John Merrells » Writing

Cease yo Jibba Jabba

John — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:40:02 +0000

Update: I’ve removed the links in this posts to the Jibba Jabba website in. I’ve been working away on something for the past six months, and am ready to release it now.

Oft heard by my children, and now the name of my current project.

Lately I have been experiencing a bit of writers block, so I figured I just needed to start afresh with a blank slate. I started yet-another-frickin-blog over at jibbajabba.info. Just knowing that I had no audience at all really did loosen things up a lot. As a result, of course, it’s a complete drivel, but I did actually make something kind of useful. It’s a Natural Language Text Classifier service, which you can give a document and in response it’ll tell you what language it was written in. That’s it. It won’t win the Nobel prize for adding meaning and purpose to a generation, but it did make me feel pretty good to get something out there.

Blogging about blogging

John — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:50:08 +0000

This post is going to be as tedious as the post ‘It’s been three years since my last blog post… and I still have nothing to say’ and the post ‘I’m taking a break from blogging…’. This is a post about blogging. A post about Pimping Up my blog.

Since my failure to get OpenID working well with my WordPress installation, I’ve decided to start with something a bit simpler, and then based hopefully upon that success build on upwards. So…

Twitter – I’m still not quite sure what the point of Twitter is, but I’m giving it a go. Adding a Twitter Badge to the sidebar was super easy. I just had to cut and paste some HTML from there into my theme’s sidebar.php. I had to add the ‘Follow me’ link at the bottom.

I can now send an update to my own blog from Twitterific on my Mac desktop, or I can send a text message from my phone. Look see! I can micro-blog about my breakfast.

AddThis – The next mini-project is to make my posts easier to share. The AddThis Button seen just below this post, and every post on this blog, allows the reader to share this post with others through any of the popular link sharing systems. I achieved this by downloading and installing a WordPress plugin provided by AddThis… super easy peasy.

FeedBurner – To make my blog easier to subscribe to I’ve published an RSS through FeedBurner. I enabled two things, a link to ’subscribe in a reader’, and a form for subscribing by email. Both were provided as snippets of code to be cut and pasted into sidebar.php. I did have to edit them a bit to make them fit style-wise.

The FeedBurner website provides a lot of configuration options – too many I think. It took me a while to work out how to get to the email subscription page. Anyway, I’ve now subscribed to my own feed, so I have one subscriber. Woohoo!

[...To Be Continued...]

25 Beautiful Minimalistic Website Designs

John — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 05:27:56 +0000

Gadzookes! Someone out there likes this blog design. I just got a heck of a lot of traffic from Vandelay Design and another site that appears to have the same content, in Japanese.

This explains the odd email I got last week taking me to task over the copyright statement in the footer of this page. Apparently I’d committed the unholy act of removing the ‘Wordpress Copyright’. I patiently explained that the content of the website was indeed my copyright, since I’d authored it, and that as far as I knew Wordpress was available under an open source license. Unsatisfied, the emailer threw his killer punch… ‘All Rights Reserved, that’s what I’m taking issue with’…. Hmm, so, what exactly does ‘Copyright (c) 2007. All rights reserverd’ mean I wondered:

The phrase All rights reserved was once a necessary formal notice indicating all rights granted under existing copyright law are retained by the copyright holder and that legal action may be taken against copyright infringement. … While it is commonplace to see it, this notice is now superfluous, ….(Wikipedia::Copyright)

Triple damn – he had me there – I had failed to live up to the highest standards of minimalism.

In any case the design of these web pages has nothing to do with me. I blame Ben Saunders. When he’s not doing really manly things in the Arctic, or planning to do really manly things in the Antarctic, he throws together some pretty spiffy web pages.

simplification – a lot of email

John — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:19:52 +0000

I get a lot of email, perhaps a few hundred messages per day. A badge of honor? Rather time consuming I’d say. The past few years I’ve just taken it to be the cost of doing business in the tech industry. A lot of stuff flows in, that’s how you stay on top of things, whether you can consume it all or not. Well, I thought I was getting a lot of spam, but upon analysis it seems to be mostly self inflicted. Whenever I browse across a page of interest I’ll offer up an email address to keep abreast of updates. Since I use my email client as a Todo list and as a news reader, it gets kinda backed up a bit. So the majority of email is actually marketing messages and newsletters and mailing lists. The problem is – I never unsubscribe. I’ve been deleting the same messages month in month out for years. Mindless busy work. Why oh why? But now I have decided to take action! I’ve decided to take whatever time it takes to stop these messages. So far it’s taken me couple of hours a day for a whole week, but I’ve stopped the bulk of it . There are some troublesome ones… websites that ask for long lost passwords… and emails without unsubscribe links… I’ve even _shock_horror_ had to engage in conversation with a real human. Bizzare. But now I have time to blog.