Blog posts

I’ve been meaning to jump on Matt Webb’s Week Notes bandwagon for a few months now. I’ve even written a couple when off-line but then forgotten them until so long after the fact that they’re no longer relevant. Still, it seems like a good discipline and clearly this blog needs some injection of life, so here goes. While I do all my work under the " Ket Lai" banner, I’m going to post them here as they’re a fairly personal reflection and may also occasionally contain some links of technical interest. ...

We did, in fact, make a newspaper. The hour or so after my last post were more than a little stressful, but the results (a few typos and a printing hiccup that most certainly wasn’t our fault) more than made up for it. And the response has been wonderful. Thousands of people now have our little artifact as a souvenir of a wonderful weekend, numerous conversations about post-digital concepts and the like ensued, people tell me they’re exploring the URLs we printed, and we might get to do something like it again. There’s talk of a supplement for our next Sunday paper. Matt and I even got a mention in the Church Times! ...

We hadn’t expected to get to do this. Arriving on site we didn’t know we’d have funding, but the call came in late on Thursday and the planning began. Matt –given his background in typography and design for print–handled negotiations with the printers. A deadline of 7pm on Sunday was set, if we met it we’d be the first thing on the press that night and should be able to have the paper on site that night. ...

I’ve been watching the recent furore over Apple’s iPhone app review process with some concern. Partly, of course, I want the process to be clear, to make sense and to provide us all with good access to the apps we want. But the slightly more selfish reason was that I was waiting for the Greenbelt app to be approved for sale, hoping fervently that it would make it through in time for people to buy it before the festival. ...

I’m up to my usual using-ruby-tools-to-test-other-environments tricks, using cucumber and my wordpress activerecord classes to do acceptance testing against a highly-customised wordpress install. I’m hoping to write a bit more about that soon, once I’ve put it through its paces a little more and cleaned up some of the code, but I wanted to quickly mention one of the key pain-points and an extremely handy solution. One of the things I enjoy most about testing in rails is the handy tasks to prepare a blank database and the transactions that ensure the database is returned to that state after each test. Obviously that wasn’t going to work cleanly with wordpress since it doesn’t use ActiveRecord, but Matt kindly pointed me in the direction of Ben Mabey’s database_cleaner gem. ...

As mentioned in yesterday’s announcement I’m pulling some content across from this blog (running on wordpress) into the new Ket Lai site (a merb app). I’ve found myself doing similar things a few times lately, such as on Only Connect (on which more, soon) and so have built out a selection of ActiveRecord models to help me talk to a wordpress database from a ruby app. At Matt’s urging (he’s been using them to move data from a legacy site), I’ve finally put those models up on github. Being a single file they arguably should have been a gist, but I’m reserving the right to reorganise them in future. ...

For a while now I’ve been transitioning away from using the name jystewart.net for my web development work in favour of Ket Lai. The shift is partly born of a desire to separate out my work from other parts of my life (increasingly important now we’re a family of three), but mostly a recognition that I rarely work on projects solo these days–instead pulling in a range of collaborators–and a group identity is more honest to what we’re doing. ...

I really liked this story about the NPRbackstory twitter account. The panel at SxSW about newspaper APIs (which NPR was tagged onto) was one of the highlights, filled with promise, and it’s good to hear about a tangible (albeit experimental) use of one of those APIs to begin to contextualise breaking news. All too often we lack the memory or the back-knowledge to appropriately interpret the stories that dominate the news (I was a little surprised and disappointed that the BBC stories about Khamnei’s comments on Britain didn’t note that “blame the British” is a common off-hand comment in Iran). News organisations often have vast resources that could help us develop some of that back-knowledge but they’re under-utilised. It’s rarely helpfully presented by web-based news outlets, but for a radio station it’s particularly hard to get that out. Twitter provides a nice way of passing on some tidbits and it’s great that NPR are using it for more than driving traffic to their very latest content. ...

I didn’t write much (outside of twitter) about SxSW 2009. In part that was because life rushed off in other directions immediately afterwards, and in part there wasn’t much that really inspired me to write. There were numerous good sessions at the conference, but far too many “social media consultants” talking without real experience and far too much focus on “monetising.” Many of us with a longer view of the web and/or more of a technical bent expressed considerable frustration with such sessions and the voting process that had allowed them to dominate the programme. ...

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