"project" in Weblog

While I was in Central America over New Year I found myself trying to place the Maya, the Olmec and the Aztecs into the timeline of world history. I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in context before - everything I’ve read deals with a single empire, civilisation or region. So I decided to draw a graph to find out. The result is Rise & Fall: The Historical Trajectory of Power & Politics.

Setting about Wikipedia with random abandon, looking up dates and following links I have creating an editorial list of the things I think are noteworthy. I’ve played it fast and loose with dates and inclusions. Broadly speaking: early entries are cultures; late ones are empires. There’s a fine line between them, when there’s any line at all. Cultures tended to be subsumed so their “end” is debatable; empires were conquered but have a tendency to decline so their end is also in question. What I’m trying to say is that this chart is just my interpretation. If you want to know more, have a read. If you decide I’ve made a mistake, drop me an email.

Out of curiosity I also decided to try to give some indication of the cultural legacy of the world’s powers. As a rough yardstick I’m using the number of Google search results for the quoted search “name culture”. This is skewed towards those whose names have continued - Chinese and Egyptian, for example - and against those who have died out - like the Mauryan and Bagan - but it’s an interesting measure.

A couple of features I like:

The straight line marking the end of the Phoenician, Kushite, Greek and Persian empires as the Romans rise.

The big gap between the Romans and the Spanish - the Dark Ages - while Asia and the Middle East flourish.

The Maurya, apparently a golden age for the Indian subcontinent, fading from Western memory and the chart.

Enjoy!

Rise & Fall: The Historical Trajectory of Power & Politics.

Over the last week or so I’ve started pushing a little thought tool/influence experiment I’ve set up called Elect or not? I’m trying to gently nudge people into thinking about why they vote for who they vote for while hopefully gathering some data on the halo effect while I’m at it. I’ll write more about the science behind it when I get some more time.

Out of curiosity I just crunched the numbers for the results I’ve had so far and thought I’d share… Bear in mind that this is people saying who’d they vote for based on looks alone, without knowing who the candidate is, who they represent or what their policies might be…

• 32% Conservative
• 25% Labour
• 24% Liberal Democrat

Compare these results to some of the proper polls… 

YouGov (2010-04-28):

• 34% Conservative
• 27% Labour
• 31% Liberal Democrat

ComRes (2010-04-27):

• 36% Conservative
• 29% Labour
• 26% Liberal Democrat

ICM (2010-04-25):

• 33% Conservatives
• 28% Labour
• 30% Liberal Democrats

Tweetminister (experimental):

• 35% Conservative
• 30% Labour
• 26% Liberal Democrat

It’s a little bit scary but my numbers don’t seem too far removed from these far more sensible and official polls… See the data for yourself on the Elect or not? Parliament page.

On a whim, and after an off-hand suggestion from Stef, I decided to pop some of my most-used Sass mixins - the ones that I include in every new project - up on Github. There’s nothing too ground-breaking here: a straight port of Eric Meyer’s reset.css, and a few CSS3 expanders.

The CSS3 expanders are probably the most interesting. I was getting irritated with having to type and retype certain of the new rules over and over again with the now ubiquitous -moz and -webkit prefixes. So I bundled them into mixins. Mixins are Sass’ way of adding very simple scripting to your stylesheets. Let me give you an example.

This Sass snippet:

div
  width: 500px
  height: 300px
  +box-shadow(#000, 0px, 3px, 5px)

Gets rendered as:

div {
  width: 500px;
  height: 300px;
  box-shadow: #000 0px 3px 5px
  -webkit-box-shadow: #000 0px 3px 5px
}

Dead simple. I’ve wrapped up border-radius, box-shadow, gradient and box-sizing. Interested? Grab the files from Github.

You Might Not Know is a place to share those little tips you’ve picked along this road called Life. These tips can be able absolutely anything. If you think they’re useful then someone else will too. Or that’s what we think, anyway.

David and myself have been busy working on the prototype for a while now and after much procrastinating we’ve finally decided it’s safe to tell people about it.

I’m rather proud of how simple it is at the moment - mostly thanks to some cunning ideas from David. Adding a tip takes moments and I’m finding it rather compulsive. We’d like to be to Knol what Tumblr is to Wordpress.

We have a hundred things on the todo list but at this point we’d just love to see a few people playing with You Might Not Know. Let me know what you think!

From the beginning of Frankenstory we wanted a way to showcase stories. Our first attempt was very predictable: a list of stories that we could add our favourites to. But something about it just didn’t feel right… Frankenstory is supposed to be fun, first and foremost; it’s not a competition. Or at least not in the usual sense.

Enter Nick, who had the rather marvellous idea of writing a blog from the point of view of Dr. Frankenstory. He busily invented a history for the good doctor…

The story of my success begins many years ago in the sleepy Alpine village of Yödelayoo where I was working as a humble librarian. One fateful day as I was dusting a big pile of Mills and Boons high on a rickety bookcase, the shelves gave way and I was buried in a veritable avalanche of romantic fiction and soppy chick-lit. When I regained consciousness, I awoke to find my face was buried in an open book –Genetic Experimentation for Dummies. What’s more, the concussion I suffered as I fell jolted a dormant part of my brain, leading me to instantly absorb all of the incredible information in this hefty scientific tome.

…set out a manifesto…

Hello dear friends, welcome to the Frankenlab, the place where I’ll be preserving some of your most interesting submissions for posterity in a glorious ‘Frankenstory Hall of Fame’. Think of it as a kind of taxidermy display for your stories where I lovingly stuff and mount some of your freakiest creations (before gluing googly eyes to them and using them to scare small children).

…and busied himself with exposing this new life of literary experimentation to the internet at large, using Frankenstories as illustration.

The result is Dr. Frankenstory’s Frankenlab. And I completely love it. It kills a whole flock of birds:

• putting the often incredibly random Frankenstories in an entertaining, light-hearted, fun context,
• minimising any feeling of elitism by putting the decision in the hands of the Doctor,
• eliminating any pressure that may have been induced by a leader board,
• yet still giving us some way to promote and reward our favourite stories.

The latest post went up last night: Djinn and Tonic.

I’ve been using Wesabe for a few months now and I love it. I’m finding accumulating financial data quite addictive. Unfortunately, of the banks I use only my current account has any kind of export. I wrote a little script to parse my downloaded statement HTML into QIF files and over the weekend I decided to polish it a little and slap it on Heroku.

The result is my QIF Converter. It’s dead simple: you copy and paste from your online transaction into the textarea, specify how it’s formatted and hit convert. That’s pretty much it. If you want to import the transactions into your own financial planning app then you can just download the QIF file. If you’re using Wesabe and you have the downloader plugin installed you can just hit upload to Wesabe and you’re done. I’ve been using it to import the ridiculous PDF statements my bank insists on pensioning my old transactions into too. Bing!

While in Iceland back in November Brian Suda and I (when not discussing ideas for sausage innuendo) had an idea for a kind of physical wiki. I had met a guy at Etech a few years ago who was experimenting with placing blank pieces of paper and pens in public spaces and seeing what conversation might develop; Brian was trying to work out how to make real-world travel guides more social. One of the ideas we came up with was this physical wiki - to act both as a social object and a way of sharing knowledge amongst strangers. When I found myself on the Barcamp London Planning Committee I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a prototype: PaperWiki v1.0b.

What is a PaperWiki?

Basically, it’s a load of bits of paper stuck on a wall and connected by bits of string.

Things are written on bits of paper and stuck on the wall. People can locate things spatially - grouping notes as they see fit - or connect related notes with bits of string. They can also write directly onto other peoples’ notes. Simple and fairly intuitive.

Setting up

Given the Barcamp context and the technical awareness of attendees I assumed that the “wiki” label would carry a fairly big hint for use. I added a note about the wiki with a link to the title to act as an example too though, just in case.

Seized by last-second doubt I also scattered a few sample questions about the space as well.

The experiment

The best and most surprising thing about the whole shebang was how easily people seemed to accept the idea. I was worried that it’d need a bit more explanation or worse still, might not use it at all.

That said, it turns out that when presented with a blank piece of paper geeks will create a Twitter clone. This isn’t a hard and fast rule - I’m not coining Stenhouse’s Law just yet - but it went down a storm. Introducing Papr.

And alongside Papr a PaperNet emerged, including its own protocol, pampp://…

…a link-shortner, Tinyprl…

…a Flickr clone, Plickr…

…and assorted other jokes…

Conclusions

Uumm, it’s not quite what I had in mind! By Sunday the jokes had overwhelmed the useful information… More Geocities than WikiSpaces. But it was still good fun and it seemed to serve its purpose as a social object so I think it was a success.

The photos that I managed to take are up in a Flickr set and there are a bunch more from other people floating around too.

As a kid, did you ever play that game where you write a few lines of a story, fold the paper over and then pass it on? Well, I did but I’d completely forgotten about it. Fortunately my friend Tone hadn’t…

The game’s called Exquisite Corpse or Consequences - depending on where you come from - and is ludicrously good fun. Tone grabbed his mate Suzie and with him acting as middle-man Suzie and I gave it a try over email:

Thomas the tank engine rolled into the station, just as he did at 6:43 every morning. The platform was quiet - it was still too early for the morning rush of commuters - and he coasted to a halt, perfectly in line with the lights at the end of the platform. But before he could open the doors to get the hell outta there, the roof came crashing down. “Man!” Shouted Rock Master Scott, “the roof is on fire!”… the Dynamic Three jubilant that their jail was finally burning yelled in unison “we don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn!”. Scott smiled… they were free now. Together they fled into the forest, shooting furtive glances back the way they had come, desperately hoping no one had noticed their escape. No one had and before long they hit the main road back into town. From the safety of the thick undergrowth they peered left then right to see Killa Gorilla cooking dearest Kevin on a spitroast. Hooting and banging his chest, they knew they’d make dessert if they stepped out. With no way back they thought fast; “what would Jesus do?” or “what would Rambo do?”. Pulling out their machine guns they were home for tea.

The End

It was so much fun that we decided to make it as a little web app! Suzie as designer, me as developer (unusually) and Tone as wrangler. The result is Frankenstory, which is loads and loads of fun! Give it a try, let us what you think, and hopefully tell your friends.

A couple of mates of mine recently came back from Tanzania and looking at their photos, particularly the ones of Zanzibar with the beautiful mix of what looks like Arabic, Indian and Roman architecture, got me thinking. I know very little about Africa between Egypt and South Africa. So I bought a couple of books. But they all strongly advice checking out current travel advice before making any plans. Over on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s website they have a nice long list of places you should and shouldn’t go… Which is great except that I discovered that my geography is patchy at best and I can’t place half the African countries on a map.

I decided that what I really needed was a map. A little scraping, some geolocation (with a manually added exception for Georgia to make sure it got pinned next to Russia and not South Carolina) and a Google Map later I had something working. Nothing too fancy but it’s already proved to be dead handy for me so I thought I’d put it live. And thus I present the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice map.