This time several years ago, I was stuck in an internet rut. I had a fairly fixed number of websites which I would visit daily, but, through habit, rarely step outside of that loop. I had a personal website, which I first created in 1996, but I rarely had any interest in it from the outside world - it was a personal excercise to learn new technologies. Like my web browsing, it too stagnated. I changed the look of it because I was bored, or keen to try out a new design, but the content rarely grew to more than a list of links. I would certainly never try to write something like this on it - for starters it was unlikely that anyone would find it to read it.
Static sites, stagnant sites
In the year 2000, when I begain my masters degree in archaeological computing (and coupled with a connection to SuperJaNET - the high speed academic network), I began to experiment a little more with web publishing, and found that the projects I was working on were worthy of a mention on the net. I revamped my website yet again, and began to put 3D renders of some work on there, and a few descriptions of what I was up to and some of the techniques I was working on. But I had no traffic. Manual search engine submission didn’t seem to work, links from some friends (equally obscure) websites, didn’t bring many visitors. It made me wonder what the point of it was, especially as I was hand coding everything, and was a considerable time investment.
Continue reading ‘The Power of Blog’
Podcasting is a phenomenon which is still, technically, in its infancy. The release of iTunes 4.9 in July gave podcasting a huge boost, putting the tools to subscribe to ‘casts straight into the hands of anyone and everyone.
The quality of podcasts out there varies tremendously. More and more people are learning how to create them, and how simple they can be - simply an mp3 file enclosure to an RSS feed. Podcasting is also working the other way by educating the masses about RSS and blogging.
These are heady days in the world of internet publishing, and in the United Kingdon, we like to do our bit. The first podcasting conference in the UK, PodcastConUK, to be held on Saturday 17 September in London, is going to be an exciting opportunity for podcasters and podcast listeners alike.
I shall probably be the only archaeologist attending (and yes, we have some archaeology podcasts up our sleeves..)!
Technorati Tags: podcastcon, podcastconuk, podcasting
I have known about Flickr for some years now, and have finally decided to take the plunge and sign up for an account. It’s a marvellous system - really well thought out; intuitive and easy to use.
I am very impressed by the RSS feeds, and the ability to post pictures from a cameraphone by email. There’s even an iPhoto plugin for uploading to Flickr, as well as a standalone OSX uploader.
Incidentally, I’m posting this entry from within my Flickr account…
This is going to be fun - Tehm and I have over 6,000 photos..! The pic attached here (hopefully) was taken with my Nokia 6600 at the Summer Solstice party at Stonehenge in 2004.
You can see my (currently diminutive) photoblog on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/chough/
moJave is a Java moblogging tool for mobile phones. I am writing this on my Nokia 6600, and it seems to work OK, but it feels rather clunky for everyday use. It is currently in beta, to be fair, but not much of the advertised functionality is present. It’s also not much fun writing this on a numeric keyboard!
Ecto is a fully-featured desktop blogging application, that helps you get the most out of your blog. It allows you to manage your blog using a fully OSX integrated interface, compose posts offline, integration with iPhoto, manage your pings and trackbacks, and support for multiple blogs using multiple blogging engines. Its burgeoning list of features make this an essential tool for bloggers.
In this mini-review I am using ecto 2.3.7 for OSX.
Continue reading ‘Ecto: The Review’
I first posted about Ecto back in May, and, after much playing with the demo for OSX, I have bitten the bullet and purchased a copy. The more I use Ecto, the more powerful I realise it is. I will post a full review here in the days to come, but I really couldn’t recommend it enough. Even the support forums for Ecto are checked regularly by the author.
Check back soon for my review.
Technorati Tags: ecto, blogging, wysiwyg
As news of yesterday’s bombings in London came through, the BBC News website slowly ground to a halt as millions of people logged on to see what was happening. I decided to follow the events through the day via the blogging community, and it gave a great ‘bottom-up’ view of the happenings, often half an hour before information filtered onto the mainstream websites.
Technorati Tags: London, blogging, bomb
Continue reading ‘Blogging the London bombings’
