Eclectic Trains

In September 2008 I wrote a blog about my frustrations with Wordpress (PHP, CSS and the rest) and I gave up! Yep, I thought Blogger would do for now. Wordpress (the open source Wordpress.org variety) was just too damn fiddly. If you want to blog why not get something that works straight out of the box like Blogger. I didn't see the point of Wordpress.com (the hosted service that Blogger is similar to) it was either Blogger the ready-made package or host-it-yourself Wordpress "purity". A rather silly dichotomy that resulted in dumping the pure option rather quickly. Well, something changed and I have had a more successful second go at Wordpress.  Hurrah!

Over the last 2 years I have seen, read and explored many highly-customised, slick and SEO-friendly Wordpress blogs and thought that my company needed to head in that direction. Our new website is still in its infancy but it has been launched.  Please go and take a look: Xube - High Quality Video Production.  It's a first attempt, admittedly, but I'm pleased with how it shows off some of our most recent work and has blogging as a core feature of the site.

It's very early days with the new website but our plans are to use the blog to deepen and enrich the content published there.  If you have a basic knowledge of HTML and are willing to learn a few CSS tricks then Wordpress is worth exploring.  It has now matured into an CMS (Content Management System) which means you publish what you like, when you like and Wordpress will handle the rest (such as archiving).  It has taken the best part of 2 months to get the features working the way I want them too and there will inevitably more changes over the next 2 months.

Any tips?  I have found the Thesis theme a good investment.  The SEO-friendly theme holds your hand around Wordpress and makes customisation slightly less daunting.  This is a paid-for theme but you don't have to go down that route.  You could try free themes, make your own or just adapt what Wordpress gives you.

I am now inspired to learn a little more about PHP, the coding language behind Wordpress, but am going to take one step at a time.

I promise myself to exercise more...
I promise myself to eat less red meat...
I promise myself to go easy on the Full English...
I promise myself to go to bed earlier and
post a few blogs before 11pm...

Brain activity is quite high - largely focused around work matters. Going to be very busy up to Christmas (green shoots? I never mentioned the phrase - just good old grafting). So my summer has been busy in the office finishing projects and setting up new ones for the Autumn. Did I get away? Nope. Did I have a nice summer? Functional but scattered with the odd lovely weekend and a special wedding.

That's probably as "transparent" as I want to get right now and as I see this blog as partly for you and partly for me, then I am quite cool with that (as some might say). I regularly follow Jeff Jarvis and he takes a militant stance on transparency which feels principled but at the same time muddle-headed. His recent article Transparency benefits us all - even when it hurts is an explanation as to why he twitter-blogged the news he had prostrate cancer. Why? Because "we are entering an age of publicness when we need to live, do business and govern in the open". Wow! So we are not already there yet but we are about to enter this new age? As a famous rock goes I thought we were at least "half way there"! Jarvis's writing is cogent and arresting. He truly believes that transparency "is a necessary ethic of the age". I'm not so sure. I wonder if Jarvis is meshing a contemporary political mantra "we must all be more transparent" with a more publicly accepted offline/online confessional culture and labelling it with "good thing" tag. Of course we can build "greater value" by sharing but all the emails, advice and good will that Jarvis has received could have been achieved in a more scaled-down and private disclosure. Couldn't it?

Anyway, I'll go back to the offline world have more of a think about that one. Yes, I joined Twitter about 2 months ago. I am not aiming to be part of the twitterati and have posted a meagre 30 tweets. I follow 13 and am followed by 8 - not really entering the spirit of it, I suppose, but I can't help but find it fascinating. "Real-time search" - who thought that an upstart operation such as Twitter could rock Google's boat with such an simple concept. What have I learnt from Twitter so far? That many people take it very seriously and must be spending up to and beyond an hour a day twittering and that Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 at the age of 50. (Yes, I heard it there first!). Okay, okay, I've found out a little more than that but I'm not hanging out in that virtual space long enough to suck in the more interesting dialogues that must be happening.

Please excuse the splodginess of this blog and if you fancy a flitter on my twitter please visit:

http://twitter.com/eclectictrains

the month of july
seems to have passed me by
it's not for want of trying
but the analogue world has been quite testing

i have a pile of mental blogs ready to go
but they sit there stubbornly stacked
in a jostling queue all sweaty and angry
cheesy and hungry

I said in a previous post that I was witnessing a personal shift in reading habits away from print. But my love of books and newsprint is going to be difficult to shake. A morning read on the tube (with a seat to boot) can induce private moments of pure insight and offer up flights of fancy before the working day begins proper. These simple reading experiences seem locked into our love of paper-based information. But the very fact that I am thumbing out this thought on my BP (BlackBerry Pearl) with its fudged QWERTY keyboard layout (two letters per key) probably betrays a greater sea-change in my literary habits; I'm just writing more. I'm texting, blogging and even occasionally 'google chatting' and all the rest, and all this has a repeat effect on my reading - I'm even more hungry for ideas in the written down form than I have been in my life time. It's probably my age combined with the easy accessibility of cheap technology for sharing thoughts (eg blogging on the web) plus the impact of the recession (shall we ditch 'credit crunch' altogether now?) all mixed up to make one big stew of curiosity.

A blogger I enjoy reading, and was introduced to through his weekly column in Monday's Media Guardian section (the print version as it happens), is Jeff Jarvis and his Buzz Machine. His recent blog on the decline of The San Francisco Chronicle is a fascinating take on a newspaper in trouble situated in the wider context of a generalised decline in the business of making and selling printed newspapers. Jarvis has one clear message for papers like the Chronicle: reinvent yourselves and engage with the new technology of news distribution (the web) or die. As a former newspaper man himself this a tough message from someone who has made berating the world of print journalism a cause célèbre. Jarvis's blog offers up an angle on the technology and humanity of communication that is a joy to read even on my little BlackBerry Pearl screen on a cold and dank February morning.
------------------
Also read Goodbye to all this? about the future of subeditors. (Interesting that The Grandad choses to write 'subeditor' as one word when the rest of the world is quite happy with 'sub-editor'. Ahhh the power of house style over common sense and popular usage. There will be a reason for sure).

The credit crunch has brought home to me how my reading habits have started to change, especially in respect to hard news. I buy The Guardian or The Times every day but my hunger for news from the blogosphere, from BBC correspondents to obscure US libertarians (read unhappy Republicans), is unsated. Get out more! Yes, I know I should but while I am not, I am going to carry on hunting and reading. Discovering a blog, maybe a gem that only a small number of people are reading, has a tragic equivalence with the under-the-bedclothes listening of the late John Peel Radio 1 show (10pm-midnight, Monday-Thursday in the late 1970s). I listened through hours of experimental dross just to catch that edgey, indie band that none of my mates might have heard of. Cassette tape in my Bush cassette tape radio recorder at the ready, great tracks would get recorded for later consumption and distribution. Today, Google Reader and Delicious are the modern equivalents of my cassette recorder for my news reading habits.

3 months ago I thought "No to Blog" and "No to Facebook". 2 months ago I said "Probably to Blog, but definitely no to FB". A withering critique of anyone aged 30+ and using FB by Shane Watson in some lifestyley section of "The Grandad" actually propelled me into publicly announcing to my friends and work colleagues: "No way am I going to join this infantile trend. I've got real friends. I don't need to collect virtual ones. And I've got a private life. What could there possibly be to share?"...

...Okay, you've guessed it, I signed up to both and one good friend, who laughed at me when I mentioned blogging and "facing", has also signed up to FB! She said it was for research purposes. Funny that because I used the same excuse. Someone I knew was developing applications for FB (and making some money, don't ask me how) and I wanted to see what he was creating but to do that I had to join. There's the rub. Once you have joined you are at least partially committed. Who wants to be a mere question mark? Load up your photo, have a poke and away you go.

Incredibly distracting? Yes. Contributing to the expansion of human knowledge through seamless digital communication? The jury's out.

What I find strangely reassuring is that the only people who have asked me to be friends (and vice versa) are people I know in the real world. So what is the point? Fun, I suppose.

Bring it on...