Now what?

Ah yes. Write. About me.

…sometime later…

…and I really do mean sometime later…

Happy New Year everyone. Hope 2010 is good to you all. So I’ve not blogged much recently. In fact I’ve not blogged much at all this year. I could blame Twitter as that’s where all my quick moans go now. I could also blame DigitalOutbox as that’s where my tech posts go now. I could blame the sciatica I’ve had for about the last 10 weeks which has curtailed my walks. In fact I could present a whole host of reasons that are all pretty valid and if truth be told that’s the real reason I haven’t blogged.

I’m not bored of blogging – I’m just scattered over the web instead of my focus being here on my site. Shame shame shame. I hope to change that over the next few weeks, either by actually writing more on iand.net or by making some changes to pull the content together again in amongst my infrequent blog posts. Not quite sure how yet but that’s all part of the fun, no?

So, look back and look forward. The done thing at this time of year. 2009 was an OK year I guess. Nothing stands out as being overly good or bad so things could have been worse and definitely a lot better.

Aim’s for 2009 were weight loss (another stone), start hill walking to get out and about and finally iPhone programming. Ummmmmm……………………………….shit.

Let’s get the fails out of the way. Weight loss didn’t happen. Well, it just happened. 1.5 kg over 12 months is very disappointing.

The weight loss is still good but the year has been fairly static and rising over the last 3-4 months, partly due to the aforementioned sciatica which has really got in the way of exercise. The good news is that after 6 or 7 weeks of not getting help I went to a physio who has really helped so despite my back still being very sore the pain has mostly gone from my left leg, although I’m still pretty inflexible compared to the right leg. Time is a healer hopefully alongside daily stretches to help with the problem. So no big weight loss predictions this year except to maintain if not lose a little. If that happens I’ll be a happy bunny. Saying that, I’m dreading stepping on those scales on Sunday morning.

Next fail was iPhone programming. I’ve done a little but that’s really it. Nothing to blame but me not prioritising. Will 2010 be any different. Hopefully.

Thankfully I did get one of my aim’s up and running. The hill walking has been a success although I would have liked to have done more than I managed. What was a surprise, as I had no intention to go so high so quickly, was I managed four munro’s this year. We were also pretty lucky with a couple of the walks in that the weather was superb which meant for some great photo’s. 2010 I’m aiming for at least a walk a month.

One surprise that I’ve been heavily involved in was DigitalOutbox, a tech podcast that I launched with Shakeel. We’re enjoying doing the podcasts and we’ve been joined by Chris and Henry. We are slowly growing our listener base and we’ve got some idea’s of how to take things forward in 2010. if you haven’t tried our podcast then visit the DigitalOutbox website or listen in via iTunes.

So, anything else for 2010 apart form weight, iPhone, walking and podcast? Photography. I want to get out and about and take some more photo’s over the next 12 months. A DSLR isn’t for me as it’s just too expensive and too big to carry around so I’ll make do with my little Panasonic for now. I also need to manage my time a lot better as well or else I’ll get hee-haw done this year. I’ll leave with a fav photo of mine from jut before Christmas. More like this over the next 12 months would do me nicely.

I also took the opportunity to remove Intense Debate and switch to Disqus. We use Disqus on DigitalOutbox and I’ve been impressed with the better options and faster performance than I saw here with Intense Debate. One big advantage of Intense Debate was the plugin support but they haven’t really taken off yet, certainly not to the level I expected.

I also tweaked the Google advert locations. I finally put on some ad’s back around April/May and they’ve earned enough to pay for the blog hosting so that’s not too shabby. The theme change also allows for a nice DigitalOutbox link in the sidebar. Nothing like a bit of self promotion from time to time. So that’s the theme change for another year although I do have some thoughts around adding a more colourful theme next time that I want to hand crank myself. Just need a bit more time and motivation.

• Picked up an iPhone 3GS on Friday. Expensive but fast and I really like the new camera. I’ll put my thoughts down later in the week not here though but on DigitalOutbox.
• Speaking of DigitalOutbox, we put up Episode 2 yesterday. Tried to keep it shorter this time. An iPhone special will be up mid-week. Me and Shak are actually enjoying doing it (so far) and we’ve got some idea’s on what we want to do next but we need to walk before we run. We also had a nice surprise seeing our podcast in the iTunes chart. No idea how it’s calculated or what it’s mean but it was a nice ego boost.
• Another hill walk today. Ben Lomond – weather was a bit sucky but worse was the migraine once I got back. Yuck. Feeling better but dulled much like the clouds.
• Wimbledon tomorrow. Looking forward to it and also seeing Andy Murray – just how far can he go? Not in the tennis but in the Andy Murrayometer. You couldn’t make this shit up.
• While in the Apple store on Friday I got to play with the new Macbook pro’s. Gorgeous design. Current plan is to sell my Macbook Pro and iMac and replace with a new Macbook pro and a Mac Mini to act as a media server/always on machine. Need funds for that though. Help.
• Starting to use FriendFeed a bit more. Impressive site but can be a bt overwhelming at times following ‘noisy’ posts.

With that I’ll end. Getting tired and it’s a school night. Later.

DigitalOutbox is a weekly podcast where myself, Shakeel and some weekly guests (eventually!) will discuss computing, gadgets and gaming. A mixture of news and topic discussion with a bit of humour thrown in while keeping it relevant to the UK. Our first episode is now out and available from iTunes or the website feed.

Over the coming weeks and months we want to expand into screencast and video download’s (and if you think I don’t have the face for video, wait until you hear the voice) but that is more dependant on time and also our own skills. This is all very new for us and is certainly out of our comfort zone but it’s something we’ve wanted to do for quite a while so it’s good to see it finally up and running. We’ll also be blogging our more tech related posts on DigitalOutbox rather than our personal blogs. Hopefully if you follow this site and/or the RSS feed you’ll want to do the same for DigitalOutbox. If you want to keep up to date on our goings on then follow us on Twitter.

We have a lot to learn and our first few attempts have been quite ropey but hopefully with time we’ll improve and build up quite a nice podcast series. I’d love to hear any comments, suggestions or feedback either on iand.net or the DigitalOutbox website. Wish us luck!

Recommend a place to get a good cheap bite to eat.
Cleveden Deli – they are very cheap and make a mean roll and sausage with brown sauce of course.

How did you get here? (this stage of life that is)
Not quite sure but I must have been a right nasty bastard in a previous life to earn this one.

What’s the most useless thing in your house right now?
Box of condoms.

You have the opportunity to talk 5 minutes worth of sense into a wayward celebrity. Who do you choose?
So many to choose from but it would have to be Kerry Katona. I’d tell her that carrying on just isn’t worth it and that she’d become loved if she ended it all now. Look what it did for Jade!

What’s the most on fire you’ve ever been?
I don’t do fire. However, this performance in Halo was pretty good.

Killionaire from Ian D on Vimeo.

OH NO, IT’S A RUMBLE! Quick, put together your ideal gang of street toughs!
Oh for fuck’s sake. Get a grip. Anyway, I’d have Edward Woodward but only if The Equalizer music was playing in the background, George Peppard aka Hannibal and Roy Keane. Sorted.

What’s the least fun you’ve ever had at a place specifically tailored for fun?
Plinky’s web site. Boring.

I’ve seen quite a few good examples of using Tumblr as a scrapbook. Interesting. I’ve wiped my Tumblr account and set it up again as a scrapbook. A place where I can throw ‘the stuff’ that I stumble across online and want to collect but doesn’t fit in the blog, Google Reader or even LittleSnapper.

Time will tell whether it will fit into my work cycle and I find it useful over the long term but I can see it being quite useful.

The blog also got a clean-up this weekend. Gone is the sidebar to leave just the post filling the page. Expect to be linking to HD video over time and the wider format will help. This also leaves a cleaner front page. The sidebar which used to list a lifestream has been moved to it’s own page – the Stream. Also finished off updating the About page and added some links at the top of the page. Nothing ground breaking but more to my liking. I did try messing around with some colour but I’ll keep that for another site.

Yes, there will soon be another site but that’s for another day.

Firstly none of my Flickr content seems to be indexed but I’ve raised this with the support team. I’m also not overly keen on the styling of the search window and performance seems a bit iffy.

Still, I prefer this to the standard Wordpress search so I’ll keep this on for a couple of weeks and see how it goes.

This post has been sitting in draft for a couple of weeks now. Lijit is still enabled and the Flickr images are now correctly indexed. All of the content I want to be returned is returning but the overall performance is a bit slow. I’ll keep it enabled for now but the search for a better WordPress search goes on.

The search results will be returned in a far more visually rich style as seen in the screenshot above. Extracts for each post are shown with your search term highlighted. Comments and posts are also easily distinguished and you can easily turn off comment searching if you only want pages and posts to be searched. The results appear in a modal window above your blog page – click on a post title to jump to that page in the blog. So far I’m really pleased with the testing I’ve done and the accuracy of the search results.

There are four blog ‘views’ currently available. The standard blog search works against your blog but you can also set up views for Video, Photo and Timeline. Video currently supports YouTube and Viddler accounts with more coming soon. Photo supports Flickr, SmugMug or Picassa.

Clicking on Blog Photo will run a search against my Flickr photo’s, returning popular images in the modal window. Mouse over the image to display a higher resolution picture and click on the picture to go directly to the Flickr page for the image. Really pleased with how this works and beats having a local gallery installed on the blog.

As a side note, the picture highlighted was taken in Aug 2007, the day the Apple store opened in Glasgow and also the day that Roy picked up his first Apple computer. It’s also one of the last images of me before I started losing some weight. What a difference! I look really fat in that picture compared to now. Anyway, enough about me.

The Blog Timeline displays a nice scrolling timeline view of the search. This is really a nice to have compared to the other two views but it’s a view that I’ve looked at having before on the blog via a couple of plugin’s so it’s good to see it incorporated in Viewzi. Within the plugin settings you have some search stats available – number of searches per day, topics searched for etc. Standard fare really.

One issue that may put people off is that adverts are displayed amongst the search results. These are adverts placed by Viewzi. i don’t have an issue and they are working on ways of incorporating your own adverts into the search results. Once in place your adverts will be displayed 50% of the time and theirs 50% of the time. Sounds fair and if your desperate to set that up now you can contact them for more info and help.

Some features that I’d like to see added through time:

• Search results return tags and categories associated to posts that can be clicked on for more deeper browsing.
• Support of additional search views – my comments from other sites through Intense Debate, del.icio.us links, Google Reader shares etc.
• Ability to search across all views via one search, returning results based on priority and relevance.
• Greater control over the modal form – CSS styling to allow alignment with blog design.

As a package I’m really impressed so far. Easy to set-up, no styling required and search results delivered quickly with hopefully more sources covered soon. I did also look at Lijit which offers much the same promise as Viewzi with many more supported sources but the results returned weren’t as well styled as with Viewzi or as well integrated. Overall Viewzi is a plug-in that is well worth trying if the default WordPress search isn’t quite doing it for you.

• On the hosting side moved from PHP 4 to PHP 5. No noticeable improvements or issues except that I can now run a few extra plugins that were PHP 5 only.
• New Wordpress, new theme. I’ve moved to using Depo Clean which I’ve always liked. Hardly any tweaks – made it slightly wider and gave the sidebar slightly more room and that’s it. Still need to think of a catchy tagline.
• Dropped the number of plugins I was using which has speeded things up a bit.
• Added Lifestream plugin which I really like. Seems to work quickly and so far without errors.
• Wordpress 2.7 back end is very different. I actually like this over 2.6 except it still feels sluggish. So I’ve removed some dashboard entries which has helped and also moved to turbo mode using Google Gears. This install, for me, was really messy and I constantly had to enable/disable gears and refresh the install page. Now that it’s complete there is a small but worthwhile performance increase.

That’s about it really. Now onto the important matter – content. I’ve got a handful of draft posts that I either need to finish, but they might not exactly be relevant now, or ditch and move on. Finding time to blog has been difficult. Even knowing what to blog has been difficult, especially as Twitter works so well for firing off quick one liners and links. Still, I’ve a few posts that I do need to get completed over the next couple of weeks so we’ll see how it goes after that. I can never see me shutting the site down but I would like to post more so it doesn’t feel so stale. Ahh, so fuck- who cares if it’s stale. It’s my site, I’ll blog when i want to! Mmmm – there’s a tagline in there methinks.