Freelance Unbound

I’ve been wittering on about social networks to students at Solent University recently, so I thought I ought to put my money where my mouth is and link Freelance Unbound to Facebook.
Apart from being a useful technical exercise, it should be interesting to see if it encourages some of my Facebook network – a lot of whom are in the media – to visit the blog. For some reason (not, surely, because Freelance Unbound is a dull read) my real-world media acquaintances don’t seem to visit it – or other blogs. Perhaps exposing them to this content in a different environment might help increase my audience.
So – how did it go?
It should have been straightforward. There’s even the handy WPBook WordPress plugin that does exactly that. And a search for “WordPress Facebook” on Google turns up a useful tutorial from Smashing Magazine as the first search result.
The first step is to create a Facebook app to embed your site on your Facebok profile. This is less daunting than it sounds. The Facebook developer process seems simple enough. Just fill in a few URLs and copy the Facebook API key number to the WPBook plugin and you’re sorted.

The problem came when I went to the Facebook app address to embed it into my Facebook profile. The login cycle seemed to go on forever, interrupted only by the occasional “Fatal Error” and PHP error message. And when a feed from the blog did finally appear on Facebook, it proved impossible to add it onto my profile – for some reason the “Add” button wouldn’t activate.
All very frustrating. Given that social networking seems to be taking over from long-form blogging as the primary creative activity online, I’m keen to figure out how to make them talk to each other – especially as some of my students have expressed an interest in creating projects that integrate social networking functionality.
Anyone with any experience with WordPress and Facebook? Input welcome…
[UPDATE: One more attempt and, as if by magic, the “add app to profile” button worked. For a few brief moments I created a headline feed from Freelance Unbound to my Facebook profile – success! And then, of course, it vanished the next time I refreshed the screen. More attempts to follow, until I lose the will to live…]
[UPDATE 2: As if by magic, the widget reappeared. Visitors to my Facebook page now get to see the latest headlines from Freelance Unbound in all their glory. For what it’s worth. Should I create a Freelance Unbound Facebook page to draw in eager readers? Maybe I should quit while I’m ahead…]

Woman in Black author Susan Hill spectacularly misses the point about e-books in this piece from the Spectator.
On the way, she does make some insightful observations about the way that bookshops are facing up to the threat posed by internet sales and digital distribution.
In fact, small, independent bookshops may be better placed to ride the wave of change than the major chains. Borders is a high-profile recent casualty of digital sales and distribution – hampered by high rental locations and a diffuse brand image.
But indies are sometimes succeeding by focusing intently on the customer and what they want.

• Quality stock – they shun mass market celebrity titles for hand-picked and interesting titles
• An enticing environment – inviting children’s areas, coffee areas and such
• Reader engagement – kids’ art competitions, author events and in-store book clubs
• Knowledgeable staff – people who care about books and care about offering you books that you will care about

This is excellent stuff – and it’s the kind of thing that has a relevance for journalism and the media. The rules aren’t hard to grasp – though seem to be hard for many publishers to put into practice.

• Know your audience
• Engage your audience
• Serve your audience

But then Hill gets all steamed up and decides to demonise e-books – which is kind of stupid. It’s a bit like typesetters demonising the PC and desktop publishing back in the 80s. I mean – it’s not going to be uninvented, let’s face it.

Perhaps the biggest concern for us all is the e-book. These have their place, just as audio books do, but publishers are rushing like gadarene swine over the cliff to predict and even encourage the demise of the printed book.

Hill can’t escape from her conditioning that a book has to be made up of bound paper. Much as journalists often can’t get away from the idea that news has to be packaged in newspapers.
Don’t get me wrong – I love books. And I’ll be sad to see them disappear, if that’s what they do. But while Hill is right to say that “the book is a perfect piece of intelligent design”, she makes the mistake of moving from aesthetics to economics:

The worst and the most immediate consequence of the demise of the printed book […] is unemployment on a huge scale. Book shops, publishers, designers, printers, paper manufacturers, binders, librarians, distributors, warehouses, wholesalers, shippers, packagers, delivery services – all of them will be redundant, all over the world. This is still a huge industry. The number of people needed to manufacture e-books is tiny by comparison.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
This is manifest nonsense. If we had been ruled by this attitude in the Middle Ages, we’d still be looking on as a protected coterie of monks laboriously illustrated manuscripts for a tiny elite to see in churches. Books wouldn’t exist you see, because illuminated manuscripts provided jobs.
As for judging the transformational potential of ebooks by the number of people employed to manufacture them – it’s enough to make you weep.
I have no idea whether ebooks will take off or not, or whether they’ll be bypassed by another technology. Or whether, if they do take off, they’ll eradicate the paperback or not.
But I think it’s fair to say that we won’t know what other avenues of economic activity will be opened up by e-books – just like we didn’t know what doors the internet would open for us. Did anyone reading this figure out that search would become a multi-billion dollar business? I didn’t think so.

Which, if you’re reading this on Freelance Unbound and not an RSS feed, you’ll see working in the headline above.
That whole new typographic look is thanks to Typekit – a service that allows web users to access a font library online and so expand the typography available to web designers.
Normally, the drawback with creating content for the web is that a visitor’s browser will only be able to see fonts that are installed on their computer.
Publishing type folks like me will have dozens of typefaces on their system, so we could happily read web sites styled up in anything from Gill Sans to Helvetica Neue, plus in my case a whole lot of Goth-style horror movie fonts I downloaded a while ago. Or rather I could, until my Powerbook died.
So now I’m in the same boat as a whole lot of other newbie computer users who rely on their Windows default font installation. I’ve got quite a few fonts, don’t get me wrong. But they’re almost all different from the ones I had on my PowerBook.
This means that if you are designing a web site, or WordPress theme, the effect is that your typography is limited to a few font families that you know everyone’s computer will be able to read. It’s a lowest common denominator thing.
But there’s a neat and, with hindsight, obvious solution – don’t pull the fonts from the user’s own computer, load them from an online type library.
The technology is straightforward – browsers can do it now. But the legalities are more challenging. So Typekit was launched last summer as an intermediary to pull together the licensing and technology into a user- and typographer-friendly package.
The user experience is pretty straightforward – just paste a Javascript embed code into your WordPress template files and you’re all set. I’ve just added it to the main index template of Freelance Unbound, so when you click through to any other page, you won’t see the Edding 780 font I’m using for headlines. (If you’re on the single post now, click through to the home page and see. Go on, it’s a ton of fun. Really.)
And choosing the fonts on Typekit is also easy enough. Though you do have to know what your CSS is doing, as you have to assign the new font to your stylesheet classes to make them work. I just changed the <h2> tag, but you can alter as much as you want.
So is this a new dawn for web design?
Given that you could only achieve fine typographic control by using Flash or embedding type in images, this is a boon for web typographers.
But given that many amateur web designers will end up making their site look like a dog’s dinner by messing around with as many “cool” fonts as they can, I suspect we’ll see a slight drop in average typographic quality online.
And, no, don’t worry – I’ll be reverting back to a real font once the novelty has worn off. (Although, actually, I am starting to quite like it…)

Despite the wealth of tutorial information on the WordPress Codex, the idea of creating your own WordPress theme can be a bit daunting.

So here’s a great tutorial on Web Designer magazine that strips the process down to its essentials and gives them to you in a logical order.

Given that I’m planning to create a skeleton WordPress theme aimed directly at students to help them learn how to customise a site, this looks ideal.

A: Not well, gentle reader. Not well.
After my PowerBook’s power connecter finally caved in, I decided I had to attempt a resucitation, using the handy guides from Fixit.com and Jason’s Screaming Light site.
Not least this was because of goading comments from readers to “Get soldering”. It’s true I had been putting it off – but that was partly because I suspected the project would require a whole day. Not to take the laptop apart, but to get it back together again with no stray components left worryingly over.
Yesterday was the day. Let’s have a look at the tally of costs and benefits.
Costs
On the debit side:

• £15.46 – for components and a soldering iron. At least Maplin got something out of this.
• 1 x soldering iron burn (not serious) – in flagrant disregard of proper health and safety procedure.
• 1 x broken Ikea bowl – used for holding some of the screws and bits that came out of the PowerBook. Fell off the table (no real loss).
• 1 day of my life – well, what else would you be doing on a Saturday? Watching football?

Benefits
On the credit side:

• I now know how to take a laptop apart.
• Er… that’s it.

Because the result, as you can see from the photo here, is that the surgery failed. No cheerful Apple chime when I tried to start it up. No power going into the battery as far as I can see.  The patient died on the table.
Why? Possibly because my operating theatre failed to meet minimum clean-room standards (it was more M*A*S*H than ER). Or maybe wrestling the components out damaged the logic board, or some other critical system. Or maybe everything in that department was fine, but something’s wrong with my soldered-in power supply cable. I just don’t know.
At least I backed up pretty much everything on the hard drive a month or so ago, so I haven’t lost much data. And I’ve realised I can easily swap out the hard drive and put it into an old hard drive casing so I may be able to pull off any extra data from that (unless taking it out has killed that too).
What have I learned?

• Never, ever do this at home – it won’t work.
• When your power connector first starts getting flaky, buy a new machine, or take the old one to be professionally repaired.
• Don’t buy a Windows machine to replace it, they suck.
• Just wait a few more weeks and Apple will release the machine you should buy to replace it.

As any visitor will have noticed, things are still quiet on Freelance Unbound this week.
Partly this is to do with the fact that I am so busy I can barely read blogs, let alone write one. But also it’s because  haven’t yet had the time, or the nerve, to perform major invasive surgery on my PowerBook, which died about ten days ago.
As a desperate measure, I made a distress purchase of a netbook to see me through until I could fix it. This has been a mixed blessing.
As the blatant, sluttily SEO-fixated headline above indicates, I don’t really like it. However, I admit this isn’t all Samsung’s fault. It is, by its nature, a Windows machine, and a lot of my problems with the machine come down to that.
So, how do I hate my netbook? Let me count the ways:

1. It’s slower than geological time
   Seriously, continents have rejoined and split apart in the time it takes to boot up and start up my program files. Whole phyla have become extinct waiting for my Documents folder to open. I have traversed the wheel of existence many times waiting for the volume control to register my despairing clicks. Mind you, I don’t know if this is the fault of the much-hyped Windows 7, or that the netbook is just underpowered. I upgraded the RAM, but that never seems to do anything – who knows?
2. It crashes relentlessly
   When I’m on the train trying to draft a blog post, for example, which is the whole point of a netbook, and which is so irritating I can’t actually express it in words. It also keeps trying to restore itself in strange, “safe” modes that I don’t understand, and advises me to do troubleshooting things that, frankly, make me uneasy. It’s a Windows thing, I’m sure. And maybe I’m just a Mac person. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, it’s not you, it’s me.
3. More alarmingly, it gives me hardware error messages
   “Your sound card is faulty, Spotify cannot play your track” is one such. But is this dodgy hardware? Or one of those software-driver error type things that’s fixed with a reboot? My rail-fail blog crash also cited an undetermined hardware problem as its cause. But is this enough to be able to send it back to Amazon? I’m paralysed with ignorance and indecision.
4. Windows sucks
   As a user experience – not necessarily as a technology platform. I’m sorry, how many menu actions do I have to go through to delete a file, or move it between folders? I’m sure there are shortcuts (sweet Jesus there must be), but I sure as hell haven’t found them yet. Give me the flexible foldery goodness of Mac OS X and its intuitive drag and drop interface. Please, PLEASE give it back to me.
5. It’s so flaming small
   Yes – I know that’s the whole point of a netbook. But trying to figure out how to use the crappy operating system and actually evolving into a new life form in the time it takes to open Windows Media Player  is made even harder because it’s all so cramped. If only Apple made a ten-inch netbook-type product… oh crap.

Yes – my real problem was timing. If my old machine had just managed to hang in for another couple of months I could be typing this now on an iSlatePad and the world would be beautiful.
But, frankly, this doesn’t surprise me. I’ve spent a lifetime just behind the technology curve – buying gadgets mere weeks before they become superseded by the next five-year wave. Why should this be any different?
The only bright spot in all this is that it has helped me overcome my fear of taking my PowerBook apart. Desperate times call for desperate measures – the soldering iron comes out at the weekend…

Why on earth do you want to spend three years and £20,000 learning the ropes of what appears to be a dying industry?
Well – dying in the sense of “very, very difficult to make a living in”.
Yes, it’s student intake assessment today, and I get to play my part in deciding the fate of the dozens of eager potential journalism undergraduates – all shiny faced and wide-eyed at the prospect of treading the hallowed halls of learning to study, well, shorthand.
It’ll be very interesting – not least because I get to ask that all-important question (though slightly more tactfully phrased), and also get to see how media savvy the young folks are.
Do they read newspapers? Do they just read Heat magazine? Do they read anything at all? What are their hopes and dreams?
And, I suppose, what right do I have to crush them by suggesting they spend three years learning accounting and finance instead.
[UPDATE: Key advice for prospective interviewees: prepare some intelligent-sounding questions to ask. That really does work.]

Things have been quiet here on Freelance Unbound for a few days. Partly this has been me having a rest after the orgy of news:rewired coverage, and partly because I had to prepare for teaching an interesting course to journalism students at Solent University on online strategy. This ties in nicely with the entrepreneurial journalism meme at news:rewired, so I’ll probably expand on that here.
But not before I’ve managed to fix my laptop – which has now died. The problem? The Apple G4 laptop power connector.
There’s a common misconception that Apple designers are gods among men. That their design is groundbreaking, faultless, sublime.
Not so, my friends. Not so.
In fact, the design of the power connector for the G4 Titanium PowerBook is rubbish. It has a serious flaw – the power lead connection into the body of the laptop is flaky and very vulnerable to damage.
There’s quite a bit on the web about this. One Apple PowerBook owner writes:

If you have a PowerBook, you may be familiar with the symptoms: as soon as you look at the connector, your system is running on battery, not wall power. You fiddle with the connector, push on it, apply force in various directions, and eventually it reconnects. The problem is progressive, too: the first time, all it usually takes is turning the connector, but within 6 months you’re doing the “my laptop power connector cut off” dance – pushing on it, swearing, and generally making anyone who sees you wonder if you’ve lost your mind.

The problem is compounded by the fact that it’s very easy to catch the power lead with some extremity or other – generally ripping it out of the socket. The result is a power connector that gets progressively distorted and bent, and that won’t sit snugly in the socket any more.
(And whose cord gets damaged, as my super-sophisticated repair indicates.)
I managed to go one further, however. Recently when I ripped out the power lead for the umpteenth time, the tip of the small jack plug inside the connector actually sheered off and stuck inside the socket (again – others online have had this same problem).
The lead still made a connection when I pushed it back in. But it was only a matter of time. Now the handy indicator light doesn’t show at all and the laptop won’t charge. And, given that my battery lasts about 15 minutes now, that means it’s officially dead in the water. I have a cool, £1,600 paperweight on my desk.
This is rubbish design. And, to their credit, the designers at Apple have clearly realised this. The revamped iBook power connector is fantastic – it’s magnetic, so if you knock the lead away, it does no damage to the laptop at all. As Christian Kit Paul says on Kit.Blog: “This is how all plug-and-socket connections should work”.
In desperation, because it’s Friday and to be away from the interweebs – and from you – for a whole 48 hours would be indescribable torture, I’ve just ordered myself a Samsung N140 netbook for emergency despatch by Amazon. (It would actually have been nice to have had this at news:rewired so I could have liveblogged myself into insanity, but there you go.)
[UPDATE: Now using the N140. My god Windows sucks.]
But even so, I won’t give up on my PowerBook. For my next weekend electronics project (in fact, my first weekend electronics project), I plan to take that sucker apart and solder in a new connector – a proper one  – that won’t break or distort, no matter what I do to it.
The instructions are all here, on Jason’s Screaminglight.com site (along with a very shrill disclaimer).
Looks like a piece of cake. I mean, advanced computer circuitry – how hard can it be to take apart and reassemble?
Wish me luck…
[NB: here’s a link to another power connector repair guide. If you need it.]

A week late, but still interesting, here’s the difference in stance of the two big red-tops over the death of war correspondent Rupert Hamer by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.

For those of you who missed it, The Sun‘s coverage is in that teeny column in the bottom left. Because he was a Mirror man, don’t you see.
Having said that, I can just imagine the conversation in the newsroom on Sunday evening as The Sun went to press:
NewsCorp management suit: “You can’t put that on the front page – he worked for our biggest rival.”
Sun news editor: “We effing can – he was still one of us!”

#newsrw Rather than adding too much to the slew of news:rewired reviews and analysis, here’s a handy guide to some of the coverage session by session. For all your Twittering and Flickring needs, check out the news:rewired site’s Buzz page.
(Journalism.co.uk has prepared its own catch-up guide, which is doubtless better. They organised it, after all. Send your blog links to Judith Townend in case they want to keep it updated.)
What the bloggers said:

• Iain Hepburn thinks the event spread itself too thinly and some of the panels missed the mark – he also takes the event to task a bit for overrunning, which forced the pace at times [UPDATE 15 June 2011: he seems to have deleted this blog content].
  Strongest content: Kevin Marsh‘s keynote speech (transcript/notes here), the Local Digital Media panel and David Dunkley Gyimah‘s videojournalism presentation.
• Sarah Booker adds a general round-up and promises session-specific posts.
• Adam Tinworth is excellent on the five stages of grief journalists are experiencing as the industry implodes.
• Jon Jacob from the BBC College of Journalism is a bit self-indulgent but is right when he argues we should forget about labels and trying to predict the future.
• Jon Slattery brings a newsman’s coverage to the event. His general roundup of the event is here.
• Julio Romo‘s Two Four Seven blog has a substantial round-up looking at the implications from a PR professional’s view and featuring some useful extra links.

Keynote: 10:30 – 10:45

[vimeo width=”200″ height=”150″]http://www.vimeo.com/8748852[/vimeo]George Brock, head of journalism department, City University.
George Brock believes he should be a professor of chaos history, and likens the search for solutions to the challenges of digital media as “throwing spaghetti at a wall”.
What the bloggers said:

• Adam Tinworth summarises George Brock’s keynote here.
• Nigel Barlow has a nice summary of the session here.
• Patrick Smith takes on the idea that journalism students can boost local reporting.
• Alex Gamela has an overview of George Brock’s keynote here.
• David Higgerson wonders whether the media’s obsession with Twitter is overplayed – a nice analysis.

I liked Brock’s point that technology is not always the disruptive social force we sometimes credit it as being. Although western media picked up on the Twitter campaign by Iranian dissidents last year, actually the regime is more threatened by opponents stamping slogans on banknotes.
So many banknotes now carry opposition messages that the government wants to recall them all. But that would destroy the economy. Very clever – very low tech.

Presentation: 10:45 – 11.10

[vimeo width=”200″ height=”150″]http://vimeo.com/8747635[/vimeo]Kevin Marsh, BBC College of Journalism, on the challenges of learning new multimedia and social media skills. Key message: Big media will not die.
What the bloggers said:

• Jon Slattery’s story on Kevin Marsh’s talk is here.
• News:rewired has an audio interview with Kevin Marsh here covering many of the same issues.
• Reuters’ Mark Jones interviewed Kevin Marsh after his presentation on whether using social media makes you a better journalist.
• Oliver Luft at Press Gazette explores Marsh’s views on the transformative nature of blogging.
• Mediating Conflict also briefly picks up on the importance of blogging as a transformative force.
• David Higgerson uses Marsh’s comments on blogging as the springboard for a discussion of the blogging medium.

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