Blogging

I’ve finally got around to redesigning clagnut.com.

On presenting web typography in Slovenia, my hospitable hosts, and discovering Zemanta, a clever blog enhancement tool.

On Messrs Hicks and Oxton’s new podcast, The Talk Show and Stephen Fry.

In the Sunday Times, Bryan Appleyard poses the question Will the web be the death of civilisation? Plenty of sweeping statements along with interesting thoughts on anonymity and indentity.

Discussion of the evolution of triple tags to machine tags, in particular Flickr’s handling thereof, and how best to represent an ISBN in machine tag format.

Brief thoughts on the vile attacks on Kathy Sierra.

As in previous years, Clagnut has been lucky enough to be nominated in the Best Personal Site and Blogs category of the Brighton and Hove Web Awards 2006. Voting closes on Wednesday 8 November so hurry along and vote!

One Day in History is a one off opportunity for you to join in a mass blog for the national record. That, and I’ve joined the photo a day for a year bandwagon.

Shrook is my OS X newsreader of choice and it’s now freeware. coComment is a long-overdue web service which helps track your comments across disparate blogs.

In acknowlegement of CSS Reboot I have created Clagnut 2.0 beta in which I have started exploring APIs and thinking more about tagging.

Mike Stenhouse has written up thoughts on his recent redesign of Donotremove. Of particular note is his zooming content approach in which ‘the information view and relevance on the page zooms out as the page goes down’. Also: Adactio pour Homme.

I think it’s high time I told you about my new book; or rather our book, Blog Design Solutions.

This meme is getting really irritating isn’t it?

Technorati recently released cool charty goodness for any keyword search, and what’s more you can post the graphs right into your blog. And then there’s egoSurf.

24 ways to impress your friends – an advent calendar.

Well it’s the usual reason – so much stuff, so little time. There’s two projects, two books and then my arch nemesis pops up.

proudpants Proud members are popping up all over the Web. I’m quite literally excited to be joining the fine upstanding network that is the BritPack. I shall display my pants with pride.

I always forget these little rules, but they are worth remembering in all forms of writing.

Take the MIT Weblog Survey

So the election has been announced. This, Election Blog, and other simple choices.

For the past month Multimap has been populating the database with geotagged blogs and now has nearly 4,000 mapped.

When I started this blog, I built the CMS myself. Not using off-the-shelf software meant designing and building things like next/previous links and comments. But it seems I got it wrong – should I change things and go with convention?

The great thing about publishing a blog through your own CMS is that said CMS can be hacked around and added to at will. You’ll find below a snippet of code shows how I’ve implemented my gravatars in PHP.

So I was perusing Joshuaink, John Oxton’s splendidly autumnal blog, and spotted that some of the commenters had small images next to their names, making the comments easy to scan for your favourite personality. In itself not a new idea but…

Hmm. I’m struggling for things to write at the moment – I’m just feeling like I’ve got little to say. For example, I nearly decided to omit mentioning the little bloggers’ meet up we had in London at the weekend.

And so to another site launch – I hereby present A View on the Ocean, an artist’s journal; a diaristic collection of photographs, comments, stories and music by photographer Andrew Robert Fox.

th his new blog, Functioning Form, Luke Wroblewski has created a nifty bit of functionality he calls continuum links.

Zeldman recently opined that, since the mainstreaming of web standards, there should be more talk in design circles of content, design and usability, but then lays into recent round table discussions on HTML, implying they are harmful.

This time the location was closer to home, in Brighton. Dunstan, Jon, Patrick, Drew, Rachel (and Bethany) joined Jeremy, Jessica, Andy and me for a splendid weekend of geek chat, free wifi, pricey booze and Asian cuisine.

Learn how to add your blog to Multimap’s new weblogs category.

Keith Robinson starts a collaborative project with his Asterisk readers to ‘show that it’s possible to make a killer band site that looks cool and is very easy to use as well’.

Brighton blogger and Web designer Andy Budd answers ten questions on topics including standards fascism and the success of Skillswap. Andy also echoing my own feelings on blogging.

One of the topics discussed at Dunstan’s was that of blogmarks: their purpose, evolution and effectiveness.

Rubhub is an XFN relationship lookup engine for determining the relationships between people who author personal websites. As such it is the first application to make use of XFN.

The nominations for the Fourth Annual Weblog Awards are out and awaiting your votes.

XHTML Friends Network is a simple piece of mark-up for identifying human relationships of links.

The results of the Guardian competition are out (actually they were announced about a week ago): Best design Winner: The Big Smoker Highly commended: The Bunker Best use of photography Winner: NYCLondon Highly commended: Apparently Nothing and Camerantics …

Clagnut posts have been getting longer and less frequent of late, which means a bunch of sites are going noticed but unreported. So it was time to emulate the trend of a rolling list of links – hence the creation of blogmarks.

Recently I’ve been playing around with MySQL full-text searching, including integrating it as Clagnut’s search engine. It’s good, but there’s a few limitations I had to get around.

Do not merge other people’s comment spam blacklists with your own list. By keeping individual’s contributions separate, we have decentralization at work and this important for maintaining the integrity of a blacklist web of trust.

Everyone’s talking about it, everyone’s getting it: the evil that is comment spam. I have implemented a blacklist technique which I’ve added to a growing decentralised web of trust.

I’ve just had an email back from the ISSN UK Centre, once more turning down my request for an ISSN for Clagnut.

A year ago I applied for an ISSN for Clagnut; my request was turned down. Weblogs are eligible for ISSN under the existing guidelines and I explain how there are increasingly compelling practical reasons for assigning ISSN to weblogs.

Until today, the listening right now bit and the last 50 listens page were generated with the help of BlogAmp, a neat little plug-in for WinAmp 2. The trouble was it only worked through JavaScript document.write statements; not exactly best practice. So I figured there…

I’m in Crete now, probably on a beach somewhere. This message has been posted by magic, without my going anywhere near a computer. And so will the following ten posts, scheduled to appear every now and then during the next fortnight. Well, I couldn’t leave you…

Inspired by some recent nefarious posts, I have reserved my name for all future comments. From now on all comments posted by ‘Rich’ will be from me. The system is far from foolproof, but for now I’m satisfied that one would have to put at least some effort in…

Last night saw the Brighton & Hove Virtual Festival Web Awards 2003. A good time was had by all – the beer was free (initially) and the venue cosy. Regular readers will know that Clagnut was nominated for Best Personal Site. Well I didn’t win but thanks to…

I’ve been shortlisted for the Brighton & Hove Virtual Festival Web Awards 2003.

A proposal: if you add a comment to a blog you can choose to be notified when more comments are added to that post. Specifically, you wouldn’t be notified each time a comment is added, just once until you’ve re-visited the post, after which you will be notified…

I’ve built a preview feature for blog comments, to make life easier since incorporating Textile into the commenting system. And talking of Textile, I’m struggling to fix a bug with its @ notation.

Salam Pax writes a blog from Baghdad. He’s currently explaining how everyday Iraqis like himself are preparing for war: Other ‘normal’ stuff we did this week: Finished taping all the windows in the house, actually a very relaxing exercise if you forget why…

Eric Meyer has created a rather nifty colour blending widget which calculates a palette between any two given colours. Fun (and funky JavaScript) and if nothing else, it’s useful for calculating the midpoint between two colours. Matt has posted a list of online style…

I was just glancing through a journal Jeffrey Veen wrote in 1991, whilst he was studying theatre in London. Almost exactly twelve years later, he could have lifted an entry straight from this week’s papers: The U.S. declared war and attacked Iraq tonight. Bush will…

A discussion of the recent prevalence and possible overuse of heavily styled lists for such elements as site navigation and overall blog structure.

Pepys’ Diary is a weblog with daily entries from Samuel Pepys’s diary, starting from 1st January 1660. I don’t know how well known Samuel Pepys is outside of Britain (anyone care to enlighten?), but every schoolkid here learns about him in History. As a…

Interconnected has been redesigned. It’s a neat non-table, 100% CSS design in brown (definitely the new grey). Note how the whitespace of the indented paragraphs describes a square. Nice. While I was there I spotted this: Patterns for Personal Web Sites, a compendium…

A recoding of Zeldman’s ‘previous reports’ button to use a styled link rather than a javascript-driven form button.

This month in DigitalWeb mag, Jeff Lash talks about using Information Architecture to promote business goals as well as user needs: Using information architecture to meet business goals by focusing on user needs not only proves your professional worth, but makes users happy…

Over at UKbloggers we have started collecting submissions for our geographical directory of British blogs.

Why is the humble apostrophe so regularly misused and why are hairdressers so often the culprits? Ladie’s perm’s at half price (As the Guardian readers’ editor points out, journalists who should know better also get it wrong.) Apostrophes have two…

Heaps and heaps of photos from around Brighton. Taken over the last 20 years they are the kind that focus upon what is extraordinary in the everyday. Found at bluejoh, a fellow Brighton blogger who met Some-bloke Tom at a wedding, only she didn’t realize at the time. One…

I have rediscovered the long-forgotten link tag. Use it to make your site more accessible.

The Guardian UK weblogs competition results are out. Obviously I didn’t win, however Scary Duck did. Highly commended were iMakeContent and Greenfairydotcom; runners up were blogjam, LinkMachineGo and Plenty of Taste. Congratulations to all the winners, all the entries…

The Undetectables are a company specializing in hiding mobile phone masts in existing architecture, such as chimneys and churches; clever stuff. If p. g. wodehouse had a blog (and others) over at lying mo’ fo’. Those of you with enough time on your hands to have…

Judging of the Guardian Best British Blog began this weekend. And yes, it was the kick up the backside I needed to get the About page up. This compo has other ramifications, particularly if you should win (like you may have to spend the prize money to pay for the extra…

Every now and then, ALA runs an article which further cements the strong relationship between its readers and its authors (who, I suspect, are also readers). I’m talking about the kind of cosy (in its most positive sense) article, written by someone who clearly gets the…

Why the change in name? To add my voice to the groundswell of support for Davezilla, a popular (and very funny) blogger who has been crudely targeted by Toho, owners of Godzilla®. Initially, Dave was intending to remove his offending ‘little dragon guy’, but is…

I guess it was inevitable: is my blog hot or not?

Adactio is a beautiful blog from fellow Brighton resident, Jeremy Keith. Try changing themes – impressive stuff. Dive Into Accessibility is an excellent guide to making your website more accessible in thirty days. With tips cross-referenced by disability, browser, design…

Well it seems someone isn’t too keen on The Guardian’s blog competition. Tom argues that the compo goes against the essence of blogging; that we shouldn’t be judging people’s outpouring of thoughts, emotions and ideas. On the face of it, this…

The Guardian have launched a Best British Blog compo. Join me in forgetting to get your entry in by 6 September and thereby failing to win an otherwise guaranteed grand.

Rather belatedly, my blogger code is: B1 d++ t++ k+ s u f+ i o+ x- e l c Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United Kingdom, Brighton, Kemp Town, Rich, Male, 26–30!

“Ultimately, of course, the users’ performance defines what’s usable. If users can easily accomplish what they want to do, then the design is usable.” Pixelsurgeon Interviews Jakob Nielsen. I have embarked on a project called ukbloggers with Ed from…

Matt Brown, the Dreamweaver Community manager and general Macromedia ombudsman has a web log. Nothing fascinating there yet but I suspect it’s one to keep an eye on.

DigitalWeb Magazine has reached it’s sixth year and celebrated with a rather neat introductory tutorial on SVG. “What Do I Know?” is an elegant web log with a decidedly Mac slant.

Blogdex is a project of the MIT media laboratory built to ‘harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source’. Translated this means it trawls approx 12,000 weblogs and lists which links are most popular…

The first post.