I have now converted this site’s permalinks to a human readable format. This was one of those things I had thought would be really hard, so I kept putting it off. However, in WordPress 2 it’s really easy!

Just go to the Options tab and choose the Permalinks subtab. There are a list of common options – I chose the Date and Name based one. Then hit Update Permalink structure and it saves and produces a text box on the screen with some code in it. This needs to be copied into a file called .htaccess which should be in your blog’s root folder. You may have to create this file. Save that, and you are away!

Don’t worry about links to your posts that exist which point to the old numeric style URLs – these still work!

FeedDemon 2 has a cool little icon on each post you read to link to it in your del.icio.us archive. I’ve actually started to use this now for a few things. Here is the RSS feed, if you are interested.

It would be nice to have a ‘blog this’ icon too. Currently it’s either going through the menus or hitting ctrl-shift-b.

Robert Scoble has an old blog hosted at UserLand, or rather had. It’s now gone.

Oh, UserLand, where did my old blogs go?

Yikes, the first couple of years of my blog are gone. UserLand took down those blogs. I don’t remember getting an email warning me about that, but I might have (junk filters catch a lot of that stuff).

My old site used to be at http://scobleizer.manilasites.com and the stuff is just gone.

Lots of old blogs used to be stored there. That’s a lot of history that’s gone. Hopefully I can get it back, I just sent them email.

This is a serious problem, I guess. At least by hosting your blog yourself, you know what’s happening to it. People who write their blog posts offline with an editor can save backup copies on their own machine.

I ought to look into backing up this blog, and the others I host. Hmmm – I guess this is done by just backing up the MySQL database. I wonder if there is a way to save a flat HTML file of the site, with all the content in it?

• Ban Comic Sans
• grou.ps might be interesting, but is suffering from being dug at the moment.
• Google’s Anti-Spyware Project
• Flickr provides an RSS feed for comments on your photos – useful enough, as it means you don’t have to log in everytime to check for comments, but it also gives a little thumbnail of the photo being comments on – excellent!
• Google Removes Its Help Entry on Censorship

Analyst claims so: “We believe that Google is in the midst of creating its own iTunes competitor, which we’ve dubbed ‘Google Tunes. We think this is a logical step, now that the nascent Google Video product has been introduced.”

read more | digg story

Hmmm. Does anyone know of a non-evil, non-megalomaniac search engine I could use?

This is my first post from digg, and it seems pretty cool. digg puts the links (the ones inside the quote) right at the bottom of a post, but I think I prefer them inside the quote, certainly above my comments, which means an edit. Still, I have to do that anyway to add in the categories, and the real time saved is in copying and pasting the links.

This is going to mean I will hardly write any original posts in the WordPress editor at all! When I am at home I tend to use the Performancing Firefox extension for writing posts, when browsing with FeedDemon I use BlogJet. Both these products automatically quote text and links for me, speeding up the process a good deal.

In fact, while I am at it, something that annoys me about the editor in WordPress 2 – when I select text and hit the link button to make that text a hyperlink, it doesn’t automatically add in the http:// bit for me, which was a real time saver in previous versions.

Also, it would be good if you could define a set list of links, which if that word was used in a post it automatically parses it into a hyperlink. You could make is case dependent, so camel-casing would prevent many mix-ups. So, everytime I typed WordPress, on publishing the post, that word was made to link back to wordpress.org everytime, meaning I don’t have to bother. That would be cool.

Plenty going on this morning – Today kept my attention for the whole 2 hour journey…

Blair apology to Soham parents

Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair has apologised to the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman for comments he made about the Soham murders.

Sir Ian Blair told the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) on Thursday that “almost nobody” could understand why it had become such a big story.

He called the media institutionally racist in its coverage of murders.

If Ian Blair hadn’t already convinced us all that he was a complete nitwit with his sophistry immediately after the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting, he certainly has now. To infer that race plays any part in the hysterical media coverage over the Soham murders is absurd: Blair admitted himself that the coverage of the Damilola Taylor murder was an exception to his theory. He asked why the “murders of white lawyer Tom ap Rhys Pryce and Asian builders’ merchant Balbir Matharu” didn’t received a similar level of publicity that the Soham ones did. The answer to this is so obvious I can’t be bothered to type this.

The shame is that Blair has a point, only he is too dim-witted to make it properly. The hysteria that engulfs the media after a tragedy like that which took place in Soham should be moderated in some way, but only because it is distastful, irrelevant and unhelpful. Not because it is in some way racially motivated, which it clearly isn’t.

Hughes to launch leadership bid

Simon Hughes is to formally launch his campaign for the Liberal Democrat leadership, a day after admitting he was “misleading” about his sexuality.

Good. To be honest, I don’t think he can, or should, be criticised for being ‘misleading’. I think many commentators have been too harsh on him, and treating the issue far too frivolously. I would imagine that coming out is not an easy thing to do, no matter what one’s personal beliefs on the matter, and, given that Hughes has had heterosexual relationships as well, there is clear evidence he had some sort of inner turmoil on the issue. That he feels the need to make statements about issues such as this shows that the sad state of affairs the media is still in in this country. Who cares, really?

The only way this could be of any significance would be if it somehow emerged that Hughes played a more active role in the shameful campaign for his election in the infamous Bermondsey by-election, the conduct of which he has apologised for.

Israel rules out talks with Hamas

Israeli interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ruled out any talks with “an armed terror organisation that calls for Israel’s destruction”.

International mediators have urged Hamas to renounce violence, as efforts begin to form a new government.

Near-complete results gave Hamas 76 of the 132 seats in parliament.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas – who also heads the ruling Fatah party – has said he remains committed to a peaceful settlement.

This seems a fairly reasonable line for Israel to take, all things considered. Hamas’ election raises so many interesting issues: the rise of Islamists and their popularity with the Middle Eastern public; the fact that they are the first terrorist organisation to jump straight into power by passing most of the democratic ‘pyramid’ (to use a kind of footballing analogy); their commitment to a referendum to introduce sharia law.

It’s pretty frightening though too. Let’s hope that Hamas can be pulled towards the centre ground as Ariel Sharon found himself.

• GPLv4 – just about funny, but even for geek hunour it’s borderline
• Barwick plans England coach talks – my choice: Guus Hiddinck. The thought that the likes of Curbishley, Allardyce or – God help us – Steve McClaren might get the job because of their Englishness is absured. Stuart Pearce maybe, but he needs more time.
• Hamas: what happens next?
• Performancing for Firefox Handbook
• Boris Johnson: Assisted suicide is problematic, but better than months of agony: I can see all the disadvantages, and if the law were to be changed, then it would need careful review, to make sure that people were not coming under any pressure whatever to take their lives. But I think it might be better than seeing increasing numbers of British people forced to take their lives in a foreign country
• Lennon tipped for Foxes post
  

Couple of interesting points from MJR:

Annoying blog comment misfeatures: letter images

Just tried to leave a comment on Sasquach wears a yellow hat at blogger.com – it has one of those annoying “type the letters from the distorted image” screens (which don’t work well [w3c]). Even when I switch images on, I can’t get the letters accepted. I don’t know if it’s a problem with the site or my eyes, but it’s really annoying.

Quite right! Though what is worse is blogger blogs that will only let you comment if you register with blogger. That really is just rubbish.

Google Problems: China; and World Economic Forum TV

25 Jan 2006: google is taking a lot of heat online for agreeing to Chinese government content requests. I won’t criticise the actual decision too much, because it’s typical corporation behaviour: follow the money, like the rest of the World Economic Forum. If you’re buying Chinese products just because they’re cheaper, you’re part of the reason they have the money and part of the reason that google is following them – corporations are seldom held accountable. If you don’t like that, maybe you should Boycott Made In China as well as google?

I think most people’s problem is that it is such hypocritical behaviour – MSN and Yahoo! have had this sort of thing in place with China for ages, and no one batted an eyelid – but perhaps many people – naively – expected better from Google. At least Bill Gates never pretended to be anything other than evil… And fine, it is typical corporation behaviour. But isn’t it nice that at least once people kick up a stink over it?

• The Beast – 50 most loathsome Americans, 2005 edition
• Secret life of Matisse wins Whitbread prize

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Iran blocks BBC Persian website

The Iranian authorities have started to block the BBC’s Persian language internet site, for the first time.

The BBC says the level of traffic to the site from within Iran has dropped sharply over the last three days.

No official explanation has been given. The BBC has expressed concern at the action, saying it deprives many Iranians of a trusted source of news.

The BBC said it would be approaching the Iranian government at an official level about re-instating access.

BBC Persian.com is the most popular of the BBC’s non-English language websites, receiving about 30 million page impressions a month – about half of which are from inside Iran.

BBC World Service radio broadcasts in English and Persian are being received by audiences in Iran as normal, as are the BBC’s international online news services in English.

When entering the BBC’s Persian site a sign comes up saying “access to this site denied”, says the BBC’s Frances Harrison in Tehran.

It is not clear if the filtering will be permanent, but many websites are routinely blocked in Iran, our correspondent says.

The BBC says readers from Iran have begun emailing them to ask for help with what are known as filter-buster sites, which enable access to banned sites.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google censors itself for China

This is a very disturbing news story indeed, and is starting to convince me that maybe MJR is right…

The company is setting up a new site – Google.cn – which it will censor itself to satisfy Beijing’s hardline rulers.

Google argued it would be more damaging to pull out of China altogether.

Critics warn the new version could restrict access to thousands of sensitive terms and web sites. Such topics are likely to include independence for Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Currently, the Google search in China acts very slowly and is disrupted quite a bit as a result of Chinese government attempts to censor it.

The company argues it can play a more useful role in China by participating than by boycotting it, despite the compromises involved.

“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission,” a statement said.

Utter nonsense. Google is a search engine, and is measured by it’s reliability and accuracy in searching. If they are deliberatley providing a hamstrung performance just to please an authoritarian government, then they are going directly against their very reason for existance. I am not claiming that Google should act as an agent on behalf of subversive groups in China, but to exclude results because of their political content is a disgrace.

I can only assume that this comes down to revenue. For Google to earn the revenues they can in China they must provide an always-on, reliable service. They are putting money ahead of ethics.

Its e-mail, chat room and blogging services will not be available because of concerns the government could demand users’ personal information.

I am sure they could demand that information. And if Google can deny it to the US government, why can’t they take a stand against China? Because they already have the market share in the US, and have to do everything they can to grab as many users as possible in the emerging markets like China.

Shel Israel offers a good perspective on this.

Performancing: Quick and Easy Blog Improvements

1. Put up a “Post not found” error 404 page – if someone tries to visit a broken link on your blog does the visitor get a nice friendly message or “error 404 file not found”? Even better for you, do you provide handy links to your top content, a search form and some adsense ads? It is surprising the difference just this small thing can make to your blogs usefulness and bottom line!
2. Offer more feed choices and a dummies guide for RSS novices – many of your visitors will not have a clue what RSS is or why it might be useful to them. If you give them a helping hand they will not only subscribe in greater numbers they might remember you favourably because of the nice thing you did for them.
3. Take off nofollow link condoms – I have never believed that nofollow did any good any way, blog spammers told the search engine reps it wouldn’t do any good and they were true to their word, but now it seems search engines index nofollow links and ignore the very solution they came up with. Thankfully the message is getting out that link condoms are bad, just say no to nofollow!
4. Show your most popular or best posts – a new visitor to your blog needs help in deciding if this is going to be a blog they want to return to. Show them your best and brightest content. There is code available for WordPress and it is really easy to do on Drupal using the statistics module, others will have plugins or you can hard code it into your template.
5. Provide comment feeds or email subscriptions – if you want really great discussion on a only semi-loyal trafficked blog you need to attract visitors who comment back. Many blog platforms have comment RSS which is a partial solution (see above) but I much prefer to use email subscriptions. There are solutions for WordPress and Drupal in the form of plugins.

Great article on Google by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books:

Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that’s the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997) its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10¹⁰⁰: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn’t taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn’t been taken was because it should be spelled googol – and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. (It belonged, and still belongs, to a Silicon Valley software engineer and home-brewed beer enthusiast called Tim Beauchamp: ‘The links on this page are a mishmash of eclectic destinations that may be of interest to you. Actually, they may only be of interest to Tim but what the heck. It is his site!’) Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Larry and Sergey are not bad-omen kind of guys. Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world – with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.

A quick note for anyone who uses the Grisoft AVG Free anti-virus package. I tried to run an update this evening which kept failing. I then downloaded the programme and installed it again, and it now works fine. There was a new build released on 10 Jan and this must be the root of the problem.

I have also been having trouble downloading updates for the Spybot Search and Destroy malware scanner. It turns out you can select different mirrors for the download, which stops you getting the “bad checksum” error.

Things have been pretty quiet over here recently. I guess I have just been concentrating on other things.

First up, I have started to host the Impnet forums – a site for fans of Lincoln City Football Club. This has involved me redesigning the phpBB board and making a few changes to see if it can help increase participation. At the moment the site is stored at http://davebriggs.net/impnet but this will change to http://impnet.co.uk – the traditional domain for the site – just as soon as the registrar geeks have sorted it out.

Otherwise, Palimpsest has been pretty busy – see the Fetish Detectives thread for some amusement – and I have been helping one member set up a blog of their own to join Chilli and Rick. I don’t think the blog is for public consumption just yet so I won’t mention anything for now.

I’ve been playing with the new beta of version 2.0 of FeedDemon, which is excellent so far. The integration with Newsgator is very useful – meaning that blogs I read at work using NG on the web are marked as such at home on FD. Fab. I also got to have a copy of the NG plug-in for MS Outlook, which I had a little play with even though I don’t use Outlook for my email (for obvious reasons…). It seems to work pretty well and integrates nicely – a good choice if you must use Outlook. I haven’t been making any link blog posts recently because things have been pretty quiet since Xmas and the New Year. Maybe things will start picking up now. Having the FD/NG sync will help me sort the wheat from the chaff anyway.

Ryan Adams, along with Nick Cave, is just about the only musician whose new releases I bother with these days. I know what I like, alright?!

Anyway, here’s a quick round-up of his solo career. I don’t know a lot about his previous existence in the band Whiskeytown, other than that they were meant to be great.

His first solo effort was Heartbreaker (2000), a gloriously pared-down alt.country masterpiece, detailing the break-up of a relationship with remarkable honesty and great tunes. Still considered by many his best album. Standout tracks: Oh My Sweet Carolina and To Be Young.

Next up was Gold (2001), a rip-roaring Stones inspired rawk record, with some touching quiet bits too. Best heard with the extra CD, with 5 songs on it that Adams wanted on the original cut. This was the start of a continual battle between Adams and his label, Lost Highway, over his prolific-ness. A good introduction for those who aren’t sure whether they like country music. Standout tracks: New York, New York and The Bar is a Beautiful Place.

Adams then recorded four albums, all of which he wanted to release after Gold. Lost Highway wouldn’t let him, but did release a compilation of some of the highlights of these records called Demolition (2002). It’s a bit of a mish mash, as each record was very different in tone. Still, there are some good tracks on here. Standout tracks: Nuclear and Dear Chicago.

Rock ‘N’ Roll was his first album of 2003, and was made because Lost Highway wanted another Gold-alike up tempo record, and Adams had produced the downbeat Love is Hell instead. So, he recorded Rock ‘N’ Roll in very little time, as a loud, brash rock record, which was essentially a pastiche of ’80s rock in general and U2 in particular. Pretty empty, though there are a couple of good stomping songs on there. Standout tracks: So Alive and Hypnotixed.

In the end, Lost Highway did release Love is Hell, as the critical reaction to Rock ‘N’ Roll wasn’t so great. They released it as 2 EPs (2003) within a couple of weeks of each other and subsequently as a single album (2004) – which doesn’t include all of the tracks on the UK edition EPs. As with all of Adams’ records, he likes you to have as many songs as possible, so these are the versions to go for. Includes his remarkable, haunting cover of Wonderwall and is a highly atmospheric, melancholy account of the trials and tribulations of relationships. Cracking stuff. Standout tracks: Wonderwall and English Girls Approximately.

No ‘new’ album during 2004, but that was made up for when Adams released 3 albums in 2005, including the first Cold Roses which was a double album. The first to be recorded with his new backing band, The Cardinals, this album marked a return to the countryfied material of Heartbreaker, where Adams is clearly most comfortable. As with many double albums, this would have been a fantastic album if it had been edited down to (say) 12 songs rather than 21. Still, it’s strong stuff. Standout tracks: Meadowlake Street and Let It Ride.

Second in 2005 was Jacksonville City Nights which was recorded live in the studio, without any overdubs. Again with the Cardinals, it is another strongly country influenced record, even more so than Cold Roses. If you don’t like pedal steel guitar, you won’t like this album much. But for the likes of me, it’s great. The real highlight is a stonkingly good cover of Always On My Mind. Standout tracks: Hard Way to Fall and Always On My Mind.

The last record of 2005 is 29, which I have only played a couple of times and I assume it is a grower. A very introverted record, played without the Cardinals and a return to the darker stuff on Love is Hell, the idea is that there is a song for each year of Adams’ 20s. There are 9 songs on 29. Erm, stick to the music, Ryan, and leave the maths to others. Anyway, haven’t had a chance to formulate a judgement on this yet, but will return with my brilliant opinions at some other point. Standout tracks: Who knows?

So, if you take the two standout songs from each album, you can make your very own Dave’s Best of Ryan Adams Thus Far (Excluding 29) with the following track listing:

1 Oh My Sweet Carolina
2 To Be Young
3 New York, New York
4 The Bar is a Beautiful Place
5 Nuclear
6 Dear Chicago
7 So Alive
8 Hypnotixed
9 Wonderwall
10 English Girls Approximately
11 Meadowlake Street
12 Let It Ride
13 Hard Way to Fall
14 Always On My Mind

Originally posted on Palimpsest.

Today we visited Lake Vyrnwy. Around the lake are a load of different trails to walk on, one of which leads to an area full of slightly mental wooden sculptures.See the flickr set for them in their proper sizes. Worth an extra mention is this one, of a tiny house on a pole. Don’t ask me…

My list is depressingly parochial, and short:

• Norwich 
• Peterborough
• London
• Cambridge
• Chester
• Amsterdam
• York
• Bristol
• Birmingham

And in the rough order than I visited them. Hopefully, others on Palimpsest will have added their’s soon.

MJR thinks of an explanation for the proliferation of cup upsets over the last week:

England’s football fans had the pleasure of random football scores last weekend: the FA Cup. Why is there so much expectation of upsets? I think it’s partly because the match is at an ideal time to help level things out, especially if it’s at a non-league ground:

League clubs

• usually full-time
• 4 or 5 games over the holidays
• mostly still negotiating new players
• some of their players seem to expect it to be easy
• usually play on expensive, well-kept pitches

Non-league clubs

• often part-time
• 3 games over the holidays
• often introduce new players in the cup match
• many of their players relish playing a top club
• probably have a pitch more damaged by winter

 And he is almost certainly right.

To add to it, though, I once read the autobiography of Frank Clark, an ex-Forest manager (and the last one who could genuinely be considered a success for any length of time) who now works in some capacity at the League Manager’s Association. He wrote extensively about cup upsets and how they come about, and one of the most convincing reasons he gave was simply that in terms of the standard squad player, there is little difference in ability between (say) a Conference side and a Premiership one, as long as everyone plays at the top of their game. The obvious star players, your Rooneys, Henrys and Alonsos, are clearly a cut above, but they can be taken out of the game with efficient marking.

 The difference between players in the higher divisions and the lower is usually one of attitude and mental stamina – something that can be surmounted in a one-off game.