Permanence of online activity

Posted on June 24, 2010
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In the early days of blogging and the internet, it was considered very important to create a page and leave it there for all time – changes after publication were frowned upon and had to be declared. This was important so people could reference the page reliably and was also considered ‘honest’. This is still true for a lot of blogs, news sites and product sites.

One of the things that I have struggled to understand about Facebook and Twitter is the lack of permanence. These are fuzzy spaces where people can play and redefine themselves and make tangential jokes about the current context that don’t make sense years, months or maybe even days later. And yet, they are also spaces that define an online personality, affect job prospects and even get you in trouble with the law. They are like postcards, indexed and made available to the world.

(Interesting postcard link via Russell Davies.)

The Bechdel Movie test

Posted on May 27, 2010
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Good grief, this is scary.

I avoid lots of tv because of the sexism, but now I begin to see why so many films don’t speak to me. It can’t turn me against Back to the Future, though.

(via Bechdel herself, who credits a friend of hers with the idea.)

High five!

Posted on April 22, 2010
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I love this stuff.

via The Chief Happiness Officer.

Riding all the lifts on Whistler Blackcomb in one day

Posted on March 25, 2010
Filed Under Diary | 1 Comment

Sarah and I have been in Whistler since the beginning of February for a two month snowboarding trip. We’ve been living in a shared house and riding most days. Yesterday we decided, with our housemate Catherine, to try to ride on all the lifts on both hills in one day.

We set ourselves some rules as follows:

all the named lifts on the trail map must be ridden (this rules out the tiny travelators in the learner areas, but includes every chair and T-bar)
closed lifts can be ignored, but you can’t choose a day when you expect half the lifts to be closed due to weather
lifts must be ridden all the way up but if there’s a midstation you can ride it in two halves (if you fall off a t-bar or button lift, this still counts if you’ve had three decent shots at it and as long as you get out of the gate)
downloading on the lift doesn’t count as riding it
throughout the day, a trail of each colour must be ridden (green, blue and black – Canada doesn’t have reds)
a photo must be taken at each lift, including all the riders participating (except for the photographer)
no splitting up to cover the lifts separately

Whistler Blackcomb is the biggest ski area in North America, but these rules are achievable. Modifications may have to be made for the larger areas found in Europe.

At Whistler Blackcomb it’s possible to purchase a Fresh Tracks tickets which gives you early access to the mountain and a buffet breakfast in one of the big restaurants on the hill. We decided this would be a fun start to the day and we were right. The breakfast was good and it felt really great to be in the mountains so early. The light was beautiful.

We headed off from breakfast a bit late, but kept up a good pace throughout the day. Some of the runs on Whistler were closed still from the Olympics, which meant our route wasn’t ideal. This is the route we took with times of when we got on the lifts.

Whistler Village Gondola (7.30am, followed by breakfast)

Olympic Chair (9.02am)

Garbanzo Express (9.14am)

Emerald Express (9.31am)

Harmony Express (9.46am)

Symphony Express (10.11am)

Harmony Express (10.34am). Again. We would have avoided the duplicate using a different route if more of Whistler were open.

Peak Express (10.50am)

Creekside Gondola (11.35am)

Big Red Express (11.47am)

Peak 2 Peak Gondola (12.12pm)

Glacier Express

Showcase T-bar

Horstman T-bar

7th Heaven Express (1.28pm)

Jersey Cream Express

Catskinner Chair (2.08pm)

Crystal Chair (2.39pm)

Excelerator Express (2.58pm)

Solar Coaster Express (3.11pm)

Magic Chair (3.33pm)

Wizard Express (3.44pm)

Blackcomb Excaliber Gondola (4.04pm)

The top lifts on the hills close at 2.30 and 3.00 and the bottom lifts close at 4pm. Note that we got on the Excaliber Gondola at 4.04pm. This meant we were thrown off the lift at the midstation, which according to our rules meant we FAILED! We failed literally by half a lift and a matter of four minutes. We certainly wasted that time in multiple locations, including getting our photos taken at the top of 7th Heaven (doh!), so we know we could have done it.

That said, we did get some nice photos, and we did get on every lift in one day.

My highlight was probably the last hour when we thought it highly unlikely we would make the last lift in time but picked up the pace to try it anyway. Our legs hurt like hell, but our spirits were high. Catherine also liked this part of the day because we did a lot of long continuous runs without stopping, despite hurting so much. Sarah’s highlight was wearing her tiger ears and the amount of joy she brought to us and people we saw on our travels.

Good times.

Christmas cards vs. Facebook

Posted on December 22, 2009
Filed Under Culture | 3 Comments

Happy Christmas!

This is the Christmas card I drew and sent this year, but which also threw me into a frenzy of confusion about Christmas card etiquette.

When I was growing up there were two sorts of Christmas card givers and you had to pick a side. One set of people gave a card to everyone they knew, including everyone in their class at school and as they grew up all their work colleagues. The second set, to which I attached myself, sent cards to people they’d not seen in a while as a way to keep in touch (and, ocassionally in my case, totally failed to send cards altogether).

Then there’s the cards. Some people use cards as a way to demonstrate their charitable affiliations, some send tasteful, some send funny, some send religious and so on. I decided to send handmade cards wherever possible, and recently handmade cards that make me laugh, and saw this as one of the benefits of my small distribution group. The downside, of course, was that the people I saw a lot in my close circle of friends wouldn’t get the amazing works of genius I created.

One year I experimented with Christmas e-cards and in some ways that was the most successful (although I still fear some of my friends didn’t realise I knew the pictures were rubbish) because I could distribute the cards so widely and relatively unobtrusively. Sure, it broke my distribution rule, but the cards made be laugh so it was OK.

All this has changed with the rise of Facebook. Now, many of the people on my traditional Christmas card list are friends on Facebook and I increasingly feel I am in touch with them without the need for a card once a year. Why a card for the friend I chat to on Facebook but not the friend I chat to in the pub? It is of course great that I am now so much more in touch with these friends, but, as a result, this year’s card giving has been totally lacking in logic or thought. It has also been fraught with the potential to offend and confuse the people who’ve received or not received.

It’s clear I need a new policy. I’ve eleven months to think of one.

Dear HSBC,

Posted on November 20, 2009
Filed Under Culture | Comments Off

I have just visited your Islington branch and have a few questions.

Why are you playing music in this branch? Are you under the impression this bank is an optional shopping experience, which you seek to enhance, or somewhere that people might visit for leisure? Do you believe that all your customers are under 25, with the attention spans of hamsters and need constant entertainment while they carry out their banking? In my experience, the music and advertising is distracting and annoying and makes it hard to concentrate on the multitude of options that your machines present me with. Speaking of which…
Why are you signs so confusing? (see above)
Why do you have one tiny table for writing at? Would it not be reasonable to assume that by forcing your customers to fill in forms to do anything, they need the space to fill in the forms?
Why does your cheque paying in machine not work properly and, on failure, not give any useful feedback about why it’s rejected my 6 cheques?
Why do you have only two staff at the tills at lunchtime? When do you expect your customers are most likely to want to use the bank?
Why are your staff wearing casual t-shirts? This is my bank. This is where all my money is. Why do you think I should entrust it to someone who looks like he is on work experience?

I’ve banked with HSBC since I was a kid, and regret it every time I do anything other than internet banking or taking out cash.

Regards, etc.

NSID Afpak meeting photo on Flickr

Posted on November 17, 2009
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NSID Afpak meeting,
originally uploaded by Downing Street.

Check out this photo on Flickr. It’s in the Downing Street Flickr stream and I found myself intrigued by the table furniture. Empty candlesticks and nice water glasses. I would expect nothing less, really, and I wonder how that environment helps to remind the attendees of the importance of their roles. I suspect and hope they don’t need it, but still. Gordon Brown looks to be drinking a smoothie :-)

I like the way they’ve made the resolution of the photo such that it’s not possible to read anything on the papers.

Lovely animation

Posted on November 16, 2009
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A really lovely piece of animation. (via Alison Bechdel).

NakedTranslations.com – building a bilingual website

Posted on July 30, 2009
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Today we launched the new version of NakedTranslations.com, a website for my friend’s translation business. The site is entirely bilingual, including a blog, and raised some technical challenges. Here’s how I did it.

Defining ‘bilingual’

We wanted to be able to do the following:

give the user a clean experience in their language of of choice, so they can navigate the site entirely in English or French, but switch between the two at will
have a distinct url for each entry, with the url relevant to the language used (for example, the related posts “New Design” on the English site has the url
http://www.nakedtranslations.com/en/2009/new-design
while the French entry about the same thing is called “Y a du changement dans l’air” and has the url
http://www.nakedtranslations.com/fr/2009/y-a-du-changement-dans-lair
keep track of comments for each entry, split by language (so, French and English comments don’t get mixed up)
link between blog entries of different languages

Choice of platform – Movable Type

The site uses Movable Type, which is certainly not my blogging software of choice. This is because MT allows you to have multiple blogs under the same login, and reference between them through Custom Fields. It also allows us to set up the language for one of the blogs to be French, while the other is English, making it easier to get blog entry dates to automatically use the right language and so forth. This allows us to have the proper urls for the language used, and link our blog entries between languages. MT has a lot of things going for it, but good documentation, a friendly user community, and a slick user interface are all missing from the mix. A fair amount of the documentation is out of date or missing a key element, and I was shocked by some of the defensive rudeness in the forums from people who said RTFM without pointing to the relevant bit of the FM or writing anything useful in the FM. Anyway…

But what about WordPress?

There are a lot of very nice looking WordPress plugins and tweaks that do similar things, but none that met our requirements entirely. The other thing that made me nervous about using WordPress was the degree of modification and tweaking required to get it working and I was concerned about maintanance with WordPress upgrades in future.

These are my notes about the plugins I found. Please keep in mind this was a few months ago and our bilingual definition is not the same as other people’s.

ZDMultiLang

http://blog.zen-dreams.com/en/zdmultilang/#4

WordPress plugin.
Works and is maintained. Allows easy switching between posts in different languages. Will probably work well with WordPress languages.
However, it does not let you specify different slugs for different languages, which will emphasise one language over the other. It requires you to set a primary language and then just enter translation for the other. This is neat, but doesn’t use WP’s post architecture. Again, neat, but I’m concerned about long term mainantance issues.

WP_Multilingual

http://made.com.ua/uk/works/wp/multilingual/

Not as well supported as ZDMultilang.
Requires FCKEditor
Allows for category translation
Again, not possible to change the slug.
It appears to not be actively maintained and it doesn’t work robustly enough. Nice idea, though.

Gengo
Looks like it would be good, but not stable at the moment

YammYamm
Doesn’t quite work with the latest WP.
Doesn’t link posts in different languages.
Does nicely allow for posts to all live in the posts directory properly, which of course means you can edit the slugs etc.

Basic Bilingual
Does not allow for different pages properly
Very basic.

Language Switcher
Doesn’t maintain the sense of proper bilingualism

WordFez
Switches text on the page. not what we want.

qTranslate
This is tricky – it holds all translations of the text in the standard fields, and filters output accordingly. Does not allow for different slugs, though.

xLanguage
All in the same entry, which seems nasty to me. Where do the comments live? Etc.

And the others?

I looked briefly, but seriously, at Textpattern, and suspect this would have done the job as well, if not better, than Movable Type. It seems to have plugins designed exactly for this purpose. I didn’t pursue this further because when we build the first version of this site a few years ago, MT was the software of choice and I didn’t want to add learning a new system into the mix, especially as my first investigations with Textpattern revealed quite a few areas of minor frustration that I would have had to address. Better the devil you know. In retrospect, and with the hassles I’ve had with MT, I’m not sure that was the right decision, but there we go.

Implementation

One of my key concerns was ensuring the templating system was as easy to keep track of as possible. I elected to use one set of templates for both blogs, referencing the files at the same location in MT’s template setup. This removed the risk of making a design change on one side but not the other. I then created a language template which gets included in every page, which sets PHP variables for all the static text on the page, with a version for French and a version for English. As the site gets published to static HTML (in the main), I was not too concerned about adding a lot of PHP language processing overhead for the template, since it only needs to do the work once.

The language file has entries like this:

$en["recententries"] = "Recent blog entries"; $fr["recententries"] = "articles récents";

And the template then uses these like this:

< ?=${$language}["recentcomments"];?>

To get the linking between blog posts, I installed the LinkedEntryCustomFields plugin (if
you go this route and use this plugin, you need to use the Pro version of MT, which is free to individual pro bloggers). This is set up to create a linked entry field for each individual entry on both blogs, and Céline has to select the related entry when she enters her new entries.

Here is more detailed implementation info, since it took me a while to gather all this, and it might help someone:

Use the Linked Entries plugin to allow you to create links between entries in different blogs.
Set up a French Version custom field in the English blog and an English Version field for the French blog.
If your Linked Entry is called english version, then you will probably want code like this on the French template.

Best to call your linking tags something like English Version and French Version, rather than using ‘entry’ keyword. This will make it easier when you have to code into templates and use ‘entry’ as a special term to access the entry info.
<mtifnonempty tag="entrydataenglish_version">
  English version: <mt :entrydataenglish_versionentry>
  <a href="<$mt:EntryPermalink$>"
    title="< $mt:EntryTitle encode_html="1"$>">
    < $mt:EntryTitle></a>
  </mt>
</mtifnonempty>
NOTE: The var name needs ‘entry’ at the end to access the correct link and text. In this example: entrydataenglish_versionentry.
NOTE 2: Some of the spaces are displaying a bit odd in the code snippet. Check the spaces are as they should be if you use this.

I automated the links between the old entries by making guesses based on date of publication and this SQL. If you are in this situation:

Use this sql to extract the blog ids
SELECT date( a.entry_created_on ) , a.entry_id, a.entry_title, b.entry_id, b.entry_title FROM mt_entry a, mt_entry b WHERE date( a.entry_created_on ) = date( b.entry_created_on ) AND a.entry_blog_id != b.entry_blog_id AND a.entry_blog_id =1 AND a.entry_status =2 AND b.entry_status =2 ORDER BY a.entry_created_on

Remove entries where there’s more than one on a date and deal with those separately (keep a list). Create one list for insert for English and one list for insert for French. Insert direct into database in mt_entry_meta table.

set the first id (the english entry id) as entry_meta_entry_id, the french entry id should have heading entry_meta_vchar_idx
add a heading entry_meta_type and put: “field.french_entry” on each line.

When this is tidy, copy the data below the existing data. Swap the ids with each other, and put field.english_entry in the entry_meta_type column.

Then delete the date and title fields and import into the database.

Bells and whistles

The look of the site was nothing to do with me. Andy at origin8 creative did all that and was a pleasure to work with in the implementation phase. The front end coding of the HTML and CSS was also nothing to do with me, with Sarah making that work well for all platforms and thinking about print stylesheets and the suchlike.

The fancy font work is sIFR, which works nicely when it does, but drove us all a bit crazy in terms of documentation and versions of sIFR and so on.

The links page works by doing multiple javascript calls to delicious – one for each of the tags pulled in. This allows Céline to save her bookmarks to delicious and have them automatically included on her site as she wants them to appear. I’m not happy with this approach, especially as it has a tendancy to clash a bit with the navigation javascript requirements of sIFR, but it works and I’ll keep looking for a better solution.

That’s that

In all, I’m pretty pleased with the end result and will be tidying up the loose ends over the next few days.

xkcd – estimation

Posted on July 20, 2009
Filed Under Diary | Comments Off

One of my favourite comics made me laugh today.

keep looking »

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This is Jemima Kingsley's personal website. I write about web ideas, culture and my life, and share some of my photos. It keeps me out of trouble.
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