:: Aletheia ::
Blogging Craig's mental space...

Another brief post -- let the pictures speak for themselves...



I do seem to be losing a fair bit of quality on google video though. Any thoughts?

This is my first attempt at animating some pictures and I guess it makes up for not having a video camera in a way.

320 pics went into this one and I'm thinking about putting some more together. Jaclyn's tutorial inspired me.

Ramble, ramble.

If anyone has ideas for a soundtrack send me an email or comment below.

All our videos are now compiled at www.mars-hill.co.nz/blog/country/video

Italy in two days!

After my recent post, Switching from Blogger to Wordpress, I'm pleasantly surprised to see an update to blogger. See the slashdot story here: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/15/1258212.

Unfortunately google won't let me into the beta programme.

Upgrading this ugly little baby will still not happen till late this year at the earliest; but more probably next year after I've re-evaluated my goals for the blog. Without constant 'net access it's become less and less of "Craig's mental space".

Tags: blogger, upgrade, wordpress

I've started using a few new programmes that might interest some people. Here's what I'm doing and how I'm doing it...

Tracks
This one's for everyone. A web-based app that works using the GTD principle of having unique contexts (i.e. @home, @office, @online) to Get Things Done. This works on Ruby on Rails and can be installed on your webhost or locally.

I'm running it locally (on OS X 10.4.x) using Locomotive - a one step installer for Ruby on Rails. Locomotive opens on start-up and my local install of Tracks is set as my homepage. Works perfectly on Firefox, there are a few known bugs on Safari.

The next two are OS X only. Go buy yourself a mac.

Tags: GTD, Tracks, Locomotive

Kip
Hat-tip to Lifehacker for this one. Kip organises your PDF files in an iphoto style interface. It features text searching and tagging and integrates well with scanners. You can also "print" webpages and documents straight to it for handy archiving.

It searches and tags documents automatically and allows you to edit those tags. You have to pay for the new release, BUT only the new release has the option to leave those PDFs where they were rather than bringing them into Kip's own directory.

I've started "printing" useful pages to Kip then tagging them more accurately. It's a much easier way to keep track of websites, like passport/visa regulations for various countries!

Tags: Kip, PDF, OSX, Lifehacker

itunes-LAME
Working within the itunes interface, itunes-LAME adds an applescript to encode new files using the high-quality LAME encoder. Simple to install; simple to use - couldn't be better. It integrates wonderfully with an itunes library.

Tags: itunes, lame, mp3

Kapai, everyone - get downloading.

I've got two Tol books out of the library at the moment; Leo Tolstoy's Redemption and J RR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings. I think I've read LOTR every year since I was 13 or 14. If my thoughts of becoming a Biblical Studies lecturer don't work out, I could always teach Tolkien and his worlds...

And almost everything I'm reading at the moment is in translation. Along with Tolstoy, I've got a book by Haruki Murakami (The Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World), and I've started Marcel Proust's mammoth In Search of Lost Time. I can tell what a lot of work has gone into each translation...then checking the front of LOTR I understand the publishers don't intend to have an authoritative and error-free version for another couple of hundred years.

All in all, it's inspired me to push back into studying Hebrew since I'm not going to really understand those epics, poems and one-liners without a good grasp of it.

Tags: geekery, books, bible

Lappy's back and I'm looking to get back into blogging on aletheia. I've found a solution to my off-line dilemma - blog clients. These little programmes allow you to write offline and publish when you get to a connection.

I'm currently using Qumana (but I keep calling it Kumara). It does almost everything I want but if anyone knows anything better...

Tell me, O great blogosphere, which blogging client will better meet my needs.

It must...
Be free (think free beer, not free speech)
Run on Mac OSX 10.4 (tiger)
Support multiple blogs (on wordpress and blogger)
Tag posts
Ping technorati-like sites

It'd be cool if it would...
Support multiple authors
Syncronise online and offline posts
Have WYSIWYG and HTML views
Be free (OK, think free speech too)

Any advice?

My digital life over the last two months has been limited by the lack of a laptop. In my madness I thought this was a great time to try rebuilding Our Crazy Travels from scratch on a new platform and kick-start writing.

Success on one count: Our Crazy Travels has been thrown together on the new system. I'm running it on WordPress 2 and the K2 mod. It think it looks good and now I have lappy back I have the chance to debug it.

Future changes for OCT:
   * Fixing the map / possibly changing to roll-over -> click, rather than bubbles 
   * Adding more photo galleries (using fgallery for this).
   * Linking in-post photos to the galleries (this is functional for all new posts)
   * Adding PoMMo to handle the mailing list

I'm hoping to avoid needing comment verification, but I might have to. We'll see how the spam pans out.

Will I move aletheia to WP? Eventually yes, it's got a lot more scope than Blogger. It'll be a project for next year while I see how both blogs develop.

The only major problem with the move was importing posts and comments from Blogger. The importer didn't work (six weeks of trying!) and I ended up doing it all manually over four days.

Big thanks to Salis, again, for advise, answering endless questions and helping out when I couldn't code my way out of a brown paper bag. Which was almost always.

Why move from Blogger to Wordpress

Call me crazy? Now that I've moved one, here are some reasons to explain why I will move the second.

Tagging
The lack of tagging/categorisation in blogger will be a big motivator. Tagging is quickly becoming the way to identify and search for things. My email inbox and Apple hard-drive is full of tags!

In our travel blog, each country is a category. I can also manipulate the slug, for example www.mars-hill.co.nz/country/greece will take you to our posts on Greece (I changed "tags" to "country").

Aletheia covers all sorts of topics and I've tried using del.icio.us to manage them (see the drop down menu in the sidebar) but it's time consuming. A built in categorizer/tagger is a must.

Pages
WP has easy to add "pages" which differ from posts in that they are static. They can be front pages or secondary pages. They can be visible or only open by links. Public or password protected. This means one can build a whole site on WP. Try doing that with blogger -- or even getting a nice looking integration with the rest of your site.

Comment interface
It's a bit easier to manipulate the comment interface in WP than in blogger. K2, which I'm using, also offers ajax comments meaning the page refreshes in a live, while you watch, way. It doesn't reload the page.

Comment information
When you get a new comment on blogger the email that is sent to you is useless. It doesn't give you the sender's email address; even though they often enter it!! Yes, two exclamation points!! In addition to what Blogger gives you, WP includes:

IP:
E-mail :
URL : (their website)
Whois :
To delete this comment, visit:

And that's quite a bit!

Sidebars
Sidebars, along with headers, footers and font-size, etc can be changed according to page, topic or author. All sorts of customisation.

PHP vs static HTML
Blogger generates pages for individual posts and monthly archives. You can view them like that. WP stores all the information in a database and calls it when required. This allows the data to be displayed in many different kinds of ways and different kinds of groupings as well as "teasers" or excerpts.

All-in-all worth the effort of learning a new interface and getting one's hand dirty with the code. (There are plenty of templates for those that don't want to.)

Talk about serendipitous...

As I lay in bed, woken by mozzies at 3:00am three nights ago, I thought, "I'd love to make a map of our travels..." Spurred on by 4 hours of manually creating a "By Country" index for our travel blog I began to imagine a map reminiscent of Indiana Jones movies. Flying planes and all.

And what did I find the next day? Lifehacker reviewed and linked to a couple of pieces of software that leverage google maps to do just that.

This is what I ended up with. I'm sure it'll become an important part of the Our Crazy Travels interface. Gotta love those visuals!

My brief mapping experience

I ended up trying two of lifehacker's suggestions as well as one mentioned in the comments. Supplement the lifehacker reviews with my thoughts.

My Pin Map link
Mentioned in the comments. Currently bare and tricky to navigate. I put in two locations, but my map remained empty. Gave up after looking around for a reason and not finding one. See my abandoned map.

Community Walk link
Favoured by lifehacker, Community Walk (CW) was my next attempt. I found it easy to add waypoints but I kept having problems with the screen layout, items flowing onto one another, etc. I browse with Firefox on an Apple 12" G4 Powerbook: the small screen may have been a problem.

I had multiple problems with the "click to move" option. Sometimes it wouldn't work. Often it would move my map so I couldn't click where I wanted to! I had to move NZ half way around the world then back again.

The application took a liking to leaving extra markers around the map. I guess they were from previous displays. I had 2 "New Zealand"s at one point...One was located just east of South America.

This was my result and I was (finally) happily prepared to put it onto the blog.

Community Walk Map - Our Crazy Travels

Unfortunately I couldn't get Samoa on the map. Even after I moved the marker a little west of the dateline, the software insisted on moving it around the world so viewers would have to view all my markers and then scroll far west onto a blank map with only Samoa.

After stuffing around for an hour, this was too much. Geek to live, huh?

In the end it proved too buggy for me. Even revisiting to place the code on this post annoyed me. Good luck to them though; it could become a good product.

Wayfaring Link.
You always find what you're looking for in the last place you look.

I haven't experienced any of the bugs that I had with CW, the map displays nicely on the blog (have a look) and interacts quite well with my index. I still have a few issues with Samoa...It seems to be a problem nation with google maps!

The screen-feel of Wayfaring.com is much nicer on the eyes. Rounded corners do mean something after all. Site navigation can still be a little confusing but in general it makes more sense to me than CW.

Lifehacker praises CW for its flickr integration and I agree. In general CW does have more features than Wayfaring. The flickr feature was excellent, but one can add common HTML to Wayfaring maps and it's all worked fine for me so far. On Wayfaring.com you can also imbed video, although I do try and think about my non-broadband viewers. Until I get a video camera, that is.

Lifehacker didn't like Wayfaring's "Waypoints" system but they seemed simple to me: Write a name, click on the map, add some tags, add your comments/HTML. Not too tricky. CW doesn't support tags...And there are some greasemonkey extensions for Wayfaring that I've gotta go have a play with.

I never got my Indiana Jones planes, trains and automobiles, but I'm placing my bets with Wayfaring and will let you know if I change my mind.