You can create your own too using the Google Search Story Creator!

At the end of the day, I don’t know why the excitement has gone. But this site is supposed to be about living so I’m gonna find that excitement. I’m going to bring it back and get excited again!

Its been a long overdue project, but the builders have been in and given the place a thorough going over. The theme was built from scratch in order to provide OSL with a more flexible blogging environment. I liked the previous simplicity a lot but I found that it didn’t quite meet my slightly diverse blogging needs. I have built up a network of sites I contribute to and I wanted to focus on them without feeling that my primary blog was being left out of the fun. I have a lifestream setup on shanemarriott.com that absorbs nearly everything I do online so I didn’t want that here also. My old blog at phrixus.co.uk was still pulling in a lot of visitors probably due to its longevity. It has been around for years and needed a shake-up, with this in mind, I will be closing it’s doors when I get the chance to find a good way of redirecting visitors to new locations.

All of the thumbnail generation is done automatically. You can specify the main image in the post editor or the theme will use what it has to hand. This means that if you don’t select a key image in the editor, the template will look at any images in your post and use the first one to generate the thumbnails. These are cached in order to preserve the performance. If there are no images, it will use a default image.

I have some great ideas on how to incorporate jQuery to enhance a few aspects but I will limit those on the public version. A lot of the functionality such as “Related Posts” has been built into the theme so that the reliance on resource hogging plugins can be reduced which was a primary aim of the theme. Even the tweet on the homepage is fetched by the template functions.

Ultimately, this theme will be made available on one of the WordPress theme websites. I have a bit of work to do on the backend before that though. If you feel particularly helpful, have a look around and let me know if you have any ideas or, more importantly, find any problems. Both are important! Thanks!

I was quite pleased with the SimplePie mashup I had created for shanemarriott.com, unfortunately, I found a fatal flaw in the system. The flaw revolved around the reliance on RSS feeds for all the content. In principal, it worked well; however, in practice, there was a problem.

Twitter only displays the last 20 or so tweets in the RSS feed. My aim for shanemarriott.com was to maintain my own archive of content. I want to ensure that if Twitter should ever leave us (God forbid), I would still have a copy of my content safely stored on my own server! The current system would not do this so I looked into the possibility of passing all the SimplePie data into mySQL. This option looked like it would work and I started the process of designing the schema that would store my digital life. Luckily, before I had spent too much time working on this, I came across the SweetCron project. This open source project provided all the functionality I required righ out the box!

The system works really well and being updated every few hours by a scheduled task on our server. As it works on RSS feeds, nearly everything from the web can be fed in. The twitter @replies are being stored but not displayed which is a really nice touch. Everything can be configured when you know where to look.

The theme has been lightly altered but at some stage I will continue to develop it. For now though, it will tick along collecting all my ‘stuff’.

Go take a look if you are interested.

I can honestly say that the last few weeks have been the busiest in my life. Due to this, I have been making regular posts to Twitter but not writing on the blog. As such, the homepage is now full of Twitter updates. This looks messy, so I have decided to remove the weekly digest feature or this site will end up as a Twitter backup. If anyone want to see my Twitter history, just take a look at shanemarriott.com or Twitter!

The image above is a Wordle, a tweet cloud of my account. I think it’s easy to see who my original Twitter friend was! Here are few more variations on the theme!

This was quite interesting to play with but I then wondered about my Tweeting habits. When do I tweet? What time? etc etc. I used TweetStats to find out! This service gives you all the stats of your tweeting habit. It works right out the box and shows you what you need to see! This is my tweet density.

It looks like I mostly sleep between Midnight and 4AM… trying to remember those times when I wasn’t now!

I was also interested to see which days were most popular. I have no idea what would make Thursday the most popular day for me! Perhaps the thought of Friday?

There are clear times when I get the urge to tweet something! Morning, Lunch and Evening! I can’t imagine I am most creative in the morning, so I must load Twitter and then reply to any tweets directed at me the previous night. Nice consistent tweeting though! I guess it is becoming a part of my routine now!

Now, to cover the fact I have not posted anything, I am going to finish off some other posts. That way, the Twitter digests can be pushed down the page a bit! To see my full TweetStats in their full animated glory, look here!

The new shanemarriott.com lists all of my posts from various blogs, twitter tweets, youtube and vimeo videos. I have the option to add Flickr images but I have nothing of interest there to display. There is more content that has uploaded using shared accounts and are not listed, however, these should still be visible on the posts they will be embedded in.

Check it out and see what you think.

Moleskines have been mentioned on this site before, check out the post for my take on the famous notebooks as this post is slightly different. For any of you fans out there, Moleskine have launched a really cool web service, Moleskine MSK.

The service is currently in Beta and there are some bugs that need ironing out; nonetheless, it has some very cool ideas.

The Wizard lets you add a picture and text in various layouts to a page which you then print and put in your Moleskine book. There are a few preset layouts as you can see in the image above. See below for an API example of the wizard in action!

The Contacts feature enables you to upload a list of contacts from Outlook, Plaxo or even your phone if you can get the .msk or .vcf files out. You can then print these pages out with a lot of options on what information to show.

The most complete element is the Events tool. It is also the one that generated errors when I tried to generate the final page. It will take a calendar file so you can print it out for your Moleskine. There are a lot of options available on what information will be printed.

There is also a basic API in the works, to demonstrate, you can generate a Moleskine page for the original OSL Moleskine post by clicking here. This leads me to the idea of having a ‘Generate Moleskine page’ option on every blog post. This sort of thing would be quite cool! Some work was required to edit out funny characters and all the text had to be on one line; but if they continue to develop it… would be a novel option to have available.

These features may not turn your trusty Moleskine into a Kindle but they will make it just a little bit more techy! In real life, I doubt there will be too much use for these features as there will not be enough room in the books. It will be very useful for printing off a months calendar of list of contacts periodically though. In theory, you could use the wizard feature to make your own Moleskine… would require a lot of cutting out though. Unless you can find a way to print on the Moleskine pages directly that is!