Right now the blog is a bit of a mess, while I figure out where i want to take the design. All parts of the site should be functional, but it lacks a bit of polish. Still, I like the texture I created for it so I will make it work!

At the moment it only uses 2 images, and yes, the menu needs making up, so does the footer (needs a bar around it, of some kind, i think) etc. And it looks a lot nicer on a large screen, on low res that pattern looks weird.

The new working title of the blog is the lst line from the poerm “what the dog perhaps hears”, one of my favorites just read from Lisel Muller

What is it like up there
above the shut-off level
of our simple ears?
For us there was no birth cry,
the newborn bird is suddenly here,
the egg broken, the nest alive,
and we heard nothing when the world changed

It’s a simple whimsical poem - full text online here http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3139/

Of course the title on this blog will probably change again…

dog illustration by vgfreddy on deviantart http://vgfreddy.deviantart.com/art/the-faithful-dog-82171082

Stats show I have 10 regular readers! Who are the 5 new ones, the same people from work?

This blog used to have a lot more back when i was following games & silentpc in a bigger way, and there was the AGHL crowd. But from these days remains still quite a bit of google power, it seems, and that means hundreds of people come here hoping to find information about a product or something. Sorry. At best you’ll find a paragraph why I liked whatever it is you are looking for.

Now most of my input happens elsewhere than my site, which is strange. And wrong. Must fix this site and use it more again.

EDIT: after checking analytics I have over 30 returning readers (not counting me) - I’m quite puzzled as to who they are now, cant think of 30! Leave a comment!

Sometimes you will see a link to a site, or news item on one site, think “oh that’s nice must check it out”. The you find out that several more of your daily sites/feeds/newsletters all mention it.
I dont usually jump on bandwagons but this deserves it :D

Each picked a different entry, here’s my choice

daily comics on a post-it savage chickens

This coming week is catch up week, where I add things to the site that have been on my pile for too long - that is mostly traditional content which has been on this site.
Mostly this is a cleanup to prepare for a new spin off blog which will be more about my professional side, technology, web - get all that todo list down so I feel I have the energy and space to do it.

* games I watch (mostly indie at the moment)
* games reviews I earmarked in 2008 but never got around to put the link/quote in (have started adding some backdated, check the games sections)
* why i am off A list games at the moment (i.e. how great games like Oblivion, Bioshock and more just dont make me want to play more super realistic games) and a reflection as to what makes me tick in a game
* a new round of the 2 line movie reviews catchup
* a new round of the 2 line book review catchup
* great software, fiction, arts and photo sites

Of course it would be cool if some of my 30 readers would tell me if they even care about any of these anymore - have you missed it? Like the new stuff, hate the new stuff? Want the photo and art stuff to stay here or go back to the spinoff blog? Now clearly I write most of it for myself, to remember what I read, wanted etc. but now that I have 30 regular readers I start to care… how weird is that?

* finish the design of this blog, it got stuck halfway through a redesign
* catch up with all the stuff i didnt post that i should have
* clean up the content
* figure out something smart around books
* change the structure of the homepage to be more topical
* start that professional blog
* get some appropriate affiliate links in a clean and clever way (not these awful amazon carousels I just put on for fun)

Where I try to figure out how to create a set of tags and categories to elegantly fit in all the things I want to fit in this site, in order to stop censoring myself.

This site is a mess. There’s a games watch site that stretches back to 1999 but has been neglected lately, there’s a bunch of journal type entries, but not many, although I would like to put more. There’s also one liners about film, but not many. And bits about photography and visual arts, spattered around. Plus a bunch of books read and book wishlists… it doesnt quite fit together, and it grows unwieldy - things are lot in the noise, and often cant be bothered to add stuff I would like to add, because it just doesnt fit…

What I want on the site…

I would like to put more about my thoughts and ideas and worries, what I think life and success are about, as I figure it out, my quest to keep simplicity and wonder at the core, or whatever I come up with next, in order to possibly by any chance elicit ideas and advice, you never know.

I would like to put more about books and stories, to share what I have enjoyed, what I didn’t get, and the huge pile I am considering to read or buy… again in order to possibly get in touch with people who could expand my horizons, steer me towards (or away from) works and authors. Plus share the amount of fiction available online, celebrate bookworm-ness and other literary bits.

I would like to share what I spot every day in my coming and going on the on- and offline - the traditional weblog model.

I would also like to share some more of the good stuff I have found, tested and used - from software to hotels, from websites to recipes, from DIY to recipes. Because good stuff deserves sharing, and celebrating good stuff, even mundane, only helps the mood.

I would like to put more about personal projects, again in the hope of getting encouragement or helping someone learn from the mistakes and struggles of someone like me

I would also like to put more about webwitchery related matters, things I learned in the trenches, mistakes I made, and the learning process now, and other projects - but that will be a separate “workey” blog I think

At the moment the categories are just a mish mash - and I have been thinking of different ways to classify it all to help people filter through - I think I can have 2 of these in parallel… or all?

TOPICS: Games, Books, Photography, Culture, Life, Online, Stuff (everything else)
THREADS: Journal, Weblog, Photolog, Booklog, Gamelog
META: Inspiration, Perspiration, Information, Motivation, Relaxation, Action
or just loads of tags?

Feedback more than welcome

I have covered the early beginning of this site as the hugely embarrassing imagisphere with the great provider list in a previous entry.

The focus changed to games in the winter of 98-99, when I fell into the game half life. Now I had always been an enthusiastic (but non hard core, they are just games!) gamer, but with half life I fell into online multiplayer gaming and a great community. I think I hung out in the newsgroup AGHL from 1998 to 2004, and still pop in it now and then to this day. But with this community came a lot of people equally enthusiastic and curious about games, games design and more, and a whole lot of debate around the matter.

At the time there was no concept of a weblog, but by today’s definition for about 4 years the site was a weblog about pc games, with a very personal filter. There were a lot of sites covering games news, but 80% of the coverage was of hyped high profile titles. I was usually interested in games that got a lot less coverage, and I wanted to get others in my circle interested in those, so I would link to any coverage, following about 15 news sites. It gave me a way to track things for myself and also somewhere to point people at when I mentioned a game and they went “uh?”.

I was still silly ambitious about side projects with no audience back then, so built a site which would list news and excerpts of coverage for (over time) several hundred games, and would allow cross navigation by game, developer, publisher, genre, and whether the game was published, unpublished or (alas) cancelled. It was rather ambitious so wrote a small set of perl scripts and templates (even though the site moved many times the scripts are still there in the file tree, and rather embarrassing). The admin was a simple set of lists and forms. The first version might have used msql, but that is lost in the mists of history. By 1999 it was on mysql, then postgresql, then back to mysql today (purely because when i moved it to a third party product they didnt support postreql).

Interestingly enough when I worked for a regional press group for 2 years between 2000 and 2002, I reused several of the perl modules I had created for this site. They were extended and grown into a full multi-site CMS and editorial system (called editorial2, highly original) and a small but fast ecommerce shop system (called simply v2) - these powered 12 city portals and over 1000 websites at their heyday. Sounds crazy, eh? What can I say, I am all for reuse! Editorial2 was abandoned when the company was bought, but v2 went on to a new life at the web agency we created as a follow up, and lived till 2007. I think at least one simple “pronouncable but never rude”* password generation routine was later moved to our next generation CMS (php) and to our Zope-based CMS, and probably lives to this day. Perhaps it will be my longest lasting technical legacy, a suitably ironic and modest one.

*(we had one report over all these years from one of our ecommerce client that one of their customers had complained about it generating a rude word. Although when we asked our client to enquire as to what it was, she came back to us saying she couldnt make heads or tails of the word -and neither could we- it was rude in some very foreign language.)

The wayback machine has quite a few snaps under iphi.net and iphi.com from 2000 onwards. Check your own site, it is a blast from the past.

All the time I have had this site, from 1997 onwards, I have been involved in building websites and web technology apps during the day, but when it came to having a personal site I had a problem (especially later once I was running a web agency). If I tried to do a site using my own code and technology, and under my own name, people would find it, expect it to be about the industry, or at the very least expect it to uphold standards and be a showcase. I would get so stuck into perfection I would spend more time on that than on content. I got enough of that from 6am to 8pm every day, I didn’t need more.

Even when I decided I should continue to have my old site, less about games and more about the stay-in-touch kind of things, me-and-my-toys.

I didn’t want it to be like work, or about work (this was probably a mistake for my own career, really). If I was going to spend more web time in my evening it would not involve coding, it would not involve design and I would not mess with it. It would be about content - content that interested just me, and that was fine with me.

And for a very long time I kept it totally separated from anything in my real life, nickname, no links, no real name, and nothing about work. I didn’t want to have to watch what I said or did. So I could get away with it.

Then the web changed, and the work-life boundaries blurred for everyone, and I decided it was silly to have that barrier. Now people turn up here knowing me from my professional persona, and I fear I cannot get away with this site anymore.

By blogging standards, it does everything wrong, it lacks focus and consistency, it has a very candid and direct tone, I might post 10 things one day then nothing for months, and, horror! a “sorry I havent posted anything” post. It jumps all over the place. No strategy, no coherence. I didn’t care, I’m not a blogger. This is for me and my 10 occasional readers, a “me and my stuff site” of the worst kind. Followed by about 20 friends on and off, when they wondered “What’s happened to iphi lately?”.  And usable for me when I need to send a link about a game nobody has heard about, because I watched it and collected links and quotes.

And on the side of technology and building it, I have gone for the frankenstein method - I messed with it live. The results shows entropy as applied to websites, a dozen half finished reorganisations and design changes, bits hanging out, bits fixed with staples. But it’s alive, even if all it can say is “gaaaah”.

Anyway, I will clean it up, and apologies to the 5 people who liked the old site fine as it was.

First, as I have said here and elsewhere before, I love blipfoto.

It is a very simple but beautifully done photoblog, or photo diary. You can only post 1 image a day (but no pressure to do it every day). The community is friendly, encouraging, and creative. If you are looking for a way to encourage yourself to take more pictures more regularly, you really owe it to yourself to check blip out. It certainly did that for me, to incredible degrees at times. I lost it over December but fully expecting to go back.

The site has been free for 2 years. But like every site out there, they have costs, and need to start covering those costs.

They are not adding ads, they are adding premium memberships, with improved features and additional bonuses (I suspect these will be special discounts, perhaps also ways to show/export your blog but probably a lot of premium information, courses etc. But I am just guessing). But they are doing something else that is very much in the spirit of the community created around the site: they are creating special supporting founder memberships:

(from the blog
you’re going to have a never-to-be-repeated opportunity to show your appreciation for everything Blipfoto has done so far, give us a kick-start for 2009 and stake your place in history with an exclusive Blipfoto Founding Membership.

For £40, you’ll receive:

- 18 months full membership, starting when we introduce our membership option
- an exclusive founding member’s icon, which will stay with you forever
- a specially produced founding member’s enamel badge
- 10% discount on all future Blipfoto purchases, including membership fees

As if that wasn’t enough, when you take out your Founding Membership, you’ll have an opportunity to pay a little extra and lay your hands on a set of 200 personalised Founding Member Blipcards. Again, this is an exclusive, one-off print run which will never be available again.

Why do I think this is so clever? Note that apart from a few token trinkets, you have no idea what the membership features will be. They are not selling the premium features, they will have plenty of time to do this later. No, they are appealing to their core users, the ones who love the service and would pay for it as it is (even though the service as it is will always remain free). They are saying “if you like us, trust us, and fund the time we are spending creating the next level”. I think this is an extremely open and modern way to fund an application, and a very courageous approach.

It works for me.

Even though I have no income at the moment I will become a founding member of blipfoto, because I have received real value from the site and want to support its team to do more of the same. I am not doing it for the badge or pin, I am doing it to support the site. I want to see what it can become, and am willing to chip in to make sure it gets the chance to get there (note that this is the same reason I paid for lwa, 72photos, aviary and others, and I would do the same for a site like bookmooch or friendfeed).