Recent Posts

London, near England - 23 April 2008. For immediate release.

Brightside Software Enterprises are pleased to announce the immediate availability of FriendOrFoe.

Tired of being followed by those mindless idiots on Twitter, not to mention those horrid spammers ?

Tired of having to search out new friends with similar interests, sense of humour and outlook ?

Tired of being a 'soul in isolation' with 0 (zero) friends in the whole wide world ?

'FriendOrFoe' is a simple Twitter utility that will subject all Twitter 'Follow' requests to lengthy and vigorous inspection using sophisticated algorithms, advanced AI techniques together with analysis of 'social graphs' to categorise the prospective follower as:

• Spammer (Citeh or Liverpool fan filters available soon) - user will be automatically blocked and receive a DM stating 'Don't follow me, follow Jesus'.
• Friend - automatically follow back, sending a DM to the recipient's mobile, changing the ring-tone to U2's 'I will follow'.
• Stalker - automatically followed on Twitter, FriendFeed, Ponce, Jaiku, NetVibes and footage of user streamed on live Webcam, right into your bedsit.
• Anyone, anytime, anywhere (aka 'Promiscuous mode') - all Follow requests are blindly followed with a DM of 'Hey I'm pretty desperate. Fancy a drink ?'

'FriendOrFoe' is freely available now as a set of Greasy scripts written by 1,000 monkeys, bashing away continuously for 8 days, on a Dvorak keyboard.

Many disgruntled readers have contacted me via email, IM, facsimile, phone and anonymous poison pen letters to ask Hey Norman - whatever happened to the unified blogging day scheduled for Friday 18 April ?

Apologies for the delay but before we get started, some random, meaningless statistics:

• Feedburner: 66 subscribers.
• Google Reader : 'From your 189 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,807 items, starred 1 items, shared 325 items'.
• Twitter: Following 19. Followers 55. Updates 1,292 in 87 days.
• FriendFeed: Subscribed to 35. Subscribed to me: 30. Comments: 180 this week, 504 all time. Likes: 77 this week, 188 all time.
• Disqus: Comments left: 59 in 21 days. Comments on my blog: 31 in 14 days. Precious clout points - 12.

Originally, on Unified Blogging Day, I was going to religiously transcribe every single 'output' over a 24 hour period into a separate blog entry (annotated with timestamp and channel).

This was primarily a final effort to alienate loyal (but shell-shocked) readers who had survived the WordPress to Habari migration.

However, thankfully, FriendFeed already aggregates that inane stream of consciousness beautifully formatted here.

A secondary aim of Unified Blogging Day was to conduct a detailed poll to see how people subscribe to each 'output' but Habari doesn't have a 'Poll' plugin so just leave a comment below indicating which channel(s) you are a) aware of, b) subscribe to c) devour feverishly and d) blissfully unaware of.

• Blog - a man barely alive but we have the technology to rebuild him.
• Tumblr - stuff I'm too embarassed to put on the blog.
• Technical blog - low traffic.
• Twitter - endless stream of drivel (soon to be upgraded to include 'Hello', Goodnight' and the state of my runny nose).
• Disqus - every single comment I have left on the blogoshpere (on Disqus enabled blogs).
• FriendFeed - unified feed of all of the above. Filters available to reduce the signal/noise ratio.

Anyone owning up to subscribing to duplicate channels will have stay behind after school for 1 hours detention (unless they have a note from Mummy).

Thoroughly enjoyed 2 hours of The Story of The Who last night on BBC4. What a story it was.

The ultimate rock'n'roll band. A Rolls Royce driven into a swimming pool, copious amounts of drugs, lots of girls and the premature death of two band members. During one gig, Moon was carried off stage - completely comatose.

30 years on, Pete Townshend looked visibly choked when talking about the (not wholly unexpected) death of Keith Moon and Roger Daltrey remarked 'Keith seemed to think he was invincible. He thought I am "Keith Moon of The Who".'

Townshend's and Daltrey's immediate reaction to Moon's death was ironic; they tried to assuage feelings of guilt by going out, doing 'crazy things' and experimented with 'even more substances'.

I never appreciated what a great bass player John Entwhistle was and he seemed the quiet, sensible one although he later died on tour in Las Vegas, in bed with a woman, after snorting cocaine (from a heart attack). Well it sure beats dying in your sleep.

There was some great footage and interviews but this clip epitomised The Who at their supreme best.

The American host has a chat with the band and introduces 'My Generation' with the immortal words: 'You're going to be surprised at what happens. This is excitement.'

The band ended a brilliant performance by trashing their instruments with the normal dry ice and smoke bombs.

However, no-one (not even the other band members) knew that Moon had bribed a stage-hand to pack his drum kit with explosives. The effect reminds me of the line from the classic film 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' - 'Do you think we used enough dynamite there, Butch ?'

A couple of Oracle bloggers (Laurent and Yas) are experimenting with Disqus on their blogs but Tim Hall has expressed some reservations about committing his blog comments to a hosted service outside of his control.

Jake Mckee is also taken by Disqus but eloquently expresses similar concerns about 'data ownership and presentation'.

I understand (and used to vehemently share) both Tim and Jake's reservations. It does seem perfectly natural to want all your blog content stored in your MySql database on your server. What if Disqus servers are slow and unresponsive or worse, even down ? Your blog would be accessible but your comments wouldn't. What is Disqus isn't around next year ?

How do you unlock your comments from the Disqus repository and migrate them back into your blog ? How do you backup your comments ? There is an export utility but, as Jake points out, currently no easy way to import the data back into the blog.

Having comments hosted on your own blog is entirely logical. Obviously, blog comments belong with the blog content. Without the associated comments, the blog is like a half-written book.

You manage the blog comments. You back them up. You moderate them. The blog comments obviously belong to you. All of them. Yes - even those 1,729 spam comments, you have to scan for the odd 'false positive'.

However, if I leave a comment on a Harry's disqus enabled blog, my comment is displayed on the original blog. The comment text that I typed in is no longer stored in Harry's database table for 'comments'. Worse, my comment is now simultaneously displayed on a Disqus community forum without my prior knowledge or approval.

But who actually owns that comment on Harry's blog. I thought of the words and typed them into the comment box. Do I own the comment ? Or does Harry ? Does it even matter ?

As an aside, having used the service for a week, I no longer view Disqus purely as a comment tracking service. I view Disqus as a 'content output' tracking service.

For example, I am now starting to ask idiotic questions and log issues on the Disqus forums. These posts are not clearly not comments (but original content) but I still want to track them (and, more importantly, responses to them) in my Disqus dashboard alongside my blog comments.

This blog used to run on WordPress but now runs on Habari which is a blogging platform currently being developed by a set of very talented people.

Undoubtedly, the number of developers and users running Habari is far fewer than the massive community using WordPress. Similarly, the number of available themes and plugins available for Habari is relatively small (albeit growing daily) and dwarfed by the vast, almost bewildering wealth of add-ons and the extensive range of themes available for Wordpress.

However, this isn't a bad thing because it forces anyone contemplating a migration to Habari to think carefully about the core plugins that are truly essential to adminster your blog and valuable for your readers.

One such plugin (for me) was an equivalent of the Wordpress sitemaps plugin. Rick Cockrum published a excellent summary of why an automatically generated sitemap is useful.

When I first configured and activated the sitemap plugin for Habari, nothing happened. No sitemap file was generated. Initially, I thought that maybe the sitemap was only generated after a post was published. So I published a new post. Still nothing happened..

I posted a enquiry on the Habari users mailing list. In an effort to 'help' the Habari community, I even opened a ticket (bug request).

Then, I made an amazing discovery when an anonymous author was forced to waste some of his valuable time to close my 'bug report':

The plugin is not intended to generate a file, rather to serve the sitemap xml document when requested.

So, it transpires that the Habari sitemaps plugin doesn't actually generate a file. The sitemap is simply a URL which is dynamically built, on request.

Now I believe this is a much neater solution. No need for the user to specify where the file should be placed. Less work for the plugin to do. Much cleaner. Much simpler. Credit to the author, Andrew da Silva.

The lesson I learned was that just because something has always been done that way doesn't necessarily mean it can only be done that way.

P.S. If you're worried about the performance impact of needlessly rebuilding a sitemap, on the fly for 234,432 entries, don't worry - some clever individual has already implemented a cache for the sitemap data.

1. Disqus lets you easily track all comments you have left scattered over the blogosphere.
2. Disqus allows you to administer comments on multiple blogs from a single dashboard.
3. Disqus has built-in effective protection against comment spam.
4. Disqus provides tight integration with Blogger, WordPress, Typepad, MT and Tumblr.
5. Disqus provides Javascript code for every other CMS.
6. Disqus supports threaded comments.
7. Disqus allows you to fix that embarrassing typo by editing comments.
8. Disqus ‘eat their own dog food’.
9. Disqus is free to use. 10.Disqus is used on over 4,000 blogs.
10. Disqus lets you subscribe to individual comment threads.
11. Disqus supports gravatars.
12. Disqus lets you rate comments you like (and dislike).
13. Disqus provides an RSS feed for all your comments.
14. Disqus styles comments in keeping with your blog.
15. Disqus is configurable and extensible.
16. Disqus is written in Django.
17. Disqus treats an email reply to an comment thread as as additional comment.
18. Disqus is under active development.
19. Disqus listen to user feedback.
20. Disqus offers an API so you can write your own applications.
21. Disqus allows you to use your OpenId credentials.
22. Disqus offer unbelievably helpful and prompt support.
23. Disqus provide excellent widgets.
24. Disqus supports multiple moderators and a range of moderation options.

Met up with some friends last night in a very busy Freemasons Arms in Covent Garden.

Les Battersby (some bloke from Coronation Street apparently) was drinking in there. Les kindly and repeatedly passed our rounds of '6 Spitfire and 2 Guinness' into our little alcove as we enjoyed Liverpool versus Arsenal.

'So, you're in Coronation Street then ?' 'Yeah' 'Red or blue ?' 'Blue.' 'Oh.'

There is a memorial plaque on the northbound M40 motorway in Oxfordshire.

Out of morbid curiosity, I pulled over this morning to pay my respects and read the inscription:

Do not stand at my grave and weep Bring a picnic here instead Just be careful opening the driver's door Because that's what I did and now I'm dead

British Airways, shocked at missing out last years trophy, have launched a superlative campaign for 2008.

Agency: Itchy & Scraatchi. Cost: £25,000 found in a digger after the completion of T5. Gate 3 - Newcastle airport.

Together we can work wonders

Off to a gentle modest start.

Together we can get people talking about T5

That is certainly true.

Together we can make T5 world famous

Some wag has added a prefix of 'in'.

Together we can keep people smiling

Most people smile, dumped in Vancouver 17 hours late with no clean shirts and underpants, don't they ?

Together we can keep things moving

Well most things with the exception of the baggage carousels.

...and the final, closing, crowning glory.

Together we can get off to a flying start

Honestly, if you made it up, people wouldn't believe you.

Five months ago, I experimented with Disqus powered comments when this blog was running on WordPress. The trial was rather short-lived because I was disappointed that Disqus wasn't able to fully integrate with all the existing blog comments. Importing comments still isn't possible but Disqus says this feature is being worked on.

However, I have decided to reinstate Disqus for the following reasons:

• Disqus recently added integration with FriendFeed so any contributions I make on Disqus powered blogs will also be visible in my FriendFeed stream.
• I am encountering an ever increasing number of blogs using Disqus.
• I am hoping Disqus will help to trigger more comments, interest and interaction on the blog.
• Disqus provide a nice combination widget providing 'Popular', 'Recent Comments' and 'People'.
• The most recent release of Disqus included a raft of changes including support for Open ID.
• Disqus is being actively developed and, more importantly, listen to their users.

I still have some reservations that the couple of articles with decent comment threads included replies to earlier comments (which are no longer visible) so we are literally starting from zero. However, hopefully some comments will appear soon and the tabs will actually display something !

Aside: Unfortunately, adopting Disqus means I will no longer be using Matt Read's recently released Defensio plugin which is excellent and highly recommended for any Habari bloggers wading through a torrent of comment spam.