I’ve just updated my amazon associates plugin to take into account the recent signiture changes which amazon have introduced for their webservices api.
This now also means you’ll have to enter your amazon secret access key in the plugin configuration page.
You can download the updated version over here.
It also means my wishlist has finally been brought back to life. Just in time for Christmas…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
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.
May 31
Just a quick note to remind people that this coming week is the third Cardiff meetup for web types in wales. It’s in 10 Feet Tall on Church St on Wednesday 4th June from 6.30pm. Featured speakers include Matthew Cashmore (Development Producer for BBC Future Media & Technology, Research and Innovation) and Tim Holmes (Course co-ordinator for the Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism and the MA International Journalism: Magazine Pathway at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies). It sounds like its going to be two really interesting talks with Matt discussing BBC Backstage and Mashed, whilst Tim will be chatting about journalism for the web. If thats not enough, there is even bands that you would normally have to pay for on afterwards.
One of the things that’s bugged me for a while whilst having a website is that at certain times of the year when people might actually like to buy me a gift they’re unable to find my wishlist. This is mainly because they’re simple folk who might not think to check amazon for my name. I’m also signed up with amazon associates, so I decided it could do me well to post my wishlist items along with my referral tag in the links in order to earn a bob or two on my own homepage. All this data is available on the web already its just a case of putting it together.
Some keen readers might of noticed the wishlist page I stuck up recently and want something similar on their own site and (like myself) either can’t be bothered or didn’t have the time to create a plugin to pull this data together. I’m putting up here my own quick and dirty plugin I built a few weeks ago to achieve this.
It uses amazon web services to look up a wishlist, stick in a specified associates id in each of my item links and replace where I put the text (without spaces) in a post with my wishlist items. The plugin regularly updates this (hourly) as a scheduled event in wordpress in case someone decides to actually buy me something. Of course you’ll need a services key to use it, which you can easily get by signing up with amazon at aws.amazon.com. Fill out your services id, your wishlist id (found by logging into amazon and heading to your wishlist page) and your locale (the bit after amazon. so mine is .co.uk) and press the fetch items to pull all the items in. If you don’t have an associates id, feel free to leave as my own : )
I used curl to get the remote data from amazon as the file_get_content methods generally aren’t enabled on normal web hosts. If you’d like the items to be fetched less regularly, then install the plugin with and updated wp_schedule_event method in the main wishlist.php to a value of your choice.
You can download it over here.
Double alliteration in a post title? Not sure I’ve attempted that before.
[Edit: You'll need to be running on PHP5 to make use of this plugin]
[Edit: I released an updated version based on Amazon's move to use of signitures, see the details here]
Jun 3
I’ve just returned from my stint in the South East after being invited to attend Googles London Developer day on thursday and remaining there to hang out in Haddenham for the weekend. Theres a ton of photo’s over on a picasa web album which has been built up from peoples pics. I even got interviewed regarding using the google web toolkit, but my experience was not exactly extended so I don’t know if it would get used at all. Essentially the event was used as a launchpad for a number of new pieces of kit that Google are introducing:Google Gears – Firstly, google gears was pitted as much the golden child of the day, with google demonstrating the new offline-enabling of appications which functions much the same within a browser without an available connection. We were shown this with the new offline functionality which Googles rss reader has built in. It looked to be a quite powerful tool for those who may have intermittent internet connections. For the most part though, I wonder how useful really is when the problem more obviously is about having any connection at all to give synchronisation in the first place or having a connection all the time. This was kind of inadvertedly demonstrated through the event having a rather dire internet connection and later through a Mountain view webcast where the demonstrater couldn’t get rid of his connection. The web toolkit now features gears funtionality as well.Google Mapplets – Essentially a way of having several third-party google maps projected onto one map. So you could search say hotel rooms and weather conditions from a Met Office and Holiday in mapplet and see the two on the same map. Nifty, but I bet it might put a few people out of business…Google Mashup Editor – I hadn’t heard of this tool until the end of the day during the Mountain view webcast, but this is essentailly an editor to quickly produce mashups. You can read more of this here.Anyway, the whole day was great and Google even gave us a night in a fancy London bar too. I think the fish and chips served could have done with being about 10 times larger though. I met like-minded geeks, and thats never a bad thing.
Did you know that not only can http://rightmove.co.uk hunt down all the prices of current houses for sale in your area, it will also give you the prices that houses have gone for for the last 7 years? I didn’t, but tonight I enjoyed checking out the fact that someone bought a house in my road for £40k in January (but I think either this is a typo, or the place is a hole!) and in 2001 I could have got one for £10k. If only I’d taken Mum and Dad on that offer of a property back in my first year of Uni, I’d have made an absolute bundle.