Blog posts

Aimed at those with a knowledge of HTML and CSS but with no prior experience of programming, Drupal 5 Themes sets out to show you how you can quickly and easily get a drupal site up and running with a highly customised look and feel. Drupal is highly themeable, with most aspects of the user interface being accessible purely in the theme layer without needing to dip into module development or the CMS’ core. The book takes the user through the various theme hooks and introduces the simple PHP code needed to override them, add new ‘regions’ (in which blocks can be displayed), customise existing themes and create your own (almost) from scratch. The primary focus is on the default theme engine, PHPTemplate, but others are referenced and a little time is spent on the options for building your own theme using raw PHP (without the extra layer of a theme engine). ...

In memory of chicagocrime.org | Holovaty.com Adrian Holovaty explains his decision to retire chicagocrime.org (tags: chicago chicagocrime googlemaps mashup retirement) Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta As it says in the subject. Now to work out how to get my sites fully OpenID 2.0 compliant (tags: api authentication openid security yahoo) MySpace Developer Platform Launching on February 5th Possibly good news. I’m just waiting to see if they allow more write access to their system than facebook does. Not being able to create events programmatically is _very_ annoying. ...

Daytrotter’s Best 15 Albums of 2007: No. 5 Feist’s “The Reminder” A nice write up of a somewhat-surprising breakthrough hit (tags: daytrotter feist music top15)

The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects—a Ruby book that doesn’t even mention web frameworks—was both a pleasant diversion and a highly illuminating experience. ...

Over the past few months, Kari and I have joined the church at St. Luke’s, West Holloway. The church building has just been renovated (and looks great) and now we’re starting to host a new series of events under the banner of “Breathing Space.” Yesterday, Martin and I got the website ready for public viewing. There’s more to come (particularly on the visual design front), but if you’re likely to be able to get to North London over the next few months take a look and see if there’s anything you’d like to join us for.

BLDGBLOG: Robbie Williams CDs will be used to pave roads in China EMI has announced that “unsold copies” of Rudebox, by British pop star Robbie Williams, “will soon be used to resurface Chinese roads.” (tags: cds recycling robbiewilliams) stereogum: New Gnarls Barkley - “Run” Not had a chance to listen to this yet. (tags: dangermouse gnarlsbarkley)

Every year I intend to write a “top 10 records/films/etc.” blog entry. I put it off until some time in the middle of January so I can catch up on a few releases I’d missed around the end of the year, and then either forget about it, or realise it’s too hard to reduce the list. The easiest way round that would be to just link to my listening charts for the past 12 months over on last.fm. But right now those are rolling charts (so if you look at them six months after I write this, they’ll have changed) and they’re also skewed towards records that came out early in the year. There are certainly a few highlights in there—including Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, Feist, Grinderman, Bjork, Radiohead and Panda Bear—but there are also several missing. So perhaps it’s easiest to just throw up a few notes, and then let go of this angst for another year? ...

Guillermo del Toro may take on The Hobbit | News | Guardian Unlimited Film Sounds like a good choice (tags: deltoro film hobbit tolkien)

A couple of weeks back I attended NCVO’s seminar on the Future of Citizenship. Building on a recent report by The Henley Centre that developed four scenarios of how notions of citizenship and civic involvement may change over the next twenty years, the workshop-based afternoon was focussed on the challenges and opportunities that such changes will present to voluntary organisations. It was a fascinating afternoon and I’d highly recommend taking a look at the full report (PDF) and checking out the follow up questions on the Third Sector Foresight website. ...

I don’t talk much about my work here, saving the more in depth stuff for the other place, but every now and again it seems worth mentioning some new project that has launched. In spare moments over the past few weeks I’ve been setting up Future Music Talk. It’s a site that pulls together blog entries from a group of people talking about the future of the music industry, music promotion, etc. There’s a lot of good discussion taking place, but it’s all so widely spread out that it seemed helpful to bring some of it together for easy discovery and maybe some more cross-fertilisation. ...