4,062 words, so I’m keeping pace with the 2000 words per day goal I’ve set myself. I notice I’m currently first amongst the 15 or so Wellington writers 🙂 Enough writing for today. I’m off to watch the All Blacks hammer Wales in the rugby World Cup.
It’s just after 7pm on Saturday 1 November and I’ve finished my first day’s writing in the NaNoWriMo challenge. I managed 2,108 words today, which I’m really pleased with. It took me about 3 hours, a little over 1 hour in the morning straight writing (about 1,000 words) and in the evening I spent 1-2 hours writing interspersed with some research on…
I’ve now officially entered NaNoWriMo, which is an annual challenge to write a 50,000 word novel over 30 days. It kicks off on 1 November, which is one day away for me. I checked into the official NaNoWriMo website tonight and I was surprised to see that 14 other people from Wellington in New Zealand are doing this. I suspect the majority are…
I’m one of those people that regularly says: “One day, I’m going to write a novel.” Well now may be my chance. NaNoWriMo is a an annual challenge to write a novel in 30 days, over the month of November. The novel must be at least 50,000 words, which is about 175 pages. I discovered this intriguing contest tonight, via Erik Benson. Erik entered last…
I posted this on my linkblog, but I feel like publishing it here too. I heard some of Rautavaara’s Symphony Number 7 (Angel of Light) a few weeks ago, for the first time, and I was quite taken by the music. It reminded me of The Matrix. So anyway tonight I googled Rautavaara and discovered a) he’s a Finnish composer, and b) I like the way he…
I judge the quality of a weblog by its IDEAS, but it seems some people equate quality with popularity. Is the ‘culture of celebrity’ that afflicts Western movies, television and radio creeping in to weblogs as well? These thoughts were prompted by the recent weblog discussion on power laws and how they relate to weblogs. Actually the topic of…
The Two-Way Web is a very simple concept. It’s all about normal everyday people having a publishing platform on the Web. Sounds reasonable to me, but a thread on Many-to-Many this week has complicated the issue. Here’s my summary, based on how I first discovered and then tracked the thread (the process somehow seems important here): 1. In my…
David Weinberger recently wrote a weblog post entitled When blogs get really popular. In it he states that the line between blogging and email will become blurred. He says: “The word “blog” will expand to cover any linkable posting (a place) where a person gets to speak her mind more than once. If it’s more permanent than IM, it’ll be a blog.” It…
Thanks to Peter Lindberg, for pointing me and others to a couple of Marshall McLuhan articles. But before I talk about those, here’s an overview of Marshall McLuhan from the Wikipedia: “Famous for coining the phrases “The medium is the message” and “the global village,” McLuhan was one of the early purveyors of the sound bite. He asserted that…
I’ve been threatening to write an article about XHTML for a while now and so here goes. I’ll also talk about CSS and table-less web designs, because in the Web world right now XHTML and CSS are as hot a couple as Ashton and Demi (who may’ve broken up now, but I couldn’t think of another celebrity couple). Recently I converted my Radio Userland…
I read with interest Matt Haughey’s essay Blogging for Dollars, where he relates his experiences running Google’s Adsense adverts on his TiVo-focused weblog, PVRblog. Matt is making a pretty penny running the Google ads on his TiVo blog and one of the main reasons why is that it is focused on a single topic. He advises: “In order to have any…
I’ve just finished transferring a bunch of links from Outlook to my linkblog. They are links I’ve been hoarding over the past few months, as ideas for future weblog articles or just for inspiration. I plan to use my linkblog to store all the ideas I harvest from the Web. Beats emailing myself, plus because my linkblog is Movable Type I am able to…
I’ve been playing around with some linkblog solutions. Firstly, on Phil Pearson’s advice I tried del.icio.us. Once I negotiated my way around the minimalist design and even more minimalist documentation, I liked del.icio.us. However the problem is that it’s a 3rd party hosted service and I want to host my linkblog on my own server. So I had to…
I’ve just returned from 4 days holiday. I was disconnected from the Web for the entire time. This was a good thing, as I spent lots of quality time with my family. Now I’m back sitting in front of my PC at home. I’ve spent the last hour reviewing stuff in my RSS Aggregator. But with 4 days worth of updates to dig through, I’ve barely made a dent in…
Too. Much. Information. Data floods my mind and my actions become water-logged. What to do? There’s too much to do. Information washes over me, my head is submerged. Metadata fills my nostrils. I’m drowning, help! I’m being melodramatic 🙂 But actually I do feel this way sometimes. Right now I am struggling to manage my information flow. Let me…
I’ve been thinking about starting a linkblog, like Phil Pearson has just done. Two of my favourite daily reads are Anil Dash’s Daily Links and Erik Benson’s Morale-o-Meter. Both those guys post a daily list of external links, with a 1-2 line comment on each link, which pretty much align with my own interests. Personally I prefer it when daily links…
2003 has so far been a year of hype for weblogs and k-logs. Blogging is on the cusp of the mainstream. Or is it? A few posts recently have me wondering: why would normal people want to publish to the Web? Mark Pilgrim: “… itís possible that an unfiltered… unedited… personal publishing system… with instantaneous worldwide…
CSS and XHTML are still dominating my mind’s attention.xml file. As you can see in my menu, they’re numbers 1 and 2 in my Weekly Topic Top 10. btw the Topic Top 10 is going to be a weekly record (pardon the pun) of the most popular topics on my mind. I’ve actually created some XML files to store each week’s top 10, so I can track what topics are…
I’ve been totally absorbed in my CSS re-design this past week. I did some final tinkering tonight, trying to find a solution to the “bottom horizontal bar” issue (outlined in my previous post). But CSS positioning is an abstract thing to get ones head around. It’s not like good old fashioned HTML table designs, where you can set the table borders…
I’ve been fixing up some teething problems with my new CSS design and I’m quite pleased to report that my homepage is now 100% valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I checked this at the W3C Validator. A couple of days ago I had about 360 errors on my test page, but I whittled it down in two main ways. Firstly, I ran all my homepage posts through a nice…
