Skin of Stars

Hello all, it’s been a while. The Skinofstars site has been languishing in disuse for some time now. Like I’m sure many others, I’ve found the transition to micoblogging is all too easy. Sometimes though, one wants to write something a little longer and long gaps are not helpful when you finally think of something. So I guess I’m just posting to get rid of some writers block really.

For the six months since my last post (my, that is a long time!) I’ve been working at Studio Lift in Reading. There are five of us; two designers, two coders and a multi-talented boss. We fill our days making like this and like this (bad linking! using Movable Type. This is the same blogging platform that is used by the BBC, The Guardian, ReadWriteWeb and various others. It comes in both Commercial and Open Source offerings and is perhaps one of the most venerable of blogging systems.

Does that mean I’m going to talk tech now?… sure (jump?). Movable Type (mt) has just released its 5th version. This places more emphasis on managing multiple blogs within a site structure. Very useful if you’ve ever tried to manage multiple blog instances (how many blogs do you think The Guardian has?). There is also a new emphasis on social communication (see Motion).

The system is written in Perl but because the publishing is static files you can drop pretty much any scripting language in without any problems. My current language of choice for server-side is PHP. You hook your language in with mt using their own markup derived syntax, and to be honest for a simple blog you never have to touch another language. Let’s look at an example which will iterate over a collection of the last five entries:

<mt:Entries lastn=”5″>
<h2><mt:EntryTitle /></h2>
<p><mt:EntryBody /></p>
</mt:Entries>

There is documentation, with my favourite page being the tag reference, but otherwise there certainly isn’t the same breadth of documentation as you would find with something like WordPress. Perhaps the strong ties with the commercial side of the software, it was increasingly license prudish at the Open Source blogging party, has been a hindrance to a warm and fuzzy community embrace. Still, some big media hitters use it so they’ve certainly got something right.

Well, as I said, I work in Reading and my crappy car’s wiper motor has broken so I’ve got to get up early and catch a bus. It’s been nice to talk to you again. Thanks for putting up with my tech chatter, I expect that you’ll get variation soon enough as we head towards the General Election

Night Night.

Oh, what a treat… and just in time for Christmas! I am very pleased to find that the BBC has finally indulged my fetish for organic software by releasing a flash streaming version of their iPlayer.

Though of course flash isn’t homespun in itself, it is cross platform compatible and so both myself and all those other ‘nix and Mac users out there can watch the last seven days of BBC content without the need for any of that Windows tosh! Not a Vista in sight! I need never miss another episode of Cash In The Attic again. Hurrah!

In a follow-up to my previous post regarding the incompatibility of the new BBC iPlayer I recently found an interview on backstage.bbc in which the developers of the iPlayer and representatives from the Open Source Consotium and the Open Rights Group discuss this very topic. It would seem that the general consensus is that release of the iPlayer to be bound to one operating system was in many ways a demonstration of the problems with DRM (Digital Rights Management) and thankfully just a stepping stone to more open access, initially through streaming and then hopefully to more open access.

Interestingly enough the developers pointed out that it is only a very small piece of the whole delivery system that was written in a proprietary format, namely the bit that goes on your computer. Over 90% of the system is running on Solaris with many of the developers using Debian based systems.

Ok Tony, off you go….

I’m appalled at a recent BBC decision to release its new online watch again service to Windows only. The problem for me is that I love the BBC normally and I want to consume their content but they always make it so hard for me. I don’t like to consider myself anti-Microsoft but I don’t want to use their software which means that I’m now pretty much stuck with the BBC’s text only content. I’m afraid I’m going to be reduced to just listening to a bit of radio 4 when I’m near a radio. If I have already paid my license fee then why should I also have to buy software from an American company to watch it?

Seems I got somewhat busted in the BBC Kent article on bloggers as the man behind the Thanet Blog List. Many of the more savvy would have guessed anyway, but its really out now, so I guess its time to discuss it.

I started the list in reaction to Cliff Richard saying he was quiting the scene after a spat with the doctor. I was concerned that there wouldn’t be the central point for bloggers to rally around. I also had issues with the links being removed from peoples blogs due to personal issues. I felt the best way to resolve this was an independent list that would link anyone regardless, trusting the reader to decide what was hot and what was not.

Now we come to the problem. Not only is it not very independent now that its clear its me, but I am leaving Thanet and so feel I will have less time to hunt down local blogs.

We have a few possible solutions here:
a) Kevin continues as is and only adds blogs when he checks thanetbloglist@yahoo.co.uk once every few months.
b) Some other person contacts Kevin saying they will take good care of it and will remain impartial.
c) I tell you all the login and password for the blog and you can all add stuff when you find it. Kevin (or someone) hangs onto the email to reset any abuses with a password reset.

I personally like the third option as I’m a community thinking kinda guy, but I can see its problems.

This is up to you guys to call it as its really your list.