Mat Harden

There’s a lot of information out there on the Web. And I mean a “lot”! I’ve often wondered how many blades of grass there are in the whole world and nobody has every been able to satisfy that query. But now I wonder if there’s more info on the Web than grass on the Earth? Hold on, what the hell am I talking about?!

Anyway, I’ve always tried to stay up with my chosen field by reading .Net magazine, various über geek blogs and now in this “Web 2.0″ world, I follow things like jQuery news on Twitter.

Sometimes it all gets too much. Some days I’ll turn on the PC and be totally overwhelmed with the information I’m presented with. I find myself in a quandary; I want to know everything, but I also need to sleep. But there are times when I think I’m too deep. Like the other day I read a jQuery Tweet that said…

Parse JSON with jQuery and JavaScript redux using the Flickr Services API
http://twitter.com/jquery/status/2799132940

…and I thought to myself “oh good, that’ll be useful”. And then I realised that this sentence wouldn’t really mean a lot to many people. Or does it reach more than what I imagine?

Then today, I opened-up PopURLs. Now from what I’ve just said about too much info, I know this is asking for trouble. But I just wanted to take a quick look. The top of the page looked like this.

PopURLs instantly exposes so much information

What I mean is there’s so many abbreviations and mash-ups of terminologies. Looking at this tiny snippet of the Web, I can see “GTD“, “Palm webOS“. These I can decrypt and understand. But then there’s the slang terms, swear words and vulgarities that seem to be more commonplace since the explosion of the social Web. Here I can see “WTF” and “rimjob” right there at the top.

I’ve got a baby boy who’s only 11 weeks old. When he’s old enough to talk, I need to be a good Dad and know the answers to everything, like: the major capital cities of the world. When this little guy gets control of a PC, then there’s going to be a lot of explaining to do! So when he comes across a page like PopURLs, is it right that he should turn around to his Dad and say “what’s a rimjob?” I think not. So what do we do?

Don’t say “NetNanny” or some other Internet kiddy-safe software. Also, we’re talking about another 10 years or so from now. So who knows what the Web will be like by then? He’ll have access to it from everywhere. Or should I say “it’ll have access to him everywhere”?

I’ve given up with MovableType. I’ve always liked it, but it’s just too difficult to do some simple things. The template/widget system is too confusing. I got very frustrated trying to remove file extensions from post URLs - I can’t believe they don’t make this easier to do. The final straw was when I somehow couldn’t allow comments even though the option seemed to be on in the admin.

WordPress 2 has so many great features and is a joy to use. I’ve taken me about 30 mins to sit down and get it all set-up including importing posts from MovableType. It took longer than to update MovableType from version 3 to 4! Let’s see how I get on with WordPress.

I’ve had the iPhone for about 6 months now and I’m extremely happy with it. My previous phone was a Sony Ericsson W880 - that really flat one with the fiddly buttons. It had all the features I [thought] I needed and I was pretty pleased with it. I’d just got myself the Jabra BT500 Bluetooth headset and was getting used to the voice dialling. For me, the main thing was the size of it. This dinky little gem would be totally forgotten about in my sky rocket, and provide a handful of music which was just enough for commuting. I’d also installed the Java app which gave me good access to Gmail.

I’d seen the 1st iPhone in the stores and not really thought much of it. Thought the touch-screen might be a bit of a pain and the applications gimmicky. Little did I know…

(continue reading…)

Not much blogging going on yet, but I’ve added my micro-blog feed from Twitter today. At least I’m serving bite size nuggets of my mundane existence for you to scoff whole.

Courtesy of Damien du Toit’s neat little jQuery plug-in. This little feature uses JavaScript, so if it doesn’t appear it may be because that’s not available.

Since the move to WordPress I am no longer using this JavaScript plugin, but rather the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools.

Last Wednesday there was a novelty story in the Metro about a metalworker in Indianapolis who built The Blue Flash rollercoaster in his own in his backyard. It might not have made it into the RCDB, but I thought it was great. There should be more of this sort of thing. Like that guy who put a fake shark through his roof.
Anyway, it reminded me of the backyard monorail I found on the web about a year ago. Maybe these guys should get together and make a backyard amusement park?