Blog posts

A couple of years ago I wrote and released a Ruby on Rails plugin called loads_from_amazon. It made it relatively simple to populate a model with data based on an amazon search, and was very helpful in the project I was then working on. That project ended and I’ve not had time to maintain the plugin since. It was based on a clunky amazon ECS library and I kept meaning to rewrite it to sit on something more up to date, like amazon-ecs, but the time never materialised. ...

I don’t think I ever got round to blogging about it, but I really enjoyed Katie Chastain’s debut album when it came out a few months back, particularly for Nathan Johnson’s production work. Nathan’s been busy working with some big names but it’s good to see that he and Katie have had time to put together a video to go with her song ‘Snowshow’. It’s a lovely example of what’s possible with some home-made props and a single-camera shoot. ...

So far as I’m aware, there’s not been much to link a small street near Victoria with Lesotho, South Africa, and 47 countries. Until now. Thanks to a collaboration between photographer James Nachtwey/XDRTB.org and moblog.net one may emerge in the next few hours. Gaining (maybe even seizing) attention is key to any campaign. Connecting causes with play (tastefully, of course) is a great way to attract it and (if you can pull it off) mystery is a potent extra component. I’m excited to see what develops in the next few hours. ...

At dConstruct in Brighton last month Steven Johnson talked at length about his startup, outside.in, that collects together place-blogs to display aggregates commentary and information on a block, neighbourhood and city level. The site is US-only at the moment, which made it a curious presentation for a largely non-US audience. Their toolset for extracting geographical information from blog entries is impressive, but a number of us were talking afterwards about what the real value of such aggregation is for those who might already live in an information-rich or tightly knit neighbourhood. ...

Reading Chuck Klosterman’s Brief History of the 21st Century (via kottke) I was left wondering (as so often with future-fiction) how much of it is really about the modern day: A report from the American Medical Association expresses fear over the proliferation of news blow. “It appears,” the report concludes, “that prolonged consumption of news blow renders the user incapable of relating to any person not engaged with an identical strain of the substance.” Society is no longer separated by geography, culture, or language; humans now group themselves solely through the shared use of specific info drugs. A divide emerges between Americans on the West Coast (who primarily smoke news blow synthesized in rural California) and people living in the East (who snort a more potent strain developed in Baltimore). Over time, people in New York and Los Angeles find themselves unable to communicate about anything – they now understand the most basic building blocks of information in totally different ways. ...

In the midst of the ongoing financial crisis it’s been satisfying to turn to a project I announced here a few months back for commentary and interpretation. As Ann Pettifor has been called upon for commentary by numerous conventional media outlets her blog, Debtonation, has really come into its own. ...

Being a little more removed from the US presidential elections this time around has been a bit of a relief. I’m still horrified that there’s even a question over which of the two candidates will win (Obama’s too right-wing for me, but that’s US politics for you), but at least we’re outside the myopic gaze of what passes for the media on that side of the pond. Slacktivist is, of course, right on the money about the travesty that is Sarah Palin’s candidacy, and it was that which came to mind as I watched video of Doris Kearns Goodwin talk at TED about Abraham Lincoln’s thirst for knowledge and quest to educate himself. Her talk is well worth a listen, but be warned it may leave any watcher of contemporary presidential politics dispirited. ...

It’s taken a month, but I’ve finally sifted through my Greenbelt photos, picked out a few passable shots, and uploaded them to flickr. It was far more satisfying last year when there was time for me to do some editing and uploading as the festival unfolded, get around and capture more, and be a little more responsive to how the photos were working out. But there are still a few shots I’m pleased with, and editing them is a nice reminder that I did make it to a little of the festival. ...

Last autumn’s release of Pro Drupal Development was a significant moment in the history of the popular CMS, providing for the first time a relatively comprehensive guide for those wanting to do more than simply manage and skin a drupal site. A number of books have followed it but few have delved as deeply or been such a definitive guide. Like most of the more recent books, Learning Drupal 6 Module Development focusses on a quite specific area of drupal development, but its a key one for any serious developer and touches every other area of the system. Experienced PHP developers may find that this book (in conjunction with some time for experimentation) will serve as a solid introduction to how they might build applications on top of drupal. ...

Yesterday, responding to a post Steve wrote on our Social Media efforts at Greenbelt I noted that it’s important to remember that this wasn’t the first year we’d worked with social media at the festival. Flickr has been our most prominent outlet, with the festival’s tags being some of the most visible in the week following the festival for several years now. But as I’ve written about here in the past (from a fairly techie perspective), we’ve made efforts to aggregate content from multiple blogs, social bookmarking services, and the like a few times previously. So what was different this year? ...