radiac.net

I had a very happy birthday yesterday, thank you to everyone who remembered!

Leela took the day off, and we went in to town for lunch. I opened my presents - a DVD (The motorcycle diaries), two books and mmm chocolate. We then wandered round shops for a while, and Leela bought me lots more DVDs and another game for my DS. We also went to the Thorntons cafe and had a hot chocolate and chocolate cake.

When we got back home, Leela's mum had dropped some presents over, but had to go home because of the snow - yes, it snowed on my birthday, yay! Leela and I then went to Pizza Express for tea while it snowed some more, then came home again and ate chocolate birthday cake.

Yay for birthdays!

I've just come across the page selling the first of the two CDs I'm working on, here. I'm loving the way they have no photo for it, and an incorrect description - you can tell this is something they're keen to promote...

It would have been nice to have some credit somewhere on something, although I'm still waiting for my copy of it, so perhaps I'm listed on the 8 page insert. I'll have to wait and see. Still, maybe I should put a little easter egg into the second one just in case?

I'm a latecomer to all this RSS malarkey, and I don't know what I'm doing.

Well, that can't be entirely true because my feed seems to work, but I do have some questions about what you actually do with your RSSs; how do you read them, and what should I offer in mine? Is anybody even reading it?

I have had an RSS feed for the past few weeks, but I have no idea if it's working for you. How do you read your RSS feeds? The only RSS readers I have used are Firefox and Trillian, and they both kinda suck.

So how do you want to read my feed - full feeds in some fancy reader, or titles with summaries and links to the entry on my site? Can I put images and Flash into a full feed, or is that wrong?

Does your reader highlight entries that change? And does this mean that the comment summary at the bottom of the entries in the current feed good or bad? Should I just split the comments out into comment feeds like everyone else seems to do?

And as for diary content, the next thing I'll be adding are categories. I want to split my diary in two, for personal and technical - I have a lot to say in both, but I am aware that a lot of my friends and visitors are probably only going to be interested in one or the other ;)

At the risk of this turning into the latest RSS blog, I have been reading the discussion on Scoble's blog about whether to offer full or partial feeds, and a lot of the comments said what I've been thinking since I first came across RSS - full feed will mean less visitors.

A full feed means that it's more likely that people will read what I write. That's good I guess - not much point writing things if nobody reads them. But readers don't equal visitors, and by offering a full feed, I lose the opportunity to slap people in the face with shiny new things I want to show off. Be it a new or seasonal design, a photo of the day, my countdown timer reminding you when my birthday is - whatever it is, you're just not going to see it.

Then there's the comment form - from an RSS reader it's an extra click and several seconds away, and I'm convinced that's a significant barrier that will put people off. Let's be honest, comments are part of the reason I keep going with this sometimes - where's the fun in writing loads and not getting any response? Of course, when I thought about it I realised that if people don't read my stuff they're not going to comment anyway, so I figure it'll balance out in the long-run. But it's not just about the comments.

The focus of the discussion on Scoble's blog is all about advertising revenue, and that applies to my site too. I'm not talking about commercial pay-per-click adverts, but drawing your attention (and hopefully your browser) to new and exciting projects that I put up on the web.

When you open up my site in your web browser, you're seeing what I want you to see. That may sound a bit arrogant, but if I want to advertise something I'm doing, I am free to put up a large flashing banner along the top, a prominent link on the side, or even intrusive flash adverts. Ok, I guess that last one's an argument for full feeds, but you get the point.

If people start subscribing to my full RSS feed, I lose this advertising vehicle. When I release a new project - and if things go to plan there will be lots of them this year - the only way I can tell everyone about it will be through an entry in my diary that will appear in the RSS feed.

You could argue that that's all that is needed, but if you don't read my feed for a few days, the entry is going to be lost halfway down. I could make it a sticky story that hovers in the top three, but that's annoying for the people who have already read it.

And what should I do if I launch a service that would generate most of its income through online ads? RSS is, by necessity and design, a difficult mechanism to advertise through. If I give the content away for free in feeds, how can it pay for itself? Take the current site at yay.org.uk for example - if that was more popular I might sell advertising to cover running costs, but by offering the top ten sites in RSS feeds, nobody would come to the site at all and I'd be back to picking up the hosting bills myself.

Having said all of that, the RSS feed for radiac.net now has the full text of the entries. I figure if I have something special to say, I'm sure I'll be able to come up with a way to draw your attention to it. I've also fixed it so that it validates (hurrah!), and I will follow it up with feeds for comments. After three or four long years in the wilderness, I am finally joining the blogosphere... but this is still a diary ;)

I've only just got round to dragging this photo off my mobile. Leela took it last week on my birthday after we spotted it when we were walking in to town:

I think it's a sign.

Although, just out of interest - who decides to book a coach holiday to Truro in the middle of the winter?

Well, it took long enough, but... it's finished! Hurrah!

Yes, that's right, I've finished the second Flash CD. Well, not quite - I've finished the first draft of all of the activities. Now, I know that doesn't sound quite so good, but some of the activities have already been through preliminary testing a couple of times and are pretty close to the final versions. For most of the activities, all that's left is a little bit of tidying up - some still have a few unresolved bugs, but the majority of the work is done. The concepts are all implemented, and aside from any bug fixes, the Flash and ActionScript is all finished.

So now most of the remaining work comes down to a couple more rounds of testing and bug fixing, and a message string dump for an editor to spell and grammar check everything. The 5 month delay on the end of the first CD was while we put the controller interface together, but we can mostly re-use that for the second CD, so hooking into that shouldn't take too long. A full week's work at most.

This is all kinds of good. I'll spend tomorrow bug hunting, then it'll be time to start on all those things I've been putting off for the past 5 years. Sweet.

Answerphones make me nervous. I don't know what it is - maybe it's the fact that I'm getting no feedback as I'm talking. Or perhaps it's that any tiny mistake I make will be preserved for all eternity for the recipient to listen to and play back to everyone else in the room, over and over again, while they roll around on the floor with tears streaming down their faces, clutching their chests because they're all laughing so hard it hurts, and then they'll record it to their mobile phones and use it as a ring tone for the next four and a half years so that they can have the opportunity to recount, to whoever is there whenever it rings, the tale of the time Richard rang up and left a message.

Or perhaps it's just because I'm paranoid. Who knows.

Well, I think I just left one of those messages. I waited until 9:05 so that they'd be in the office, but no, it went to answerphone. I figured "Hey, how bad can it be", opened my mouth, and promptly spewed forth the least coherent stream of verbal diarrhea that I believe I have ever spoken. I knew I was talking crap, but I was on a roll and perhaps it would get better as I went on. But it didn't. I ended it by whimpering an apology into the handset before hanging up.

At least Orange let you re-record your message if it goes wrong. Just a shame this wasn't an Orange phone.

I've been away for a week. Well, I was away from Tuesday to Friday - I went back to Kent, had two days of meetings with various peoples, and came back again. So I'm back in Cornwall now, and back on the work. Lots to catch up on. It's Leela's turn this week - she has set off for a week of partying and presentationing at some hospital in Devon.

I've just added a search feature to my diary, at radiac.net/search. You can stick something after that to search the diary for something, ie /search/foo. The GET form has to submit to /search/?s=foo - I'm not loving that little difference, but that's just the price of a GET, isn't it.

I don't really expect anyone to use it, but it should save me a lot of time when I want to link to an old entry. I was going to put up a 'recently searched' list, but then I remembered I'm friends with Tristan, and decided it might not be the best idea.

You stay classy.

Several things happened this weekend. First we got an e-mail from our landlord saying he was selling the flat. That made me kinda nervous, since we were planning to stay here for 4 more months. I rang him up and he said he'd try to make sure we could stay until July as agreed, so that's nice - I'd hate to try to find somewhere to rent for a month or two, because it clearly just wouldn't happen.

On Saturday morning I wrote a small Eliza bot for PGPlus, in perl. They do already exist, but this was more for a practice of Net::Telnet for when I write the web interface. I stuck the Eliza logic onto the top of the bot just so it didn't seem such a waste of time - that and it brings a bit of life to the talker ;) There is a little extra functionality; it has some admin commands, and I might add some stuff for users to save me messing with the pg+ source. It's been about 4 years since I last got my hands dirty with pg+ code, and it has such messy source you really need to spend some time getting into it - and I just don't have the time at the moment, so hacking a bit of extra stuff into a perl bot seems like quite a good idea.

I then noticed that the bright blue ink from the logo on my highlighters was wearing off all over my fingers and my mouth. I haven't bitten my pens since prep school, but I do still hold them in my mouth for a bit if I'm using several at once. I decided that bright blue lips wasn't a great look for me, so I cleaned all of the logos off with nail varnish remover, and now they look shiny clean. Insight into the mind of a crazy, eh?

Apart from watching a couple of episodes of Stargate, the rest of the weekend was devoted to the Flash work, which is still dragging on. As I've been going through the 21 activities I've been finding lots of little things to check and test, as well as adding features and even rewriting huge chunks of some of the activities; numbers 5 and 7 bear little resemblance to what they were this time last week. It's not that they were wrong - I have just thought of better ways to do them. I am now 112 steps through my 326 point checklist, although I still have 32 new features to add. Still, nearly there.

Once upon a time, I was sitting at my computer minding my own business when the front door opened, some people wandered in, and started walking around my flat. That time was about 5 minutes ago, and they're still here now.

They're walking around, looking behind things and around things, and taking photographs. I refer, of course, to an estate agent and potential buyers of the flat, and to be fair I opened the door and let them in, so it's all legal and above board. However, things appear to be moving rather quicker than I had hoped; this is potentially not good news. We'll have to wait and see what happens with the sale - hopefully we'll be able to persuade the next owner to keep us on until July, otherwise we might have to resort to sleeping in the car for a month. Score!

Leela had a phone call today - she has been offered a job in a hospital in Cheltenham!

We went up at the start of the week; she had her interview and I had a look around. It looks like a nice place. I'd been up there once before for a meeting, but had literally just driven straight to their office and back out to the M5 again. It was good to have a wander round - I felt horribly lost, but managed to find the same car park twice, so it can't be too bad. Leela finishes her pre-reg in July, so it looks like we'll be moving up there around then.

Thought I'd get this in just before April 1st to avoid any april fools-related confusion ;)