gilest.org

Weak note for Friday, 14th March 2014

It's been a few weeks since I wrote one of these. I knew that would happen, and that's why I called them Weak Notes rather than Week Notes. So that's fine. All part of the plan.

I'm sitting on the train now, heading home from London, and the man in the seat next to me is doing some business. He's just spoken to James about next week's meeting. He thinks they'll be in for 400. I think he means 400 thousand. Maybe 400 million. Not sure who "they" are, but clearly they have money to throw around. Hope it works out for them.

New RSS feed

I can't imagine why I ever thought it would be easy to maintain an RSS feed by hand. That lasted about five minutes. Anyway now I'm using a desktop app called Feeder to do that job. Very easy to set up and use, and at the end it spits out an xml file straight to my webserver.

If you're one of the RSS massive and you'd like to subscribe, you'll find the feed at http://gilest.org/gilest.xml.

Recently

• A plan to write something really cool about home-made daleks fell through after my interviewee got cold feet. Shame, I was getting quite excited about that.
• I've been doing some posts on the GDS blog, including What we mean when we talk about content design and An incomplete history of civil service authors. More to come, particularly more audio interviews.
• Lots more GDS stuff happening. I hope to have some finished videos to show off soon.

Strategies for people like me - alpha, then beta

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Strategies for people like me, a series of simple cards I made for getting people out of a creative rut.

I've shown them to a few people and the feedback has been very positive. One friend asked for two sets of cards she could put to use in a work project. Another couple of friends asked if they could buy a set.

So I'm pondering ways of making the cards available to buy. Before we reach that stage, though, I need to improve the cards themselves, or the words printed on them. I started with 50 sentences on 50 cards, removed a couple just before printing, and have just weeded out about 10 or so more that I don't think quite fit in. I'm going to check that in the next couple of weeks (by asking people what they think) and all being well, I'll make another set that I'll call 'beta'.

After that - well, maybe then I can see if there's an easy way to turn the cards into an easy thing that people can get their hands on.

(It would be nice if moo.com, who printed the cards in the first place, offered a way for people to turn stuff like this into sellable products. I wonder...)

Spare ideas this week

• The Bayeux Tapestry as a Twitter feed. One panel/section of panel per week.
• An app called What's hidden near me? It know where all the hidden/secret/underground stuff is in London. It knows about all the abandoned Tube stations, the secret bunkers, infrastructure porn, rivers diverted in tunnels, you know the sort of stuff. It just knows. So you can open it and point your smartphone camera into mid-air, and see through the real world, and peer into the secret stuff hidden behind and beneath it. I'd buy that.
• Karaoke presentations: karaoke, but with a slidedeck. You sing and illustrate your song (or display lyrics, or both) at the same time. Well, I'd try it.

Filed under: notes
(14th March 2014)

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