Richard MacManus

I’m currently updating my ‘About Me’ page, so that it reflects my 2004 goals and themes that I’ll be exploring this year. I’ve got the draft sitting on my brand new Palm Tungsten T2, which Father Christmas bought me. Now I’m wondering whether to publish a photo of myself…if I can even find a decent … Read more

Summary: I analyse a 1994 Personal Information Management program and compare its goals to what we want in in a similar tool in 2004. I discover the requirements are basically the same. The blogosphere is mostly a synchronous give-and-take of content. People largely comment on and link to things that other people are commenting on and linking … Read more

Man it gets quiet in the blogosphere over xmas. I’ve had to resort to some real work to keep myself occupied. I’ve been diving into XSLT to try and develop something interesting for my weblog’s topic-based navigation. XSLT can be infuriating at times. I got most of what I wanted from my XSLT session today, … Read more

Summary: I analyse Game Neverending, a multi-player social software web application, and compare it to a virtual world that I created in my recent novel. One of those silly but addictive questionaires is doing the rounds: What kind of Social Software am I? You could be a Wiki, the Blogosphere, FOAF, or other varieties of Social Software. Turns out I’m Game … Read more

I’m doing some incremental changes to the site. First up, I added my linkblog to the sidebar. I use my linkblog to save links, ideas and memes that interest me. Hence its name: Web of Ideas. It’s a Movable Type site and the search functionality in particular makes it very worthwhile. Often when I’m thinking … Read more

I’ve just finished reading my Nanowrimo novel as a whole piece for the first time. I’m pretty pleased with the story, apart from one thing right at the end (which I’ll address at the end of this post). The whole point of Nanowrimo for me, as a first-time novelist, was to gain confidence in my … Read more

Two recent memes from the blogosphere seem to me to be ripe for mixing: Meme 1) The current trend for tech blog re-designs to have a minimalist, lotsa-white-space look that places emphasis on the content. Dave Winer probably started this trend with his re-design, but I’ve seen it elsewhere before him (e.g. Peter Lindberg and … Read more

As I was browsing my local bookstore, ostensibly looking for a Christmas present for my Grandma, I came across a book called all hail the new puritans. It was a collection of short stories from young British writers circa 2000. So it was a few years old and probably collecting dust on the shelf. But … Read more

Couple of bits of feedback from last night’s post on weblog ontologies. Bill Seitz points out that his Wikilog does in fact have a hierarchical view, the user has to enable it though (via their user settings when they visit Bill’s site). For example the post of his I used as an example yesterday has … Read more

I’ve been jotting down re-design ideas in my trusty paper notebook. On the Web there is an unwritten maxim: learn (steal?) from the best. So I decided to review some of the weblog ontologies/taxonomies on the Web that I admire. My method of review is informal and non-judgmental. I try to illustrate my findings with … Read more

Morality in art has always been a fascination of mine. And by art I mean literature, music, movies – the works. Some weblogs even. A favourite artist of mine is the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. One of Gould’s theories was that music should be judged on moral considerations rather than aesthetic ones. In an … Read more

I had written a long post describing my motivations for writing my novel, but on reflection I won’t publish it because it belongs more to my personal journal than on a public website. That is to say, it’s probably only relevant to me. But to sum up in a sentence: my main reasons for writing a … Read more

In November 2003 I embarked on a new adventure: writing a novel. I took part in Nanowrimo, an annual novel-writing challenge that takes place every November. Nanowrimo stands for ‘National Novel Writing Month’ and the task is to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. I first discovered Nanowrimo just 3 days before the 2003 … Read more

What’s your primary content? I felt a bit guilty about dissing Jason Kottke’s new design yesterday. I didn’t mean to be negative, actually I admire that he’s put all his content in one feed. It has its merits – for example readers only need to subscribe to the one RSS feed. The drawback though is … Read more

I’m thinking about re-designing my weblog. While I was busy writing my novel in November, others were exploring the boundaries of the weblog form. Dave Winerre-designed his hugely influential blog, Mark Pilgrim did a re-design (and curiously, Dave and Mark’s blogs have ended up looking pretty similar – or maybe it’s just me!). Dave is … Read more