SolarPlexus

You’ll see it pop up time and again, on sites and blogs that aim to advise potential bloggers: keep writing, keep blogging, and remember to ‘find your voice’.

By that, they mean the stance taken in your entries, a sense of personality and self should be evident. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is by limiting your subject matter. That’s why we get dedicated bike blogs, Star Wars blogs, sports blogs etc.

Laudable, to be that focused.

I make no apologies for being unable to take that route. I’ve always laboured undered the label of Jack of All Trades (implying therefore, Master of None) - and that’s that. I can’t change it, and necessarily this blog tends to be all over the shop, subject-wise. There’s too many things I’m interested in, a few I’m more passionate about but not to the level where I could envisage myself creating a specific blog.

Finding my voice, then, is just that much harder. I’ll have to think of another way! Could I be more controversial, more flippant, attempt to be jocular. Hmmm, too forced.

Sapienter si sincere.

I’m not a big fan of the Twitter-scene - there I’ve said it. There seems to be a propensity for folk to get so wrapped up in it that they emit pellets of their lives, habitually. It’s that old mobile-phone on the bus thing: “I’m just on the bus now”, “I’m three mins away now”, “I’m getting off the bus now” yadda yadda yadda.

However, I don’t presume to talk down a genuine desire for friends and colleagues to keep in touch, to feel connected, to reach out in these days when more of us are tied to our PC screens for big chunks of the day.

Mike Robinson, creator of Mloovi, has tasked me with creating some graphics for MlooviTweet - and clearly I needed to sign up to Twitter to get a handle on the thing. I suppose I could have blagged the assignment without becoming a tweet merchant, but that’s hardly the best route is it?

Naturally, I feel the desire to connect the Twitter mechanism to my blog somehow. Some folk just publish their tweets in a sidebar widget or list, and leave it at that. I’ve decided to try to cross-fertilise both blog entries and tweets.

Before the purists amongst you rant on about horses-for-courses, and using the right tools for the right job, please let me explain…

I’m not an avid blogger. I pen blog entries in spurts, when the mood takes me, and when work allows. I feel I should do more, as this blogging thing doesn’t seem to hurt my graphic design business, quite the opposite in fact!

Anything that lubricates the blogging process is worth looking at. I use iGoogle as my browser homepage, and on that I’ve got a Twitter gadget that saves me opening up the main site. From there I can write tweets very easily - so why not then port them over into the blog? Quite often I feel I could comment on a news item, TV or radio prog, something in the street, etc. - but logging into WordPress on the spur of the moment is just downright disruptive to the workflow. However, punting a few choice words into a tweet box seems just the ticket.

Let’s see - I could be talking out of my botty, and not even bother doing that!

This is a topic that straddles both my private and ‘work’ time currently, so I’m going to send you over to Wisely if Sincerely to read the lowdown. Now, move along, please…

Well, here we are: another year, another round of frolicsome mayhem? Well, I can hope…

The last few weeks have been spent attending to moving my blogs from the Blogger platform to Wordpress. Christmas festivities? Sorry, didn’t have time.

I opted to install Wordpress in my own server space, rather than go for the fully-hosted option. Mainly because I wanted to tweak the visual format extensively, and I also wanted that functionality for free. Tight mockJock, that’s me.

My ISP is PlusNet and their CGI / MySQL set-up is a little quirky to say the least, and it took me a while to hunt down the correct tutorials to get things running. However, I suppose I should be thankful that these are standard account features at no cost, and since my broadband is currently costing me £10 a month from them I can hardly complain. Whoops, slipped back into Scrooge McJock mode there again.

Some tools exist to automatically port blog content from Blogger to Wordpress, but since these seem to rely on both source and destination blogs to be hosted by their respective suppliers - not hosted ‘locally’ - I was up a bit of a gumtree, for I had sited both in my webspace.

Now that I’ve done the graft of cutting and pasting each individual blog entry, and rationalising the image storage within a free Picasa web album, I realise that there was probably an easier way to do things. And that probably involved picking up the XML from an RSS feed of the entire blog history? Can any code monkeys confirm that I have shamed myself by doing things in a Really Old Fashioned Way?

Nevertheless, transferring the material in this plodding manner to help me review the content, not in any kind of Orwellian history-changing way, but simply to update myself on, for instance, some of the linked material. Interestingly I noted that one entry, which linked to a comment I made elsewhere, was rendered useless due to wholesale comment deletion. Most of the comments were at best critical, and at worst derisory so I wonder if the blog’s author had taken it all to heart just a wee bit too much. I’ve just looked again, and all subsequent comments commenting on the comments being removed have themselves been removed, though this now seems to be a site-wide problem. Odderer and odderer.

While the task of manually transferring all this guff from one stage to another was tedious in the extreme, the job was made tolerable by the simple fact that I’ve not created that many entries since both Wisely if sincerely and SolarPlexus began. Maybe now that I’m a bit more entranced by the Wordpress experience I’ll feel the urge more often. Ahem.

Happy 2008 to you all!

I noted with some interest this recent blog from Brum Blogger Extraordinaire, Pete Ashton. In it he mentions an old concrete shopping ‘quadrangle’ in Birmingham. I remember gaining access to the roof of Littlewoods way back in 1986-ish. Littlewoods department store forms part of this garrison, and afforded a different perspective to the norm.

If you look carefully at the big version of this picture you’ll see that the mid-eighties timeframe is confirmed by the ladies’ footwear - calf-enhancing heels all the way ;)

The Hearing Aid has been relaunched in a new guise, solely piloted by The Baron. The new address is http://www.thehearingaid.blogspot.com

Um, ‘twould appear that The Hearing Aid is no more. The Baron is on holiday right now, but I’ll quiz him about his site’s disappearance when he’s finished getting his yearly dose of vitamin D. It’s very dark in Baron Towers…

The Hearing Aid

Stonking blog from my mate The Baron - what’s hip, what’s not, and what’s being listened to in Baron Towers…