Skin of Stars

I was recently contact by Parker Jones to see if I could add to the development of http://activethanet.com, a wiki site dedicated to clubs and societies in Thanet. I thought to myself, what a great idea, just add yourself. Still, seeing as I don’t live in Thanet anymore I wasn’t sure how I could help, I could think of no other clubs to add. I’d like to be helpful though and I saw my chance in their FAQ. He suggests that people create their own site and then get that added to the list. It really is very easy to do and needs little technical skill, especially if you are using a service like GooglePages or Webs. These are easy enough to do, but in my opinion lack a something important, your own .com/.co.uk address. What you can do though is get a .co.uk address from a domain registrar and then get it to just forward to your Google Sites webspace. I’ve used uk2.net as my registrar for years, but others I know have recommended 1&1 who also do an easy site builder. It’s always worth having a look around though, it will cost you maybe £15 a year, which is little more than a cheap night out and gives a definite ‘pro’ factor. If you really want some cheap hosting with loads and loads of geeky goodies then I’d recommend a look at Dreamhost, you won’t get the greatest search rankings, but they give you loads of space (off-site storage perhaps?) and do include one click installs for popular software like WordPress (blogging) and MediaWiki (same as Wikipedia).

If you want to host your own site (not a GooglePages type thing) and still keep your site up in the rankings then then you really need to use a UK hosting server, especially if you are using a .co.uk extension. Maybe then consider shared hosting like 1&1, who have UK servers. Naturally we are spiraling up in cost here, next steps are Virtual Private Servers (VPN) from £15 a month all the way up to dedicated servers where the sky really is the limit. It really depends on whether you are serious about visibility or thinking of this as a business or hobby.

Lets take a look at http://oonagi.co.uk which has been around for eight years, they are hosted on shared server-space with Dreamhost in California, a google search for “oonagi” brings them top, a search for “Thanet music” brings them in 4th, for “Thanet gigs”and nothing till page 3! That has cost about £40 per year, it would probably be a little more but the cost is offset by sharing its space with other sites. Now there are some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) issues there to start with which could bring them up the rankings, but still it provides a gauge as to cost/visibility balance.

If one thinks about it though, where does traffic come from on a local focused site like a club or society. It is going to be links from other local sites, like Active Thanet or some of the blogerratti (EastcliffRicahard, BigNewsMargate). So to conclude, you can do yourself a free site using any number of web services, just contact some people, get yourself linked and they will come.

I posted this on oonagi, but thought it interesting enough to post here:

I do think that flash has a purpose, especially in sites that where it’s more important to have strong visual features, like band sites. For example, neverestsongs.co.uk is undeniably beautiful. But when we look at that instance, you cannot say that it is crawlable by seach engines. Yes, there are methods to ensure that search engines can index the pages, for example giving a site an HTML base and using flash for progressive enhancement (check to see if user can play flash), or alternatively using meta data to include keywords and content.

Perhaps we should take neverestsongs as an example. When we check the source code (ctrl+u) afters going directly to the site we see that:
a) the only meta data there is is the keywords: ‘music, luke, twyman, kent, england, english, uk’
b) it is displayed within a frame, with the actual site being stored on whitevinyldesign.com/newnnev, a page without any further content for search engines to crawl

So far as search engine optimisation goes, both these (very good looking) sites are not being indexed properly by search engines… or so the common belief goes. Still, with a little digging you will find that Google does index flash pages! Apparently they use a search engine indexer provided by Adobe (the owners of flash) which they can use (though one would guess they have to front up some hard cash). You still have to be careful how you build your page and should check it against Adobe’s swf2html output but you can now rest a little easier that you will show up in search results, well, google’s search results. A quick search on flash and seo will yield a wealth of information.

Now, is flash the industry standard? I am certain that it is for creative industries but I did feel the need to check the top 10 global websites to see how much they used flash. For this I used Alexa.com, and checked their global rankings. Of the top five sites (Yahoo, YouTube, Windows Live, Google and MySpace) at least some use flash, but they only use it as embedded players with XHTML sites. Funnily enough, this drops of dramatically as you go through the rankings of the top twenty. So the big players do use flash, but its sporadic and only as a small part of their site. If you look through their code though they seem to be doing all their fancy eye-candy with javascript (facebook make extensive use of javascript, as do google).

So here is my conclusion. So far as problems caused for search engines, this isn’t the issue it always used to be. You still need to take a little care but it’s certainly not something for a client to be concerned about. My other question, is it the industry standard? That depends on what kind of site you want. For the large sprawling behemoths it clearly isn’t appropriate, else they would be making far more extensive us of it. If you’re in creative industries (like a band, or an artist) and you want a good site that captures your audience, then flash is the way to go.

Found a page with some neat GIMP tricks for photo manipulation.

Linux Focus, GIMP Manipulation.

Don’t be worried by the Linux Focus part, it’s just where the article was written and is just as relevant for Windows versions.

I’m in the process of building an arty website for one of my modules. Truth be told, almost every other one of my modules includes building a website but this one is quite nice as I get to have some fun with it… infact the website ones are always more fun, certainly more fun than computer networks or social research theory. Anyway, I digress, the point here is the arty bits.

Now, I’m not so great at art, the best I can draw is a stick man and certainly not like Lowry did! I’m not even that fantastic at using art packages (my preference being the GIMP). Still, with design you always need to use a graphics package so I do my best to wing it. Luckily I have assistance in the form of resources from deviantArt, so I thought I’d share this little trick.

I always go for the GIMP brushes, but there are brushes for other package, like PhotoShop. Firstly you need to find them. You go to deviantArt.com, then click categories in the top left-ish, then pick resources from the droplist, then application resources then, in my case, GIMP brushes. You can then just browse through them finding ones you like and downloading them.

To add them to GIMP go to the GIMP’s programs folder (its a hidden folder in your home/user for linux so press ctrl+h to see it, you windows boys will have to look for yourself but I presume it’s in Program Files) open it, then open brushes, then just paste them in from the zips.

Hey presto, you’re an instant artist!

Hmm, wonder if you can use the word gif as an adjective… Anyway, I spent a bit of time today making a simple animation inspired by such things as Noah’s photo everyday for 6 years. Thought it would be nice to do a really simple version with photos I’ve taken of myself over the past 3 years. You can see the result in my avatar, but I’ll reproduce it here in case I change it:

It’s not great but it is pretty easy to do. First things first is to get some appropriate software to put this together. In my case I decided to use the GIMP with the GAP extension (erm, I’m just gonna let you find that). I’m sure there are far more specifically tailored programs but I know how to use the GIMP so it saved me spending time having to get familiar with a new UI.

Step two would be to get a tutorial, which luckily for me I have already read and used before on other projects but will be useful for any of you out there who are thinking a little bit of animation might also be a little bit of fun.

Obviously my attempt at animation isn’t exactly going to get me a job with Disney just yet but it is an interesting little experiment. I’ll also say that I had far better luck when I tried the same thing thing with some photos of my sister. Whereas I have a tendency to only take the odd photo of myself for avatars and the like and make do with the first one or two, my sister is more compelled to take many and then decide which one to use after. So lets string them together and see what we get:

Looks pretty neat eh? Though it may be worth pointing out that she’ll probably kill me for posting this.

I’m back in Oxford now and to be honest I’m glad. It was nice to be in Thanet, see old friends, that sort of thing but I’m eager to get on with learning. I didn’t really do much more than drink and watch TV in Thanet, being home makes me instantly lazy. I had three boy projects that I wanted to do in my month off…

1. Re-build the Manston Garden Club website. I knocked a really shaky one together a year or so ago and I was never impressed in the slightest with it. I always thought it looked like one of those ‘welcome to my webpage’ sites (google it). This project I did based on wordpress and its kinda ok now. If you like you can see it at manstongardenclub.co.uk

2. Re-skin and re-organise oonagi. It looks awful at the moment; cluttered, not very user friendly and lots of pointless pages. I have now done most of the design on a test site but I’m still some way from sorting it enough to go live. It will still be based on the e107 system with changes being almost entirely cosmetic. This should give the least jolt to the users who have already been through many changes on the site over the past seven years.

3. Develop Thanet Blog List Build a geographically specific collectively edited news site. Basically a reddit/digg/newsvine for Thanet, as well as being portable to other areas. This will probably be based on a system like Pligg but unfortunately I can’t get it to work on my current webhost (they are a little backwards on the technology side) and am going to have to buy more webspace elsewhere. I don’t have enough money till February so you’ll have to wait I’m afraid. The idea came out of some brainstorming for the new Blog List build. As there were so many new blogs popping up I thought that the current approach, just posting them as blog entries, was restrictive. My ‘vision’ was that everyone adds new blogs and every gets to vote on whether its and good or not This should help filter out the one-post-wonders as well as letting the average reader quickly find the authoritative blogs. Even better, I wanted the user to have the possibility of having their own account where they can have feeds from their favourites, a little like netvibes, thus saving time from visiting all blogs as well as being able to see at a glance whether there are any new posts. Alas, I couldn’t really get it together and quite frankly its not my project any more anyway. I think its current new design is pretty cool and it wouldn’t be difficult to get a latest entry feed page on it with all the blogs listed.

So I managed about one and a half out of three projects. Thats not a very good ratio in my eyes. Lots of thoughts, lots of talk but not enough action. At least I’m more productive here in Oxford so hopefully we’ll see some more results shortly.