- When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?
Some useful numbers on blog posting for optimum circulation. Short version: publish in the morning to get the regular readership, and tweet notifications in the late afternoon for maximum activity boost/retweet value. Publish a minimum of one post per day, ideally more, in order to build an audience. - Comic Sans Criminal – There’s help available for people like you!
I am going to send this to anyone I catch using Comic Sans inappropriately. Anyone continuing to misuse that sodding font after reading this is actively evil, and should probably be removed from the human race for the good of all.
Links for Monday December 20th 2010
- A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I’m An Atheist – Speakeasy – WSJ
Yes, it's a rehash of the same old pro-atheism arguments we've all heard time and time again. But it's eloquent, witty, and surprisingly warm and kind, and I liked it. - notes on "how to clone delicious in 48 hours"
This made me laugh with recognition. After all, delicious doesn't go anything complex, does it? It's got all of three different blobs of data – users, who have links, which have tags. (And some optional text, but that's trivial). How had can that be to throw together? And one one level, that's true. I could roll my own personal delicious in a weekend. But I couldn't make it available to anyone else without months of work.
Links for Friday December 17th 2010
- Insipid
Self hosted delicious clone. Might move to this if I get time to play with it a bit. - 2010 in photos
The Big Picture's pictures of the year are out – this is a link to part 1 – you'll find links to parts two and three below the picks. Beautiful, alarming, saddening, touching, all the usual. Well worth a squint. - Giving better deign feedback – I would like it if anyone who ever commissioned agency work was made to sit down and read this until their eyeballs bled. "The Client Doesn't Like It" should, essentially, be irrelevant. You don't hire people to produce things you like, you hire them to produce things that work.
RSS
Could anyone reading this blog (NB: I’m talking about my blog, not the mirror of it’s content on LJ) via RSS reader either leave a comment or drop me an email (instructions in the website footer) if they see this post? For some reason, my own RSS reader will only show new posts if I delete the feed and re-create it, despite the fact that viewing the source of the feed in my browser shows me an up to date feed. I just want to be sure that this problem isn’t affecting other people. Ta!
Links For Wednesday 15th December 2010
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Here's an interesting thing to think about, particularly in light of the fact, that at my company, for example, I often get certain tasks because I know the code better, and can therefore accomplish the same task faster. Yet, we charge by the hour (well, actually by the ten-minute block). This essentially means that exactly because I've got more experience than some of my colleagues, clients pay less for my services. Yet the company has far more cash and training time invested in me. The obvious solution would be to charge more for my time than for some of my less experienced colleagues, but obviously, that's a hard sell to clients, not least because they lack the skills and knowledge to correctly evaluate whether it's better to get me, or someone else, on a given project. Especially when for some projects, I will work faster, and for others, I will be slower, because it's code I don't know so well, but one of my colleagues might know better.
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Hmm. This sounds like the good business to me. At some point in the not *too* distant, I need to get to grips with iOS development, and I like that there's now a simple Cloud-based DB that I can use for storage/sync.
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Naomi Wolf produces a far clearer, far more on the nose, summation of the point she was articulating when she got leapt on but the left wing blogosphere last week. It is not a defence of Assange, it is a condemnation of the current rate of international prosecution for crimes far worse than what Assange is accused of. It wasn't a defence of Assange when she wrote it last week, but plenty of people out there got distracted by about seven words in amongst a much wider point, and her real point got lost. So she's restated it, and you should read what she has to say.
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This is interesting. I've been trying to find numbers/commentary on wikileaks from a feminist perspective that isn't focused on Assange and the allegations against him, and failing. I'd like to produce an article on the real-world effects of wikileaks as regards women and/or social justice, but it's proving very hard to find even vague commentary in that vein, never mind hard numbers. This is the closest to useful commentary (that isn't about the allegations) I've found thus far.
Links For Monday 13th December 2010
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For very real and serious: if you have *ever* left a comment on a Gawker blog (or if you're not sure if you might have or not), you need to check whether any email address you might have used is in this spreadsheet – instructions on how to do it are there in the right hand column, I'm happy to explain more if people need me to – and if it is, and you've used the same password anywhere else (and if you can't remember, assume you have) then you need to change it right now, as that email address and password are now out in the public domain.
Links For Friday 10th December 2010
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Your second stock-filler recommendation for the day! What are you waiting for? Go! Get shopping! Buy my friend's fine literary product and help make the world a better place!
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I know Stross is one of my regular linkees, and I'm sure a lot of you glide over him at this point, but I thought this was a particularly interesting read, and I commend it to anyone who is feeling frustrated by the apparently lack of ability for members of the public to influence anything in the wake of stuff like Wikileaks and the student fees protests. It won't tell you how to change things, but it provides an interesting perspective on the whys of the current situation, that lead to some interesting thoughts on how one might affect change in the medium-term future.
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Budgie's Fast Fiction Challenge, now in its second volume. I commend it to your attention as a perfect stocking filler.
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Reverting to Type: exhibition. Must go see.
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Interested mostly into the insights into conversational interface, rather than the actual product here. For consideration: pair a more general use version of this with some voice recognition software, and it won't be long before all those SF voice-activated computers become a reality.
Links For Wednesday 8th December 2010
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This one's doing the rounds today – the story of an autistic child who has been removed from his father's care, for seemingly, no sensible reason other than bureaucratic procedure. It it is as presented (and I've seen a lot of people prefix retweeting it with that, I suspect because like me people simply don't want to believe that this *can* be true) than this is deeply saddening, and Something Ought To Be Done. I cannot fathom how this could be allowed to happen – it would seemingly require *far* too many people who are allegedly "carers" to be Orwellian bureaucratic jobsworths with a shred of human decency or willingness to stop and think. So: a link that deserves to do the rounds, in the hope of Something Getting Done.
Sounds Get Lost Amid The Shouting
In a shock move, unprecedented in recent years, my Twitter and RSS reader are full of discussions of the Turner Prize.
Annoyingly, they’re not talking about the Prize itself. They’re talking about the protest. And I think that’s sad, because for the first time in a while, I wholeheartedly love the winning entry, a very moving sound sculpture by Susan Philipsz.
Don’t get me wrong, the protest is important. The winner of this years prize even said so, and expressed solidarity with the protesters. But I love the Turner Prize, and I am am sad that the only way to get a lot of my friends to pay any attention to it is to get a bunch of people attempting to spoil the event (for the best of reasons, but it’s still what they were trying to do).
So: if you’ve been writing about the protests on Twitter, Facebook, LJ, your blog, or wherever, and live in London, I strongly suggest you get yourself down to the Tate, and go and see this year’s Turner exhibition. Because if you’re sitting there cheering the protesters on, then it is incumbent on you to understand what they were protesting for, and make no mistake, they were protesting to ensure that some of them have a chance to be Turner Prize nominees one day.
I’ve gone to the Turner Exhibition 4 years out of the last 5 (and was bastard annoyed at myself for missing last year), and it has been worthwhile every single time. Yes, every time there has been one entry that I thought was a bag of wank (and annoyingly, that one has been the winner at least once), but if you’re someone who, if they notice it at all, spots that annual award of the Turner prize, and mutters something about “that’s not proper bloody art” and then forgets about it, then I challenge you to go any bloody look at the exhibition for once, and form an informed opinion.
The prize is not just about the winner – there are 4 nominees across the full spectrum of the arts, and I promise you that every year, you will come away thinking that at least one of them was brilliant and interesting. Most years, I find two out of the four excellent, once of them good but not my taste, and well, yes, there’s always that problematic fourth one, but there’s a place for that, too.
This year is no exception – while I loved Philpsz’ entry, and consider it a very, very deserving winner, Angela de la Cruz was also excellent, and I would have been very nearly as happy to see her win, and Dexter Dalwood was something I could see appealing to a lot of people. (This year, The Otolith Group were the one I liked least, but honestly, I don’t feel I experienced them properly enough to say whether they were good or bad – I just didn’t have the time to spare to watch their whole video from start to finish.)
Links For Monday 6th December 2010
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On the one hand: I'm sorry that the fundraising hasn't been as as successful as they hoped, because it is a good cause, on the other, surely a child of six might have thought that while people *like* having celebrity drivel as part of their Twitter/Farcebook experience, it's not something people would actively *miss* if it went away – whichever marketroid through the campaign up is clearly not very good at their job, especially as the campaign ensures it's own silence – they can't remind people that they're not there in order to drive donations without violating their pledge. (No, I'm not donating via said campaign. Show me a cause where I can get celebrities to stop Twittering/Facebooking for good by pledging, and I'll get the chequebook out.)
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More grist to my mill in re: getting rid of books as physical objects: cheap POD books, which is where we're heading for book-as-physical-object (unless you want current bestsellers, which I almost never do) tend to be shoddier things. A good POD book is just as good as a regular book, but I've seen some very shoddy examples in the past, where I would definitely rather have had the ebook.