I almost forgot about my ‘Portfolio’ pages, they’re in a sad state and could be worth upgrading for the archive’s sake. After what happened with my Old School Photos (I ‘lost’ the originals and only have tiny little compressed versions to show for 2002/3) I’ll have to do it right this time, whatever that means. I did find this, its my homepage through the ages – made me laugh. I’m only typing this so I can take a screenshot and add “Meta Comment 2.2″ to the list.
You know I wouldn’t direct you towards Radio 1 if it wasn’t for a good reason. But our good friend “Catgut” will have his first nationwide airplay this evening (going into tomorrow morning) on BBC Radio 1.
Now, not only is this the first time he’s going to be recognised for his amzing (and Mac-enabled :D) talents in such an open way – but it is also, to my limited knowledge, the first time a Podsafe Tune has made it to BBC 1.
So, check out the show: Huw Stephens: One Music
Or jump straight into the good stuff: Podsafe Music Network: Catgut
Update: So his track went on around half 12 Thursday morning, that was fun. We hung out in the messageboard with a bunch of hip-control-mosh-hungry nu-music lovers, Radio 1 is still so bad. Its been a while since I’ve let someone play music at me (bad music) without the handy Podcast / iTunes fast-forward. The “Catgut” track was a good ‘un, and even recieved instant feedback; positive in the most part. No mention of the Podsafe Music Network. You can stream the show from this site. What an evening, although Adam Curry didn’t get back to me. Bah, It’s Still Rock & Roll To Me.
Another Update: I’ve grabbed an MP3 from the stream, for you non-RealPlayer folks. You can download Catgut here. The song is “I Love Milk” and it was first heard on the Podsafe Music Network… not the BBC, remember that!
A Further Update: Catgut has his own website now; LittleCatgut.com, check it out- if you want to know / hear more of Catgut’s unique musical style.
I’ve got the idea for my first WordPress plugin; so far I have the idea, the name and a semi-working demo (Alpha version 0.1 – See “Consuming” here). I don’t know if anyone reading this is a mentalist coder, if anyone’s out there I need some help!
The plan is; you see a film (maybe you’re watching something right now) and you want to tell people, or you want to take note, you want to rate it or provoke discussion. Maybe you just want to remember you saw it, when you wake up the name will be lost. Sure, you could write up a lengthy post on your weblog, or… you could ‘consumer.us’ it. Shit, that name needs work.
So you’re watching a film, its 3AM… it a really great film – you’ll never get round to remebering the name, or buying it – but you want to tell someone – and damn it iChat is empty – well you load up your favorite Mozilla based browser (or hit the dashboard on OS X) and a del.icio.us style entry form appears. It’s pre-configured with your blog details and Amazon Affiliate ID. All you have to do is write in the Movie Name, your rating and maybe a one sentance review (which will appear optionaly to the reader in AJAX form, oh I love Web 2.0)… click “Submit” and voila; its on your WordPress Sidebar. (Demo: on my Homepage: Consuming) I’ve done the demo with K2’s Asides, although I started with a del.icio.us plugin and at one point even thought I’d stumbled on the fully formed idea; Addictions, sadly this is a pretty limited version 1.x of what it could be.
So, where to go from here; Asides is okay. There must be a way to write a plugin that will write and read to its own columns on the blog’s db. Using del.icio.us is possible – but there’s not a tonne I can do with the default entry points “URL” “Details” “Tags”. Oh, I also want to allow comments, from readers on the reviews or ratings (possible with asides). Maybe I should just build a frontend for asides. Then again, If I use Asides I want to hide that catagory (Asides works off a certain category). You can see why if you click “Consuming” from the Category links (nice Category Visability Plugin. Anyway here’s what I want to do:
“Consumer.us” / some other name – is a plugin for wordpress that allows blog authors to display ratings of recently viewed films (maybe books, music and whatever-else denoted by little icons) in their WordPress Sidebar. Film’s are added through Dashboard Widget or del.icio.us style popup window, ratings and short reviews can be accessed by the visitor using AJAX and this is all integrated with Amazon Affiliates and Wishlists through the options panel in WordPress. Visitors can subscribe to the Consumer.us RSS feeds, people can view tag clouds and anyone can scan through a huge library to see whats hot through the del.icio.us styled homepage.
