Tag Archives: blogging

Tuesday, 13th Sep 2011

Clusterflock at five

This line by Deron stands out as important:

A smallish group with varied and somewhat overlapping interests who could speak from expertise and point to fascination.

Tags: , ,  
Comments Off / Permalink

Wednesday, 31st Aug 2011

New FYPA features

As well as an experiment in blogging (which I will start documenting soon, I promise) I’m also using FYPA.NET as a place to experiment with how a blog can be navigated. While the “newest entries at the top” thing is one of the finest things ever, it’s not the only way. I want to try out new approaches, adapt existing ones and generally have a play with the stuff I’m throwing on this site. Because I can.

Most of these experiments will trickle in and the chances are you won’t notice them, so here’s a roundup.

The Image Grid

I’ve always liked the way Tumblr does archives and over the last few weeks I’ve been assigning a thumbnail to posts with images. Now there’s a decent chunk of them it’s time to reveal the Image Grid. Maybe in the future I’ll integrate videos and text summaries, or maybe I won’t. I quite like how it works as a filter, just picking out the graphical stuff and ignoring the rest.

Random Posts

On the sidebar you’ll find links to three posts. The next time you load a page it’ll be three different posts. It’s a little serendipity thing. Again, nothing revolutionary but nice to have.

Useful tag links

One of the things I’ve been keen to do with FYPA is really get to grips with tagging. I’ve always understood the spirit and purpose of a loose taxonomy in building archives on the fly and using them to see what’s bubbled up (the Big Tag Cloud is part of this) but as a form of site navigation they seem a little lacking. Most blogs just dump them in a long list in tiny-type, perfect for the reader to ignore. And, given the nature of ad-hoc tagging, most of the tags will be for that post only, making them kinda useless until another post gets that tag at some point in the future, maybe.

I wanted to do something about that, so I harvested a feature from the P2 theme which I remember being impressed by. Tags are still listed in full, since seeing how the blogger has tagged the post adds valuable information, but only the ones that hold 2 or more posts are highlighted, saying “there’s more stuff here”. The rest are clickable but the eye is not drawn to them, and there’s a disclaimer on the tooltip. It makes a surprising difference to an often overlooked feature.

More to come…

Still on the to-do list is Date Archives. I’ve been thinking about the utility of these a lot lately as they seem to have lost a lot of their point over the years. Does anyone ever explore a blog through the monthly archives? Can they be re-invented somehow? On FYPA I’ve been concentrating more on daily archives, which I’m very pleased with (click on the date header or the use the calendar in the sidebar) and might start looking at weekly summaries as a way to collect them (especially as some days have been drier than others, depending on my mood and/or workload). But monthly is still a mystery. A mystery that can wait, mind.

Tags: , , , , ,  
Comments Off / Permalink

Friday, 12th Aug 2011

Dave Harte on running a hyperlocal site

He’s been doing BournvilleVillage.com for 20 months and has some wisdom to impart.

2. You are a Creative Citizen
I’ve decided that rather than a hobby, running the Bournville blog is part of my ‘practice’. Positioning it this way makes it sound a bit arty and pretentious – that’s a good thing. Putting together words and images is a creative act. Maybe you’re only telling the world about a lost cat but that lost cat article is contributing to a new form of journalistic practice – hyperlocal blogging. Given you don’t have to adhere to the techniques journalists get taught at journalism schools, that you can experiment and test out new ways to use various media, you’re not far off being an artist. At the very least you’re playing a part in a shifting media landscape that’s coming round to your way of working, take pride in that.

Other points include “You are not the community” and “Local media is worse at this than you”.

Tags: , , , ,  
Comments Off / Permalink

Tuesday, 26th Jul 2011

A New Yorker moment

If I worked with a fridge near me I’d stick this to it. I strive to fully “experience” everything I recommend online. It’s easy, mind you, to hit the retweet button without properly checking out that thing that that person you like linked to, particularly if you like them or want them to like you. But that way leads to madness and tears and it’s one of the reasons I started FYPA. It’s actually slightly awkward posting links here compared with the ease of Twitter or Tumblr and the format kinda requires an explanation, so that effort gives me the impetus for the link to mean something, and for it to mean something means I need to know and understand it.

So yeah, I like this cartoon.

Tags: , , , ,  
Comments Off / Permalink

Saturday, 23rd Jul 2011

Interview with MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey

Haughey has long been an influence on how I approach the web so interviews with him are always a joy.

Where do you see blogs in 10 years’ time?

In a really weird space, because of Twitter and Facebook. There’s definitely been a decline in the last year or two, but I sort of see a resurgence of people who want to be serious writers be like, “Why am I dicking around with writing things in single sentences?” So I think serious blogs might come back, but I don’t think raw numbers of people blogging will ever get up again. Because Twitter and Facebook are so much easier.

It’s funny: [Twitter co-founder] Evan Williams, who I worked with on Blogger.com, was very into making ideas as simple as possible. We started with a byzantine project management app, which grew to huge groups working on massive projects for months, and one part of it was, every project had a blog, and then we were just like, “Why don’t we just spin this off as a thing?” And then that became Blogger. And then, “Blogging’s so hard, why don’t you just make that a sentence?” It’s a logical progression, but then what happens to culture? It’s kind of a bummer.

Tags: , , , ,  
Comments Off / Permalink

Friday, 22nd Jul 2011

In praise of John Coulthart’s Feuilleton

Feuilleton abounds with discussion of every genus of fantastic art, with many luscious images that few visitors will have seen.

Deserved praise indeed. You should subscribe.

Tags: , ,  
Comments Off / Permalink