Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and Pixar, in his Stanford University commencement address in June 2005:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | 2 comments so far | Tagged with: Apple, Pixar, Steve Jobs

At the “macro” level, fonts as rendered by Chrome look thinner. Subjectively, they are not as legible. They also look slightly washed out.

At the “micro” level, if you magnify the Chrome and Safari snippets a few times, you will see that Safari uses subpixel rendering: loosely speaking, this means that the “edges” of character shapes (glyphs) are actually drawn in different colors, not just different tones of grays. On the other hand, Chrome seems to have inexplicably switched to purely grayscale rendering of fonts.

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: Computing, font, font rasterization, Google, Google Chrome, Safari, subpixel rendering

[Note: I'm doing a lot of work with WordPress at work at the moment, so am accumulating plugins, coding tips, tutorials, etc., like nobody's business. Something I started (and then quickly stoppped) doing a while ago was a 'WordPress Wednesday', writing at least one post a week that talked about an element of WordPress and its associated plugins. I'm going to try and keep it going for a little while longer this time...]

There are a bevy of “popular posts”-type plugins for WordPress around. They will look at various metrics – page views, number of comments, etc., – and use an algorithm to work out which posts to include in a widget or other form of display. Some use information collected within WordPress, others connect to third party statistical information, such as Google Analytics, and others do some combination of the two.

One I’m trying out is PostRank, which was developed by a company that has now been bought by Google. In the words of the plugin authors:

PostRank measures the audience engagement with each story by analyzing the types and frequency of online social media interactions – comments, tweets, diggs, etc. The more interesting or relevant the story is, the more active your readers will be in organizing, responding to, and sharing it.

The collection of popular stories the widget generates (see the sidebar) looks pretty spot on to me. It avoids the mistake that others have made of counting hits from Google Images (a search for quite a common word results in many hits for one post that’s several years old now), instead concentrating on actual user engagement.

As well as the widget, the plugin adds an PostRank column to the list of posts in the WordPress admin area so I can see the engagement of my most recent posts at a glance.

All the information is useful, although the design out of the box is a little garish for me, especially when sitting on a template based on WordPress’s default Twenty Eleven theme. The widget has eight selectable colour schemes to choose from, plus a ninth ‘style-free’ option ready for you to apply your own CSS. If I keep the plugin around, I’ll move to that option, but it will take a little time to work out the relevant selectors.

For more information about PostRank, visit the website. And if you’re using the built-in plugin search facilities within your WordPress site’s admin section, be warned – there’s an unrelated plugin also called PostRank out there. Click on the ‘plugin details’ link before installing to make sure you’re looking at the correct one.

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: popular, posts, relevance, social media

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Read the rest of How to remove expired rental movies from your iPhone or iPad (319 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments so far | Tagged with: how to, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iTunes, movie rentals

It combines standard WordPress comments with mentions of a specific post on Twitter and Facebook. Other plugins can do the same thing, but Social also broadcasts notifications of new posts to the same social media site, and tracks replies & retweets of that original broadcast message.

It would be nice if the broadcast facility used my bit.ly Pro settings, so that it used my shortening domain, mtthw.mn – something that my previous auto-tweeting plugin was able to do. However, that plugin insisted on garbling apostrophes, quotation marks and other common punctuation, so if Social can cope with this I’m gaining as well as losing.

But this is a very new plugin which has backing from a commercial organisation, MailChimp, so there’s every possibility it will improve in future.

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: plugins, Wordpress

Unfortunately, as soon as I saw the content of the message I realised that it wasn’t from him at all, but a computer-generated message.

You look different in this pic http://tinyurl.com/…

The link itself (which for obvious reasons I’m not about to repeat here) led to a web site that was a carbon copy of the twitter.com homepage, complete with login form.

And it’s that last part which is the crucial one. By impersonating a trusted website, it will trick enough people into entering their username and password. And from that, whoever collects that information can do anything they like with your account, from reading potentially sensitive private messages, to sending out DMs or tweets with malicious intent.They could even change your password so that you can’t access your own account. The key is, they will have total access to your account, and can do anything with it – and not only will they not have your own (impeccably high, I’m sure) moral and ethical standards, but it’ll be next to impossible to prove that anything they do wasn’t done by you.

(...)
Read the rest of What to do if your Twitter account is ‘hacked’ – and how to avoid it in the first place (589 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | 39 comments so far | Tagged with: fraud, how to, phishing, Twitter

A lot of web-based blog and other CMS editors (including apps I’ve written and/or managed) include huge amounts of chrome – from navigation menus, to fields for additional metadata. A lot of the time it doesn’t particularly matter, but if you’re writing large chunks of prose, an uncluttered user interface is essential.

WordPress can be one of the worst offenders when it comes to chrome. Its standard blog post entry screen is built up of many boxes, each with specific purposes. Users can reduce the impact by switching off boxes they don’t need in the Screen Options dropdown, and then drag and drop the remainder into some sensible order. But it still can mean that quite a small portion of the browser window is devoted to the main task of writing content.

In the recent update to version 3.2, WordPress introduced a full screen mode, which allows all the chrome to fade away, allowing for a predominantly blank screen. Basic WYSIWYG controls are accessible at the top of the page, but everything except your text fades away if your hands remain on the keyboard instead of moving the mouse (see illustrations on this post about the WordPress.com installation – the same illustrations apply to self-hosted WordPress.org blogs). Most of the toolbar functions can be activated with familiar shortcuts – ⌘-B for bold (HTML <strong>), ⌘-I for italic (<em>), etc., so for the most part you can just focus on the writing, applying formatting as needed as you go.

A new WordPress plugin, ArtsyEditor, tackles the same issue in a slightly different, more customisable way.

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Read the rest of ArtsyEditor: another approach to distraction-free writing (280 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments so far | Tagged with: ArtsyEditor, Wordpress, writing tools

— Dave Lee rants (in a good way) about people taking Twitter as a serious source of news. It’s not – it’s more akin to pub conversation, the sort that allows old wive’s tales and silly lies to propagate.

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: Media, new media, Twitter

That’s a shortcoming in Twenty Eleven, to my mind. I’m in the process of constructing a WP 3.2-compatible template for work, and while we won’t be supporting all of WordPress’s post formats, we’ll need to format entry detail pages, and flag up entries on index pages, depending on which format we use.

For RSS feeds, Tweets, etc., I may want to indicate the type of post format so that readers know what to expect. For example, if an entry has been defined as a Gallery style post format, I may want the RSS reader to display:

Gallery: A selection of pictures

Modifying WordPress’s RSS feeds are slightly trickier than the web pages, as they’re not defined within the theme folder. However, WordPress’s add_filter can come in very useful, as illustrated in this sample code:

Adding this function to my theme’s functions.php means that last week’s aside now shows up in my RSS feed as:

Aside: Park Avenue Cat, Arts Theatre

As far as I’m concerned, this is a temporary fix. It doesn’t do the same for automatically sent tweets going via the plugin I use for that purpose, and there are other places in a template where you’d want to use a similar technique. But it’s a start, and if you’re out there scratching your head and wondering how to tweak your RSS output, hopefully this may give you some clues.

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: post formats, RSS, WordPress 3.2

I was a loyal user of the paid-for app Tweetie 2 by Atebits, and when Twitter bought it and converted it into a free application, I continued to use it. It seemed to strike the right balance for me of allowing some access to more sophisticated functions, while keeping them unobtrusive when you didn’t need them.

One of the ways it achieved this was by hiding advanced features – picture uploads, autocompletion of @ usernames and #hashtags, location marking, etc. – behind the keyboard. If you clicked the button that displayed the number of characters remaining, the iPhone keyboard would slide down, revealing the additional options.

I suspect that some of these functions were so well hidden that some users didn’t realise they were there at all. Which is why, I’m guessing, that with the latest update, to Twitter for iPhone 3.3, the key ones are now visible as you compose your tweet (compare with this screenshot from GigaOM’s review of Tweetie 2):

Twitter for iPhone's new editing screen, with completions and geotagging

Also previously hidden, the ‘shrink URLs’ option is now an automatic function, with Twitter using its t.co shortening service on the fly. When tweets are displayed, the t.co link is replaced by an abbreviated version of the destination URL, making it easier to spot where people would like to send you should you click on their links.

All this is great. They are gradual refinements that shows that great iPhone design eschews gimmicks in favour of straightforward, simple and practical application.

If only the rest of the app followed the same rules. I’m going to set aside the repeated crashing I had with version 3.3.0 – when it comes to apps that repeatedly crash on startup, I’ve been there, done that, and feel the developers’ pain – and concentrate on some of my bugbears.

(...)
Read the rest of What Twitter for iPhone 3.3 gets wrong (1,106 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | One comment so far | Tagged with: app, development, iOS, iPhone

The final talk was from Sian Meades, a freelance writer whose own venture, Domestic Sluttery, runs at a profit.

Paid blogging (@SianySianySiany)

• Carrie Bradshaw (Sex and the City) has destroyed the image of the freelance ‘lifestyle’ writer, particularly women
• Other speakers extolled the virtues of self-hosted WordPress over other platforms, especially Blogger/Blogspot. However, Domestic Sluttery runs on Blogger and she would avoid WordPress at all costs (she prefers MovableType)
• It costs $10/year to run – and that’s for the domain name. It is possible on Blogger – but it does take a lot of time to get it working to satisfaction
• In terms of sharing buttons, DS had a Tweet button on all their pages, but Facebook was generating much more traffic without a share button. Adding a Facebook button saw huge traffic increase. Look at your traffic and see what works for you.
• If you’ve found a niche, be comfortable in it. Don’t feel that you have to branch out into other areas (e.g., using the keyword tips from Jason’s presentation) if you don’t want to
• Get into a routine that works. If you write best at midnight in bed with your laptop, write then.
• Bloggers are quite needy – strange beasts that stay away from the public, but at the same time to want grab attention
• There are two types of blog ‘success’: your readership size, and your reputation within your chosen sector. Going after the former won’t necessarily get you the latter
• Blogging can be a lot of fun, and open a lot of unexpected doors. Sian has had trips to the North Pole (in the Arctic Circle, rather than the pub in Greenwich) and an African safari as a direct result of her blogging
• If you build a loyal readership, they will want you to do well. Don’t feel apologetic about your success if/when it happens
• People buy into bloggers as people. If you write on lots of different, even controversial, themes, people will find your writing on those subjects. They might as well find them on your personal blog, where you can be in control of how you are perceived.
• If people have an issue with you as a writer, they won’t be the sort of people likely to work with you anyway
• Other bloggers will be better than you. Don’t worry. Don’t be threatened. Use it as an inspiration to improve.
• You make all the decisions about what you blog. If it’s not working for you, do something different, whether it’s branching out into new topics, etc.
• Domestic Sluttery makes money in a number of ways:
  • display advertising, through Handpicked Media’s ad sales network – paid for on a per-impression (CPM) basis
  • directly managed display advertising, charged for on a fixed monthly rate
  • Affiliate links, using Skimlinks
• If taking direct sales, working with small companies can be beneficial (but may need hand holding in terms of working with bloggers) [And, in my experience, in terms of the concept of web advertising in general]
• Affiliate links don’t make a living wage – display advertising does

And with that, we went off to the pub. I hope these four summaries have been useful for the people who weren’t able to make the event. The next Twespians meetup (a social event rather than a seminar evening)  is currently scheduled for March 15 – keep an eye on the Twespians website for details, or follow @Twespians on Twitter.

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: blogging, profit, twespians

Because the elements below are general rules of thumb, I found the individual points tend to overlap quite a bit. They are all branches of the single point: Don’t be a dick on the internet.

Update: Laura has written up her own notes (with the slides she used) on her own blog.

A blogger code of honour (@lauratosney)

• Recent conflicts and disagreements between journalists, critics, bloggers, etc., with regard to theatre bloggers are neither new nor unique to this sector. Friction between companies, traditional media and social media has existed in other sectors too (here, she cites issues in the fashion blogging world)
• What can help mend bridges, and build new ones, is an ongoing code of honour. This is not (self-)censorship, or a harsh ruleset, just a way to get along.

Transparency

Be transparent. If you’re writing a blog post after having seen a preview, say as much (rather than citing it as a ‘review’).

I’d also suggest that if you have been given tickets, say who gave them to you. If you paid for your tickets, say so. Organisations that work with bloggers will appreciate the shout out, and your readers will have all the facts when deciding how much to trust your word – the less transparent you are, the harder it will be for them to trust you.

Offer a right of reply

When writing news stories, journalists will go to people involved in the stories for comment. For blogs, we often assume that leaving comments open will be enough – but not everybody wants to respond in a public forum like  that. To offer a right to reply properly requires thought.

Make it easy for people to find a way to contact you privately, either via a contact form on your website or by publishing an email address.

I’d also add:

• Go for the contact form option if you can. If you include email addresses on your web pages, they’ll get ‘harvested’ by spammers.
• If you get things wrong, make your corrections as quickly as possible. If somebody points out an error in a comment, publicly thank them (and consider crediting them in the amended copy if appropriate)

(...)
Read the rest of A blogger code of honour? #Twespians bloggers’ seminar (part 3 of 4) (307 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: blogging, twespians

Six tips for great SEO (@shadowdaddy)

SEO is about building readership, allowing new readers to find your content more easily by making your site show up higher in search engine results. It helps you avoid blogging into a vacuum.

The keys to SEO are:

• Quality content
• Inbound links
• A good site structure (which common blog platforms help with)
• Building a buzz – blogs are inherently social in nature, and about creating a conversation

Quality content is vital. There’s a reason why it’s top of the list above – all the semantic HTML in the world won’t help you if your content is rubbish. You’ll attract occasional visitors, but the only way they’ll stick around is if they enjoy reading your blog.

• Traffic for blogs is cyclical, especially if you’re talking about current issues or reviewing shows. You will need to keep creating content to build an audience
• Reviews of touring shows can retain interest longer term than shorter ones

Any incentive for bloggers to talk about regional and touring theatre is okay in my book. You’ll also find that long running West End shows can also generate traffic, but you’ll be competing against many, many other content sources.

• Conversion for commercial websites = revenue. Conversion for bloggers = more readers & comments + status in a wider context. Both can lead to money w/ advertising, etc. in the long run

Tip 1: Get the tech right

• This includes the right HTML metadata, from page title and descriptions, to well structured URLs and good links
• Most blogging platforms go a long way to doing the heavy lifting for you
• The words that are clickable in your links count for a lot. Making “Read my review of [title of show]” works far better than “click here”
• When displaying page titles in search results, Google truncates them after 67 characters. So keep them short and to the point (and, if possible, put your site name at the end of your title rathe than the beginning)
• Link back from your new blog posts to relevant old ones. Helps search engines traverse your blog and indicates that your older content is still relevant. Link out to other people as much as you can, too — they’ll be able to tell, and hopefully link back. And it builds out your network
• Be careful with tagging your posts. Can be very useful, but make sure that clickable tag links lead to archives of your content rather than aggregated content from other users of your hosted platform (e.g., WordPress.com)
• Some hosting platforms ‘fix’ problems that you need to be aware of if you’re self-hosting – e.g., if example.com, www.example.com and www.example.com/index.html display the same content under three URLs, search engines won’t know which to consider the real one

Tip 2: Get in early

• The most contentious area when it comes to blogging about theatre getting your review up early (especially before the main print publications) can get you high traffic levels, but there are ethical issues re. press nights, etc.
• People will disagree about whether the print critics should have gone en masse to review Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark even though its press night had been pushed back again
• One possibility which can provide a better traffic/ethical balance:
  1. Write a preview post with some information (e.g., casting news, etc)
  2. Once you’ve seen the show, write a quick review ASAP
  3. Update with a full, considered review
  4. Make sure that your older posts get updated with a link to your most up-to-date review

Tip 3: Create controversy

• Strong opinions get people talking (e.g., the West End Whingers)

This isn’t really SEO, although if people start linking to your coverage then those inbound links will help you. Writing deliberately provocative posts purely as ‘link bait’ can damage your personal brand, so be careful

Tip 4: Create longer-life topics based on reader research

• Think outside just reviewing
• Google’s AdWords keyword adviser and Search Insights tools can help show you what sort of phrases people are using to search for content in your field. These should inspire you to think about areas where you can provide useful information

Tip 5: Promote it

• Think about auto-posting to Facebook, Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr, etc.
• Provide tools to help your readers promote your content to their friends, e.g., Tweet Button, Facebook Like button.
• FB’s Like button has just changed to give you greater control over how your posts appear on people’s walls. Greg Finn’s optimisation tips at SearchEngineLand can be useful here (expect to see blog Facebook button plugins updated to make this easier for non-techies)

Tip 6: Analyse your readers’ habits

• Hosted platforms offer some analytics, and/or you can use Google Analytics
• Can show you what keywords people are using to find you, what pages are providing the interest, etc.
• Google’s webmaster tools will also help – can show you how your site places in the searches people are using

All of this is important, but it should be your guide, not keep you on a leash. Write about what interests you, and worry less about your readers want to read — but keep an eye on which terminology you use that can make your content easier to find

Coming in Part 3, Laura Tosney’s common sense ‘code of honour’ for theatre bloggers, and in Part 4, blogging for profit…

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: blogging, SEO, tips, twespians

The theme for the evening was ‘theatre blogging’. Unfortunately, struggles in finding a venue for the serious part meant that this event had to be rescheduled at fairly short notice, so attendance was well down on the initial estimates. However, the four short sessions are potentially interesting to a number of people, so my notes (based on the live tweeting I was doing while others were listening more intently), along with some of my own commentary in italics, are below. (Parts 2 to 4 will follow)

Session 1: The many faces of blogging (@lurkmoophy)

• Bloggers are becoming as important as ‘traditional’ press in terms of media.
• Why blog? Amplification of voice, community, inspiration, shared learning, expanding horizons, etc.
• Differing opinions of theatre bloggers from mainstream critics: “Bloggers don’t have the restraints theatre critics do” (Gardner) vs. “I’m not aware of bloggers championing the important, the new or the unexpected” (Coveney).

Personally I think it’s a bit rich for press critics to imply that they’re the only ones who promote new work. Just as theatre bloggers are incredibly diverse in what they cover rather than being a homogenous mass, many critics rarely go outside the narrow confines of the National and the West End, while others cast their net far wider…

• Theatre bloggers can broadly be split into three groups: reviewers, those giving opinion & commentary, and theatre companies (with some having a foot in two or three groups rather than just one)
• Some self-marketing tips: when you’ve posted a new blog entry, as well as publicising links on your Facebook and Twitter feeds, consider a Posterous and/or Tumblr account too. No need to post the whole thing – a short summary and a link will help.
• If reviewing, absolutely essential that the title of the show and the venue appears in your HTML page title – and ideally the word “review”, too
• Good semantic markup will help a lot. Not only using <h1>, <h2>, etc., for headings, but microformats, RDFa markup and/or HTML5 microdata. Google’s Rich Snippets – which provide more detailed, structured information in the basic search results – use such markup to discover and track structured information. See Luke’s article on Ubelly.com – “An Introduction to RDFa and the semantic web”

This is a huge subject in itself and is one for the people who enjoy getting their HTML hands dirty. In brief, all three systems referenced above are ways to give search engines additional context for the text you have on your page, from “this string of numbers is a phone number” to “I am giving this production a rating of 4 out of 5″. Microformats markup text using CSS class names, RDFa uses XML attributes, while HTML5 has defined specific new attributes to hold contextual information in a structured way.

• Where you host your blog can help or harm your credibility. A blog that is created as a subdomain of blogspot.com or wordpress.com can have a harder time gaining credibility than one that has its own domain name
• When going for a design, nice and/or simple always works best
• Build a network by intelligently commenting on other people’s blogs

These days, your site will most likely not get any boost to its ranking in search engines purely as a result of you linking to it from your comments elsewhere (so don’t indulge in comment spam!). But those comments will help other humans find your blog, and if they then link to it, those links will help your ranking

• Be consistent. Consider making yourself a writing template for your reviews – e.g., opening paragraph of context, two paras of talking about the cast, two paras on your personal opinion, conclusion. Your readers will expect a consistency of tone and structure

If you do go for a template approach like this, it goes without saying it should be one that works for you. If nothing else, giving yourself a word count to work to, and relentlessly subediting your work until it fits that word count, will help your writing get much tighter

• An editor is essential. If you can’t get somebody else to look over your work, you’ll have to wear that hat as well. It can be easier to switch roles if you take a break of half an hour or more between writing your work and then editing it.
• If you want to be a thought leader in your field, blogging can be extremely useful. For example, @MarcusRomer of Pilot Theatre has done this very effectively
• For theatre companies, blogging tends to be a value add rather than a solution in its own right. It probably won’t drive ticket sales on its own, but can support other networks and reinforce existing marketing messages
• Place some thought as to what blogging platform is best for you.
  • Blogger possibly easiest (and tends to rank highly in Google, which owns it), but is the most limited
  • WordPress.com blogs have more modern look, you get more features in the back end, and the option of premium upgrades (although these can mount up)
  • Self-hosted WordPress-powered blogs offer immense flexibility, can be a fully-fledged CMS if need be, but can be a lot more work as you do need to know what you’re doing
  • Posterous and Tumblr have great organic search & virality, but their simplicity can be a downside. They work well as supplements to more fully-functioned blogs
• When it comes to social media, don’t just join a network (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) because you can. Go where your existing & potential audience is
• Twitter is for communication & conversation rather than just pushing out notifications. Obey the 80/20 rule – spend 80% of the time conversing & engaging, and people will accept the other 20% being self-promotion
• Some tools for Twitter include Tweetdeck for managing & monitoring multiple accounts, CoTweet for allowing multiple people access to the same accounts, The Archivist for analysing brand performance, and bit.ly for tracking links and clickthroughs

Session 2 was primarily about SEO, but overlapped with the above points in several places. But that’s for another post. (Update: read part 2, Six tips for great SEO)

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | One comment so far | Tagged with: blogging, notes, seminar, twespians

As with any top 100 list (e.g., The MediaGuardian 100, or The Stage 100) there’s inevitably a minor flurry of people huffing and puffing about why so-and-so is in the list and they’re not, or why person A is higher than person B. For the most part, the rankings seem to be based upon PeerIndex’s algorithmic evaluation of how each tweeter interacts with their followers, ensuring that the metrics are a little bit more intelligent than just how many followers you have.

Algorithms which take into account engagement rather than link acquisition will always be more useful. And they can act as a source of encouragement, too: demonstrate to people that they will find Twitter more useful not by accumulating more followers, but by entering discourse with the ones you have, and Twitter will be more valuable for everyone.

But generally, the scope of the i’s list, of “all UK Twitter users”, is ultimately too broad to be of any particular value — except, perhaps, to the newspaper itself (some short term publicity) and those who made the cut (some brief ego-plumping). What’s more important for your average Twitter user is connecting with people that matter to them — and I’m not sure that there are many people for whom “based in the UK” is the only criterion for relevance.

PeerIndex’s pages do seem to be rather more intelligent than some of the other Twitter analysis tools I’ve seen. It does at least attempt to quantify not only an overall score for your Twitter account, but tries to identify whether you’re stronger in arts & entertainment coverage than in politics, for example. But still, the sort of metrics PeerIndex provides are better for judging how you are tweeting — and how you could be doing better in terms of engaging with those who follow you — than working out who is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than anybody else.

© Scott Matthewman, 2011. | Permalink | One comment so far | Tagged with: PeerIndex, ranking, The i, The Stage 100, Twitter

The bulk of each issue consisted of a number of short strips, reprinted from various US and European sources, which included some characters who were born from Mickey Mouse’s back catalgoue of shorts from 1929′s Plane Crazy onwards. As a result, the likes of Clara Cluck, Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow were characters that I knew well. They may not have been as close to my heart as the likes of Mickey, Pluto, Donald and Goofy, but they were never far away.

As far as the public at large goes, though, I suspect that many of the peripheral characters have long since been forgotten. And that’s part of the premise of the new Nintendo Wii game, Disney Epic Mickey (Wii). (...)
Read the rest of Disney Epic Mickey, Nintendo Wii (520 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: Disney, game, Mickey Mouse, Nintendo Wii, review

We have asked a range of industry experts to propose actors – from any era, any country, male or female – who they think deserve the accolade of being named the greatest theatrical performer of all time. Their nominations have resulted in a shortlist of ten being drawn up, and we are opening votes to the general public.

From now until the beginning of December, we’ll be profiling each of the ten shortlisted actors in the paper each week, and adding more content to the website throughout.

At its heart, the entire site is driven by WordPress 3.0 and the page design is based upon the enormously extensible Hybrid theme framework.

With Hybrid, as with the (non-free) Thesis theme that I use on this blog, the theme makes extensive use of WordPress ‘hooks’ – a series of callback points that get referenced at particular points on the template page. Most WordPress templates use a few callbacks defined in the WordPress core, but then create brand new templates for the home page, for pages hosting individual posts, for archive pages, and so on. In contrast, Hybrid provides a huge array of template pages, each of which is highly structured to allow CSS to address nearly everything really easily. In addition, the number of the callback hooks that the framework adds is huge, meaning that it’s possible to supplement the framework with additional code without having to rewrite whole template pages.

Using Hybrid saved so much time, although better documentation (always a bugbear with open source software where the developers have to double up as the technical writers) would have cut down development time even more.

The site also uses a jQuery plugin called jCarousel to create the rotating banners across the top of each page. After trying a few different carousel options, this one seemed to provide the greatest versatility with the least amount of additional markup.

The only non-Wordpress native elements involve the voting mechanism, which was built by The Stage’s former web developer James Squires (and, after James moved jobs a couple of weeks ago, completed by Aaron Brown). This allows votes to be validated by email address or using a Facebook account, using code built in-house (we’ve expanded WordPress’s built-in commenting features to Facebook accounts using Simple Facebook Connect).

The final technical bit is the web font we are using for our body text on browsers that support custom fonts. We’re using Old Standard TT via Google’s Font API, which gives us a typeface look that’s more similar to the typeface we use in print than the ‘websafe’ Georgia.

In its first few hours since it launched, discussions on Twitter and the like have concentrated on who’s not in the list (and, of those who are, the emphasis on 20th and 21st century actors from the British Isles). Over the course of the whole campaign, I hope that discussion will widen out into what makes a great actor stand out from a good one.

Visit the site now at www.thestage.co.uk/greatestactor.

© Scott Matthewman, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: hybrid, web design, Wordpress

Hello, hive-mind. What are your top 5 must-have WordPress plugins?

I’ve tried out several plugins since moving this blog to WordPress, so coming up with possible suggestions wasn’t difficult. Keeping it to five was, as was deciding on an order for them. I’m not sure the order I eventually went with was the correct one, though, so here are my top 5 plugins, presented in alphabetical order.

NB: Not all the plugins mentioned below are, at time of writing, attested by their authors to work with WordPress 3.0, the most recent version. As with any software, use is at your own risk: all I can say is that they work with my WordPress install.

Custom Post Limits

I first blogged about this plugin almost exactly a year ago, but it deserves another outing. The plugin allows you to fine tune any page where WordPress would normally show multiple blog posts, be it the main index page, monthly archives, lists of posts tagged with a certain phrase, etc.

With the default WordPress installation, all such pages must show the same number of posts, which isn’t always helpful. I’m no longer using the template that initially made me start using this plugin, but it remains in use because it offers setting that should, quite frankly, be a standard WordPress feature.

Google XML Sitemaps

One of the best ways of ensuring that search engines including (but not limited to) Google can find all of your pages, and not just the ones linked from your home page, is the use of an XML Sitemap. This is a file that effectively lists all the unique URLs that exist on your blog, and can also give hints as to which ones you consider the most important, and which ones the search engine spider can poll for changes less frequently.

While most modern WordPress themes are designed well enough to include some best practice methods of search engine optimization (SEO), having an automatically-updated sitemap can really help ensure your posts get the best chance of being indexed accurately.

Redirection

As its name implies, the Redirection plugin can help you implement page redirects. This can be especially useful if you’ve previously run your blog with different software that used different URL building schemes, for example.

If anybody follows a link from a third party website to an out-of-date URL on your blog, normally they would see an error page (in the parlance of the HTTP specification used by web browsers, the status code of the error is number 404). This plugin allows you to intercept that error before it’s shown to the user, and instead ask their browser to redirect to the new, more appropriate location.

As a result, your readers are happier, search engines (which include the number of successful links coming into your site as part of their ranking algorithms) are happier. It’s a win-win.

The user interface of this plugin isn’t the greatest, to be honest, but once it’s set up correctly you will rarely need to access it too often. It’s worth keeping an eye on the logs it creates to check that you haven’t missed any pages, though.

Theme Test Drive

Everybody wants a little bit of individuality for their blog. Finding the right visual theme can sometimes be the most daunting part of setting up a WordPress blog. While WordPress 3 makes it easy to switch between radically different themes, the last thing you want to do is to have your audience on the web watch you try out theme after theme until you find the one that fits.

Theme Test Drive allows you to apply your new theme so that only you can see it. Regular visitors to your set will continue to see the old theme until you’re ready to switch.

It’s the WordPress equivalent of having a fitting room to try on new clothes, rather than having to strip down and parade about in your undies in front of the other shoppers. Which is just as unpleasant for them as it is for you. (Don’t ask me how I know.)

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

Back in August 2009, I recommended a plugin that allowed you to automatically build a list of related blog posts. This one’s better. The algorithm takes more of the blog’s content into account, it allows for extra customisation and caching if you need it, and can include the related links in your blog’s RSS feed if you want it to.

If you’re logged in as an administrator and view your blog posts while this plugin is switched on, each of the recommended links also displays a relevance score. In theory, this can help you identify if you need to use a cut-off value to eliminate links to posts which aren’t quite as relevant as you’d like. In practice, I’ve found that YARPP is reliable enough not to need any tweaking at all.

© Scott Matthewman, 2010. | Permalink | One comment so far | Tagged with: Google, plugin, related posts, SEO, sitemaps, theme, Wordpress

Midweek, The Stage Jobs & Auditions was selected as a “staff favourite” on the UK App Store, which meant that it got a slot on the App Store main page within iTunes, albeit one well below the fold. Still, that certainly contributed to an increased number of downloads and a peak of number 3 in the “free apps” version of the Business apps chart.

At least, I thought it was a peak…

(...)
Read the rest of My first iPhone app, a week in (380 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: app, auditions, development, iPhone, jobs, The Stage

Over the weekend, my first iPhone app went live on the App Store. A free download, it’s a simple little app that allows users to browse The Stage’s jobs and auditions that are advertised online (and, in most cases, also in our weekly print edition).

The Stage Jobs and Auditions app (which we call just Stage Jobs for short) is free to download and use (save for your own 3G/internet connection costs). It briefly hit number 3 in iTunes’ chart of free business apps, which probably says more about the small number of downloads in that category than any soaraway success.

The bulk of the app takes the data from The Stage’s recruitment section, served up as XML via a private API (thanks to our web developer James, who implemented the server side of the API). This is converted to the iPhone’s standard drill-down format of clickable lists which, when clicked, slide off to the left to reveal more information – either a list of subcategories, a list of adverts, or the advert detail itself.

Going from proof of concept to a workable prototype was remarkably quick – a matter of weeks – thanks to a few things.

(...)
Read the rest of My first iPhone app (437 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: app, Apple, auditions, development, iPhone, jobs, The Stage, Three20

That latter experiment didn’t really work for me, because it involved characters I did not know talking to each other about a crime case I knew even less. As such it proved hard to get drawn in.

And I thought the online Romeo and Juliet, punningly entitled Such Tweet Sorrow, might actually suffer a reverse problem. The story of Verona’s two houses both alike in dignity is so well known that it couldn’t possibly work.

Not for the first time, I was incredibly wrong. Such Tweet Sorrow (aka @Such_Tweet) is an utterly compelling retelling. But the kicker is that for it to work, you have to have it playing alongside your existing Twitter conversations. If you dip in via the official website, it just doesn’t work.

You may have heard of site-specific theatre, a “performance which can only be done in a particular place or site”. Such Tweet Sorrow is the first, truly successful, online version – website-specific theatre.

(...)
Read the rest of Such Tweet Sorrow: website-specific theatre that works (580 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: drama, Fiction, Shakespeare, social networking, Theatre, Twitter

I saw the very first preview — breaking set automation and all — as the guest of a friend. At the time, I wasn’t particularly impressed and tweeted as much, in rather scatalogical terms that amused my friends – which is what it was meant to do. Unfortunately, that single tweet was done via a phone whose battery has been totally erratic over the last few weeks, and no sooner had I sent that than everything went dead and I had no chance to elaborate further on the night. However, the following morning I did discuss with my friends what my misgivings were, all the while conscious that, as a preview, there was scope to tweak some aspects of the production and fix others.

Unbeknownst to me, that tweet was being dissected on the message boards of another theatrical website — and as such, by people who were deprived of the context of my Twitter stream. It’s important to remember, I think, that individual posts on Twitter aren’t discrete, but part of a larger, longer, multi-threaded conversation that frequently heads off and continues on other websites or (gasp) the real world.

As it is, my overall impression of Love Never Dies is somewhat more diverse than a single tweet probably suggests. The Daily Mail, however, rang me earlier today to check that I had actually written the aforementioned tweet, so it may be mentioned in the national press tomorrow morning. Frankly, there are more influential and worthier people whose opinions matter more than mine, so quite what the Mail is doing sniffing around my Twitter stream I’m not too sure. Whatever they say, though, tomorrow’s podcast should demonstrate that my actual opinions are more well-rounded and thorough than a single, post-preview, tweet that gets repeated out of context would suggest.

[ad#468x60 for within articles]

UPDATE: The aforementioned podcast is now online as a streaming MP3 as well as available as an ‘enhanced’ podcast via the iTunes Podcast Directory. I’ve also – a little warily – reopened my Twitter feed.

Closing my Twitter feed didn’t stop the Daily Mail misrepresenting my eight-word tweet as a ‘review’, nor did it stop one rather over-hopeful individual attempt to start a campaign to have me sacked (wasn’t going to happen, but you’ve got to his admire his chutzpah). It did, however, help ensure that today, I was able to communicate with my usual Twitter friends in my usual Twitter style without worrying what tabloid hacks may misrepresent as ‘news’.

© Scott Matthewman, 2010. | Permalink | 2 comments so far | Tagged with: Love Never Dies, Theatre, Twitter

Thankfully, the Independent on Sunday puts ‘editor-at-large’ Janet Street Porter’s column online, so we can read it for the cost of what it’s worth — approximately nothing.

I don’t suppose we can blame Street-Porter for the startlingly unoriginal headline, Twitter ye not, for it will not change the world. I mean, it only shows a healthy respect for the oeuvre of Frankie Howerd by the subeditors’ desk, albeit a respect that others have shown before them. However, the resulting spew of words can only be put down to her.

It takes 730 words for Street-Porter to demonstrate that she has no idea what she’s talking about when it comes to internet messaging service Twitter.

If I want to know whether a show is worth going to at the Edinburgh Festival, or if Bonnie Prince Billy’s latest album is worth buying, I certainly don’t want a 140-character Twitter; I want an intelligent review written in real sentences, not some bastard lingo that’s the ugly love-child of texting and abbreviations.

We can do that. For the Fringe, The Stage is providing notifications of each one of its 350+ reviews through the @EdinburghStage account. Each review is, as Street-Porter requires, intelligently written by one of our six full-time (or a couple of additional, part-time) festival reviewers. The Twitter notification consists of the name of the production, its location and a link to the full review. If there’s room, we also include a short summary of the review but nobody’s under any illusion that this is the review in its entirety.

Interestingly, teenagers have already sussed Twitter is crap and aren’t taking it up. According to a Nielsen survey, only 16 per cent of the people twittering are under 25, while a whopping 64 per cent are between 25 and 54. The largest group of users are aged 35 to 49 – and that’s enough to deter the young. The use of social networking is already dropping among teenagers as the number of 25-34 year-olds using sites such as Facebook increases. In fact, ITV might have sold Friends Reunited in the nick of time, because at this rate the only people trying to meet up via websites like it will be so middle-aged, dreary and dull that no one will bother logging on.

This is the same Janet Street-Porter who, five years ago, was saying Yah-boo to the youth cult:

For a long time now I’ve been writing that this country’s obsession with youth is ludicrous, when it’s the crumblies who have all the power, the disposable income and the ability to vote Labour in or out at the next election.

“Yes, this obsession with youth is disgraceful. Except when I can use it to justify whatever conclusion I’ve decided I need to come to in order to fill this week’s page of newsprint.”

Back to today’s article:

Twitter panders to all that is shallow and narcissistic in our society, reducing lives and experiences (like childbirth and death) to missives that last even less than the average British male’s attempts at foreplay.

“You see what I did there? A pop at masculinity, by implying every man’s bad in bed, just to prove a point about a service I don’t really understand. What’s that you say? By doing so, I’m being as shallow as I imply Twitter is? The very idea!”

The closing sentiment of Street-Porter’s diatribe really takes the biscuit.

It makes me angry that we’re so keen to stop talking in sentences, and are swapping having real conversations for knee-jerk reactions. If this is the future for politics, we’re in trouble.

Forgetting, of course, that Twitter is a conversational tool, whose component elements are limited to 140 characters. Those elements can then be built upon to build greater conversations, either on Twitter or diverging off onto blogs, message boards or the real world.

The knee-jerk, of course, is the bread and butter of the newspaper columnist, as shown here. And in an environment where journalists are paid by the word, brevity is far from being the soul of wit: it becomes the enemy of the purse.

To paraphrase Street-Porter herself, if columnists like her are the future for print journalism, no wonder it’s in trouble.

© Scott Matthewman, 2009. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: columnists, Janet Street-Porter, journalism, newspapers, The Independent, Twitter

WordPress is a great blogging platform. And because it’s built on PHP, it’s possible to include lots of dynamic code that gets evaluated and run whenever one of your website’s readers loads a page.

Too many such dynamic elements, though, and it can seriously degrade your site’s performance, especially if those elements require complex database access. A case in point is any plugin that calculates related posts ‘on the fly’. The more posts your blog has, the longer any such calculation would take. And given that every reader will be shown the same related posts information, recalculating that information on every page view doesn’t make much sense.

A caching plugin (for example, WP-SuperCache) would help, but it makes more sense to maintain the related posts links in the database, and only recalculate the network of links when posts are created or edited.

That’s the intention behind Efficient Related Posts. Every time you create a blog post, the plugin will store links to other posts — so when you view the post page, no expensive recalculations have to be made.

Of course, if you calculated related posts only for new posts, the only links that would be created would end up going to older posts. Efficient Related Posts gets round that problem by selectively recalculating other posts’ links too. So if you create post A and the plugin determines that it’s related to posts B, C and D, those three posts’ related links will get re-evaluated.

In a blog with thousands of entries, there’s a possibility that the evaluation loop could cause some serious delays. At least by containing those delays to the admin side, your readers will gain the benefit of the related links without any delays in their preparation.

© Scott Matthewman, 2009. | Permalink | One comment so far | Tagged with: plugin, related posts, Wordpress

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our “solution” to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we’ve received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

– Jeff Bezos, via Simon Willison

© Scott Matthewman, 2009. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: amazon, apology, Jeff Bezos, public relations, Simon Willison

Anyway, there are so many plugins for WordPress that it’s often hard to know which will serve your needs the best.

One that I’ve just implemented is really helpful: Custom Post Limits, written by Scott Reilly. (...)
Read the rest of WordPress Wednesday: Custom Post Limits (256 words)

© Scott Matthewman, 2009. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: archives, blog, coffee2code, custom post limits, plugin, Scott Reilly, Wordpress

They have chosen not to publish that letter, but instead have included some discussion of the matter in their regular Corrections & Clarifications column:

A G2 article called the censorship from Twitter of the hashtag (equivalent to a subject line) “Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy” the worst outrage against freedom of expression ever. We should have noted the explanation provided by Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, for the problem users encountered searching for #MrsSlocombesPussy: a programming bug means that Twitter’s search function does not work on hashtagged words of more than 16 characters. MrsSlocombesPussy is 17 (The strange case of Mrs Slocombe’s vanishing pussy, 8 June, page 15).

Note the wording “We should have noted…”, which implies that mentioning Biz Stone’s comments in Jeffries’ column would have made everything alright. In truth, the whole premise of Jeffries’ piece is flawed, and consequently the whole piece ends up being a work of fiction. There was no intervention from Twitter, there is no censorship issue, and there never has been.

What’s more, currently the article is still online in its original form: no mention is made of the correction. And links to the article are still being cited on Twitter as an example of American prudery. (see update 2 below)

Hopefully that’s just an oversight, and Jeffries’ piece of nonsense will either be removed, or have a disclaimer placed on it that’s so large it makes it clear that the content can’t be trusted.

Update: The Guardian’s Kevin Anderson, writing in today’s Technology section, gets it right.

Update 2: As of 10.30am on Thursday, July 9, Jeffries’ article is now headed by the correction.

© Scott Matthewman, 2009. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: Are You Being Served?, Mollie Sugden, mrsslocombespussy, Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, Twitter

Stuart Jeffries’ book about television nostalgia, Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy, is a great read. And so it’s really disappointing when he gets it so, so wrong.

After the sad passing of Mollie Sugden, best known for her role as Mrs. Slocombe in 1970s TV sitcom Are You Being Served?, a number of people paid tribute on Twitter by adding a ‘hashtag’ of #mrsslocombespussy to their tweets. For the non Twitter-literate, a hashtag is a word preceded by a # symbol that, when clicked on, leads to a set of search results of all the public tweets mentioning that word.

Except, in this case, it didn’t. Follow the hashtag for #mrsslocombespussy and you see “No results found”. As soon as people found out, they were up in arms. Those pesky Americans! Don’t they get our ribald, if mildly offensive, innuendo-laden 1970s humour?

Jeffries himself wrote a piece for today’s Guardian, which appears in the ‘Shortcuts’ section of the G2 supplement. It’s also online with the same headline as in print: The strange case of Mrs Slocomobe’s vanishing pussy.

And then, suddenly, and totally unacceptably, the tweet-grieving, which had brought solace to so many, stopped. Click now on the hashtag now and Twitter replies, “No results.” …

Twitter is run by Americans and those puritanical censors of British culture’s Rabelasian rudery don’t dig double entendres, especially when they relate to a woman’s genitals. As a result, they acted to silence the tweet-grieving.

Except, er, they didn’t. And it was pretty easy to find out why, to be honest. Only on Monday, a British newspaper had included in its media section a breakdown of what actually happened:

But not everyone on Twitter got the joke, with bloggers immediately suspecting foul play. “An odd, vulgar hashtag has appeared [that] obviously doesn’t belong there and doesn’t lead to any actual Twitter conversations,” said a blogger on the social media site mashable.com. “Trending topics are a great way to find out what’s hot in the Twitterverse, but they’re also a haven for malicious hackers and spammers.”

Yet when people tried to search for the topic #mrsslocombespussy on Twitter, it generated zero results, leading to suspicions that it had been censored or filtered out. Not so, said Twitter’s co-founder, Biz Stone, who blamed its disappearance on a bug. “We don’t filter out offensive content from search,” Stone told appscout.com. “There’s a bug involving hashtagged words with more than 16 characters. If you search for the same word or phrase without the hashtag you would see it in results.”

So it was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy. Which was somehow entirely appropriate – Mrs Slocombe’s pussy falling foul of a cock-up. They could write that into a new show.

(My emphasis). And indeed, he’s right: If you search for MrsSlocombesPussy without the preceding hash symbol, all the results come up. Which, sadly, currently includes rather a lot of people complaining about censorship that doesn’t exist, as a result of being fired up by Stuart Jeffries’ inaccurate article.

If Jeffries — or his editor — had just read that piece including Stone’s comments, he could have been saved an awful lot of embarrassment. It shouldn’t have been too difficult: after all, Monday’s media piece appeared in — yes, you’ve guessed it — the Guardian.

Update: Things have moved on — but not by much

Update 2: Another article from the Guardian — thankfully this one gets it right (by repeating Monday’s factually accurate version of events)

© Scott Matthewman, 2009. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: Are You Being Served?, Hashtags, Mollie Sugden, mrsslocombespussy, Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, Twitter

Maybe I’ll do something new with this place. In time.

For now, on the subject of expiration, I’m linking to this comment at the base of a post about Rails’ different caching methods, and their expiration techniques.

One very useful way to avoid the dog pile is to expire behind. Similar to a write behind cache, on checking a ttl and finding the content expired, still serve up the stale content for that request, but also asynchronously start rebuilding the content via a queue/background worker. If you randomize your ttl’s a bit this results in very even system load.

To me, this makes great sense, especially in the context of an application I’m working on at the moment. So I’m linking it here not so much so I can find it again, but in the hope that the concept’ll permeate into my subconscious as I’m coding.

© Scott Matthewman, 2008. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: action cache, cache, fragment cache, rails, ruby, ttl

Given the frequency and similarity of the referring URLs for each request, I think I’m probably safe in guessing that the IP addresses are being spoofed.

I just wish I knew why… All the queries are directed to one page, and Akismet’s spam filters aren’t picking up any unusual commenting activity on there.

The only other thing I can think of is that someone may be attempting some form of click fraud activity on the CPC ads on that page. For as long as that remains an option, then for obvious reasons I won’t divulge which page is under attack (and through which search keywords).

© Scott Matthewman, 2007. | Permalink | No comments yet | Tagged with: analytics, click fraud, Computing, IP spoofing, referrer, spam, url, web traffic