Blogging

The gift that simply keeps on giving. ‘914 scam’ - if you don’t know the correct name, you may already be doomed to failure. ‘reasons for isolation’ - spending too much time on the Internet searching for ‘reasons for isolation’. “craig gordon” “ian curtis” - odd combination of a dead pop star and a living Sunderland goalkeeper. ‘my wife’s shapely legs’ - yeah right. Take those stockings off. Now. “(“current vacancy” or vacancies or opportunity or careers or “working with” or “working for”) and (“oracle dba” or oracle dba )and london” - with such a superlative grasp of search term syntax and semantics, you would simply be wasted as an Oracle DBA. ‘dead bodies in the floor boards’ - stop it. You are worrying me with the use of ‘in’ as opposed to ‘under’. ‘how to become a virgin again’ - Please sit down. Have a drink. I have some bad news for you. ‘ian curtis hanged ice block’ - Look I’ve already told you twice This is an urban myth. ‘make friends under 14 to 16’ - try Facebook or Beebo. Just don’t get caught. ‘oracle killed siebel’ - Mr. Ellison with the lead piping in the library. ‘selling strategy of siebel system anatomy’ - yet another reason I don’t work in sales. ’the most important decision of my entire life’ - undoubtedly left disappointed at my lack of insight. ‘urinal pulled his zipper down’ - yet another reason I always favour a private cubicle. ‘why durex gossamer withdrawn’ - apparently on the advice of the Pope.

Introduction Habari is a blogging platform, created back in January 2007 and in the subsequent 18 months, the software has matured and version 0.5.1 was recently released. Originally, I downloaded and experimented with Habari late in 2007 but it wasn’t until February 2008 that I finally took the plunge and migrated my blog from WordPress. Installation Habari requires PHP 5.2 (or higher) and PHP Data Objects (PDO). If your hosting company can’t meet these requirements, think about switching to one that can. Habari also supports multiple database types: ...

+1 for a ‘friend’ +5 for a ‘follower’ +10 for a blog comment +25 for a blog contact +50 for an email +100 for a photo +250 for a NSFW photo +400 for an audio conversation +99,999 for a hot steamy IM session +1,000,000 for sharing a pint

I have tried many times, in many different places, to articluate the idea that micro-blogging reduces ones blogging output but Russell Beattie completely expresses my thoughts on the subject in this brilliant article. ‘Tweeting totally takes away that blogging urge from me… Once I tweet about something, it’s like it disappears from my mind completely.’ I can completely identify with this statement and another sentence also struck a resounding chord with me: ...

[ This post also had working titles of ‘Friends, bloggers and countrymen’ and ‘anti-social networking’. ] A few weeks ago, a gentleman called WaveyDavey001 was kind enough to invite me to participate in a Fantasy Football League. Rather rudely, I attempted to invite several of my friends into the same League so I only needed to manage one team. WaveyDavey001 politely agreed with the caveat; ‘I’d like to vaguely know most (of them)’. ...

Disqus recently released a update which includes the ability to export comments on a WordPress blog so I have just exported all historic comments left on this blog (when it was running WordPress) into Disqus. This operation was slightly complicated because this blog now uses Habari but the necessary steps were: Download and install the new Disqus 2.0 plugin for Wordpress. Delete all obvious spam so the export only processes genuine comments and runs faster. Switch the archived WordPress copy of the blog back to the original location. Export all comments from WordPress into Disqus. Claim comments left by myself using an alternative email address before I had even heard about Disqus. Wrap the WordPress blog in cling-film, label and place back into cryogenic storage. Reinstate the Habari blog. However, because I am pretty stupid and overly hasty, inevitably I omitted step 3. This meant that while all comments appeared on the Disqus site, the permalinks to the individual blog articles were incorrect and referenced ‘/wordpress/’ instead of ‘/blog/’. ...

I suspect I have different audiences reading my blog, Tumblr, Friendfeed, Jaiku, GR Shared Items. I call this ‘reader fragmentation’ but haven’t applied for copyright yet. Should I ?

Define your favourite Web 2.0 service in two words (or less) Blogging: ‘Dear diary’ Flickr: ‘Cat photos’ FriendFeed: ‘Friend’s Feeds’ Tumblr: ‘Disposable blogging’ Wikipedia: ‘Online encyclopedia’ Twitter: ‘Inane drivel’ del.icio.us: ‘Period overload’ Disqus: ‘Modern flamewars’ Digg: ‘Technical narcissism’ Last.fm: ‘Dire Straits’ YouTube: ‘Cat videos’ LinkedIn: ‘Gizza job’

There is a new, improved Monthly Archives plugin available for Habari which is now installed on this blog. I realise that I’m probably the only person to ever scan the historical archives but I really like it so, once again, many thanks to Chris Meller and the Habari community.

Many disgruntled readers have contacted me via email, IM, facsimile, phone and anonymous poison pen letters to ask ‘Hey Norman - whatever happened to the unified blogging day scheduled for Friday 18 April ?’ Apologies for the delay but before we get started, some random, meaningless statistics: Feedburner: 66 subscribers. Google Reader : ‘From your 189 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,807 items, starred 1 items, shared 325 items’. Twitter: Following 19. Followers 55. Updates 1,292 in 87 days. FriendFeed: Subscribed to 35. Subscribed to me: 30. Comments: 180 this week, 504 all time. Likes: 77 this week, 188 all time. Disqus: Comments left: 59 in 21 days. Comments on my blog: 31 in 14 days. Precious clout points - 12. Originally, on Unified Blogging Day, I was going to religiously transcribe every single ‘output’ over a 24 hour period into a separate blog entry (annotated with timestamp and channel). ...