Tag: digital)(self

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I pity the fool, who subscribes to my feeds

    New and piped up, Hello User feed rssLinkList(‘http://feeds.feedburner.com/HellouserBlog’,10,false,false);

I have been including or,’mashing‘ if you will, external RSS feeds into most of my blog posts since sept 05. aahhh I remember the day well. I was like… “how do I do this?”, and the thrind was like… i dunno, i’ll look for something… and he found this thing, plugged it in, and we were away. Still going strong after all these years.

Once that is installed in your WordPress application, its a simple matter of including a small script in each blog post.


< phpcode >
rssLinkList('add your rss link here.rss',20,false,false);
< /phpcode >

…and inserting the link to the feed, with a few extra parameters, number of posts, summary or titles only etc. voila! no matter when someone comes to that particular post, there is always fresh data, assuming I have included a worthwhile feed.

So how does this feed get ‘mashed’ into the blog post itself and consequently the ‘master feed for my blog? Well… it doesn’t. Which is one of the reason why I pity the fool who subscribes to this . When I make such a post, and read it through my reader, that script just turns out as… well script, totally useless to the average human.

Secondly, I have been usingfeedburner as my RSS front end (?) since i started having a feed. Since I regularly change my source feed I felt it would be convenient for people to never have to update the link they subscribe too. Plus there are some cool stats and stuff. I was using an rssmix feed for the longest while, but now, since all my cool friends (brian, scott d’arcy) have been talking about pipes so much, i figured… meh, what the heck? Perhaps the Pipes will allow me to do some how elegantly nest one feed roll, inside another feed post. (If that is making any sense at all you should seek professional help)

The big problem is, that if you have ALREADY subscribed to my feed, when i switch over to the new source, ALL previous posts are smooshed together as the one most recent post, going back in time to forever as far as I can tell. God forbid you ‘starred’ anything or even want to to check back on some of my more brilliant work. I suppose it is a simple matter of select the hello.user rss and clicking ‘mark as read’, but yet I still apologize for the hassle.

Lastly, thn there is the whole matter of the copious amount of blogs I have, and relative lack of blog posts to go in them… but thats another story.

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Zack the panhandler, buying/selling music on the street

An interesting thing happened to me while I was walking downtown a few months ago, which given my recent pursuit of the old forms of music distribution, I thought I should try and connect some dots here. These young hip hop dudes walk up to me and are all like, “”yo, yo, ya gotta check our beats man… “” and, “10 bucks will get you this phat cd of us and our friends”“. And I’m thinking, (not too coherently mind you) this is suspicious, but my curiosity is piqued and I throw on the phones to hear a few traks. Ok, the beats ARE phat, no question. So good in fact that i’m thinkin ” …who IS this rapping? I know that voice, is it a local artist?, blackalicious? from the uk? ” I can’t place it. Although I am questioning the origin of the music, it’s a risk taking sort of evening, and if these guys are desperate enough for beer money to flog cd’s on the street, I’m willing to throw in dime to help ‘em out.
So I buy the CD entitled “Killing Time compilation”, and over the next few days give it a good listening to. Slowly, I realize I am not listening to some downloaded tunes from underground artists I know, but in fact, some great original material from the very same guys who sold me the cd. How did I figure it out? Well the fact that all the tracks are available on MySpace was a big clue.

I have tracked down a discussion forum that has pictures of the killing time complilation cd.. Checking the back cover, the URLS of each artist MySpace was one of the prime tools for sharing and promoting their music.

http://www.killingtime.ca/
http://www.thisdancedancerevolutionwillnotbetelevised.com/

Here is all the myspace pages
www.thisdancedancerevolutionwillnotbetelevised.com
www.myspace.com/hits2006
www.myspace.com/imaginationstreetrunkmus
www.myspace.com/panhandlers
www.myspace.com/zachbeats www.myspace.com/kevarnoldmagnificent www.myspace.com/likkercats

This post has been sitting in my ‘drafts’ folder for many more months now, i think I started the post almost a year ago actually. I fear most of the links are quite broken. I have just not been able to figure out how to finish it off. Basically, it describes a way of buying music that is probably not too common, yet serendipitously it worked out. I have not heard if these artists have gone on to great fame and fortune, I haven’t even seen any announcements for any performances locally. Regardless, as far as new music goes, why not give those dudes on the street that are trying to make a buck a chance. You may be surprised at what they have to offer.

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My Cassettes on CBC

Interviewed about my research
My Cassette Collection on CBC
Originally aired Wednesday August 16th

cbc radio3 feed rssLinkList(‘http://radio3.cbc.ca/rss.aspx’,10,false,false);

Yay! Although I should have been working much harder on finishing the actual writing of my thesis, I spent a good portion of my ‘holiday’ time this year, preparing and giving some interview to our dear friends over at the CBC. Through the power of social networking, ( Thanks Jen! 🙂 ) my idea (and link) ended up on the desktop of a CBC producer who proceeded to call me and set this up. ( Thanks Anna 🙂 )

As I have previously, and repeatedly (sorry internet!) announced, my research project uses pictures of peoples cassette tapes, to explore design strategies that benefit personal media collecting, (storing and sorting) and sharing. When I was first contacted, I thought it was going to be just the blog piece which I was MORE than happy with. Since the idea of publicizing this was to draw as many additional participants as possible, the internet is the natural place to find them. In fact, I think the best promotion this project has seen so far has been the link from the renowned author running joho blog. (Thanks Mr. Weinberger! 🙂 )

Anyway, the interview went faaaiirly well. All those, “ooh I should have said…” moments will make good blog posts. I can also recycle it now that its on the internet and… geek geek geek. Of course I’m my most harsh critic, its good exposure anyway you slice it.

On a very short side note, I recieved an interesting response from Bowdens Media Monitoring, who can provide access to anything recorded on the CBC (I think)

The online service only provides audiotape cassette, CD Rom or DVD format for Radio Coverage. Please refer to the attached for pricing information. If you require an mp3 file, this must be obtained from the Radio/TV dept. The cost is $90.00 plus 10%copyright fees, taxes and delivery fees. Please let me know which format you would prefer.

….uuhhhh… send me the tape! 😉