love a good story
Longer-form writing. Things I’ve maybe been mulling over for a while. There is no pre-determined topic — I could end up writing about anything really.
Decided to Install Windows 7 back on to my P.C. as the primary operating system, then run GNU/Linux within virtualbox. Thought I’d give steam games on windows another go as I’ve got 8gb of ram sat there not really doing much. This way all my development stuff can be encapsulated within the virtual machine.
Also looks like I could be going to see Chas & Dave in a couple of months. I’d never heard much of their music until I started working at PM Connect. I gotta say they are growing on me.
Missed yesterday’s entry by 50 minutes — been sat in the bath listening to this week’s episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage.
Finished The Last Of Us: Left Behind. Another great addition to the world and characters from the original game. Although the relationship between Ellie and Riley was doomed, it was still nice to see their friendship. It gave more depth to Ellie’s character too.
Cant wait to get on to Metal Gear Solid 5 next. Just need to power through 1-4 first. I don’t have to, but I’d like to experience the whole story.
I think I may be addicted to playing Bitcoin Billionaire. It’s annoying because I know it’s a waste of time and yet I still find myself tapping away like a mad person.
Discovered a new album through some random listens today — Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans by Uffie. From the first song on this album I was hooked.
Tinkered with my site again tonight. I think I’m gonna add in a playlists post type too.
Think I’m gonna now have an hour or so on The Last Of Us: Left Behind. So far I’m loving it.
Slept in till 10:40.
In the early afternoon we went for a run around Kingsbury Water Park. A load of the water’s-edge trees have been cut down, not sure why though. When we got there it was nice to see that the car park was pretty empty – no masses of people to avoid when doing our laps.
Later on, after getting caught up with the new X Files series, Lizzie cleaned out and changed Moomin while I washed up and Cooked the tea.
I’m quite impressed with myself in keeping up this 100 days so far.
Today I saw possibly the worst film of my life – Dirty Grampa – at Vue, Star City.
I think in parts the humour actually offended me. I couldn’t believe this was the same guy I’d seen in Jackie Brown.
On a more positive note, me and Liz did go for a nice meal at the Green Man in Middleton. My only quarm was that my otherwise nice burger came on a bloody brioche bun.
Then on the evening we watched the first episode of the new series of The X Files. Despite the mixed reviews I actually liked it.
My fish and chips have just arrived.
Currently sat in Sainsbury’s cafe once again. My nectar points are gonna be through the roof by Christmas.
I’m thinking about restarting the ecommerce CMS I started for my last 100 days attempt. Except this time not part of the 100 days. Cant help thinking it’s a waste of time as there are already so many. But if I treat it as a learning curve, then it will have some benefit.
Randomly thought about how far we’ve come with technology and yet I’m sat here stirring my tea with a wooden stick.
Mid last year I heard about the idea of the 100 days project.
In a nutshell, you pick some form of creative pursuit — no matter how simple or complex — and commit to performing that action every day for 100 days.
I put the idea to some co workers. One person out of a few interested people actually completed it.
I failed in that challenge.
So I decided that I’m going to start again with an alternate take on Jeremy Keith’s 100 words for 100 days. My plan is to write 100 words the first day, 99 on the second, 98 the third etc.
This is the first.
Three weeks ago I launched a new website side-project.
This was a purely creative outlet for me, doing something I’ve wanted to do for a while — write album reviews.
Well, they’re not specifically reviews; more like recommendations. When I hear albums I want to share with people, I now try to write a little piece about it.
At the time of writing this, I have not long finished the third album — Priest’s eponymous debut. But I am already starting to worry that I’ll run out of ways to describe these albums.
I know that they are all different and I know the thoughts I want to get across to readers, but I’m just worried that I wont do these artists I love listening to justice.
I’m going to continue this in the same vein as the 100 days project, except I’m going to publish one every week on a Tuesday evening. I just know that if I tried to do one a day the writing would be even worse and I’d probably fall behind and end up not actually doing any.
So a realistic goal like once a week should be manageable. You can see the reviews I’ve got scheduled on the coming soon page. Cheers, Dave.
I have just written this post and then lost it without saving. I am annoyed. That said, I’ll try and rewrite without rushing too much. I’m always tinkering around with this website. As a result I tend to sometimes get bored with it. I feel the design just looks dull and uninspired, and find that … Continue reading “Inner critics and just getting on with it”
I have just written this post and then lost it without saving. I am annoyed. That said, I’ll try and rewrite without rushing too much.
I’m always tinkering around with this website. As a result I tend to sometimes get bored with it. I feel the design just looks dull and uninspired, and find that my backend could be a lot cleaner… phrasing. I then feel that my website needs to be improved – and as a result rebuilt.
This is the inner critic talking.
You know that guy/gal right? They are the one that sits back doing naff-all and only pipes up to say something when you’ve created something, or are thinking of doing so, and says “That’s shit – what are you thinking?”. The inner critic is a fecking wonker (intentional fake swearing) and needs to be put down.
Something I listened to last week really hit home with me about this. On this episode of The Web Ahead podcast, Jen Simmons talked with Jeremy Keith about understanding the web. I am always inspired when hearing Jeremy talk about the web and building for it
This is when the site never gets launched because it’s never quite good enough. The number of designers who haven’t launched because it doesn’t look quite right, or the number of developers because they haven’t finished writing their own CMS.
Jeremy Keith on The Web Ahead episode #110
In this episode He and Jen were talking about how people – in general – are so used to publishing on the web through a service – or gatekeeper as they called it. Also they mentioned about people’s habit of self-censoring and imposing their own restrictions.
It was after listening to this that I realised that my own reasons for thinking I needed to rebuild my site were all self-imposed reasons and that it was stopping me from actually writing stuff. I have been concentrating too much on the tools of publishing instead of actually just publishing.
So this entry is a way for me to try and break that habit. Let’s see how long I can keep it up for… phrasing.
Facebook, Twitter, Google plus – all places that help you to publish easily – and for free – on the web.
But guess what, the web is already free – or at least it should be – and many people’s only notion of publishing on the web is through one of these, or other, third party silos. It doesn’t have to be this way.
And it shouldn’t be this way.
In the beginning there was the web. This completely revolutionised publishing and gave everyone a chance to have their voice heard. 25 years on and that is still the case. Only now we have these monolithic silos that have made publishing even easier, and for free (zero cost).
The problem with free though, is that it comes at a price. All of these companies that offer you the opportunity to publish and get your thoughts out there, are doing so to serve their real customers – their partners and investors. You see, every piece of information you pass into these silos, whether knowingly or not, is used to help profile you and your friends. This profiling and tracking goes on to help make you more susceptible to targetted advertising – the core business model of most modern-day tech “startups”.
Imagine a world where everyone’s thoughts and opinions are only published through one of the current “Ministries of Truth”, where the publisher only shows what it wants to show; hiding what it wants to hide as it “currates your timeline”.
We desperately need many more independent avenues of information and points of view from people, not corporations, if we are ever going to get a chance at a more free on open world online.
The Indieweb is an initiative; a community, with the aim of publishing on ones own website and taking back control over the content that they publish.
Everyone who has access to the web has the potential – and it’s not as hard as it may seem – to get started publishing with you in control. The Indieweb isn’t about jumping through hoops to publish in a particular way either – the whole point is to do it your way and under your terms.
You should be able to publish and present your content in exactly the way that you want to. This post is about introducing you to the concept of the Indieweb – to the concept of your being in control of your own writing and publishing.
To get started on your path to online writing freedom, head over to the Indieweb site now for advice.
Jams were a type of content popularized by the website This is my jam.
This is my jam has since gone into read-only archive mode. This is such a great way of closing a website — especially one whose content is mostly community-created.
I started to use the site at the end of last year to start saving songs that stood out to me at a particular time.
Thanks to This is my jam for making me an archive of my own. This means I haven’t lost all of my data with them just because they have closed doors.
I still love the idea of saving individual “jams” though, so I have implemented it on my own site as of today. I have also pulled my old jams into my site. Going forwards I look forward to documenting any new and/or forgotten gems that I hear in the future. They will all be found on my Jams page.
I’ve been using Laravel for my personal website for about eight months now and haven’t looked back since.
This huge advantage to my rebuilding it in that way — from its original WordPress foundations — was that I had a crash course in using Laravel as well as learning some best practices as well.
Now that I have been using my site daily for all this time, I have found places where it has got messy — unavoidable through the learning experience — as well as places where I want to refine how I publish.
At the moment I am using what are called explicit post types. Meaning that I manually choose which post type a particular post belongs to before publishing — picking the appropriate create form to publish from.
However I have been thinking more and more about implicit post types — post types whose contents define what sort of post it is. Going the way of implicit may also see me abolishing the need for post-type-specific areas of my site.
I could still do this to some degree I suppose. e.g. If a post doesn’t have a title, it’s a note; If it has a location, it’s a checkin; etc.
The only way to see how this is going to go is to build it and actually publish with it for a while, I guess.
Update 8th February 2021: I now use WordPress for my website and have done for a few years now.