Although about as technologically gifted as a gorilla’s bum, The Leither (a local magazine I occasionally contribute to- if only in loud hand gestures and stilted opinions) has signed up to Twitter this month. This is a piece I wrote to celebrate this move. Although technologically akin to turning up late to a student party with three empty bottles of blue nun in a ragged paper bag we’re tweeting…

twitter is the latest online service to be hyped to such a lofty a lofty degree, in a rash of himalayic superlatives, that you could be forgiven for thinking it offers a cure to swine flu, a solution to toxic debt, or the answer to life’s persistent questions. it does not.

twitter (once you’ve signed up at twitter.com) lets you share a few choice words with friends. think: “anyone fancy a film tonight?” don’t think:
“anyone fancy a beer with the editor?” your message is limited to no more than 140 characters known as a ‘tweet’.
tweets can be trivial “i’m at the beach, mmh Seafeild”, or it could be a link to an article you’re reading, a photo of your new puppy. simple stuff you’d like to share. once logged in you can find and add friends near and far (you can choose to ‘follow’ bands, there’s a few celebrities on there… @BarackObama) their tweets will appear on your homepage where you can reply to messages or just keep an eye on what’s happening. friends can choose to follow you by searching your name or through invitation. by connecting with these other twitter users you create a global conversation, accessed easily through your phone, IM, mobile browser, or old- fashioned web. at home at work at play.
Read On »

Eliot Shepard’s photos on Slower.net were always an inspiration for my early party photography, his back catalogue begins (or, rather ends) here. Well worth a peek if you’re into oddly beautiful street photography with a dash of genius in his messy (and fairly spontaneous, you’d imagine?) compositions.

I snapped, this [above] slower.net-esque photo on Friday at the Leith Festival programme launch (that’s right there’s a launch for a glossy booklet). The photo is not my style, anymore, but it’s fun. Don’t-cha-think, and hey that tray is 4 years older than me!

I don’t have a clue how to explain my 9-5 life. Recently I’ve noticed, when trying, I either play-down the creativity (and freedom) I have in my job or fail to mention it at all. I think I’m a graphic designer, but I’m not really sure… the deal is I work for a small family-run (not my family) print/design place in Edinburgh (Leith to be exact). We’re a busy, happy bunch, the company is very much established and our customers are all sorts- from nice nobodies looking for a one-off poster print for someone’s birthday, to the ‘clients’ who are mainly architects or local businesses who don’t have in-house designers (a flyer here, a brochure there- mainly business cards) then there’s the advertising agencies or PR firms who need rush print jobs or print finishing and then we have the nobodies who think there somebodies who don’t want to spend any money, but want it now – miserable rich bastards, Edinburgh’s full of them.
Read On »

this fella runs a country, but still has time to follow me on twitter and move his own furniture. mr. Obama has made it 100 days- some notable moments: the whistle stop train tour, the Obama’s decline $100,000 redecoration budget. Bo. Pres’ meets the press corps (they scrum and grovel), O! shirtless, visit Carla Bruni… and her husband, our monarch is totally gay for Michelle (apparently), the YouTube addresses oh and the inauguration. but what about New Orleans.. yer, whatta’bout it?

i wanted to delete a plethora of posts on Meta Comment. mainly irrelevant and mostly useless i was close to just deleting everything pre-2009. fresh start. but i don’t like editing old posts, i hardly moderate comments- its a fun old world and reading some of my earlier stuff is always amusing (to me– and let’s get something straight it’s all about me).

the alternative plan was to separate the new posts from the (very) old… just this week i discovered a great hack for Wordpress that allows me to display a ‘this post is old’ banner on posts of a certain maturity. y’see when i switched over from iBlog there were a lot of formatting issues – not to mention missing images, broken links etc – i tried to weed them out over time, but got busy, so anything from ‘05/’06 is a real mess. yay for $date_check_age

this simple code checks the age of a post (set at 999 days or older here) then displays the ‘.expired’ element (must be defined in your CSS) only to visitors to those elderly posts… it doesn’t print (or echo?) the element in your new material. so:


< ?php
$date_check_age = '';
if (is_single()) {
$days = 999;
if (time() - strtotime($posts[0]->post_date_gmt) > ($days * 86400)) {
$date_check_age = 'this is an archived post' ;

}
}
?>

< ?php echo $date_check_age; ?>

Read On »