James.Cridland.net

James Cridland's blog

Where radio and new platforms collide. With beer.

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A trawl around the web, January 26th to February 14th

Thursday, February 14th, 2008


Uploaded on 13 February 2008, this is a viewing platform in the war museum in Salford Quays. Photo by Mike Willshaw. Used under licence.

All this online sharing has to stop
It's ruining the motor mechanic industry. (No, really)

Flickr CC search
A quick page whipped up to help me find nice pictures for this blog - it searches all Flickr CC images together (which the Flickr UI won’t let me do).

Aussies Head to SXSW
A website using one of my photos, albeit only credited in the ALT tag (which isn’t cricket, by the way).

Oceanworld Manly
Another spotting of one of my photographs, complete with a link to my own website. How splendid.

Living on Earth: Swedish Body Heat
Sounds exciting, but actually it’s a radio feature about trains, aired on WBUR and other stations. They used one of my photographs to illustrate it on the web. Cool.

When statistics speak volumes
Good piece by Paul Smith on the press releases radio stations send out on figures day. Paul still owes me a fiver, by the way.

MMS For O2 iPhone
Just the thing I was looking for. Brilliant - now I can receive MMS on the iPhone. (Bizarre that it doesn’t support it…)

Twitter on the iPhone: Hahlo
While I’m on an iPhone theme, I use this for Twitter (it’s much prettier than it looks on this page). For this, and for the MMS thing, I’ve donated.

Keeping the conversation going
Nic Price activates a magic Wordpress plugin. So have I. Good idea.

Do We Have The Backup?
‘how it can be legitimate for a government to build roads but not to lay fibre is a mystery to me, and one that deserves to be questioned.’ Good point.

Big name #4
Hello, ladies. Contacting me has never been easier. Etc.

What HD-2s Don’t Stream And Should?
A rant about streaming. But included in this is interesting: WRXK’s HD2 channel (a new one only for HD radios) is entirely themed around their breakfast presenter. Neat idea. (Course, I was behind the ‘Virgin Radio Party Classics’ channel on Sky, voiced by Suggs.)

Interactivity: A lost opportunity for your station?
Some “isn’t the US behind the rest of us” type thoughts from Mark Ramsey; but some useful and interesting figures he quotes.

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from January 26th to February 14th. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

A trawl around the web on January 3rd

Friday, January 4th, 2008


Photo taken this week by mike138. Used under licence. Photos for my Delicious postings like this will be taken from Flickr’s ‘interesting feed’ for the day concerned. Seemed like a good idea.

Postalicious
One of the reasons I stopped posting my Del.icio.us links to this blog was the unpleasant way that it rendered, and the lack of any control I had with regard to timing. This hopefully fixes this.

Meet Mr. TechCrunch UK - ScobleShow
In the latest of my “let’s mention Robert Scoble because he normally adds your mention to his linkblog”, a serious one - Robert interviews the excellent Mike Butcher, who’s looking very well in this video. I last saw Mike a good eight months ago.

Ubuntu
Recently added it to my normal workhorse laptop (an HP Compaq tc4200). I wouldn’t say it worked totally instantly out of the box, but after a little tinkering, it’s doing everything I want except print, which is a good start, and I’ve still Windows on the machine if I need it.

The UCC Journalism Society Conference 2008 (my speaking events)
Delighted to be speaking on “the place of traditional media in the Web 2.0 world” at this conference for University College Cork: under the auspices of my Media UK work.

An ego blog-search
I wanted to see who was blogging about me, but I had problems with Google Blog Search returning my own blog entries. I’ve worked out how to stop that with -blogurl, like so: “James Cridland” -blogurl:james.cridland.net -blogurl:www.flickr.com

v-moda “Vibe Duo” headphones for the iPhone
My Christmas present to myself was an iPhone: and these are just excellent headphones - way better sound than the original crappy ones, and with a headset mike, so I can still use it as a phone. Mind, damn expensive.

ShinyRed - 10 blogs to read in 2008
Nine blogs you might actually want to read; and one ridiculous suggestion. But it’s very nice of them, so thank you, ShinyRed.

Dull and boring post

Sunday, September 30th, 2007

This is a quick, dull, and boring post. It’s to check that my upgrade to Wordpress v2.3 has worked without incident, and that the tags work

Follow me!

Sunday, September 9th, 2007


‘Follow me’ by Kitten Betty from Flickr. Used under licence.

Back in 2005, Google announced a way to ‘prevent comment spam’.

The idea was to specify a “nofollow” attribute to all external links from “any link that a user can create on your site”.

Wordpress followed suit, and added code to use this tag in all comments in blogs. I use Wordpress (I recommend it, indeed) and therefore have been automatically adding “nofollow” to all comments on my blog.

However. I also only allow authorised comments. Leave a comment here, and you’ll find that it’ll spend a while before appearing, as I hit a button to accept it, assuming it’s not spam and not off-topic.

Therefore, given that I’ve specifically allowed all comments - including URLs - to appear on this blog, I am therefore standing by those comments and the URLs they post; and therefore, I see no reason why Google can’t use the links on this website to calculate page rank.

So, I’ve added the DoFollow plugin, and all external links from this website are now visible to Google, and other search engines.

Wordpress jiggery-pokery

Sunday, December 10th, 2006

Wordpress is quite a clever beast, really; the plugin support is great and really extends the software’s usefulness. (Much like Firefox, of course).

I’ve fiddled about and have added Technorati tags (mainly so that my BBC Backstage posting would appear correctly), and thought I’d add a tag cloud too. It’s not very useful so far, because there aren’t many posts of mine with tags, but at first glance, it appears a rather better way of categorising these posts.