notes: July 2006

I like G24

I'm quite amazed by the Guardian's new print-your-own newspaper, G24. In size and format it's almost exactly what I've been wanting to see a national newspaper do for years now; it's what I hoped the Guardian or Independent might become when they switched from broadsheet to tabloid.

It's much smaller than a tabloid (A4, of course - has to print nicely) but packs far more words into a dozen pages that you'll ever see in the first 12 pages of a typical issue of Metro.

Plus, because the whole thing is compiled automatically all day, every day, the thing you download is always up-to-date, the most up-to-date kind of newspaper you can carry away with you. It's bloody clever, another market-leading idea from the Guardian's new media gang, who continue to cut a path a long way ahead of the other UK online newspapers. I predict G24 will be a success with intelligent commuters, backpackers who don't want to pay for Guardian Weekly (in fact, it probably spells doom for Guardian Weekly), and those who work unusual office hours.

In some respects you can tell it's been put together by a computer. There are odd layout quirks - large gaps, or a single line of a story hanging over into the following page - but overall it looks very professionally produced and is a delight to read. Doesn't take long, either; just right for a tea break or a Tube journey.

I don't suppose it will remain free for long, though. I just hope that when they do start charging for it, they'll opt for a sensible low-cost price-per-issue rather than a subscription; after all, most people won't want to commit to reading it regularly, they just want to read it when they think they've got the time. That's not something you can pay up front for.

Monday, July 31, 2006
0 comments

We all went on a summer holiday

We spent a lovely week on the coast, at Highcliffe where Dorset and Hampshire kiss. Every day was incredibly hot, so midweek we took breakfast down to the beach with us - bowls, milk, cereal and all - and trudged back to our chalet at 11ish, when it was getting uncomfortably hot. I swam in the sea every day; Barney and I made dozens of sandcastles. The days were hot but easy.

Later in the week we enjoyed days out in Bournemouth (where B and I went up in the Bournemouth Eye and doh! I forgot my camera) and the Isle of Wight, which surprised me with its beautiful and dramatic landscape. I'd like to explore it more one day; a walk around its coast sounds rather appealing.

Labels: family, photos

Sunday, July 30, 2006
0 comments

You get what you pay for

The downside of moving to Gmail - indeed, the downside of depending on any free web application for anything - is this sort of thing:

"We're sorry, but Google Mail is temporarily unavailable. We're currently working to fix the problem -- please try logging in to your account in a few minutes."

Sigh.

Wednesday, July 12, 2006
0 comments

My special son

My special son, originally uploaded by gilest.

Labels: family, photos

Monday, July 10, 2006
0 comments

Painty toes

Painty toes, originally uploaded by gilest.

Labels: photos

Monday, July 10, 2006
0 comments

How and why of Rising Slowly

When I began thinking of how to revive Rising Slowly, my first thought was: "Can I really be bothered?"

One of the things that troubled me most during its first incarnation was that much of the time, each post didn't need very much content. After all, all you can do most of the time is simply point people to a link and tell them what the weather angle is. I simply don't subscribe to the method used on many weblogs which involves cutting and pasting whole chunks of the destination link's text - what's the point? Let people follow the link and read it there if they want to.

The simple act of trying to string out lots of early Rising Slowly posts with additional comment was time-consuming and harder than you might think. It was also tough to be that opinionated about something as universal and uncontrollable as the weather.

So when the time came to re-invent RS, my thoughts turned to slimming it down. I wanted to eliminate the need for me to waste time writing unnecessary blurb, and cut the time it took to add new content.

My solution was to use the tools that are out there already. A Flickr feed for the photos, sucked in automagically from the RS pool - that was easy. Then a del.icio.us feed for the link content. I decided that all most weather-related stories needed was a link and a one-liner from me; I could use that one liner to provide quotes, additional context, or gags, depending on the link and on my mood.

I didn't want to clutter up my personal del.icio.us space with weather links though, so I set up a fresh del.icio.us account just for use with RS. Then I downloaded Cocoalicious and the associated bookmarklet (search the page for "1.0b38" to find it) and added that to Camino. To really speed things up, I gave the bookmarklet a shortcut key ("rs").

To add a new link from my browser, I just hit Command+L to highlight the URL in the address bar, type "rs" and hit return. The page is promptly opened in Cocoalicious with title, URL and selected text (if any) all inserted for me. All I need do is add extra comment, some tags, and hit Post.

This way, each new link takes a few seconds. Photos are pulled in as and when they are posted to the group. It's all very minimal, very quick, and very shortlived.

What do you think of this approach? Is anyone visiting the site often? How does the links feed work out? I'd love to hear any comments you've got on the new approach.

Labels: work

Wednesday, July 05, 2006
0 comments

Degrees of 'favouriteness'

Flickr's Favorites feature is nice, especially because it only requires one click to add a photo to your faves page.

But I'm not a big fan of the Favorites page itself; it crowds together the images as little square thumbnails, making it feel cramped and squashed. I'd prefer to see my faves larger.

Also, I'd like it if there were degrees of 'favouriteness'. There are some pictures that I really do consider my favourites, but others that I simply like quite a lot. This latter category might not necessarily fit too well in my Favorites page, but I'd probably like to be able to remember them and scroll through them at a future date. I might also like to share them with other people.

It would be nice if Flickr introduced a ratings system for Favorites. Give a picture one, two or three stars - the top-rated pics would go to the Favorites page, the rest would simply be noted. You'd be able to view them separately, or combine all the different 'levels' of faves into one big 'everything' view. I'd also like it if I could set Flickr up to automatically post all my favourites to a weblog (although I'd settle for a more blog-like, or photostream-like, presentation of favorites within my Flickrspace).

In the meantime, for all the images I like quite a lot but that don't necessarily deserve to be one of my official Favorites, I've created Photo Chutney, which will do the job for the time being.

A note about spelling: you might have noticed two different spellings of 'favourite' above; that's because I used the American spelling when referring to the official Flickr Favorites page, and the British spelling the rest of the time.

Monday, July 03, 2006
0 comments