I’m about to start a photoblog at blipfoto

This is a very slick photoblog site with the constraint that it only allows one photo a day, and it has to be from that day. This is an interesting challenge, which forces one to maybe look at the same things in a different way to keep taking a picture day after day (although you dont have to have one every day).

Like every blog, some people use it as a photo diary, some as a way to allow far away friends to keep in touch, and others are pure art

Mine is http://www.blipfoto.com/iphigenie

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!

This has now moved to http://iphi.net/index.php/site/services/, although the old article is still on the back page if you want to have a laugh at what I didn’t get back then.

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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

Note: this is a talk-out-loud piece written wearing the hat of an average user - it is not written wearing the hat of the web and software professional - that’s why it is in my personal blog and is written in light conversational style.

In the past I have often said that as cool as I thought many rich-online-applications that seek to replace desktop apps, I hadnt really started using any of them. But recently a shift has started to happen, and it hit me in recent conversations about some images and patterns I used on my site - all of them had been whipped up playing with online applications.

So I guess it is time to reverse the pattern of posts saying “web app x, tested, stopped using” to spread some love to the ones I do end up using.

1. Aviary (& donationcoder)

When I first heard of aviary, I really wanted an account. I registered my interest but alas never made the cut. Luckily for me some of the delighful people on the Donation Coder site had some invitations to share, and I got to get my hands on one. I am amazed as to what can be done with image manipulation online nowadays. I guess I shouldn’t be, having been in the web development field for long enough, but it’s actually different seeing first hand what can be done, and how smooth it works.

Screenshot: Vector editor in opera

Even though I only just dabbled with the tools, I ended up paying for aviary, in part to support them and get them to implement all the promised apps, and in part because the ability to have access to tools such as these from any computer or any OS really will make my life easier when travelling. I can access them on a friend’s computer, I can use an older laptop, or a netbook, because I only need the RAM and CPU to run the application and view the result, not to process the image. And of course I can boot on FreeBSD or opensolaris or anything with a modern browser available, and aviary should work. No more “crap, I wanted to quickly whip something up on this photo but the machine is booted to BSD and running something and I dont want to switch” (of course I might get the whole virtualisation thing finalised and wont have that problem at all anymore, who knows? But that is another story)

As I said, I mostly just dabbled with the apps - especially peacock, which is just like pipes but for images generation.

Screenshot: Peacock with my little triangle experiment

I was playing with triangles, which are my favorite shape (as much as one can have a favorite shape). At the time I was trying to create a set of nice sharp triangles as a basis for a website design - another idea which didnt really make it through. But the background based on triangles I created in peacock was used on this site for a while, and is still my background on my computers. It doesnt look quite that great on white, but it is a transparent png and creates a fascinating depth effect on a dark background (don’t take my word for it, look!)

See this on aviary

Out of the full applications they are planning to do, I am most interested in the font creator and probably the “real medium” painting simulator. And I am a bit disappointed they seem to have cancelled any idea of web design tools. It will be interesting to have access to things like sound editing without having to install any application, since I need it maybe 2-3 times a year (at the moment I just use wavosaur when it happens, since it is a no-install app). We’ll see!

Edited: one thing I forgot to mention about aviary is how people often share their creations, complete with all the actions used in their creation. This makes it a great learning feature, because not only can I admire what people created with the tools, I can also see how they did it.

PS: Donation Coder is a great community, by the way. I joined it a while back because I wanted to donate something back for some apps I was using, and as an addict to independent software this was a great place - full of addicts like me, and developers. It is also a very supportive learning community. I should write a bit about them, but just go check the site, the software offered on it, and the discussion in the forums.

2. Colourlovers

I have been working on a slight update of the colors used on different sections of the site (not that you could tell, like half of what I ever do it hasn’t made it onto anything visible). Now I am a)lazy b)not a designer so I thought it would be fun to use a webapp to play with color schemes. So I found Colour Lovers a few months back and played with it a bit. Created several palettes at random, some of which became the currently half-finished themes on the site.
I also played at creating patterns from those palettes and others, and in spite of the rather limited set of available patterns (especially ones that use the full set of 5 colors), I had a bit of fun. Since I was just messing about I cannot comment for the app’s suitability for production work, at first glance I would say it is not sufficient. But it might be a good one to get a bit of inspiration in a way that does not kill concentration, prior to going to work in the professional tools.

Screenshot: Colourlovers

I particularly enjoyed the option to submit an image and have the system offer colors from that - although I mostly found that some of my favorite photos of my own turned out to make rather lousy color palettes. What works in a photo does not work in a flat color setting.

In the end though, Colourlovers, like other very narrow fun-social websites before them (eg: wordie) is something I can see myself using in short bursts followed by months of forgetting about them, especially since for the pure work of palettes and texture, aviary mentioned just above has some pretty nifty tools.

See the patterns on colourlovers

both files are to be considered released on CC license, attribution required (a link to this post would be enough)

I’m probably not alone in having spent time sketching ideas out only to never do anything about it - not because research showed it wouldn’t be a success, but because I never got the courage or focus together to even get that far. In my case it has often been “don’t feel like doing it alone and cannot quite justify trying to lure one of my friends to waste their free time on it”. Others do just that, though, and succeed.

Some would not have worked, others certainly would have with the right partner, but I never even really looked. I need to get some of those to rest, so I stop feeling bad about not following up on them.

I’m sure many of you know that feeling.

The stealth PC silent pc shop

In 2002-2003 I considered starting something about silent PCs, because I hate background noise and couldnt find much in the UK. I bought domains, I played with platforms, I contacted manufacturers, I got a plan together. But since I was running a web agency at the time that took me 10 hours a day already, I couldn’t do it without harming that business, so I didn’t. Others did it, but now silent is mainstream and most of these stores don’t exist. I think there is still potential though, as many products are still hard to find.

This was revived in 2004 around tiny form factor PCs, again because they were so hard to find. Rinse, repeat.

Smartguilds.com

At some point I also considered writing an online guild management tool for online gaming guilds. Being a gamer I had ended up in guilds or playing communities more than once, and being the person I am I always ended up an officer/leader… So I thought there was a potential for a service offering a neat forum/roster/calendar/loot manager/wiki/chat server etc. Again I got domains (12 or so), sketched it all out, played with the platform. Then did nothing, I didn’t have a designer that I could call on at the time, and then I got a lucrative job offer. Others did it, but I can’t tell how well they are doing.

Cooklink.net

Another idea I worked on about 2-3 years ago was social networking around recipes - there wasn’t that much of that around, just the normal sites where you could submit recipes. We had the idea to create a much more agile, web2.0 way of entering recipes, and using simple semantic analysis to allow recipe exchange across languages - so for example Bruno in Berlin could enter a recipe in German and metric units, but then Sam in Colorado could see the recipe in english and with US measures and temperatures, and perhaps even some altitude notes. Played with a drag-and-drop recipe builder, and then with text analysis. Then I took a job with a media and semantic search company and left this idea behind. It would have needed a few smarter people around I think.

The multi-language and international connection is a hard thing to achieve in text based online communities (come to think of it it is hard to architect right even on a simple content site), but I think this would have been an interesting thing to pull off.  Content that is formulaic, for example recipes or craft patterns, or code is a great way to start, because it uses a limited, structured vocabulary and grammar which can be mapped across the language boundaries, allowing for some experiments in cross-boundary community building.

But the challenge is not just technical. Advertising and affiliate deals are usually limited to one language and territory. I have worked on sites in the UK where only 30% of the audience could be monetized (apart from automated network or adsense style ads). It takes a significant operation to deal with agencies in multiple countries, and I am always amazed how outdated this feels. Also, affiliate deals are again very narrow. Even amazon will only give you widgets for one country at a time. If you want something that shows the same books on a site but with the UK link to a British visitor and the German link to an austrian visitor, you have to build it yourself. And it is a pain.

I do hope this changes one day, I like a diverse world and being able to share without forcing everyone into one language. but this turning into a topic of its own.

news it ain’t

I am known for ranting quite often as to how much of the news we are given is not news. PR statements, discussion of what other media are doing, reports on studies, non events, curiosities, opinions - but not news. Not real information, and many real events left unsaid.

I thought it might be interesting to actually show how much white noise and fluff we are getting and rattle my cage every morning about what I saw and heard on the web instead of to my poor colleagues.

The world was spared.

Historyslices

That one I still haven’t given up already, although I cannot help thinking it is already out there and I haven’t found it, or could be built combining existing services in a large part. It would build on things like flickr notes and visual search and concepts from image recognition and genealogy sites and mapping - with a dollop of social networking to tie it all up.

This starts with your garden variety history buff. I know several, and I know most of those have accumulated boxes and boxes of images and articles. Some could almost build a museum. Most of them have a rather narrow niche of interest - the local train line, or their family, or a business, a town. They have done their research, and often can talk through stories, showing you old photographs and maps, connecting them together. And most have blanks - they have identified some of the buildings, vehicles, words on the images but not all. And for these blanks there might be another history buff perhaps 5 or 100 miles away, focusing on something different but who could recognize the unknown element, because it is familiar to them.

These people are not online much. They use ebay, know their way around a scanner, and know how to search for information online some. But they don’t publish. If they are very clued up they might be on a genealogy site or upload some scans to flickr.

What these people won’t do is spend hours and hours messing about with a fancy webapp. They won’t get the idea or time to put it all up on a site, even though they probably have enough to fill a site and a few books. But if there is a site where they can add things gradually and easily, which builds them a site and then connects with others (squidoo with semantics?),
upload just one image, register what you know, and what you don’t, in 3 or 4 minutes, then send it out there to see what it connects with (leveraging the commons, possibly?),

Because these stories will be lost if they aren’t moved into the digital age.

I really want this one, please tell me someone’s built it. Or, if you too have some history buffs in your family circle and have thought “there should be something online for them”, get in touch. I haven’t given up on or thought this one through yet. Since I first discussed that one Flickr has started the commons, and that is a step in the right direction, a building block. But there still is no connection or structured annotations or the ability for normal people to tie into it…

blumphster.com

A site to poke fun at all the ridiculous web2.0 ideas out there, which were surfing on the new bubble and hoping to print money. Was going to be a fake such site, but everytime I came up with what I thought was a silly web app idea that would work as a fake, I found a real one too similar.
Not particularly topical now that there is no bubble.

There’s actually a few more but I think that’s enough ghosts for today.

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.