EightyOne

I am now officially a ‘micro-blogger’ — I have signed up with Twitter, a service that, in their own words is “A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?”.

The site works like a blogging platform, but with posts being kept at 140 characters of less (presumably to fit in a single SMS text message). One of the key selling points of the service is that you can add updates via the web interface, a dedicated app, or even by text message. As well as making your own posts, you can also follow other people’s updates, which adds the obligatory social aspect.

At first I didn’t see the point, but I was tempted in by seeing how other people were using it. I’ve found that, perhaps, this style of service quite suits me. I don’t often find myself writing long posts, but do like to natter about what I’m up to. The ability to text in updates is also incredibly nifty, and it’s not something that would necessarily work in the context of a full-on blog post (Blackberry users excepted)!

My Twitter page

@media 2007 Europe is over, and once again, I’ve come away feeling inspired and ready for some web-type action.

My favourite presentation had to be Jon Hicks‘ How to be a Creative Sponge. The session tackled the tricky subject of finding inspiration for design when all you have is a blank page. I regularly find myself wondering where to start when approaching something new, and I’ll certainly be trying out some of Jon’s techniques to kick-start the next project (plus some existing ones that’ve hit a bit of a brick wall).

This year, the sessions were more ‘approach’ oriented than covering technical details (well, the ones I attended, anyway), and I think this works well in the conference environment. The two-track system from last year was used once again, but this time the two tracks were focused more on either design or implementation, so this made picking sessions a little bit easier (I still would’ve liked to have seen them all, though!).

So, a thumbs up for @media 2007, which I might be daring enough to say was the best yet. Hopefully I’ll be back next year!

It’s been aaaaages since my last update on the development of the new Left Hand Red Wordpress theme, and that’s because there hasn’t been much developing. Last week, however, I pushed myself to plow on.

The dark grey scheme wasn’t inspiring me much, so I’ve replaced it with a white/light grey scheme with red highlights, and ditched the single-column format with the addition of a second column for secondary navigation and blurb. I’ve only really been blocking things out, and it’s very much still ‘bare bones’, but once I’ve settled on a colour scheme and layout I will start introducing some graphics and styling touches.

I’m currently using a red background for hovered links (see below), which looks quite striking on the simple, monotone background.

I’m probably still going to use a single-column layout for single posts and pages. I’m also going to implement Gravatars for comments, which I have more recently added to the existing site.

Apple boss, Steve Jobs, has publicly said he wants record labels to allow downloadable music without Digital Rights Management (DRM). Apple have been criticised (and even threatened with bans by several European countries) for the ‘Fairplay’ DRM on songs sold through the iTunes Music Store, which (deliberately or not) only allow the music to be played in the iTunes software or on an iPod music player.

However, I was always strongly under the impression that the inclusion of DRM was at the insistance of the record labels, which this request would seem to indicate. Without the DRM, they simply would not licence their music to Apple, so they have no choice but to include the ‘anti-piracy’ measures.

As well as limiting iTunes Music Store purchases to Apple software and hardware, the ‘Fairplay’ DRM restricts the number of computers a song can be played on, and also restricts things like how many times you can burn your legitimately-purchased music on to CD. Removing the DRM would mean that the files could be played on any software or hardware that supports the AAC format used by the iTunes Music Store, and copied, moved and, most importantly, played as the purchaser wishes.

Ideally, there would be no DRM in digitally distributed media, but if used it should be completely transparent to the user, and wouldn’t pose any restrictions to legitimate use. In reality, it does things like stop people watching high-definition versions of their legally-purchased Blu-ray discs on their legally-purchased players through their legally-purchased HD TVs, because one of the devices, even an AV cable, doesn’t support the required DRM.

I’ve personally had to register for licenses for content that I’ve created, heard pops in legally purchased, ‘copy-protected’ CDs that I’ve transferred to my iPod, and for some reason, my iTunes music library has four of the maximum five computers registered to it, even though we only have two. This hasn’t caused any problems yet, but could the next time I reinstall my OS or add a user to either computer.

Hopefully this is a significant step towards a DRM-free future.

Apple seeks online music shake-up [bbc.co.uk]

Update: A more detailed look at Jobs’ open letter, and further insight in to the Apple/DRM situation — Apple would “switch to selling only DRM-free music” if labels agree [arstechnica.com]

Progress is slow to non-existant because I’m suffering from creative block (AKA lazyness). So far I’ve done a little styling on a plain theme that I’ve applied to the ghost-blog of my chum, Dan Stevens.

So far, setting up the theme has been almost as easy as setting up a stylesheet. In addition to your stylesheet, though, you have to create at least one template file, which forms the markup. This is essentially setting up an XHTML file with added custom PHP tags to insert the blog posts and information. e.g.

the_title()

This template I’ve split in to three files — header.php, footer.php and index.php. This will allow me to re-use the header and footer, whilst providing customised versions of the main content to suit the front page, individual posts and archives, for example.

The most useful concept to get to grips with is the Wordpress ‘Loop‘. This is the portion of code responsible for looping through posts, and repeatedly inserting the desired markup.