Mac

How The Minister Got His Groove Back

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , ,

The Ministry will re-open for business next week, albeit in a modified form.

My hiatus this summer (sic) did not really rekindle my desire to get back into the blogging saddle; or at least not in the way I had expected.

Every blog seems to have a shelf-life. Maybe the Ministry is reaching its expiry date. (It celebrated its 1,000th-day birthday just last week.)

However, I think at least part of my problem is WordPress. To be honest, I have come almost to loathe WordPress.

To quote the rather good tech hack Andy Ihnatko:

WordPress is as simple as it can possibly be. Which is not to say that it’s as simple as anything can be…

I had two illusions about WordPress development:

“You can find an existing WordPress theme that looks like the site you want. Download it, activate it, tweak it a little, and you’re there.”

Not really. There are thousands of free, professional themes for WordPress that’ll take you 75% of the way, but that’s a bit like a ship that will take you 75% of the way to the Sun. You’re still about 25,000,000 miles short so pack a lunch and wear comfortable shoes.

Also, good luck finding “a theme that’s 75% close” to what you want. There are search engines that let you click and select sertain features (“Three columns,” etc.) but on the whole you want a single checkbox that reads “C’mon, you know what I mean.” It ain’t there.

The power of WordPress is its integration into the larger WP community of plugins and services. These things only work if the theme supports ‘em. I quickly found myself back in my classic AppleScript Quandary, where I’d want to incorporate a feature to simplify posting, but the effort of writing that feature and making it work correctly far outstripped the effort required to just do it by hand every time, over my entire lifetime.

“I want to use this plugin with my theme.”

“Okay: so here’s how to incorporate support for the plugin architecture…”

If you’ve never got your fingernails dirty backstage in WordPress that may not mean much to you. To me, it rings far too many bells: I am fed up with WordPress’s all-too-regular security updates that have to be applied every few weeks and, in being applied, break one or more of the plugins you have to utilise to make WordPress user-friendly. And, while it’s not exactly rocket science, WordPress’s composition interface just isn’t as easy to use as it could be. If you want to embed audio or video, in particular, you just end up crossing your fingers and hoping for the best when you press the ‘Publish’ button. If you were designing a blogging platform in today’s meultimedia-rich Web, you simply wouldn’t duplicate WordPress.

I have been exploring other options over the summer.

I began by looking at Twitter. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find there but I figured that all the meeja hors creaming themselves about Twitter must be on to something, rather than just being a bunch of bleating sheep herding themselves into a frenzy of mutual masturbation.

Turns out that they really are a bunch of bleating sheep herding themselves into a frenzy of mutual masturbation.

Now, please don’t get me wrong: in its rightful place, there’s nothing wrong with mutual masturbation. But really, Twitter’s a massive crock of steaming shit. I’ve been ‘following’ on Twitter some writers, comedians and musicians I admire in the hope that I might also admire their ‘Tweets’.

It transpires that all 140 characters is good for is an endless stream of knob gags (Charlie Brooker, take a bow) and txtspk wnk.

(You can ‘follow’ me @minitruecouk: I never tweet and I rarely bother to look at the account, so it probably won’t waste your time as much as ‘following’ most other Twats. Having never posted anything, I have one ‘follower’, a spammer: that’s everything you need to know about Twitter.)

Sorry, but I just don’t see Twitter as anything more than an overhyped flash-in-the-pan like Friends Reunited, MySpace and Facebook before. I have almost-pristine and long-deserted accounts on all of those networks, too.

Then I tried Tumblr. Which taught me that I am at least 20 years outside its demographic. What the fuck is Gossip Girl, anyway?

After that, I bought and trialled blogging-specific software for the Mac called Blogo, which I quite like and which certainly provides a better user experience than WordPress but doesn’t entirely float my boat. I’ll continue to use Blogo from time-to-time, but it won’t be my main blogging interface.

Next, I designed and (with the help of a freelance coder) built a personal website that incorporates a blog using Drupal instead of WordPress as its base: I like it, but it’s not right for the Ministry. (While it is still under heavy construction, and will be for some time, I do intend to maintain and develop that website and blog; some blog content will be duplicated between that site and the Ministry, but each will focus on different themes and both will have exclusive content. If you want the URL, let me know.)

None of these routes totally slaps my kipper and until last weekend I was genuinely considering closing the Ministry.

Then I discovered Posterous.

Posterous is fucking brilliant. I don’t often get evangelical (and I’m certainly not on commission) but Posterous is one of the websites that – like Spotify – threatens to be good enough to change the way people use the t’Internet.

You want to blog? Send Posterous an email.

You want to embed multimedia on your blog? Email Posterous the YouTube URL or the MP3 file. It does the rest instantly.

You want to update a series of different blogs and networks, too (eg Facebook and Twitter)? Register your accounts and then email Posterous. Bang: it’ll do it all for you.

There’s a good, quick overview of Posterous here.

post@posterous.com: that and an email program is all you need.

And, as most of the visitors to the Ministry know to their detriment, I can email from just about anywhere if the mood takes me.

It’s free. It works. I’ve fallen in love with it. It’s so simple it hurts me that, having been addicted to email for 15 years, I didn’t think of it.

I’m a tightwad at heart but I want Posterous to release a premium offering just so I can give it some money – something I’m not prepared to do with Spotify, at least not until it offers a genuinely compelling paid proposition.

(In fairness, it is at least theoretically possible to blog text – but not multimedia – via email in WordPress. But if you can make it work, you’re a better man than me. I’ve been trying intermittently for five years now and still not succeeded.)

Of course, Rupert Fucking-Murdoch will eventually buy Posterous and ruin it but in the meantime I have found my blogging appetite rekindled by its sheer simplicity, brilliant design and idiotproof ease of use. Everything I want to do, I can do in Posterous – and, from what I’ve seen, I can do it more easily and more conveniently in Posterous than in WordPress.

So while the Ministry remains at its old home, that address is – for the foreseeable future – simply going to be duplicating the content I email to my Posterous.

I have until December to decide whether or not to renew the Ministry’s domain name and – despite not being able to implement the Ministry’s trademark black and fuschia theme – it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Christmas will see the Ministry relocate to Posterous permanently.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether you can take anymore of this and, if so, where and how you’d like to take it – fnar, fnar.

Next up (probably): a music-related post I’ve been working on for about six weeks. So it’d better be good, but more likely will simply be self-important.

So – oddly, after all I’ve said – it’s kind of good to be back.

Posted via email from minitrue’s posterous

When you see a crowd I see a flock

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , ,

I knew I liked Barry for some reason.

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

“It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. 

The Minister has been under the weather these past few days and still stands shoulder to shoulder with Jeffrey Bernard.  It has meant I have not fully enveloped myself in the inauguration in quite the way I had hoped, but isn’t it just absolutely fucking fantastic to wake up in a morning knowing that, at long last, those unspeakable cunts are no longer in charge?

Anyway, brace yourselves, chaps: the Clusterfuck officially begins tomorrow.

£90k a year to become Legislative Drafter for the Falkland Islands?

Seriously – it’s got to be worth considering at the moment.

Who Are You?

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , ,

So, Woopra.

It’s been active for one month.

Excluding the freak results from The Day Of The Wikileak and visits from search engine robots, the Ministry is somehow attracting an average of 20.8 visitors each day – 603 in 29 days.

76% of these visitors come from the United Kingdom, with the United States of Yankee Doodle the next most frequent visitors (accounting for 11% of traffic).  However, the Ministry has stamped visas from residents of Canada, Iceland, Australia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, Singapore, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Poland.

Three-quarters of visitors spend 0-5 minutes wandering the corridors, but 6% stay here for more than 20 minutes.  (Why?  Even I don’t find it that interesting…)

59% of visitors are running Windows XP as their operating system, 18% run Windows Vista, 17% are Mac converts and 4% use various flavours of Linux.

46% use Firefox to browse the Ministry, 39% inexplicably favour Internet Explorer, 11% opt for Safari and 2% use Google’s new Chrome browser.  Sadly just 0.5% of visitors use Opera, which is arguably the best of the lot.

61% of visitors find the Ministry because of search engines (with Google accounting for very nearly all of that traffic), while 30% of the site’s visitors arrive here directly, suggesting more than 20 people have the site bookmarked (assuming they visit 2-3 times a week).  5% come here following links on Facebook, of which I am not a member.

Very few searches come up more than once, but one that regularly appears is for variations of the name Renee Fladen-Kamm.  Amazingly, the most popular page of the Ministry – apart from the home page – is that containing SMIP #8, the story of Walk Away Renee: this page accounts for a full 12% of the site’s traffic.  Billy Bragg’s never been so popular.

Among the more unlikely Google searches that have led here in the past month have been “sue grabbit run”, “thesauretical”, “alec baldwin 30 rock meat locker” and “mouthofthemersey”.

And to complete the stat attack, I’ve been intrigued to learn about my visitors’ screen resolutions.  The most popular screen resolution for visitors is 1024 pixels x 768 pixels (24%), followed by 1280×1024 (18%), 1280×800 (15%), 1440×900 (12%), 1152×864 (10%) and 1680×1050 (5%).  I’m not sure what this means but for some reason I find it mildly piques my interest.

As I said the other day, the thing I find most amazing is that the Ministry pulls in any visitors at all other than the ten or so people to whom I have given the URL, at least one of whom – and I’m looking at you, Minister’s Wife, even if you’re not looking at this – has forgotten it.

I do not advertise or promote the Ministry and never have done, apart from having had three t-shirts printed for myself, one for Domdeplume and one for julesallen.  (Bearded_baby is owed one, too, but has still not told me his t-shirt size: this may be because that information is increasingly embarrassing to him…)  I have left one trackback link on Popdose but otherwise this site is invisible, which is just how I like it.

Nevertheless it’s gratifying that anyone finds the site intriguing enough to read it at all, let alone to return regularly, and I’m grateful that you would spend your time here.

So hello, thanks for stopping by and do please feel free to contribute: everyone is welcome – we’re an equal opportunity Ministry.  Unless you’re Nicky Fucking Campbell.

Scum (d. Alan Clarke, 1977)

By BigBrother in All posts No Comments Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Two things.

First, I’m getting an iPhone 3G.  And I’m not even paying for it!  Said thing of beauty is to be provided by my employers.  (Of course I’ll probably have to forfeit this year’s remaining annual leave entitlement, but…)

Second, The Moral Bankruptcy Of 21st Century English Football (Part Infinity + 1) and There Are Times It’s Embarrassing To Be A Lawyer (Part Infinity + 2), courtesy of The Guardian‘s George Monbiot.

In the past few days, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club has dropped its [libel] cases against some of its fans. I am now allowed to write about the worst example of legal bullying I have ever seen.

The club has had serious problems, on and off the pitch, and many of its fans use an internet forum – owlstalk.co.uk – to discuss them. They make the kind of comments you would expect to find on any talk board, and which would normally be forgotten within 15 minutes. Two and half years ago the club launched its first suit. Only now have the people who posted these comments emerged blinking from the labyrinthine nightmare of English law…

Sheffield Wednesday went to court to demand the names and email addresses of 14 people who had posted comments on owlstalk. Here are some of the comments over which the club complained. “What an embarrassing, pathetic, laughing stock of a football club we’ve become.” “Another day, another blunder. I doubt even Leeds were in such a mess this time last summer, and look what happened to them.” “I am waiting with bated breath to hear who the Chuckle Brothers have signed after their trip to watch players abroad. With the amount of money they have to spend and the wages they can offer the best we can hope for is that little known Transvestitavian International I Sukblodov, who last scored in a brothel.”

Such comments were deemed by Sheffield Wednesday’s lawyers to be “false and seriously defamatory messages” which had caused grievous injury to the delicate flowers who ran the club. (They should try posting an article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.) The lawyers threatened “proceedings to include claims for injunctions, damages, interest and legal costs (which could be substantial)”. The judge threw most of the application out, but instructed the forum’s host to reveal the email addresses of four of the posters, whose remarks seem to me to be almost as trivial as those he dismissed. This took place a year ago, and the long shadow of the law hung over the posters until the club’s lawyers dropped the case last week.

Another case dates back to February 2006, when the club sent a warning letter to a fan called Nigel Short. When he received the letter he offered to apologise and to change his comments, but the club rejected this. He was able to fight it only because he found a lawyer – Mark Lewis of George Davies Solicitors in Manchester – who was incensed by this case and was prepared to represent him. “I’ve had two and a half years of worrying I was going to lose my house,” Short tells me. “It’s been hell. If Mark hadn’t done this no win, no fee, I would have been bankrupt by now.”

In November 2007, Short was diagnosed with throat cancer. The case continued. But on Wednesday September 3 he announced that his treatment had been successful. On Friday September 5, the club dropped the case and agreed to pay his costs. It issued a press release which suggested it had done so because of “Mr Short’s medical condition”. I asked the club whether it had abandoned the case because it knew that Short would now live to fight the action. It has refused to answer my questions.

Full case report of the fiasco here.

I dare say if I thought about it long and hard enough I could come up with some pithy pun or other on which to end this post – given my origins it would probably centre around an (entirely justifiable) insult towards natives of South Yorkshire.

As it is, I’ll suffice myself to say that the firm of solicitors instructed by Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, its directors and shareholders in the above matter was Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis, known colloquially as K&L Gates.

Decide for yourself whether you would ever entertain the notion of instructing such a firm.  The Minister will be taking his (admittedly limited) purchasing power elsewhere.

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