17th September 2011
The time to renew my subscription to .Net magazine came around, and I decided to go for the digital option this time. The main attraction is that new issues come along without their cluttering up my house afterwards. After all, I do get to wondering how much space would be taken up by photos and music if those respective fields hadn't gone down the digital route. Some may decry the non-printing of photos that reside on hard disks or equivalent electronic storage media, but they certainly take up less physical space like that. Of course, ensuring that they are backed up in case of a calamity then becomes an important concern.
As well as the cost of a weekly magazine that I didn't read as much as I should, it was concerns about space that drove me to go the electronic route with New Scientist a few years back. They were early days for digital magazine publishing and felt like it, too. Eventually, I weaned myself from NS and the move to digital helped. Maybe trying to view magazine articles on a 17" screen wasn't as good an experience as seeing them on the 24" one that I possess these days.
That bigger screen has come in very handy for Zinio's Adobe AIR application for viewing issues of .Net and any other magazine that I happen to get from them. There's quite a selection on there, and it's not limited to periodicals from Future Media, either. Other titles include The Economist, Amateur Photographer, Countryfile, What Car and the aforementioned New Scientist as well. That's just a sample of the eclectic selection that is on offer.
For some reason, Future seem to wait a few days for the paper versions of their magazines to arrive in shops before the digital ones become available. To me, this seems odd, given that you'd expect the magazines to exist on computer systems before they come off the presses. Not only that, but subscribers to the print editions get them before they reach the shops at all anyway. This is the sort of behaviour that makes you wonder if someone somewhere is attempting to preserve print media.
In contrast, Scientific American get this right by making PDF's of their magazines available earlier than print editions. Given that it takes time for an American magazine to reach the U.K. and Eire, this is an excellent idea. There was a time when I was a subscriber to this magazine and I found it infuriating to see the latest issues on newsagent shelves, and I am still waiting for mine to arrive in the post. It was enough to make me vow not to become a subscriber to anything that left me in this situation every month.
Some won't pass on any savings with their digital editions. Haymarket Publishing come to mind here for What Car, but they aren't alone. Cicerone, Cumbrian publishers of excellent guidebooks for those seeking to enjoy the outdoors, do much the same with their wares, so you really want to save on space and gain extra convenience when going digital with either of these. In this respect, the publishers of Amateur Photographer have got it right with a great deal for a year's digital subscription. New Scientist did the same in those early days when I dabbled in digital magazines.
Of course, there are some who dislike reading things on a screen, and digital publishing will need to lure those too if it is to succeed. Nevertheless, we now have tablet computers and eBook readers such as Amazon's Kindle are taking hold too. Reading things on these should feel more natural than on a vertical desktop monitor or even a laptop screen.
Nevertheless, there are some magazines that even I would like to enjoy in print as opposed to on a screen. These also are the ones that I like to retain for future consultation, too. Examples include Outdoor Photography and TGO, and it is the content that drives my thinking here. The photographic reproduction in the former probably is best reserved for print, while the latter is more interesting. TGO does do its own digital edition, but the recounting of enjoyment of the outdoors surpassed presentation until a few months ago. It is the quality of the writing that makes me want to have them on a shelf as opposed to being stored on a computer disk.
The above thought makes me wonder why I'd go for digital magazines instead of their print counterparts. Thinking about it now, I am so sure that there is a clear-cut answer. Saving money and not having clutter does a have a lot to do with it, but there is a sense that keeping copies .Net is less essential to me, though I do enjoy seeing what is happening in the world of web design and am open to any new ideas too. Maybe the digital magazine scene is still an experiment for me.
10th August 2008
At times in the past, I have complained about there not being sufficient documentation of the actual code used on WordPress itself. True, there is the venerable Codex, but that can be incomplete, and any extra help is always useful. Peter Westwood (a.k.a. westi) has generated documentation from the code itself and put it up on the web for all to peruse. While we are on the subject of information on the more advanced aspects of WordPress, blogs by Mark Jaquith and Andrew Ozz are also worth a look. As the cliché goes, every little helps...
31st August 2007
A recent article by Lorelle VanFossen on The Blog Herald got me thinking about my blogging journey and what I have learned about myself. My brush with reactive blogging has taught a number of lessons. The first of these is that I just cannot keep up with others; someone always gets there first. Another lesson is that taking on a topic of the day takes up loads of time when it lies outside my area of expertise, and I spend a lot of that time researching the topic. What follows from this is that if the post doesn't flow from me, it either takes up a lot of time or it doesn't happen at all. Yes, I have been known to bin stillborn posts due to loss of interest or where things just wouldn't come together at all.
Following all of this, I have come to the conclusion that I am a proactive blogger. That said, I still need to get some bursts of inspiration from somewhere. For instance, my hillwalking blog always experiences a burst of activity after I have been trekking in the outdoors; such encounters never fail to produce something that is worth sharing. In the same vein, anything you find here is likely to influenced by what I have encountered in the technology world. Yes, news items do provide ideas for posts, but it is in a more leisurely way rather than the frenzied approach of some. And like the hillwalking world, such inspiration does have its peaks and troughs.
6th July 2007
Themed Login
Here's a useful idea: get your blog login page to look like it's part of your blog. It does work well on my hillwalking blog, but you do have to watch how it behaves with whatever theme you are using. Strangely, I couldn't make it work on my offline blog, the development mirror of what you see online. The ability to set what page is displayed after logging in or logging out is an especially useful inclusion.
My Category Order
My Link Order
My Page Order
These sound like wonderful ideas: being able to control the running order of things on your blog sidebar is a good thing. What scuppered my using them is that you need widgets turned on for the effect to work, and I have seen issues with how ID's have been set when things are widgetised.
23rd May 2007
Having two blogs allows me to stream my content; I doubt that many visitors to my hillwalking blog would appreciate seeing posts on, for example, the minutiae of UNIX shell scripting. However, as disparate as these worlds are, there is something shared between them, and it has started to cause some cross-fertilisation between them: blogging itself. Rather than being too self-referential on my hillwalking blog and preaching to the choir, I have taken the decision to muse about blogging and its progress right here. There is also some escape in the opposite direction too: technology does get used on the hill too. Examples include GPS receivers and digital mapping, and my hillwalking blog is definitely the place for them. It is all very much audience-driven; this consideration of content is the sort of thing on which a posting on The Blog Herald has been musing.
21st May 2007
Looking at the visitor statistics for both this blog and for my main website, I have noticed a definite dip in visitor numbers at the weekends, at least over the last few weeks. Time will tell whether this is a definite trend, yet it is an intriguing one: fewer people are reading blogs and such like when they might have more time to do so. It would also suggest that people are getting away from the web at the weekend, not necessarily a bad thing at all. In fact, I was away from the world of computers and out walking in the border country shared by Wales and England yesterday.
Speaking of walking, it does not surprise me that my hillwalking blog received less attention: many of my readers could have been in the outdoors anyway. And as for this blog, it does contain stuff that I find useful in my day job, and it appears that others are looking for the same stuff too if the blog statistics are to be believed. Couple that with the fact that technology news announcements peak during the week, making it appear that the weekday upsurge is real. I’ll continue to keep an eye on things to see if my theorising is right or mistaken…
10th May 2007
What we call walking or hillwalking in the U.K. goes under the banners of hiking, tramping and yomping in other parts of the world. One term that we share with other parts is backpacking and this is much bigger in the U.S. than it is in the U.K. My hillwalking blog has come to the attention of members of the hillwalking and backpacking community and WordPress’s logging of who visited my blog has alerted me to this and allowed to find other similar blogs.
Why have I mentioned this here? The reason is that it has allowed me to see what blogging software others have been using. Blogger seems to be a very popular choice with a number using Windows Live Spaces, in the process making me aware that Microsoft has dipped its toes into the hosted blogs space. Other than this, I have also seen Typepad being used and one or two self-hosted operations to boot, mine included. Intriguingly, I have yet to encounter a fellow hillwalking fan in the U.K. using WordPress.com to host a hill blog, but I do know of a German backpacker having one. Video blogging is used by some, with the ever pervasive YouTube becoming a staple for this, at least for the ones that I have seen.
It’s an intriguing survey that leaves me to wonder how things develop…
17th January 2007
Hello and welcome.
This may be the first time that you encountered me in cyberspace, but this is not my first foray into the blogosphere: that is HennessyBlog. So why the new blog, then? The reason is that I fancied having somewhere to mull over computer technology, both new and old. And HennessyBlog is already devoted to the enjoyment of the great outdoors matters else, and I do not want to dilute that focus. While a technology fan, I also like going walking in the countryside and visiting interesting towns and cities, capturing any views encountered with my camera. From these photos, I have compiled my online photo gallery, and HennessyBlog also features news of updates to this.
So there you have it: this will be my technology blog. I do build my own PC’s, so references to computer hardware may appear from time to time. Even so, I am more of a software person and programming is a love of mine. Currently, we also are going through a period where there are a lot of new software releases: who cannot have heard of the forthcoming versions of Windows and Office? I have been having a look at some of these. Like anyone interested in computer technology, the Internet is also a big interest of mine, not least because I have been dabbling in web development for most of the last 10 years. I deliberately say development because, although I can probably do passable website interfaces, I am more technically adept than artistically gifted. I did mention programming earlier: this pays my bills, so it may feature at some point.