Sunday, 13th March, 2005

Text Wrangling

tranniefesto about conversation

I'm feeling rather 'prompted' today, partly in response to reading that Mike (of Troubled-Diva) is being interviewed on BBC Radio Nottingham tomorrow morning about being nominated for the Bloggies (ahem BBC Radio Lancashire, why have you not called?!), partly as a reaction to a snippet I found on Paul Hammond's weblog (via Tom Coates):

The first is around the idea of aggregating separate streams of personal data into one coherent weblog.

...and partly also because it's been mulling around in my head for ages — trying to express itself through a bunch of cobbled code.

See, I have a very specific aim with this weblog — and not just a self-gratifying, self-publicising, narcissistic ego-wank one either. What I'm trying to do, is collate my life into an online format.

Hmm, that makes less sense out loud than it does in my head...

OK, what I'm trying to do, is create a seamless flow of thought and conversation, that reflects the way I think and operate, in a way that both looks pretty, and is of interest.

Is that better?

Put it this way: Suppose I'm walking down the street, and I spot something a bit odd. This happens a lot to me, I must confess — I don't know why, I just seem to see interesting things around me. And they make my thought process go off on some odd loop.

What I'd like to be able to do, is grab that moment, and share it — or more specifically, record or document it, both for my own personal benefit, and because I think other people might find it interesting too.

So all this bollocksing around with code I've been doing recently, is an attempt to make things like that much more easy for me — the automatic instertion of things that I blog via Flickr (and the as-yet not-quite-working auto-insertion of things I send via email to my flickrblog) is me trying to make the whole process as easy and intuitive as possible.

I want to be able to take a picture with a cameraphone, and within moments have the thing appear here.

Equally, I want the same thing to happen to little snippets of thought or ideas that I might have during the day — but be nowhere near a computer. Stuff that people say, things that I see — I want to be able to jot them down instantly and without the current hassle of diving into a command-line and pratting about with some MySQL commands.

...

You'd be forgiven, at this moment, for berating me with the notion that I'm being a bit self-important about this. I mean, what on earth makes anything that I think or do or see of any interest to anyone else? And, in all honesty, this is pretty much the same thing I tell students when they're about to embark on some self-orientated project: "It isn't going to work unless your life is actually interesting"

Which brings me rather neatly onto the question of why blog in the first place?

The other night, I was sast in bed (sober, I must point out ), having a little rant to myself. I do this quite a lot really — talking to myself that is. I think sometimes people ust notice and wonder what the hell I'm on:

"Mummy, why is that man talking to himself?" "Ignore him dear" "But why is he wearing a dress?"

OK, so maybe not in the street — but certainly whenever I'm in the car, sat at home, lying in bed.

And it occured to me, half-way through this little ramble (I forget what it was about) that this compulsion to witter to myself, is exactly that same thing that I do when I'm writing — just slightly faster I guess ... the only main difference being that when I do it via the keyboard, at least some other people rather than me are listening.

So yeah, maybe it is a self-righteous soapbox

...

Nah — it's got to be more than that.

Something Tom Coates said recently caught my eye:

Weblogs are representations of people online

Now, that is, in a sense, what I've been rambling about today — this page, I guess is me.

But it's me in a very particular sense of the word "me" — as I repeatedly point out, I'm not a woman, nor is my name Siobhan. But the person who writes this stuff is...

...God, I'm really not making any sense at all today.

What I mean, is that over the past few years, the person I call "Siobhan" has evolved into someone quite specific — she has her own mannerisms, ways of talking, ways of reacting to things. She does this in a very specific way — a way that, yeah, maybe has glimmers of recognisability in the way that I am as a person, but equally (and I've said this before) she's a carriacature — a cartoon charater.

What I find interesting, is that this 'person' I've ended up creating, is embodied in this weblog. So perhaps the reason I do this, is because if I didn't, then I wouldn't exist.

...

Ack, I can talk utter shite sometimes can't I?

...

Anyway, the way I've been approaching this task of 'making my online life (onLife?) easier', is by repurposing other tools that already exist.

I could, for example, write some procmail thingumy, that would take every email I sent to, um, blog[at]tranniefesto.co.uk for example, and merge it into the database. Or I'm sure I could take an SMS gateway and work it so that I could write via my mobile...

...but I'm finding that using things which already exist have a very particular benefit — they tap into pre-existing communities.

Take my (nearly working) Flickr-feed for example ... using the 'Blog This' thing to send chunks of code into a Blogger.com account that I set up for testing purposes ages ago, I can parse the RSS feed, compare it with a cache I hold here, and stick the differences into my blog automatically — all it takes is a bit of hand-coding the 'Blog This' template, and some fancy regular expressions to pull out the relevant data.

And in doing so, I still have a seperate store of images — almost an archive, seperate from the main weblog, that I can share with people I've met via FLickr, and elsewhere.

I mean, I know that if I used Movable Type or any of the other standard blog tools, then I wouldn't have to write all this crap for myself — but I kinda like doing it. I feel it gives me more control over how I incorporate things together round here. The comments are a perfect example of this

Building Tension

bloggies

Dammit, I should have written something a lot more incisive and intelligent (or perhaps even witty) today. You know, what with the results of the Bloggies being tomorrow and all that

I don't, obviously, have any delusions that I'm going to win — I think that'll be Hot Toddy personally — but it was fun taking part I've met some interesting people as a result.

Dear BBC Radio Lancashire, You know, there's still time. I'm not doing anything special tomorrow morning...

Hey! That's uncannily like my weblog you're talking about there

Yes, but you wank my ego too, so that's OK

Oh, and "brain-seep"?! You've been watching Nathan Barley too much honey