Will Dee

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

It’s not often I’ll rave about an ad, but in this case I’m happy to make an exception.  It’s one of the best ads I’ve seen in a long time (piper abuse slays me…).

Perhaps I’m biased, Johnnie Black being my favourite tipple of all time and all, but I reckon that any ad that keeps your attention for longer than the 30 second small-barnyard-animal-patience-threshold of the average goggle-box viewer has to be a good ‘un.

This is probably politically incorrect, but fuck it, it’s a good song, and it brings back memories…

Hope you have a fabulous Christmas, and that Santa’s brought you everything your little heart desires.

Call it a modern Fantasia, but from what I’ve seen of the trailer, it looks like it’s going to be a special effects visual feast.   I’ll be taking the kids to see this for sure!

Check out the trailer!

Jeez!  What a week.  I swear they get shorter and shorter, and people try cram in more and more every 7 days!  Last time I checked, it was Thursday last week, and I was putting in the finishing touches on an online prize draw for the (nameless) company I work for.  Expected result 1500 entries, which was the result of the previous attempt to gather client email addies.  10,000 and counting for this campaign.  A success, I think, and we’re not even 75% of the way through it! Yay!

The down side to this is that the last couple of weeks have been an absolute nightmare, work wise, and I’m beginning to question whether or not it’s worth continuing at this pace or not.  My gut tells me no.  With current blood pressure levels, I may just conceivably make the festive season, but that’s about it.  I’m beginning to think about going freelance again, so I can charge an idiot tax, which will go some way towards making the frustrations more palatable.  Not entirely, but somewhat.

Or maybe I’ll be able to talk the wife and kids into a more bohemian lifestyle, and I’ll concentrate on becoming the next Alf Hitchcock.  Hmmmmmm…..

Panasonic AG-HMC40/41

Ok, so I have to ask. Is this overkill for filming very basic web ads for clients who want ‘em?

Probably, but hell, it’s just so secksy.  I want one.  Maybe it’s the geek in me (no, I wasn’t a member of the AV club at school) but I want to caress this camera.  *aside* the wife seems to think that wanting to fondle consumer (prosumer???) electronics is sick and/or demented.  But it’s a good looking camera, and the specs are pretty awesome!

Following on from a previous post about blogging for fun and profit, I was messing around with OIO publisher on a couple of other sites and was *really* surprised to see that people are actually buying ads on them.

Now, I can understand that there are companies that might want to buy an endorsement or discrete banner or button ad on a blog that’s widely read and/or written by someone semi-famous.  But these ads were bought and paid for on autoblogs.

What’s the rationale behind advertising on a splog?  Is it purely to hopefully get some traffic from a site that’s got targetted content and traffic from Twitter and other social sites?  Any thoughts?

I occasionally wonder if blogging could ever become a full time business, if approached in the right way.  I don’t mean like <insert famous blogger name here>, or any of the others who’ve secured book deals and V options for ludicrous amounts of cash, but more like your everyday citizen journalist, who logs on every day and writes for a living.  But not for a newspaper or magazine.  Just for themselves.

Hmmm…your thoughts?

And no, I don’t entertain any thoughts of giving up my day job to become a blogger, for fun and profit or otherwise.  Can’t write worth a damn.

I’ve recently started working on a new little application that’s basically a custom configuration tool for WordPress.  The idea came to me when I started working more intensively with WordPress, setting up multiple blogs, and doing the same damned thing time after time after time afte…well, you get the idea…

If you use the latest build, as you should, to stay secure, you invariably end up doing the copy/paste thing with themes and plugins you want to include when you upload the package.  Problem is, even if you do include the plugins and themes in the package you ftp to your server, you still have to go in and select the theme, activate the plugins and so on.

Trust me, after you’ve done the 75th blog, it becomes real old real fast.

So, what I’ve got now is a little app that allows me to take the latest package from WordPress, as a freshly downloaded zip file, and from my desktop, add themes and plugins.  Better yet, it modifies the install.php to set the new default theme, activate the selected plugins, set the first post (don’t you just hate that “Hello world” first post and “just another wordpress blog” tagline?) to whatever you want, and tweak the install file in a few other ways.  It then zips the lot back up and voila, I have a custom WordPress installation package I can upload immediately, with all my default tweaks, ready to run.

Over the next week or two I’m planning to make it look pretty (I’m a geek, not a designer, so the UI’s truly hideous) and add some basic ftp functionality so I can upload the custom package direct to my server.

A 4 hour job cut down to 15 minutes!  w00t!