Posted by Andrew
I decided to play with this whole Tumblog idea and set up my own Tumblr account to collect all the things which I find cool. I may feature collections from it occasionally, but if you want to see what I think is cool, but can’t be bothered writing up, check it out
Posted by Andrew
After a bit of pain talking to fairly inept iTunes Store support and finding no answers while trawling forums and other online sources, I ended up being forced to remove the old iTunes podcast feed and create a new one. So, if you subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, you will need to subscribe to this new podcast entry to successfully get updates.
Sorry, but it’s the only way it was going to work.
Posted by Andrew
No really. I didn’t celebrate last night. I had planned to head out to Blue’s Point and watch the fireworks, but I grew tired of the idea upon realising that Blue’s Point would most likely be filled with a lot of intoxicated people who I probably wouldn’t even like when they were sober and when I was in a good mood, let alone while they were drunk and I was in a bad mood. As such, I stayed at home and watched Lano & Woodley. This worked pretty well for me, as for those of you who can remember back that far, I deem New Year’s to be a celebration of an arbitrary day, so really, not celebrating it doesn’t bother me. It’s a reasonable enough excuse for a party, but if there’s no party that I want to go to on the night, why bother?
Enough of me justifying why I sat at home and watched slapstick comedy last night instead of going out and getting smashed. The actual intention of this post is to write about a new structure for my blogging I plan to embark on over this next year. It isn’t a New Year’s resolution, the dates simply happened to line up that way, I swear! Anyhow, the two creative pursuits I publish most on the web are my writing, and my photography. Since the beginning of this iteration of my blog, in late 2005, both pursuits have been featured in the one place, mootpointer.com, with my gallery, kerplode.com, coming along mid-year to host my photography (which was still featured as it was added on mootpointer.com).
I’ve decided, for a number of reasons, to work on splitting my writing and my photography. The main reason which I can nail down is that in some ways I’ve used photography as an excuse not to write. People may say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I can tell you, posting a picture is not going to increase your writing experience, which is part of why I keep this blog. It’s not that I want to be a writer professionally, but writing is something I enjoy, and I’ve actually been complemented by a few people on the writing style on this blog and the only way I’m going to improve is by writing more.
Equally, my photography is going to improve by increased practice as well. By setting aside a dedicated place to showcase it, I’m hoping to make a regular thing about it, with at least weekly posts of fresh work, not stored work, which my failed photo a day was. I’m looking to post various shots, from candids, to landscapes, random city work, even commercial work that I have clearance for, and of course gig work. I envision that this will take place on a subdomain of kerplode.com, leaving the gallery in place (although we’ll get to that later in this post). There won’t be much in the way of words there short of explanations of the shots and such. I’d hope that I might have some subscribers to a feed there, who are interested in seeing my photography, but don’t really care much for my rambling. Now, I can understand that, and in fact can embrace that.
My vision is that eventually, my photoblog and gallery will be integrated. I’ve been looking at writing an image gallery for a while, but this is the perfect reason to do it. Seamless integration between photoblog and gallery would be amazing, with tagging, posting, linking and all that jazz easily done. Attaching photos will be done through and AJAX browser in the posting interface, and blogging will be an option when photos are uploaded. Of course, there will be some development time involved, so I’ll be coming out with it in bits and pieces as I develop it. I would plan to release the source, but I haven’t yet chosen a licence. That will come later.
For now, both my photography and writing will stay on mootpointer.com, until I have enough of a working solution on kerplode.com that I can shift the photography over. Hopefully by March, I’ll have a fully stable gallery/photoblog running and everything will be beautiful. Hopefully. Of course, there is a large probability that I’ll quickly get bored of the idea and it will be left to rot as another subversion repository in my /Developer/Projects folder… How will you know what happens? By reading as I progress (or regress). I’ll be sure to document it. Really.
Posted by Andrew
I started this here blog. 10 pages of posts later, here we are. You’ve been here through many rants, many photos, many periods without any posting and a couple of bursts of regular posting. This has been an interesting outlet over the last year, and I’m sure it will continue to be. Hopefully in the next year I’ll start hacking Typo to make it better in some ways, I’m just waiting for the team to get their act together and get their Trac up and running again.
I’ve been working on making a list of stuff to organise before the weekend. The amount of gear I’ll be taking is actually quite impressive. I’ll be shooting on both film and digital, for variation and just because it’s cool. The total cost of the whole adventure has been reduced because Mum has kindly offered to drive me up and take a mini-holiday in Port Macquarie while I shoot the festival.
Also, if you want to get a cool present for that photographer in your family, buy one of the many Olympus OM-10 cameras which are on eBay at the moment. They are a great little beast, a really fun camera.
Oh, and as a present, here’s a shot that has been on flickr for a while.
Posted by Andrew
Well, my little comment about BlogTrash certainly sparked a little debate. I’m now getting called a “Blog Snob”, “Hater” and “Hypocrite”. Much fun really. It amuses me that having people surf past your blog regularly (I have had over 600 visits this month) means you’re a much bigger target for whoever was on the receiving end of your rants, because, chances are, they’ll surf by.
Now, I’m in two minds here, in some ways, I’d like to try and explain what I said, and demonstrate that I was making a subjective and personal assessment, based on what I would like to see. I’d like to be able to make peace with these people, but that seems kind of boring.
Basically, I think it’s mostly the younger bloggers who are doing the attacking, although I could be wrong. The language seems to suggest that it is. I am a younger blogger too, I’m only 17, but I’m in two minds about continuing this circle of hate… But it’s so tempting to just unleash, entrench and settle in for a nice good old blog war…
At this point, I’ll stick with backing down. I was having a rant, and wasn’t in a particularly good mood when I posted this. In defence of Kentucky Gurl (language warning), I agree with a lot of what she says, although she has said it in a rather inflammatory manner.
Basically, I’ll leave you with this: If you didn’t care about people reading your blog, you wouldn’t have signed up for BlogMad. It’s as simple as that. I was giving you the opinion of someone who reads blogs, and doesn’t just click past after those 25 seconds are up. I was telling you what I like to see, and what ticks me off, which is generally what happens on blogs: people rant. So, if you don’t like what I’ve said, then by all means, disagree with me, but don’t descend to calling me names because I said something which hits too close to home.
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