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About me
Web developer at Big Fish. Bassist, sandwich enthusiast. Excessively tall.
Category Archives: Life Online
Insane Clown Posse only really popped up on my radar after their song “Miracles” gained some Internet fame, mostly because of the wonderful lyric “fucking magnets, how do they work?”.
For a lot of people though ICP fandom represents a whole lifestyle. They call themselves Juggalos. Juggaloism can best be described as what happens when a white rap/metal crossover band accidentally creates a religion and acquires tens of thousands of devout followers around America. They have a reputation for being loud, drunk, obnoxious, and generally a bit trailer-trash. As easy as it is to categorise people in such a way, it seems too broad a generalisation to apply to so many people. After all, if this is a genuine culture then there must be many different facets to it – you can’t judge a whole population of people by the actions of a few.
I saw a lot of people tweeting about Internet Explorer 9 on the browser’s day of release in March 2011. One particular tweet, from @mathias, stood out, linking to the website getie9.com:
Greatly amused by a prank from James Chapman of Twitter. For some reason he was on the official website for Scouting for Girls (inexplicably popular teen band who have songs like “She’s so Lovely”. The chorus to that one goes “She’s so lovely, she’s so lovely, she’s so lovely, yeah”) when he noticed that the Twitter widget on the homepage was connected to an “official” account. The only problem was that this account didn’t actually exist…
My favourite side project at the moment is the Greggs Adventure. Long story short, it’s a blog in which I attempt to eat and review everything sold at Greggs.
When I started the blog in late 2010 I just put the posts up on my regular blog – the site you’re reading at the moment. After a while, as I realised that Greggs actually sell quite a lot of products, I moved it onto its own WordPress installation and domain name. I updated it regularly, posted links on my Facebook, eventually created a little Facebook Page for it, and it ticked along happily with a few regular readers – mostly people I knew personally.
On Sunday 13 March 2011 I posted a link and brief description on B3ta’s Links board, flagging it as “I made this!” so people would know that it’s original content. I posted this mostly because I was idly browsing B3ta and figured it’s the kind of thing the people there might be interested in hearing about. I was expecting a little rise in traffic, a couple of dozen hits maybe, but what happened next has been a crash course in how things get picked up and spread around on the Web.
I feel sorry for Microsoft. They created the widest used operating system in the world, and they still own the office suite market. But I can’t stand to watch them pretend to be the world leader on the Web.
When I read about Microsoft and their approach to Web technologies over the last five years I’m not thinking about the company that gave us Windows, the operating system that taught me so much about computers. I’m thinking of Internet Explorer, Silverlight, ActiveX, and the emerging HTML5 standards support. I’m thinking about the countless hours spent in the Consider server room trying to get an otherwise perfectly put together website look right in Internet Explorer. Like it or not we’re still stuck with making sure our work looks right in IE6 and IE7, then double checking that IE8 is comfortable with everything. The problem is that Microsoft’s biggest legacy is Windows XP; still found on most corporate computers and still available with new laptops and netbooks. As long as people are still using XP we’re stuck with these old browsers.
CMS Made Simple has been my CMS of choice for about four years. Why? Mostly because it let me use Smarty, and it’s what we used to use at Consider. But it’s 2010 now, I’m in a different company, and the world of the open source CMS has come a long way (some more than others).
Why ditch CMS Made Simple? “Ditch” is such an ugly word. But ultimately it’s because I want a simple website that’s going to do what I want it to do. That means sidebars, widgets, the occasional custom template. At Consider we did plenty of custom backend stuff for clients and a lot of bespoke modules for added functionality. I carried the CMSMS influence over to my personal site because it was what I knew and what I was using every day.
It’s really easy to download TV shows via BitTorrent, and while I may be a little late in the day to discover RSS downloading, this technique ensures you’ll never miss an episode.
OpenID is best described as “an open, decentralized standard for authenticating users which can be used for access control, allowing users to log on to different services with the same digital identity”. Finally! Wouldn’t it be great to just have one login that you use on all your favourite sites, such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Google?