PigPog

BBC NEWS | England | Dorset | Mayor may axe child spanking rite: “A 350-year-old ritual in which a boy and girl get a mock beating from the mayor of their town could be scrapped because of fears over child abuse.”

QDB: Quote #402200: “ I was in the back of my physics auditorium, trying not to fall completely asleep. The professor asks a question about what method we use when doing math in science, so to pretend like I’m not falling alseep, I shout out ‘sig figs’”

A good argument for strong coffee.

gapingvoid: history of chess pieces: “Chess pieces move the way they do for a reason: A drunk Scottish guy in a pub told me this story.”

Cats watching cats watching cats… | Metafilter: “Like cats? Like infinity? You’ll love the Infinite Cat project.”

The FE colleges I’ve contacted about customer service training could really use some customer service training.

Teaching them to answer the phone would be a good start.

My dad pointed out last night that there’s never anything new on PigPog, apart from links to other people’s stuff, and we’d not put any new photos up for ages. He had a point. The last photo uploaded was in June.

Changes

Part of the problem is that the photography section, whilst very nicely coded, with lots of PHP work on my part, was a bit tricky to update. It involved editing a text file, and uploading the photo by FTP. Nothing too difficult, but enough to be offputting. So, we’ve replaced it with another Blogger blog. We’ll let Blogger do the hard work from now on. We just pick the photo with the free Picasa program from Google, then use Hello (free from Google) to post it to our Blogger (free from Google) blog. Which then shows ads from Google, and a Google search box on the bottom of the page. It’s all one big corporate tie-in. Google: The New Microsoft.

It should make posting a bit easier, though, and reduces the emphasis on quality a bit, so you’ll see more crap photos. Sorry about that. You were probably getting bored with the same sparrow on a fence that’s been there for the last three months, though.

RSS Feeds

The RSS Feed for the photography has changed to http://pigpog.com/photos/atom.xml – similar to the other sections. If you subscribe to our single feed (http://pigpog.com/rss.php), you should still get the photography along with everything else. As ever, let me know about any problems.

It’s a busy bloggy night tonight, ain’t it? Blame the Moleskine.

Anyway, time for an update on the guitar. Back in July Michael was given a surprise gift of a Squier Stratocaster by his parents (one of which can be found here). At the time I envisaged lots of fun ‘men with guitars’-type yumminess and thought that the guitar would be a fun thing to see in action, but not something I’d take to myself.

The mighty axe, in the hands of a far more capable (and damn sexy) player.

But then I decided to have a go at ‘spanking the plank’ myself, bought a copy of "The Complete Guitar Player – Book 1" and got cracking. By the end of the first week, I’d got Mull of Kintyre down to a fine, if overly long, 10-minute, 3-second between each chord change masterpiece. Chuffed with my achievement, I decided to sign up for guitar lessons. I had one lesson, then my instructor was sadly, tragically, abducted by aliens. Or maybe he played one too many power chords and exploded. Or maybe he read this and, quite rightly, ran for his life. Whatever, I had one lesson and the guy didn’t bother to call me back with dates for any more. Never mind. I decided to plod on regardless.

Bought some more books from Amazon, including one that offers ‘Private Lessons with Kirk Hammett’. Well, you know me – anything featuring the words ‘private’ and ‘Kirk Hammett’ and I’m all over it. I haven’t so much read it yet, more stared agog and thought ‘WTF?’. So that will go away until such time when it doesn’t appear to be utter gobbledegook. I wonder whether I’ll still want to learn Thrash Metal songs when I’m 75.

My repertoire now extends to plodding, fumbling, beginner-speed renditions of Summer of 69, Helter Skelter, Hey Jude and The Times They Are A-Changin’. Mull of Kintyre is coming on a treat, got it down to almost 6 minutes now. It’s frustrating at times, especially when the strat is out of tune and sounding like an injured cat. But I’m plodding on, and hope to have mastered enough to provide a bit of tuneful entertainment over the festive season.

I remember seeing the Moleskine notebook in Waterstone’s and thinking how nice it was, but thought no more of it afterwards. It came to mind again recently when mentioned on Joi Ito‘s and Merlin Mann‘s blogs – and maybe a couple of other places too. I set off on a hunt for more info, and despite feeling doubtful that purchasing yet another notepad and keeping in mind the point raised in Hugh McLeod’s ‘How To Be Creative’ that states "If you have the talent, you don’t need the propsquot;, I took the plunge and bought one. After all, my talent had gone into hiding and I hoped that buying something nice might coax it out into the open again.

When it arrived on Thursday I was glad I believed the hype. It’s astounding how something so simple can be so beautiful. Every part of experiencing this book is a joy, from its sleek black cover (now festooned with a sticker that came with it on the front and a Fender sticker on the back), to its elastic clasp to writing on its pages. But, at the same time, it doesn’t have that intimidating ‘expensive notebook’ feel about it – you know the one, it’s expensive, it’s nice, so anything that goes in it has to be a work of art in the neatest handwriting.

At the same time, I bought a Moleskine ‘Memo Pocket’ book. This is a small version of the concertina file, housed within the same gorgeous black cover with the elastic clasp. Until earlier on today, I thought I didn’t have a use for it until Michael suggested I might be able to fit my Zire in there. And it fits like a dream. The elastic closure keeps it safe and the other pockets are free for 3 x 5 cards, post its and any other stuff I feel inclined to keep.

Regardless of whether the stuff about Van Gogh and Hemingway using Moleskines are true, I am now a Moleskine fan, and can see in the future piles of books filled with all manner of crap, while older spiral-bound efforts just sit gathering dust.

Summary: Just a bit of mindless blather about blogging software, since I’ve spent a bit of time trying some alternatives out. Might be of interest if you blog. If not, I’ll only bore you.

If you read this by RSS, sorry for the reposts that seem to have been happening – I think it’s a result of me trying out different software for our blogs. Either modifying the Blogger settings to publish stuff ready for importing elsewhere caused it to make the whole RSS feed look new, or it knew exactly what I was playing at and it’s upset. Sorry, Blogger.

Still, just through it might be worth posting about my findings, in case it’s any help to anyone.

Blogger

The defending champ of blogging here at PigPog. We’d gone our own way, with a load of home-made PHP scripts holding everything together, and it struck me one day that I was spending more time on the mechanics behind the site than on the content. Without content, PigPog was looking a bit sparse. I had a bit of a play, and discovered that Blogger could be persuaded to output PHP pages, using PigPog’s standard set of ‘includes’, so they’d fit in quite nicely.

Setting Up

We set up three blogs on Blogger – one for me, one for Sam, and a separate one for articles. After a while, we dropped the articles, then later added Filter and Quotes. It’s all worked quite nicely. We have access to any tools that support Blogger, but it all still gets neatly hosted on our own site, and looks like the rest of PigPog. There’s a bit of extra PHP work to make the front page stay up to date, but it’s nothing too complicated. It couldn’t be – I’m not much of a programmer, more of a copy’n'paster.

Why Change?

Why thinking of switching? Well, I was fascinated by trackback, and Blogger doesn’t do trackback. I also liked the idea of having everything under our control – if Google decide to change the way Blogger works one day, we could just lose our ability to blog. Old stuff couldn’t vanish, but it would give us a bit of a problem. I don’t imagine they would do anything to break things, but you never know.

Movable Type

Movable Type is the obvious choice. It’s commercial now, and because we have two authors (Sam and I), it would cost us $70. Not too much to pay if it’s good, but enough to think carefully about.

Installing

Installing it wasn’t too difficult, though there seemed like quite a bit of configuring in text files to do before uploading. With a few guesses at the settings, though, it didn’t take too long to have a working test blog.

First Impressions

I was slightly surprised at the lack of features. It’s not really that there weren’t many, but I’d expected more, somehow, for the money. We’d need a few extensions to make it really work the way we’d want it, and I’d still have to cobble a front page together in PHP. Customising looked like it could be a bit tricky, too, especially since it’s all written in Perl, and my brain falls over at anything more obscure than fairly simple PHP.

WordPress

WordPress is an alternative to Movable Type. It’s open source, and it’s free (beer and speech). It’s also written in PHP, which is good.

Installation

I was impressed. WordPress was a fair bit easier to install than Movable Type. All went smoothly. A couple of changes to a text file, upload, then just point at the setup scripts to finish the job. It keeps you informed every step of the way about what it’s doing, too. It’s ‘Five Minute Install’ was just that.

First Impressions

WordPress continued to impress me. Setting everything up was pretty easy. Creating entries was pretty easy. The documentation was a bit lacking, but there wasn’t anything that was too difficult to figure out. Then I hit a problem. It only supported a single blog for a single installation. We already use four blogs, and we’re more likely to add to that than remove any. I tried working out ways to get around that with categories, but it would always be a problem. We could create four seperate installations of it on the server, but then we’d have to manage templates and such like across all of them, adding to the work.

Blosxom

One of the things that’s always been a bit of a problem for me with blogs is that they’re very good for date-related stuff – stuff that will only be relevant this month, but not so good for stuff that isn’t. I’ve written several articles about computing, and about productivity, but the only way to find them is to use Google, or to know what month they were written in, and scan through everything I wrote that month. It should be easier than that – visit my blog, click ‘computers’, and there should be a list of articles about computers. Same for productivity. Blosxom works a bit more that way.

Installation

Installing isn’t too bad. You are expected to get your hands dirty in the Perl script, but it’s well labelled. Upload the one script, and you’re done. There’s no fancy admin interface. Your blog entries are just text files you upload. It’s all pleasantly simple. The Zen of blogging.

But! No PHP

Then I hit the problem. It’s a Perl script. It chucks out HTML fine. I could make it chuck out PHP instead easy enough. PHP wouldn’t actually process it, though, so it was a bit pointless. I never really found a good way around this.

Conclusions

So in the end, I came around full circle, and decided to just stick with Blogger. There’s features that are missing, but I’m sure they’ll add them soon enough. If there’s no sign of trackbacks in a few months, maybe I’ll have a look around again, but for now, we’re staying where we are. I was in serious risk of wasting every bit of time on the mechanics there again – time to get back to the content.

Update: I did a bit more reading, and discovered that Movable Type uses PHP in dynamic mode. In static mode, it’s just chucking out text files, which can be PHP just as easily as HTML anyway. I’m having another play with it now, and I’ll report back later.

$19.99 vs. $20 or Pricing 202 :: MarkTAW.com: “Clark Howard famously figured out K-Mart’s pricing scheme. They used the last two digits – the penny amount – as a sort of inventory control system. Anything labelled $x.43 (or something like that) was actually below their cost and on clearance. He bought only clothing that was on clearance and below K-Mart’s cost.”

Interesting article about why things are priced the way they are. Doesn’t matter if it’s $ or £ – 19.99 sends a different message to 20.

Sorry if it looks like I’m just spreading Mark’s whole site around our assorted blogs, but I’m finding plenty worth linking to in there – it’s worth a good poke around.