first blog posts two decades ago this month fully expected that the things he wrote would be online forever, and I don’t intend to take that away from him. I’m sure that when I write a post in October 2038 looking back on the next two decades, I’ll roll my eyes at myself today, too, but for me: that’s part of the joy of a long-running personal blog. It’s like a diary, but with a sense of accountability. It’s a space on the web that’s “mine” into which I can dump pretty-much whatever I like.
I love it: I’ve been blogging for over half of my life, and if I can get back to you in 2031 and tell you that I’ve by-then been doing so for two-thirds of my life, that would be a win.
How the Mom Internet became a spotless, sponsored void
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Gritty blogs have given way to staged Instagram photos.
A grinning toddler is bundled in a creamy quilted blanket and bear-eared hat. Next to him, an iPhone atop a wicker basket displays a Winnie-the-Pooh audiobook. The caption accompanying the Instagram shot explains, “i am quite excited to have partnered with @audible_com…. i’m not sure who loves it more, this little bear or his mama!?”
More than 260,000 people follow Amanda Watters, a stay-at-home mom in Kansas City, Mo., who describes herself on Instagram as “making a home for five, living in the rhythm of the seasons.” Her feed is filled with pretty objects like cooling pies and evergreen sprigs tucked into apothecary vases, with hardly any chaos in sight.
This is the “mommy Internet” now. It’s beautiful. It’s aspirational. It’s also miles from what motherhood looks like for many of us — and miles from what the mommy Internet looked like a decade ago.
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Explain…
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
I only fully relax when I’m in the countryside…
I only relax when I’m in the countryside. It’s not a convenient truth, especially when London is my home and one of the most exciting and eclectic cities in the world – not to mention one of the only places I’ve managed to successfully secure full-time work!! (pending probation) I’ve viewed London through the lens…
A Suitable Blog
At a little over 590 thousand words and spanning 1,349 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is almost-certainly among the top ten longest single-volume English-language novels. It’s pretty fucking huge.
I only discovered A Suitable Boy this week (and haven’t read it – although there are some good reviews that give me an inclination to) when, on a whim, I decided to try to get a scale of how much I’d ever written on this blog and then decided I needed something tangible to use as a comparison. Because – give or take – that’s how much I’ve written here, too:
Of course, there’s some caveats that might make you feel that the total count should be lower:
- It might include a few pieces of non-content code, here and there. I tried to strip them out for the calculation, but I wasn’t entirely successful.
- It included some things which might be considered metadata, like image alt-text (on the other hand, sometimes I like to hide fun messages in my image alt-text, so perhaps they should be considered content).
On the other hand, there are a few reasons that it perhaps ought to be higher:
- It doesn’t include any of the content “lost” during the July 2004 server failure, some of which (like this post about Orange) were later recovered but many of which (like this post about Christmas plans and upcoming exams) remain damaged. It also doesn’t include any of the lost content from the original 1998/1999 version of this blog, only the weird angsty-teen out-of-context surviving bits.
- Post titles (which sometimes contain part of the content) and pages outside of blog posts are not included in the word count.
- I’ve removed all pictures for the purpose of the word count. Tempting though it was to make each worth a thousand words, that’d amount to about another one and a half million words, which seemed a little excessive.
Of course, my blog doesn’t really have a plot like A Suitable Boy (might compare well to the even wordier Atlas Shrugged, though…): it’s a mixture of mostly autobiographical wittering interspersed with musings on technology and geekery and board games and magic and VR and stuff. I’m pretty sure that if I knew where my life would be now, 18 years ago (which is approximately when I first started blogging), I’d have, y’know, tried to tie it all together with an overarching theme and some character development or something.
Or perhaps throw in the odd plot twist or surprise: something with some drama to keep the reader occupied, rather than just using the web as a stream-of-conciousness diary of whatever it is I’m thinking about that week. I could mention, for example, that there’ll be another addition to our house later this year. You heard it here first (unless you already heard it from somewhere else first, in which case you heard it there first.)
Still: by the end of this post I’ll have hit a nice, easy-to-remember 594,000 words.
A New Look
Well, it’s been over a year since I last updated the look-and-feel of my blog, so it felt like it was time for a redesign. The last theme was made during a period that I was just recovering from a gloomy patch, and that was reflected the design: full of heavy, dark reds, blacks, and greys, and it’s well-overdue a new look!
I was also keen to update the site to in line with the ideas and technologies that are becoming more commonplace in web design, nowadays… as well as using it as a playground for some of the more-interesting CSS3 features!
Key features of the new look include:
- A theme that uses strong colours in the footer and header, to “frame” the rest of the page content.
- A responsive design that rescales dynamically all the way from a mobile phone screen through tablets, small 4:3 monitors, and widescreen ratios (try resizing your browser window!).
- CSS transitions to produce Javascript-less dynamic effects: hover your cursor over the picture of me in the header to make me “hide”.
- CSS “spriting” to reduce the number of concurrent downloads your browser has to make in order to see the content. All of the social media icons, for example, are one file, split back up again using background positioning. They’re like image maps, but a million times less 1990s.
- Front page “feature” blocks to direct people to particular (tagged) areas of the site, dynamically-generated (from pre-made templates) based on what’s popular at any given time.
- A re-arrangement of the controls and sections based on the most-popular use-cases of the site, according to visitor usage trends. For example, search has been made more-prominent, especially on the front page, the “next post”/”previous post” controls have been removed, and the “AddToAny” sharing tool has been tucked away at the very bottom.
[spb_message color=”alert-warning” width=”1/1″ el_position=”first last”]Note that some of these features will only work in modern browsers, so Internet Explorer users might be out of luck![/spb_message]
As always, I’m keen to hear your feedback (yes, even from those of you who subscribe by RSS). So let me know what you think!
Remembering December 2003
For the first time in over seven years, I’ve recovered a handful more of my “lost” blog posts: articles that were written prior to the great server fuck-up of July 2004.
Since then, I’ve kept regular backups. A lot of the old stuff is sometimes cringeworthy (in a “did I really used to be such a dick?” way), and I’m sure that someday I’ll look back at my blog posts from today, too, and find them shockingly un-representative of me in the future. That’s the nature of getting older.
But it’s still important to me to keep all of this stuff. My blog is an extension to my diary: the public-facing side of what’s going on in my life. I back-link furiously, especially in the nostalgia-ridden “On This Day” series of blog posts I throw out once in a while.
The blog posts I’ve newly recovered are:
- Parcel of Goodies (1st December 2003), in which I get some new jeans and announce an upcoming Chez Geek Night (the predecessor to what eventually became Geek Night) at the Ship & Castle
- AbNib & Str8Up (2nd December 2003), in which I apologise for Abnib being down and perv over hot young queer people
- Orange Gives Me 80p For No Apparent Reason (2nd December 2003) and Justification Of What You All Already Thought About My Sanity, And About Orange’s Competence (5th December 2003), primarily about a very petty dispute I had with my mobile phone provider
- The Software Engineers Behind My Alarm Clock (3rd December 2003), containing my complaints about the engineering decisions behind my clock, which woke me up too early in the morning
- Troma Night (7th December 2003), about the most-recent Troma Night, at which we watched the tragically-awful A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell
- Something In The Water (10th December 2003), talking about several of the new romantic releationships that have appeared amongst my friends – of these, the one that had surprised me the most is the one that lasts to this day
- Worst 100 Films Of All Time(10th December 2003): my observation about how many Police Academy movies made it into the IMDb’s “bottom 100”
- Christmas Is Coming, The Exams Are Getting Written(12th December 2003), which is, as its title suggests, about Christmas getting closer, and exams upcoming
- Banned From Driving For Life, Before He’d Even Passed His Test(12th December 2003): a reflection upon a recent news story
- Gatecrashing(13th December 2003), in which I drop in uninvited on a stranger’s house party, and everything goes better than expected
- Final Troma Night Of The Year(14th December 2003); a short review of 2003’s final Troma Night – at this point, we probably had no idea that we’d have still been having Troma Nights for seven more years
- Christians Should Be Banned From The Internet(15th December 2003): a tongue-in-cheek critique on how awful contemporary web design for Christian-centric websites were
- Frustrating(16th December 2003), about things not going right at work, but things going very right in the bedroom
- The Right To Read(17th December 2003), an anti-DRM rant
- Out Of Place (18th December 2003), again stressed about work, but looking forward to some retro-gaming
So there you go: especially for you stalkers or those of you looking for a trip down memory lane – some links to what I was up to in December 2003.
For those of you who are really on a roll, here’s some further reading from the period: Kit, on the last Troma Night of the year; a religious argument that Alec kicked off (thanks, archive.org); Liz starting her first blog; Paul applies for a hardship loan;
Instead Of Blogging…
Things I’ve been doing instead of blogging, this last month, include:
- Code Week: hacking Three Rings code in a converted hay loft of a Derbyshire farm, as mentioned on the Three Rings blog.
- Hoghton Tower: as is traditional at this time of year (see blog posts from 2010, 2009, 2005, 2003, for example), went to Preston for the Hoghton Tower concert and fireworks display, accompanied by Ruth, and my sister’s 22nd birthday. My other sister has more to say about it.
- Family Picnic: Joining Ruth and JTA at Ruth’s annual family picnic, among her billions of second-cousins and third-aunts.
- New Earthwarming: Having a mini housewarming on New Earth, where I live with Ruth, JTA, and Paul. A surprising number of people came from surprisingly far away, and it was fascinating to see some really interesting networking being done by a mixture of local people (from our various different “circles” down here) and distant guests.
- Bodleian Staff Summer Party: Yet another reason to love my new employer! The drinks and the hog roast (well, roast vegetable sandwiches and falafel wraps for me, but still delicious) would have won me over by themselves. The band was just a bonus. The ice cream van that turned up and started dispensing free 99s: that was all just icing on the already-fabulous cake.
- TeachMeet: Giving a 2-minute nanopresentation at the first Oxford Libraries TeachMeet, entitled Your Password Sucks. A copy of my presentation (now with annotations to make up for the fact that you can’t hear me talking over it) has been uploaded to the website.
- New Earth Games Night: Like Geek Night, but with folks local to us, here, some of whom might have been put off by being called “Geeks”, in that strange way that people sometimes do. Also, hanging out with the Oxford On Board folks, who do similar things on Monday nights in the pub nearest my office.
- Meeting Oxford Nightline: Oxford University’s Nightline is just about the only Nightline in the British Isles to not be using Three Rings, and they’re right on my doorstep, so I’ve been meeting up with some of their folks in order to try to work out why. Maybe, some day, I’ll actually understand the answer to that question.
- Alton Towers & Camping: Ruth and I decided to celebrate the 4th anniversary of us getting together with a trip to Alton Towers, where their new ride, Thirteen, is really quite good (but don’t read up on it: it’s best enjoyed spoiler-free!), and a camping trip in the Lake District, with an exhausting but fulfilling trek to the summit of Glaramara.
That’s quite a lot of stuff, even aside from the usual work/volunteering/etc. stuff that goes on in my life, so it’s little wonder that I’ve neglected to blog about it all. Of course, there’s a guilt-inspired downside to this approach, and that’s that one feels compelled to not blog about anything else until finishing writing about the first neglected thing, and so the problem snowballs.
So this quick summary, above? That’s sort-of a declaration of blogger-bankruptcy on these topics, so I can finally stop thinking “Hmm, can’t blog about X until I’ve written about Code Week!”
On This Day In 2003
Looking Back
On this day in 2003, I first launched this weblog! That means it’s eight years old today! I’d bought the scatmania.org domain name some time earlier with the intention of setting up a vanity site separately from my sub-site on the avangel.com domain, during a rush on cheap domain names perpetrated by some of the friends I’d lived with in Penbryn, but never found a significant use for it until this day. It was at about the same time that I first set up (the long-defunct) penbryn-hall.co.uk, a parody of Penbryn’s website launched as an April Fools joke against the hall, which eventually got me into some trouble with the management committee of the halls. Some friends and I had made it a tradition of ours to play pranks around the residence: our most famous one was probably 2003’s joke, in which we made a legitimate room inspection out to be an April Fools joke, with significant success.
In my initial blog post, I took care to point out that this wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination my first foray into blogging. In actual fact, I’d run a weblog, The Åvatar Diary, for a few years back in college: a few fragments of this still exist and are archived here, too. I suppose that this means that, ignoring the occasional gap, I’ve been blogging for almost thirteen years. The Åvatar Diary died after an incident with a rather creepy stalker: remember that this was in 1999, back in the day when Creepy Internet Stalkers were still new and exciting, and I panicked slightly and shut the Diary down after my stalker turned up in person somewhere that I’d hinted that I might be in a post.
I didn’t mention the new site launch, to begin with, hoping that folks might just “pick up on it” having re-appeared (I’d been promising to launch something at that domain for ages). Later, I launched Abnib, in an attempt to unite the LiveJournal users with whom I associated with those of us who hosted our own blogs. Abnib still runs, after a fashion, although I’m likely to let it die a natural death as soon as it wants to.
Looking Forward
So here I am, eight years later, still blogging on the same domain. The frequency with which I write has waxed and waned over the years, but I still find that it’s just about the best way for me to keep in touch with my friends and to keep them posted about what’s going on in my life: it’s unintrusive and can be dipped in and out of, it’s accessible to everybody, and – because I host it on my own domain – it’s under my control. That’s a million points in its favour over, say, Facebook, and it’s nice to know that it’ll exist for exactly as long as I want it to.
It also provides a great “starting point” by which people find me. Google for me by name or by many of the aliases I go by and you’ll find this site, which I think is just great: if people are trying to find me online I’m happiest knowing that the first pages they’ll get to are pages that I control, and on which I write what I want to: I’ll bet U.S. Senator Rick Santorum wishes that he had that.
I enjoy blogging about geeky stuff that interests me, things that are going on in my life, and my occasional and random thoughts about life, the universe, and everything (with a particular focus on technology and relationships). It’s put me in contact with some strange people – from pizza delivery guys who used to bring me food on Troma Nights back in Aber to crazy Internet stalkers and confused Indian programmers – and it’s helped me keep in touch with the people closest to me. And because I’m a nostalgic beast, as this and similar posts show, it’s a great excuse to back-link my way down memory lane from time to time, too.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone by.
Abnib Lives On
Okay, okay, I get it!
After my blog post a few days ago about the imminent death of the oft-neglected Abnib, I received a surge of complaints by IM, email, and comments. It turns out that a higher-than-expected number of you are actually using the site on a daily basis.
So I’ve extended its life by a further two years, at least. I’ve also done some quick hacking to put together a new, more-maintainable framework for it. I give to you all: Abnib 7.0!
Features not in 6.0 but now present include:
- Easier to maintain; so when new blogs appear or old ones disappear, there’s a chance that it’ll be kept up-to-date.
- Really ugly new skin thrown together in a few minutes.
- Combined RSS and OPML feeds, to make it easy for you to switch to a better aggregator, as I assumed you all already had.
- It’s a little faster to update itself and a lot faster to use.
- Abnib Tweets, for those of you who are of the twittering persuasion. I’m not, so if there’s anybody I’ve missed you’ll have to let me know.
- Abnib Rockmonkey – a random daily snippet from the long-dead Rockmonkey wiki.
- Abnib Chat, the return of the abandoned chat room. Hey; if people still want Abnib, maybe they still want this, too… but I shan’t hold my breath! And no, the old Rockmokney bot, Iggy, isn’t there, so there’ll be no random cries of “Surfboard!” unless you bring them yourself.
Update: Wow. So far the chat room’s seen Matt R, Ruth, Bryn, Claire and me. Just not at the same time. It’s just like old times (although Iggy, who I just reinstated, is yet to say “surfboard” even once…)
New Look, New Protocols
Oh yeah: I changed the look-and-feel of scatmania.org the other week, in case you hadn’t noticed. It’s become a sort-of-traditional January activity for me, these years, to redesign the theme of my blog at this point in the year.
This year’s colours are black, white, greys, and red, and you’ll note also that serifed fonts are centre-stage again, appearing pretty-much-universally throughout the site for the first time since 2004. Yes, I know that it’s heavier and darker than previous versions of the site: but it’s been getting fluffier and lighter year on year for ages, now, and I thought it was time to take a turn. You know: like the economy did.
Aside from other cosmetic changes, it’s also now written using several of the new technologies of HTML5 (I may put the shiny new logo on it, at some point). So apologies to those of you running archaic and non-standards-compliant browsers (I’m looking at you, Internet Explorer 6 users) if it doesn’t look quite right, but really: when your browser is more than half as old as the web itself, it’s time to upgrade.
I’ve also got my site running over IPv6 – the next generation Internet protocol – for those of you who care about those sorts of things. If you don’t know why IPv6 is important and “a big thing”, then here’s a simple explanation. Right now you’re probably viewing the IPv4 version: but if you’re using an IPv6-capable Internet connection, you might be viewing the IPv6 version. You’re not missing out, either way: the site looks identical: but this is just my tiny contribution towards building the Internet of tomorrow.
(if you really want to, you can go to ipv6.scatmania.org to see the IPv6 version – but it’ll only work if your Internet Service Provider is on the ball and has set you up with an IPv6 address!)
In Which I Express Praise For My Sister
Normal blogging will resume shortly, but I just wanted to quickly take advantage of a period of strong mobile signal as I sit on this Thames Travel bus (oh yeah: I’m in Oxford for a few days) to share with you a feeling of warm fuzziness I experienced earlier today. (note: this blog post took a few days to get “finished”: I’m now stuck in a small town outside Oxford by heavy snow)
In her latest blog post, my sister Becky writes about achieving a couple of things on her “to-do before I die” list. And when I read about her revelations about the nature of domestic abuse and her selfless willingness to go out of her way to help her fellow man, I was filled with an immense sense of pride.
I’ll remind you that, unlike about a fifth of the regular readers of this blog, my sister has no formal training or experience in active listening or counselling skills. She’s never been taught how to listen without prejudice, how to build rapport, or how to show empathy. She knows that this certainly isn’t part of her job description. What we’re looking at there is plain old, genuine human compassion. And it makes me proud not only of her – as my sister – but also of humankind in general, that this kind of caring for one another still exists, even for a stranger, within the general population. That’s simply awesome.
In other not-dissimilar human-compassion related news, Ruth and I were offered a lift – saving us a two-mile walk through the snow, after midnight – by two complete strangers the other night, after our bus was cancelled. It’s been a good week for stories of people being nice to one another, both in my immediate experience and in the news. I like it.
Catch-Up: Concerts
Yes, it’s true, I’m bad at blogging. But as we all know, weblogs suck anyway. Regardless: here’s the long-awaited catchup of my whereabouts and doings of the last week (as all I’d previously said is that I’d left and that I’d got back again.
Claire and I went to Preston a week last Thursday evening, for a busy weekend of travelling around and attending concerts on what turned out to be the hottest weekend of the year so far. At the Old Trafford Cricket Ground, Manchester, on Friday, we saw REM, who are absolutely stunning live, it turns out: on stage, they throw a lot more energy and a lot more emotion into what is (in recordings) quite quiet and sombre tracks. A wonderful concert, although we did get somewhat crushed when we were (at the start) within spitting distance of the bands, and so we had to retreat back before the end. Supporting them were Idlewild, who turned out to be brilliant, Feeder, who were very good, and The Zutons, who weren’t so good. Claire was more impressed by the latter, but I think that may just have been because she could look down on their saxophonist (not in height, of course, but in saxophone skill).
Then, on Saturday, we travelled down to Milton Keynes to see Green Day at the Milton Keynes Bowl. The bowl is, to all intents and purposes, a large grassy crater just outside of the city, in which they’d erected an enormous sound stage. Green Day were supported by a handful of pretty nondescript pseudo-rock bands, much of which we slept through with our t-shirts over our faces to help us breathe in the sticky air until the sun set. Green Day themselves were brilliant – aside from a slight problem with the video link (the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound meant that by the time we could hear what they were singing we’d already seen them mouth it): they could have done with repeater projectors as well as the repeater speakers they had – a royally rockin’ gig. A good selection of stuff from their new album and older material, lots of crowd enthusiasm, a few bottle fights, all the stuff you expect from a nice, loud concert. We spent the night at a draconically-run travel lodge-like place a little way between Milton Keynes and London.
And on Sunday we went into London (well; if you’re going to travel 700 miles around the country anyway you might as well take a minor diversion if you pass a place of interest) to go to the National Science Museum, which was good as ever. Their new “Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy” exhibit wasn’t very impressive, but I don’t know what I expected from it, though.
The highlight of the trip has to be a conversation between Claire, my sister Becky, and I in the cafe at the Science Museum. It went thusly:
Dan: Claire doesn’t like carrot cake.
Becky: (to Claire) Have you ever tried carrot cake?
Claire nods
Becky: (to Claire) And did you like it?
Claire nods
Becky: (to Claire) So… do you like carrot cake?
Claire shakes head
Unfathomable.
So I’m Sat At Work…
…minding my own business, and some random guy walks in through the office door, looking lost. Nobody seems to get up to see to him, so I – in my new desk, which is quite close to the door – go over to greet him. “Is there;” he begins, sounding a little unsure of himself, “Is there a ‘Scatman’ here?”
Oh; fucking hell, I think. For some reason, I’m reminded of the last time somebody wandered up and confirmed my identity by addressing me by my “blog name”, and it turned out to be a scary stalker type. I try to think back about what libellous thing I might have said this week.
“Hi; I’m from Unigryw (another company in the Technium),” he begins, “I was looking at your web site -“
“Scatmania.org,” I reply, pronouncing the hyperlink with surprising clarity.
“Yes,” he continues, “I was hoping I could use your review of Nice ‘N’ Naughty on LocalTVi.”
So, I let him. Pretty much all the original content on my weblog is covered by a creative commons license anyway, but I just told him he could do whatever he liked with it. And if only LocalTVi had an RSS feed, I’d keep an eye out for my review appearing on it, too. I thought everything had an RSS feed, these days. Ah well.