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Steve Rubel has resolved to return to feed reading in 2011.

However, I have been using Google Reader since 2007 and use it daily to catch up with the tech and sports news in addition to my favourite blogs. I honestly can't imagine life without it. I was also interested by a recent article (prompted by the demise of delicio.us) that described the use of Google Reader as a bookmarking service.

Steve Rubel sings the praises of Markdown and good old fashioned text editors.

I agree and for a long time have dithered over whether to write all of my blog posts in Markdown. This makes sense as it simplifies the syntax and theoretically should make writing content easier and quicker. I was particularly struck by Caius Durling's use of Markdown on his Habari blog and the use of the plaintext plugin to reveal the raw Markdown.

However, despite experimenting with both the Markdown plugin for Habari and later the Markdown filter module for Drupal, I have actually never taken the plunge.

I think the subconscious reasons behind for my reluctance to bite the bullet and fully embrace Markdown are:

1. Knowing the subset of HTML tags I commonly use, I am finally relatively comfortable composing posts in raw HTML.
2. Although Markdown uses a simple, easy to learn syntax (which is rather the whole point after all), the Markdown markup would be a slightly different syntax to learn and master.
3. I am (justifiably in my case) worried that I would constantly produce incorrect Markdown syntax and hence generate flawed HTML so I would be forever reviewing the generated HTML which again would be time consuming and self-defeating. A side by side split, live screen Markdown/HTML preview would be really useful.I have just discovered the Live module which looks like it could be used in conjunction with the Markdown filter to create similar functionality (but only when this module is ported to Drupal 7).
4. Sometimes I embed images from Picasweb or YouTube and I'm not sure how these HTML embeds would work in Markdown or whether the Markdown processor will accept raw HTML for these occasional exceptions.
5. Drupal supports different filter types on a per post basis but I have concerns about attempting to migrate a blog containing a mixture of HTML and Markdown posts to different blog platforms and I'm hardly likely to convert 1,000 historic posts to Markdown. However, if the Markdown is processed and the generated HTML is stored in the database, this may not be a problem. Another obvious solution is trying to curb this constant urge to tinker with the underlying technology powering this blog but that is unlikely to happen.

Anyway, time to stop procrastinating. I have managed to write this post in Markdown and already I like the modified, simpler syntax, so I will endeavour to follow Steve Rubel's advice and join the ranks of the 'modern communicators'.

Manchester, near England - Wednesday 5 January 2011

The footballing world was left reeling yesterday at shock news emanating from Manchester City's training facility at Carrington. A local man, Frank Booth explains: 'I always pass the City training ground on my way to work so I always check out the players going through their drills. Yesterday I was quite shocked to see all the players smiling and laughing. I couldn't believe my eyes so I stopped for a closer look.

'The senior players appeared to be discussing the presents they had received at Christmas. Emmanuel Adebayor was sporting a lovely Inter Milan shirt and Carlos Tevez was passing around some Braun hair straighteners. All of this just two days before a crucial top of the table clash away at Arsenal that could decide the destiny of the league title and end 35 years of hurt. The Italian manager, Mancini, was no better and appeared to be trying to place a Christmas Angel on top of Yaya Toure's head using a small, portable step ladder. For a laugh, each squad player had given Mancini an identical pale blue and white City scarf so he was attempting to wear all 23 scarves at once.'

Roberto Mancini attempted to justify this unexpected outbreak of peace, love and harmony: 'At this moment, this is very normal for the players to be relaxed and smiling. In the recent moments, we had tough matches over Christmas so now we relax just for one of the eight daily training sessions. There is no problem with morale in the squad in this moment. The Inter Milan shirt for Adebayor is not a problem. In fact, that was, how you say, my Secret Santa gift for him'.

In an exclusive interview, Chief Executive Garry Cook attempted to give a managerial spin on this remarkable turn of events: 'It is absolutely ludicrous and completely untrue for amateur journalists from tabloid newspapers to print these despicable lies just before a crucial match. There is no suggestion whatsoever of any harmony within the club - either on the training ground, in the dressing room or on the coach to away matches when Joe Hart, Kolo Toure and Gareth Barry squabble over the front seat near Roberto. Why - only this morning, I was having a chat with Carlos about the imminent arrival of Edin Dzeko from Wolsburg. I told Tevez, that we had been forced to offer Dzeko a basic salary £375,000 per week and Carlos was moaning that this was higher than his £350,00 a week and he was going to cry and cry and scweam and scweam until he got an improved offer of £500,000 a day'.

'I replied this simply wasn't possible and anyway his annual net income would exceed £775,000 when we win the Premiership, The Carling Cup, the Fair Play League and the Champions League this season. Tevez didn't take this very well and exploded with rage, mumbling something in Spanish about City not even being in the Champions League. He then proceeded to strangle me with his snood and Brian Marwood had to intervene and restrain him before I was choked to death. So, rest assured, there are still internal squabbles, player disquiet, unrest and petty arguments in the Manchester City dressing room and I wouldn't have it any other way. It shows that the players care. It shows the player are passionate. About money'.

Before Christmas, my friendly postman tried to deliver a parcel when no-one was home. Instead of leaving the parcel propped up by the front door to be buried under the falling snow, inviting passers-by to steal the potentially valuable item or slinging it into our dustbin, this time he helpfully left a note asking me to collect the package from the local sorting office or 'request a redelivery' on a subsequent date using a form on the Royal Mail web site.

As I am quite lazy, I went for the latter option, and requested re-delivery for two days later. The Xmas parcel duly arrived on the prescribed date so that was fine. Well done to the Royal Mail for making the re-delivery request option available online. Less work for me. A little more work for them. Everyone's happy.

A full 10 days later, I was a little perplexed to receive the following email from Royal Mail. At first, I assumed it was a feedback request to 'Please rate our service' but no, it wasn't.

Subject: Redelivery response

If you are now in receipt of your redelivered item, thank you for using our on-line redelivery service and please delete this email.

Ah OK so I can safely delete this email message as my parcel has been successfully redelivered but let's read on just out of idle curiosity.

Dear Sir or Madam

Thank you for requesting redelivery of your item.

Your local delivery office received your request and after searching for your item was unable to locate it. This could be because you have either already collected the item from the delivery office or it has been redelivered.

If this is not the case may I firstly apologise for any inconvenience you have been caused and for information on what to do next please visit our website at www.royalmail.com or contact Customer Services on 08457 740 740

I had to read this correspondence three times before I was able to parse the words - 'Your local delivery office received your request and after searching for your item was unable to locate it'. Eh ? But the local delivery office did receive my request and actioned it. The re-delivery request had a number associated with it so why didn't they update the status with 'Re-delivery scheduled for '19/12' ?

The next sentence is also rather odd - 'This could be because you have either already collected the item from the delivery office or it has been redelivered.' Somehow this implication of the first statement is that this state of confusion may partially be my fault for having the temerity to visit the local sorting office as requested to collect my parcel. Again, it's clear the Royal Mail has no idea what actually happened to this parcel. For all they know, it's sitting at the bottom of my tall, black wheelie bin under two heavy sacks of Christmas rubbish imminently destined for landfill.

However, even though the Royal Mail has no idea what happened to my parcel, I can rest easy - 'If this is not the case may I firstly apologise for any inconvenience you have been caused and for information on what to do next, please visit our website or contact Customer Services on 08457 740 740'.

So, if my parcel hadn't been successfully re-delivered or I hadn't collected it in person, this email from Royal Mail Customer Services hardly inspires confidence that they will inform me with any degree of certainty what to do next.

People never ask me Hey Norman - what modules have you installed thus far on this wonderful Drupal 7 powered blog ?

• Archive - monthly archives.
• Disqus - although I had some problems with this module so I am currently using a simple Disqus block.
• Global Redirect - ensures that 'node/1234' is redirected to '2010/21/22/blog-post'.
• Google Analytics - mandatory to torment myself over visitors statistics using GA.
• Markdown Filter - although I haven't fully embraced this yet. Old (raw HTML) habits die hard.
• Mollom - Disqus provides built-in spam protection but I use Mollom to guard the user registration and contact forms which is very effective.
• Pathauto - to map Drupal nodes to my date based permalink structure.
• Token - required by Pathauto
• Tagadelic - marvellous, configurable, graphic 'Tags' page to aid Bill's navigation of this site.
• Wysiwyg - evaluating various options but not found nirvana as yet.
• XML sitemap - produces search engine friendly sitemap.

I also modified the 'page.tpl.php' template to reinstate my wonderful, award winning rotating tagline (or slogan in Drupal terminology).

Curiously, I haven't enabled the D7 core 'blog' module as I don't need multi-user blogs. Each post is simply an 'Article'.

The date for the long awaited Drupal 7 release has been announced as 5 January 2011.

Dries should just play this video. Then he should simply read the following and leave the stage.

Straight as an arrow
Defect defect
Not straight, not so straight
Reject reject
Towards anti-social
Solo solo

Standing on the stairs
Cold, cold morning
Ghostly image of fear
Mayday, mayday
Gonna leave this region
They'll take me with them

Drupal 7
Drupal 7
Drupal 7
Drupal 7
Drupal 7
Drupal 7
Drupal 7
Drupal 7

Theres a common saying in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) circles along the lines of:

It takes 10,000 times more time/money/effort to acquire a new customer than it takes to retain an existing customer.

Evidence of this is commonplace; introductory offers, improved interest rates, free Parker pen and pencil gift set and enticements for new customers for which existing customers are ineligible.

Now I occasionally claim that I am writing this blog purely for me, myself and I. What I mean by that is that I tend to write what I want when I want and don't feel pressured to produce content on a regular ongoing basis. However, that's not entirely true; if it was I could equally well write this stream of consciousness into a A5 notebook locked in my top drawer where no-one would ever see it.

Let's be honest - people are blogging to get noticed and everyone likes feedback (even if it's negative feedback) and it's fantastic if, just occasionally, someone says 'God - that post about LinkedIn and pole dancing made me laugh'.

A recent comment by Bill (which I will reproduce here) rather took me by surprise and made me pause for thought

I like your blog, but just one thing about it frustrates me - you “tag” posts, but I can't seem to find an index of these tags. (?) For example, I like to read your comments on emacs - but without such an index, I am forced to use Google to search your site.

Now here was a potential customer (an interested like-minded reader or even hopefully, that rare animal, a brand new subscriber) for my business (my humble blog) and what was I doing to welcome him, to encourage him, to help him find his way around my blog ? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

After giving this some thought, I decided to take prompt and decisive action:

Many thanks for popping by and bothering to leave some constructive criticism about the lack of decent navigation options on this blog. There's a couple of reasons for this:

1. I recently moved this blog to Drupal 7 and I didn't actually know how to add tag clouds, archive pages, previous/next post, related posts or search functionality.

2. In the past, I have played with all of the above on both WordPress and Habari in an effort to keep casual readers lingering for longer and my gut feeling was that none of these additions made a blind bit of difference to Pages/Visit and merely cluttered up the blog.

However, prompted by your comment, I have now added 'Tags' together with a search box on the sidebar and an 'Archives' tab allowing you to browse by year or month.

Unfortunately, I never heard from the mysterious Bill ever again. A cautionary tale and a valuable lesson in CRM for all small-time bloggers.

Shamefully, I don't read many books so an eBook reader has never been high on my list of priorities as it would probably become a moderately expensive white elephant and yet another gadget to carry around.

However, Amazon's high profile marketing campaign for the Kindle eBook reader sparked my interest sufficiently to download the free Kindle Reader application for Android to sample the experience of reading an eBook on a mobile device.

In addition, I've just purchased a higher capacity (16GB) SD card for the Android phone which means it could replace my iPod Touch as I can now store all my music on the Android phone and start to consolidate two of my mobile devices. If the Android Kindle Reader application is usable, could the HTC Legend also fulfill the role of an eBook Reader ?

I downloaded Tom Reynold's 'Blood Sweat and Tea' mainly because it was free and I had previously enjoyed Reynolds' blog about his experiences as a paramedic working for the London Ambulance Service.

I have had (courtesy of my employer) an HTC Legend for 3 months and I have been staggered at the razor sharp quality and resilence of the screen. Even without a screen protector, the display is pristine and crystal clear despite moderate use during that period.

Reading text on the Android is pretty easy on the eye. The font is large enough and clear enough for me to read easily and the contrast is excellent. Also, I am only reading for short periods (up to half an hour on my commute into the city) and the fact that 'Blood Sweat and Tea' is merely a compilation of blog posts means each story is a very short and manageable chunk. This light, casual reading may be slightly easier on the eyes than ploughing through 'War and Peace' for prolonged periods.

The larger screen on the Kindle does look great and I have heard great things about the screen technology but there's one reason I would currently not even contemplate buying a Kindle.

I selected a popular book being advertised for Christmas - 'The Fry Chronicles' by Stephen Fry. The paper edition of this book costs £8.20 at Amazon (UK). To my amazement, the Kindle version of the same book costs a staggering £12.99.

Yes - you read that correctly. £8.20 for the hardback book and £12.99 for the electronic version of the same book for the Kindle.

Now let's think about this. For the paper edition, the publisher has to print a book on 448 pages of paper. The book also has to be bound and this is the hardback edition. For the Kindle edition, the publisher has to, err, well, create an electronic copy of the book.

How in God's name can the publisher/Amazon justify charging an additional, extortionate, staggering premium of 58% for the Kindle edition ?

Now this may be a one-off rare example and it's true that some books are cheaper on Kindle than for the paper book. For example, the popular 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is slightly cheaper on Kindle (£2.68) versus £3.89 for the paperback edition. Now I don't have the time or inclination to exhaustively check the comparative prices of paper versus Kindle editions for the remainder of the best seller lists and it is true that some classic texts (e.g. Treasure Island, Sherlock Holmes) are freely available for eBooks.

However, in a sense that's irrelevant - the Kindle edition should always, always be cheaper than the paper book - guaranteed, 100%, every time for every book regardless. Until that is the case, I won't be buying a Kindle or any other eBook reader.

Frankly I think the pair deserve each other but some excellent quotes from Tevez's agent, Kia Joorabchian, on Garry Cock.

‘Garry Cock thinks he's bigger than Carlos Tevez.

‘Garry Cock has an inflated opinion of himself. I brought him in from Nike after he begged me to get him a job in football.'

‘I got him a job which paid him more than four times what he was earning at Nike and he didn't complain about me then but it's all gone to his head.'

‘Maybe because he played no part in bringing Carlos to the club that's a problem for him. Maybe he's upset because he didn't have any input.'

Last week, I went to see The National at Brixton Academy. Twice. Both shows were great (Monday just shaded it) and the band resurrected a rarely played classic ‘Lit Up (one of my all-time favourite National songs) on both nights which was an unexpected and brilliant bonus.

I’d been eagerly waiting for these dates to come around since I saw the band on election night back in May at the Royal Albert Hall.

This beautiful photo taken by Alison Philcock brilliantly captures the mood and sense of expectation shortly before the band took the stage.

My family were genuinely perplexed as to why a grown man was going to see the same band play twice within three days and were unimpressed with my reply of ‘Well, I couldn't get tickets for Tuesday'.

I also won a £10 bet with Norma who bizarrely insisted that the band would play the same set in precisely the same order. On Wednesday, two of my favourite songs ‘All The Wine' and ‘About Today' replaced ‘Runaway' and ‘Little Faith'.