The Palimpsest Authors Directory is up and running, and the slog is now to get some content in there. Most of it is being cut and pasted from Wikipedia, which is released under the GNU Free Documentation Licence.

This means that we can copy the material, and amend it, as long as we credit the original source and publish our versions under the FDL too, which I obviously have no problem with.

The bit that really takes the time is looking for links to Palimpsest threads, and setting up the bibliogrpahies to link to the Palimpsest Amazon account. But we’ll get there in the end!

Wasn’t aware of this, but when browsing through the Writely blog, I found this snippet of a press release:

Since its beta launch in August 2005, Writely has enjoyed enthusiastic adoption from users all over the world including businesses, bloggers, editors, students, teachers, poets and playwrights.

…

Case#3: NaNoWriMo Collective Novel Creation

By midnight on November 30th, a group of seven writers are due to finish a 50,000 word novel as part of National Novel Writing Month: “We are using the Web Word Processor Writely which is ideal for a collaborative project like this, where people from both the U.K. and the U.S. are working on the same document.” (You can view the novel in progress at http://www.writely.com/View.aspx?docid=acjp62pqm98b)

Am slightly ashamed that we didn’t get it finished in time. Outside pressures put paid to it. Still, I might knuckle down during the Christmas holidays to get at least my chunk finished. It would be a shame to waste all that effort.

A slightly more wordy list than usual today: I don’t think I will have time for any lengthy articles but will keep returning to this throughout the day.

• HipCal is the new name of MyPimp. Apparently the developers had originally thought the service would be used mainly by students, hence the vaguely amusing name. The realisation that quite a few professionals wanted to use it, but were put off by the URL, meant a change was felt necessary.
• Nick Robinson, the BBC Political Editor, now has his own blog on the BBC news site. Entertaining stuff.
• My local council, rather strangely, have a VBulletin discussion forum on their website. Top marks, I guess, for trying to open lines of communication, but it has hardly been touched and the setup leaves a lot to be desired. Good use of Council Tax funds too, when phpBB is available for free and is surely the better option when user numbers aren’t known.
• There was an interesting interview with William Hague on Today this morning. Hague has returned to the shadow cabinet as shadow Foreign Secretary, as a result of which Malcolm Rifkind has flounced back to the backbenches.
• Not sure if I have mentioned it before, but Protopage is an excellent RSS aggregator and personalised homepage. You can add RSS feeds, link lists and sticky note anywhere on the screen you like, and can have multiple screens too, making some or all public, if you like. Good stuff.
• Absurdity of the day: Sainsbury’s and Woolworth’s have taken the DVD of Jerry Springer: The Opera off the shelves for Christmas due to pressure from Christian groups.

Well, I am back now and should be posting again more often.

Here’s a few things I have been playing around with recently, some of these things may never see the light of day.

• I’m looking into trying to do for football discussion what Palimpsest did for books. Still not sure on the title. Stewart, who is helping me out, suggests Goal Mouths but my original idea was the slightly clumsier My Cultured Left Foot. Any thoughts would be appreciated. The site is hidden away here. It’s running on phpBB at the moment, as I doubt numbers will be great enough to warrant the investment into VBulletin, say.
• I have installed a version of Drupal, which lifts various stylings and user accounts from a Vbulletin install. I had the idea as I wanted a CMS that could create some sort of directory of authors, with biographical information, bibliographies, appropriate links and whatnot. Am not entirely convinced just yet, as Drupal seems to be more of a blogging platform than anything else, but more playing might reveal a way in which it could be used. The work in progress is here. Drupal is being used in the interesting Open Source Theology project.
• I received a job lot of Ubuntu CDs at the weekend. 32 and 64 bit ones, and some Mac ones too. If anyone would like one, email me your details and I will post it through.

Apologies for the disruption in service. Little’un has been in hospital for a while and all my spare time is spent with him and my better half.

Hopefully they will be home and normal service resumed later this week.

I have started a visual book list. Looks quite nice, though the numbers of unfinished books worries me slightly. Will get round to writing little reviews at some point for each one.

Chain Reading. It’s like a social booklist keeping thing. Kind of.

You select the book you are reading, and have read, and will read. Recommend them to people. Maybe they will recommend some to you. Fairly interesting.

Of course, some people had this idea nearly 12 months ago…

Glypho appears to be a site offering collective authorship. It looks quite interesting, but at a guess I would say the quality of writing is probaby variable…

Horrible! From Guardian Technology:

“Prosecutors claim a Mac specialist on trial in connection with the killing of his wife did a Google search for the words: “neck snap break” and “hold” before she was killed. Robert Petrick, who is defending himself in Durham, NC, cross examined a computer forensics expert this week. The expert testified about digital footprints he said the state discovered on several hard drives in Petrick’s home,” reports TechWeb.

“Prosecutors claimed that Petrick, who stands out in his Christian North Carolina community as a self-professed Pagan, left behind a trail of digital evidence including a visit to a site called bloodfest666. Investigators are also focusing e-mails to women they said Petrick was having affairs with and a download of a document entitled ’22 ways to kill a man with your bare hands’.”

Note: “a lawyer standing by for Petrick said he believes the evidence was all culled from the hard drives and he has no information that Google participated in the investigation.”

From Guido Fawkes’ blog.