Staple Diet

Wootten’s Weblog

Create Your Own TinyURL Service for Wordpress

May 16

Posted by Ian in Computers and Internet, Web

I don’t particularly like using URL shortening services. I think I first noticed them getting used rather prolificly in the Guardians technology section to include lots of random links to bizarre web content. TinyURL’s own web site wouldn’t particularly inspire me to go ahead and make use of it either. But, because of my own use of services such as twitter, I’m forced to shrink down links to get within those 144 characters.

Herein lies a problem – If said URL shortening service disappears, all my links are broken to all that interesting content I worked so hard to find. Not good.

In order to our bit to help, a number of developers and even services have taken action in order to make sure they provide alternatives for the links over which they’re responsible.

I’ve installed a plugin here which uses the recently puchased domain “woot10.eu” to provide alternative links using the code <link rev="canonical" href="shorter link" />. My full ianwootten.co.uk domain does not lend itself well to be able to provide a shorter URL on the same domain unforunately.

There is a whole huge discussion on the approriateness of using this technique (mainly) due to the rev attribute not being included in the HTML5 spec. See the comments in Chris Shifletts post for more on this.

Anyway, Duncans plugin takes the id of any wordpress post and coverts it to base 36 (instead of 10) and offers up the alternative in the header of each post. I believe the conversion could go all the way up to 62, if php’s base conversion actually supported the use of different cases in conversion.

In my own case, I’ve had to forward the links from woot10.eu across to www.ianwootten.co.uk using a .htaccess file so that the plugin is actually able to pick them up.

Now when you visit:

http://woot10.eu/p8p you’ll be forwarded on to the longer URL such as http://www.ianwootten.co.uk/2009/05/15/my-vicious-circle-of-posting-quality-content.

This isn’t particularly useful if you want to find the alternative for URL, as you’ll have to hunt through the source of a post. For that I’d suggest Simons bookmarklet which looks for an alternative link, or creates one if it doesn’t exist using tinyurl. As an aside, there looks to be an interesting talk on the canonical attribute and link element by Matt Cutts of google here.

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My Vicious Circle of Posting Quality Content

May 15

Posted by Ian in Web

I’ve been looking back at the posts on this site and the commitment that I supposedly made (internally) a couple of months ago about posting regular, interesting content. But it seemed to die a death very promptly.

I think that there may be a bit of a vicious circle here (in my own situation at least). I’d love to post regular interesting stuff, but for that to happen I need to feel that it might be read. By far the most commented stuff here is when I link up code. Those posts take a fairly substantial amount of time for me to complete as they are born of the result of my own frustration of hours spent tinkering with code, which I think might be useful for others to be clued up on. I also need time to gather my thoughts and structure what exactly I’m trying to say to people. This all adds up.

If I post more often, I fear the lesser quality of content might be pretty boring for the majority of people and probably not at all worthy of feedback from them. So I end up in a kind of stalemate position – should I post this/shouldn’t I/Oo-er and I don’t do anything. I’m not saying that I have a massive amount of visitors here, I’d just like them to enjoy the experience when they visit.

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How has web use changed your life?

Feb 15

Posted by Ian in General

I’ve been pondering this morning how the use of the internet has (or may have) changed my life. As a child/teen during the web’s infancy, I was blissfully unaware that so many lifes/careers/relationships would be enabled or changed as a result of the interactions it might facilitate. I hadn’t even heard of google prior to arriving at university and two years prior to that had never had internet access anywhere locally.
I am sure my behaviour today would be pretty different if the web wasn’t around due to the massive impact its had in my world view. It seems a far smaller place and more tightly coupled. I feel free to drop messages to strangers and write blog posts into the ether. I won a T4 competition in my early uni years which landed me a car and £4k richer, which I wouldn’t have entered if I’d had to phone – so I’d definitely be poorer. There are however, examples where the use of the web has had a detrimental effect on particular individual lives.

It’s a huge one to think about. Would my life be better as a result of the web having not been so widely adopted in the way it has? Would yours?

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Stephen Fry and the Ascent of “Micro Blogging”

Feb 6

Posted by Ian in Computers and Internet, Geek, Web

Twitter is all over the news at the moment. For the uninitiated, it allows you to list short updates of what you are doing at any time. BBC News seemed to have an all-out assault at the end of January raving about it at every opportunity – the first moments of the Hudson plane landing, an short chat about it by Stephen Fry on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross and this short clip on iPlayer by Stephen Fry again. For Stephen Fry, this has meant an insane amount of new followers, indicated by the stats by twittercounter, which are shown below.

Stephenfry's Twittercounter

Notice the stats for 27th January – a full 20,978 extra followers in a single day! My own profile has a paltry 38 in comparison for all time!, which is about 30 more friends than I actually have offline…

I guess this huge upsurge is in part due to the fact that Stephen is such a well known comedian in the UK and by no means a stranger to the web. Just yesterday Jason Kottke observed his day as deciding “to start his own reality chat show after becoming stuck in an elevator”. He also has an awesome blog and podcast. He also is a very open advocate of open source and free software. How on earth he finds the time to live both his life virtually and as television celebrity I do not know. But I like the cut of his jib.

It seems micro-blogging is truly being picked up by the masses. I really enjoy it, but ideally I’d love to be using a decentralised open source service, hosted on my own personal webspace. I’d like to suggest the Open Micro Blogging service, laconi.ca as the way forward – but then I also want to be able to reply to my friends on twitter and them to me and I don’t think true two way cross network chat will happen for a while. I see wordpress to blogger as laconi.ca is to twitter. I’m actually surprised that there doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort from any one of the current big blog companies right now to push for a more open alternative. The automatticians have put out prologue but it doesn’t seem to have been touched for over a year and only supports sharing amongst groups (as in a working environment)…that’s no fun for the rest of us.

Bring on a true open web status service, (complete with adopters) where I can update any one of my friends on my activities by them following a status feed on my homepage and vice versa. This requires clients who make use of such services though and right now twitter is stronger in that regard.

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4 Comments

Are Music Blogs getting a Raw Deal?

Jan 31

Posted by Ian in Computers and Internet, Music, Web

I can’t help but feel a little sorry for music blogs as of late. I’m sure you may be familiar with The Hype Machine and may use it on a daily basis. For the uninitiated, it is essentially a music blog aggregator, which takes details of tracks and ranks them based on how often they appear and how popular they are. I’ve found it really interesting to browse around and discover new artists.

However, lately I’ve been wondering if these blogs are getting a raw deal. From my own personal experience, I can say that recommending music takes a lot of time and effort, especially if you decide to go into detail about your choices. Often, the recommendations which the Hype Machine scans are sourced from long detailed blog posts, which I’d say were put together to provide some context for why the author made those choices on any particular day. These aren’t put up quickly without little thought. However, I generally never look at these posts when listening to music from the hype machine, as I’m after that next great track fix. I can’t imagine that these blogs get much traffic that translates into loyal visitors from the machine. I’ve previously also heard that many of these blogs get a huge amount of their bandwidth eaten up from the number of downloads/streaming they get as a result. I don’t know who is to blame here, or if indeed this problem exists, whether the blogs are providing unneccessary background information or getting good results from the machine, but I still feel a little sorry for them all the same.

[Update 2/2/08: One thing I forgot to mention here is that there are alternative services offering a different way of providing music recommendations. I recently discovered the Peoples Music Store which allows users to make music recommendations within their own unique stores. The users get 10% of the sale if people decide to purchase from their stores. I really like the idea, but I'd imagine people might take these recommendations and purchase somewhere cheaper, like amazon.]

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8 Comments

What do I have to contribute?

Jan 29

Posted by Ian in Computers and Internet, Geek, General, Web

It has struck me over the last couple of days and it’s a reflection of my attitude to being interested in geeky things in general. I’m an elitist. When I started my blog back in 2003, I loved the fact that relatively few of them existed. It was a reflection of my day to day life and I felt my voice was being heard (even though I had no analytics tools to back that up and it was not particularly interesting).

Back then, I started out on Movable Type and quickly moved it over to b2/cafelog, which later grew into Wordpress. Fast forward 5 years to now and every manner of blog subject exists, whilst in the meantime my own seems to have fallen into a state of disrepair.

I think my blogs’ own slowdown has occurred because blogging about day to day life is not so much fun now – I’m no longer unique as I was in terms of the technical ability of being able to output my thoughts. Anyone can start a blog, tumblelog, lifestream or twitter account and use it to expose their daily activity online. They need to know nothing, or very little at all about how the back end works. So I’m now left thinking, what do I have to contribute in all this?

My own PhD research has had little exposure here, where if I had chosen to air my thoughts, it might be continuing in new directions from discussion which may have opened up around it. Instead, it is hidden away in research papers and closed forums which an average joe may never come across.

I’m proposing that I push to air my thoughts on all manner of subject here over the coming year, as well as my usual day-to-day activity. Hopefully I’ll be contributing something new, something interesting, something playing on my mind and which I want to discuss with each post.

I’d love it if you’d join me for the ride and I promise I won’t be at all elitist.

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1 Comment

Fairy Tale Design Challenge

Jan 13

Posted by Ian in Geek, General, Music, Software

It seems that all I do these days is talk about what’s going on over at Fair & Bare and if you’re here because you prefer the more geeky side to me I apologise I’ve not been indulging you recently. However, that said, these posts do represent a significant part of me right now and what’s going on in my life so I think it fair I shout about it.

We’re holding our second design challenge right now and calling for designs based around the concept of a unique twist on a fairy tale. The prize is our biggest ever, at £200 + a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS3 (which was kindly donated by one of F&B’s community!). You have until 15th February to both submit a design and get it voted on by the F&B peeps!

It looks like I’ve also failed to mention over here the winner of our Snowdodgers competition as the amazing Mister Shrew. The shirts we printed look amazing and you should pick one up now if you haven’t already.

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New T-Shirts from Fair & Bare

Nov 20

Posted by Ian in General

I’m really pleased to announce that Fair & Bare has just released 2 new shirts. First up is “Feel the Force” based on a slogan submission by JonnyDanger and secondly is the fantastic Esther Aarts’ “My Bike is My Castle”.


JonnyDanger - Feel the Force

Esther Aarts - My Bike is My Castle

We printed these on super-soft, Fairtrade certified, organic in-conversion cotton using fantastic waterbased inks. They also look pretty darn good. It’s the net result of a ton of hard work by our printers, designers, community and the original cotton original farmers that mean that these have been able to be released. Head over to buy one (or more!).

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Fair & Bare Snowdodgers Challenge

Nov 3

Posted by Ian in General

Yesterday I announced that we’re running our first design challenge in conjunction with team Snowdodgers at Fair & Bare. These are some really amazing fellas who are trying to raise £48,000 for charity by rallying a £200 banger round 4000 miles involving the Arctic circle. We’re asking designers to get in designs relating to the chilly weather and the guys crazy antics!

If you’re interested, you’ve got just a month to get an entry in. You’ll win £100 plus a space on the rally car for your design!

Check out the challenge page for full details of how to enter!

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Sweetcron is pretty sweet at Lifestreaming

Aug 31

Posted by Ian in Computers and Internet

For people like myself who are fairly erratic at posting regular updates to their blogs, you might do well to pass your eyes over to Sweetcron. Sweetcron does very well at pulling your content from other places on the web you may frequent and gathering it altogether in a neat little summary page automatically. This is otherwise known as a lifestream and has gained popularity as people tend toward exposing more of their activities on the web. You can see mine over here (although is mostly twitter updates for the minute).

What sets this lifestream software apart from others is that as its opensource it can be downloaded, modified and hosted upon your own servers. That means you’re free to mess about with it as you like and maybe customise the page in your own snazzy design. It’s also based on the lovely codeigniter PHP framework from the peeps at ellislabs, which I’ve used a number of times now. You’ll need to modify the .htaccess and codeigniter config to get it working in a sub-folder, but it’s all fairly easy and self explanatory.

The author, Yong Fook has done well to put this out as a side project all on his tod. Whilst my design looks fairly basic, there is a more fancy version included that looks a lot like Yongs homepage.

If you’re a proper geek, a homebrewed version of a lifestream might be more your style.

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