Following Saturday's mention of the Orange Animals Balloonacy I've now signed up for my own balloon, you can follow its travails/travels here. If you seee it come past your site, please give it a wave!

I ought to file this under "Odd, but strangely compelling".

So I'm balloon racing for Orange, if you look at the bottom right of the page you should see a small orange balloon bobbing around (click on it if you dare), tip of the hat to Tom's site for pointing me towards this balloonacy.

What does this mean? Possibly some more traffic to the site, and it's something suitably silly so I like it. So, for the newcomers, welcome (have you seen the wiki?), and for the regulars, yeah I've sold out (again) don't panic, it's short term and normal (shoddy) service will remain in place. Enjoy!

I'm not entirely sure whether I should post this in the widgets category, but given that there is a widget involved, I guess it's as good a place as any. As an aside, I suppose that's why folksonomies are so popular, as there's little angst about choosing the perfect single category, you can just shotgun all the selections that are close enough.

Today's widget is for the Techdirt Insight Community, of which I happen to be a member. The Techdirt Insight Community (TIC) is an invited community of experts, who currently provide analysis and feedback on a competitive basis on a number of submitted cases. I find the competitive aspect interesting, and approaching the cases in a serious and analytical manner certainly appears to be the most successful approach.

Today's news of an alliance with Thomson Financial, allowing Techdirt to distribute research material from the Techdirt Insight Community (including TIC's new Smart Dossiers) through Thomson's leading research and analysis platform is a big step forward for TIC. Providing another route to market for TIC's data, and potentially more interest in the entire TIC programme.

I was amused and interested by Cam's recent G'Day World where he chats with Aussie entrepreneur Bronwen Clune.

Bronwen runs Norg Media who have a chunk of sites in style that I just love - user generated news. Think Digg, Slashdot, Newsvine, Unrumor, Techmeme, Norg is up there with them. Norg's niche is people powered local news, Australian local news at that. So they're in an ideal niche for mobile interactivity, people reporting on the spot with videos, pictures and stories direct from their mobile devices.

However, they don't currently have a mobile version, Bronwen mentions that it's something they're working heavily on for this year. But, until then here's the Mowser-powered versions of Norg for Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. These look like a great interim solution until Norg themselves are ready to rock out their mobile version.

I'd suggest that Norg have a good look at Mowser's publisher FAQ, as it would be trivial for them to let Mowser to do 99% of the heavy lifting for their mobile content adaptation, which would leave Norg to focus on just the few best bits they need. Norg use WordPress heavily, so the Mowser WordPress plugin should also be very useful.

It's somewhat ironic that I haven't had a mobile friendly web presence until now, given the primary focus of my blog and wiki; plus, a potential audience of over 2 billion handsets is stupid to pass up. When you consider there are more S60 users than Mac users, the old complaint of "this web site doesn't render nicely in Safari" starts to look rather silly...

So, for now I'm taking the simplistic route - it's not ideal, but for a low traffic personal site, it's quick, easy and does most of what I need. I've got Mowser to do the heavy lifting of crafting an appropriate transcoded version of my content for anyone who visits the mobile version of this site.

Was it difficult to do? Nope, I just followed the Mowser Publisher Faq

Can I use Mowser to make my web site or weblog mobile?
YES! Please! You can even help automate the process by adding headers to your websites (check HeadersOverview for more info) or directing a mobile site to Mowser via its own domain. (DomainRedirect for more info).

In fact the Faq makes it sound quite tough, it just needed one small DNS change (my hosting co did this in minutes), and a couple of small html changes to the headers of a couple of pages (not essential, but useful). If I was a WordPress user, it looks even easier with the Mowser WordPress plugin. What can I say, highly recommended!

Add this to the "it seemed like a good idea at the time" list.

Now perhaps it's down to the way I use Truphone, but for me it's pretty much useless. The idea of the button is that it shows whether my phone can take Truphone calls right now, or whether they'll be forwarded elsewhere (at a possible cost to both parties). There's one fatal flaw in this apparently useful button, I haven't and won't give my Truphone number out, as I don't believe in the concept of me paying to receive calls. So, I only connect the Truphone app to my WiFi when I need to make free international calls, at which I must admit it is very good, with a sound quality that makes Skype look like the toy it is.

If this all makes me sound like some curmugeonly old luddite, then so be it. I'm a big fan of VOIP, but with the cost of voice calls approaching zero there is very little benefit for me (YMMV) in fiddling around and gaining yet another phone number.

Case in point, I have more inclusive minutes every month on my mobile contract than I use, so almost all UK calls to landlines or mobiles are effectively free from my mobile. My landline provider offers free calls to everyone using the same provider, which is 2/3 of my regular calls, and cheap rates otherwise. So going through some hassle to save a very small sum really isn't worth it.

Not the "old" uber-techy blogging via a Jabber bot approach, but something far simpler, good old clipboard copy and paste.

<JimH> heh, there's another blog post, I'll just anonymise the 10-15 lines above
<Russ> Hehehe
<Russ> Oh, by all means, don't need to anonymize me.
<Russ> Hello Jim's Blog!!!
<Russ> Just copy/paste

The rebirth of Russ and Diego as bloggers has reminded me - not that my stats haven't been telling me for a while - that this blog has been crawling along. The posting has been sporadic, and whilst I've been quite happy with the quality of most of the content, the focus and sheer volume of interesting posts hasn't been there. Two or three years ago I was posting at least one item a day every day, it's now slowed to one a week (if you're lucky), sure there used to be more dross, but also more useful nuggets. I suspect the signal to noise ratio was little different, and it was a more interesting read overall.

So, to get back to those heady levels I'm going to re-embrace some of the techniques I used then, and bone up on a few of the strategies in the following guides:

• ProBlogger: 31 Days to Building a Better Blog
• Dive Into Accessibility 30 days to a more accessible web site
• Business Blogs: How to Build A Better Blog
• The Mark Twain Guide to Better Blogging

I suspect the two Mark's are the ones I'm going to take most seriously, I wonder if Mark Twain has joined Google yet? It certainly looks like it...

Returning to the main theme, the most productive technique I used was to have one (just one) large text file in which I wrote all my draft posts. In this file I scribbled short sentences, ideas, and saved links for later use. I have tried other strategies (multiple files, dumping links on delicious, editing on a wiki), but none worked as well for me as one big melting pot. I'll use Unison to keep the file synched on multiple boxes, so I can take notes wherever I happen to be. I'm also going to be jotting down notes on the most interesting stuff I talk about on im or irc as some of that probably deserves a bigger audience.

Something I've had on the wiki for a while is the search box below. It's a swicki from eurekster, and it will find you a load of search results optimised toward Symbian smartphone oriented results. The more searches you guys do, the better it can be trained to return great results.

check out the smartphone swicki at eurekster.com

If you'd like this on your site follow this link to find instructions etc.

Do you watch MobuzzTV? I do, it's one of my favourite vlogs. Anyway they've now made it nice and simple to embed the latest episode on your weblog / home page / whatever; simply add the following line of html and "Bob's your uncle"...

<script src="http://dailybuzz.mobuzz.tv/?embed"></script>

Here it is in action:

Great stuff, it'd be cool to be able to embed a specific show too, I guess that's in the pipeline.

This is the first new category for a while. Here's the logic behind it, I like widgets, buttons, badges etc for blogs, but I also like minimalism. So as a compromise between a stack of the latest shiniest widgets all over the sidebar of my blog (the teenage girl bedroom look), and the Zen purity of tasteful white space, I've decided to dump the widgets I like in this category of the blog. If you feel you need widget overload, fight your way thru this category, otherwise be grateful that the irregular posts here will fall off the front page reasonably quickly.

Enjoy!

This blog will be changing ip address some time tonight/early tomorrow as the splendid folks at JaguarPC are putting this site onto a faster and better connected box, for the princely sum of zero extra bucks!

I ought to praise JaguarPC more often, I pay very little ($8/month) for more bandwidth than I can consume and a fast enough server that offers everything I currently need. Less than 2 beers a month for something that just sits there and works can't be bad, lets see how well the new box goes.

The DNS stuff is all set ready to go, see you on the other side!

There's a fair bit of noise in the blogosphere about the nano-blogging battle between Twitter, Jaiku and Loopnote. Ewan's summary does a good job of rounding up the coverage, and Chris Saad's overview of the 3 services provides some useful background too.

As a user, you might not want to put all your eggs in one basket and use just one service, so your best bet is to mix and match. There's a couple of tutorials on how to use Twitter as your main service and to get it to cross-post to your Jaiku account, here and here, which work simply due to Jaiku's ability to consume RSS feeds, I see this as a big plus for Jaiku - flexibility is good!

Jaiku's extra flexibility appeals to me, their native S60 client is a big draw too, the lack of IM integration is a pain, but I can't believe their website can be flakier than Twitter's...

So taking the leap, how would you cross-post to Twitter from Jaiku? The simple route is RSS, but, Twitter hasn't (yet?) gained native support for RSS import, so your best bet is to use one of the third party services like twitterfeed or rss2twitter. Here's how to do it with twitterfeed:

1. Create a new twitter user at twitter.com (or use your existing one); as this twitter user is going to be the one posting your blog entries, twitterfeed needs to know your twitter username and password to post your Jaiku updates to your twitter account
2. Login to twitterfeed using your OpenID - Don't have an OpenID? Get one free at MyOpenID. AOL, Yahoo! and Livejournal users should find they already have an OpenID anyway
3. Tell twitterfeed the URL for your Jaiku RSS feed, and how often twitterfeed should post to twitter. Your Jaiku RSS feed is easy to find; for instance, Mike Rowehl's can be found at the foot of his Jaiku page as http://mikerowehl.jaiku.com/feed/rss
4. That's it!

Easy enough, no? For instance here's a Twitter user that I set up using twitterfeed which follows the latest Unrumor.com business headlines, it took me longer to create the twitter user than to add the feed.

So I've succumbed to the meme, and joined the Twittering masses. Like Matthew I'm probably the wrong generation, being ancient enough to be Nathan Barley's dad, and experienced enough to remember life before Web 0.0 (shudder).

First thoughts:

• Restraint is a wonderful thing, it's too easy to think of Twitter as IM and fling open the kimono like a dirty mac.
• It's micro-blogging, innit? The whole post-a-phrase is not unlike Gustaf's observations category. Should I integrate my Twitterings onto this blog in a daily summary? The jury's out on that one for now.
• Multiple entry methods are good; web, im, sms, api, pick the ones you want to use.
• It's not very interactive, a few times I've wanted to directly reply to someone else's Twitterings on Twitter, and the direct reply documentation is a little hidden away. I wish I'd spotted that earlier.
• It's too easy to forget that a friend's Twittering is not public, in fact I don't know of an easy way to discern the intended visibility of a friend's comments. Beware.
• IM is Jabber/XMPP - hurrah, sanity! It also means Twitter doesn't suffer from the problems that IMified are suffering with MSN, dead-end locked-in IM systems, just say no.
• There's a few services that use Twitter a little like an aggregator, I'm unsure whether this is a good thing. Although any service that embraces bots has to be good, no?
• OpenID is conspicuous by its absence

So Erik's tagged me with the "Five things you don't know about me" meme, which I'vetracked back to Jeff Pulver via lots of interesting places.

Here goes:

1. I once played in an impromptu game of cricket in the Paris Bourse.
2. I love classic French cuisine, even andouillette and steak tartare.
3. I can order a beer in around 12 different languages.
4. I used to play American football and have caught a pass from Dan Marino.
5. I've never owned a GSM phone that works on 850 MHz (a US only band).

Who's next? I'm tagging these guys - Gustaf, Martin, Ewan, Phil and Diego.

New adventures in Python, well that’s the theory anyway.

I’m experimenting with using Backpack and Nokia’s Lists app for blogging. I’m finding it really useful for both roughing out and finessing posts, and the markup syntax is Textile based which is simple to use. Possibly the best bit is that I can write stuff pretty much anywhere, i.e. if there’s a web browser or my phone to hand I can write.

The only crufty bit currently is publishing the stuff onto my blog, I’m running the pytextile renderer with pyblosxom, so all I’m doing currently is copying and pasting from Backpack to a new file. The next step is to automate this process, so I’ll be lashing up a quick python script which will use the Backpack api to check my Backpack pages for new posts and publish them. That should be straightforward enough, let’s see…

Hurrah, it looks like Bloglines have finally resolved their 301 handling. Also they've announced a Publisher Tools programme to help Bloglines to work better with your blog. It still needs the "publisher" to be a Bloglines user, but it's certainly a start.

Now what about some of their other problems?

Update: The "claim my feed" process is a complete pain in the arse, and I've not managed to get it to work yet despite the required codes appearing in both my feeds and htm. This is not the sort of freedback that Bloglines were after, but I guess it's best they know.

Feet up! has 0 adverts this week.

These are the splendid people currently supporting feetup.org's hosting costs, and Jim's toy and beer budget:

So, what's this entry all about? There's an explanation here about what I'm calling my feed ads and more of my thoughts on adverts can be found in my blogging/adverts category.

Advertise on Feet up! to keep Jim in beer and nice toys.

...and one step back.

The blocking ideas I suggested earlier sounded great at the time, but the "deny from sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org" line really is just a waste of time. If I'd spent more than few seconds working out how DNS Blackhole Lists worked I'd have understood, fortunately I've now got a nice simple Pythonic solution that I'll be publishing shortly.

In the meantime if you've been blocked from reading this site directly, it'll be because you're a spammer (mail, comment or referrer) or just dead unlucky, if it's the latter contact me and we'll see if I can help resolve things.

Nothing earth shattering here, but in a simple move to reduce the level of spam I've been getting on the wiki I've blocked a few sites with Apache's .htaccess file.

It's a "one strike and you're out" approach, any ip address that grabs forbidden files from my robots.txt file, or engages in comment, wiki, or referrer spam will probably be banned; it's my site, I can be as irrational as I like! My inertia and can't-be-arsed factor will affect the results here...

For those of you who also have high can't-be-arsed factors, here's a potted guide to using Apache's order, allow, and deny directives in an .htaccess file for this purpose.

• Open .htaccess in an editor
• Add something like the following lines to block ip address 1.2.3.4

  order allow,deny
  allow from all
  deny from 1.2.3.4
  

• Save .htaccess file
• Done

For testing, try entering your ip address in the deny line; you should get 403 errors when you try to view your pages. To block further ip addresses just add further "deny from n.n.n.n" lines.

For added hilarity and possible unwanted consequences I've also added "deny from sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org" which should block all ip addresses in Spamhaus' sbl and xbl blacklists, I have no idea whether this really works yet; I'll have to track down all the 403's in my access logs and see if I can establish why they appeared. I'm not a huge fan of blacklists, but I've noticed that a number of my regular unwanted customers already appear in this blacklist so it appears to be worth trying out.

In summary, what I've done so far is very trivial to implement, but it requires some manual updating. I'm going to observe how well it works in practise for the next few weeks before automating the process further or abandoning the experiment. I'd like to think it proves to be effective. I don't think it'll be too resource intensive as despite it appearing that every hit will cause a dns lookup, in fact dns does a lot of caching and I suspect my local dns server will handle 90% or more of the requests.