Alden Bates' Weblog

Back in the 80s, when Trace Hodgson was doing a weekly strip for The Listener, somehow it all went terribly strange and twisted, and we got "Shafts of Strife", a comic strip that felt more like a drug trip than anything. Like many things, it's now available to read on the Internets, courtesy Roger Langridge:

Read 'Shafts of Strife'.

Peter Jackson should adapt that into a movie.

The first Transformers: Dark of the Moon trailer's hit the net.

Sort of an Alien meets Transformer vibe to it...

Via Boing Boing: Maru the cat and his love for boxes:

Which makes me wonder how oddly-shaped a box would have to be before he failed to recognise it as a box.

PS: OK, you know? Screw fixed-width layouts.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the next movie, is still half a year away, but screw that, because Transformers: Prime is starting at the end of the month!

The Hub has just released another commerical for it, and it looks very good. If the writing's as good as it was on Transformers Animated, this should be a great series!

(not)

Some two years ago, when Wikia introduced their new Monaco site skin, the Transformers Wiki moved to independent hosting citing a number of complaints, such as misleading the community, and ignoring dissent and forging ahead with changes.

Wikia are now introducing an even newer skin. Have Wikia learned from TFWiki's departure? Well, from what I can tell from the Community Central blogs, they haven't changed a heck of a lot. Though they said that the skin was going to be mandatory for all Wiki, and that individual Wiki were not going to be allowed to modify the skin beyond a background image and colours, there were a couple of notable exceptions. One particular "shot themselves in the foot" moment was when Wikia offered to let the World of Warcraft Wikia widen the skin, apparently in an attempt to prevent them moving to independent hosting.

There have been many vocal protests on Wikia's staff blog entries, but despite those Wikia are forging ahead with little change to the skin, which has caused a bunch of Wiki to head for independent hosting. The aforementioned World of Warcraft wiki can now be found at WoWPedia.org, and Halopedia seems to be the latest Wikia to move. The skin change has even resulted in a movement calling itself the Anti-Wikia Alliance.

How much will this affect Wikia? Probably not much in the short term, as they get to keep copies of all of the wiki that leave, but in the long term...

So, I've noticed a new web design element spreading insidiously across the web. Suddenly you can add web toolbars, which float at the bottom of the browser window, to your website, so every user who visits your site gets an extra toolbar full of various tools which may or may not be useful depending on your usual internet hangouts.

Wibiya, for instance, has one which will link to your Twitter, Facebook, and/or YouTube account, and allow visitors to Tweet or "like" your site (you can see a demo of a Wibiya bar on Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic). The Meebo Bar similarly allows you to link to Facebook, Twitter, et al. I first started noticing the things when Wikia threw one on their new skin.

Is this a new trend? I note that, unlike toolbars which are actually built into your browser, you can't turn them off. I also wonder if there are privacy concerns here — if a company can get its toolbar on enough sites, they can start building up a pretty comprehensive picture of people's browsing habits. Of course, this isn't new, and web bugs have been around for years, but these web toolbars seem to add an extra carrot to entice webmasters to place them on their web site. Hrm.

Some time ages ago, I picked Bloglines as a feed aggregator. I'd already tried a bunch of non-web applications, but running something separate from my browser to keep track of new posts on web sites somehow seemed counter productive. For one thing, it meant I had to have my computer polling all these sites itself, looking for new posts. It made much more sense to use a web-based service, that would poll the sites for a bunch of people.

Bloglines is a pretty good service, with a simple and clean interface. It worked well for what I wanted, and made it pretty easy to find new stuff that interested me. It wasn't perfect, but I suspect half the problems I had with it were at least in part attributable to my internet connection, which sometimes works well, and sometimes works like a brick. Unfortunately when I logged onto Bloglines about a week ago, there was a notice saying that it's closing down at the end of the month. For now, I'm giving Google Reader a go, since Google controls everything anyway.

So, thank you, Bloglines, for years of service. I hope the team goes on to even bigger and better things.

A tremendous end to an awesome series.

Continue reading "Doctor Who, Series 5, episodes 11-13"

This series is, so far, the best the new show's managed. That said, the latest three episodes have been variable...

Continue reading "Doctor Who, Series 5, episodes 8-10"

Yes, I'm slow about posting these. I blame RTD for sapping my interest in Doctor Who. Moffat is slowly winning it back, episode by episode, but it's a long, uphill struggle.

As usual, spoilers abound.

Continue reading "Doctor Who, Series 5, episodes 4-7"