got a dodgy ipod hard disk pintsized shows you how to sort it out here.

Reminds me of the good old days when my ipod Mark I died - almost. I was customizing an old ghetto blaster to accept an ipod in one of the tape slots - then it would be connected via a cable to the amp. All was going well until with the ipod in the tape slot i drilled a hole for the cable and forgot it was still there.

I managed to widen the headphone socket quite substantially with a powerdrill - which i thought had completely screwed the ipod, but i turned it on and all still worked - but the headphones wouldn’t connect properly.

But popping off the ipod case and getting to work with some bits of copper sheet an a soldering iron i got it all working fine again. The hard disk finally died a year later (and it only held 5GB) so i bought a 3rd generation a while ago. Perhaps I should replace the disk though and get it going again.

I wonder if I can upgrade the hard disk to a larger size….

Jeff Jarvis at buzzmachine.com has called upon us to blow up blogs. I’m making a CMS system for artists (this site and my art site are the prototypes) that incorporates a wordpress blog and i’ve embedded it within my own menu system. I’ve not altered the look and feel radically from the Kubrick default, just tweeked it to fit in with my own design.

The issue here is that if you’re only concerned with the RSS feed then the look and feel doesn’t matter, plus if you only blog - and do nothing else then it can be good to use a very standard template, loads of blogs just stick with Wordpress Kubrick. There is something to be said about using a format that is familiar to you if you just want to read and search for stuff.

What I want to do is provide a site for artists so they can upload their portfolio online, edit their events and contact details online and blog with a news area. For this application people will visit the site to view the pictures and presentation is very important.

When I think about blowing up the blog I’m not thinking about presentation alone - what interests me more is the applications of the blog technology. Turning all sorts of other data into feeds, and interlinking different sites through that data. Flickr for instance is an image blog in essence, its feed can appear on your blog - or you could subscribe to it, but you will probably want to visit the site too. Id be interested to know if anyone has manipulated Flickr data in any interesting ways (other than a few thumbs on the sidebar like i have).

The whole of this site - and alistairmcclymont.com is controlled by a custom CMS system. Virtually everything is editable online. Primarily this is useful for my portfolio and biography.

The portfolio has a system that enables me to upload an image online - this image is then automatically resized, recompressed and a thumbnail is created. It is then put into the appropriate area of my portfolio along with all the info. The whole thing is done with php (using GD Lib to resample the images) and mySQL. The biography is the same - and it gets automatically reordered by date (forthcoming, current, past areas etc). The news area is a customized wordpress Kubric theme (i’m itching to use the K2 theme - its just too uncompliant with internet explorer at the mo (on a mac - i know its a crap un-supported brower, but so many of the people i deal with use it)).

AJAX - fantastic, i’ve just added my first bit of it at alistairmcclymont.com. Its a database linked slideshow for my portfolio - the beauty of AJAX is that it all happens on the page - so smooth animated effects are possible. On top of that this script gets over the problem of the URL not changing, and so hampering bookmarking of pages (the script adds a little number onto the end of the URL - and doesn’t get in the way of the php which is doing the same thing). Check out the slideshow here.

Its all based on the script from this guy Max Kiesler. I just slapped a bit of php and mySQL onto it. I might get around to posting it if anyone’s interested