skandalon

Aphelis Reloaded: Part I

Photo: Skandalon, December 24th, 2010 (CC)

On December 23th, Skandalon celebrated its second year of existence (the very first post was published on December 23th, 2008).

However, as you may have noticed, nothing was published here for the past three months. To make a long story short, the last queue crash messed with the timestamp of all the posts I had stored either in Draft or in Queue. Instead of taking the time to recreate each and everyone of them (I was told to do so by Tumblr’s support team), I decided to work on a project I had in mind for a while: moving everything from Tumblr to a self-hosted Wordpress blog.

Keeping in mind that Skandalon was originally setup to be a usable online archive, I see three good reasons to move away from Tumblr to a self-hosted Wordpress blog: more control over everything, better SEO, better search function. That being said, I see no point at all to launch myself into some Tumblr bashing. I’m still convinced Tumblr is a terrific blogging platform for some users, especially when it comes to its ease of use (it really offers an effortless blogging experience). However, this quality could also be a draw back for some other users.

I’ve read about experienced Wordpress users who decided to move to Tumblr precisely because they were tired of doing server maintenance, dealing with upgrades, struggling with plugins compatibility issues, etc. As it turns out, I’m moving away from Tumblr precisely for the opposite reason: I want more control and I’m more than willing to spend some time coding and fixing things so they fit my needs (and hopefully my taste).

This project is divided in two parts. Part I is all about setting up a self-hosted Wordpress blog, coding a theme and setting everything up to my liking. Thus my first challenge was to replicate as much as I could from what I’ve come to love here over at my new Wordpress installation. I successfully achieve this task during the course of the last Fall season. If you never visited Skandalon (because you’re used to check new posts via your dashboard) you obviously won’t notice anything about the design. For those of you who are familiar with this website, you should feel right at home over at the new blog. If you wish to give it a try, simply visit Aphelis.net

Aphelis is still an online archive and I’m still providing adequate references for each and every post. With Skandalon, the idea was simple: I reblogged content, but doing so I systematically added details about the origin of the content, date and context of production, authorship, URL links etc (that, I would say, is the main difference between a working archive and a place were one dumps things without caring to much about them).

With Aphelis, I’m trying to do a little bit more. Along with the reblogged content, I’ll try to write some notes as often as possible. Why I found the content interesting in the first place? How is it related to the main theme covered by the blog (art, communication, technology)? Is there other related resources online? Etc. As a result, I won’t be publishing as often as I used to do here (around two posts a day for the last year and a half). But hopefully, I will produced more substantial content.

As I wrote above, this is a two parts project. Part II consist of moving every single post ever published here over to Aphelis.net, the new self-hosted Wordpress platform. This is a technical challenge. There are different tools out there built for this specific task. But none of them fulfills my needs. One of the main problem lies in the differences between the two blogging platform. For example, Tumblr does not use titles (except for some specific post types, such as text post, like the one you’re reading now).

Ben Ward, the author of the Tumblr2Wordpress export tool (a fork of Hao Chen’s script), is aware of this issue and working to fix it. While I was able to fix some other issues by tweaking the code of his script, the title problem asks for some advanced modifications (I’m not a programer and I’m not familiar with PHP). Truncating can easily be achieve by implementing a small PHP script within Ben Ward’s script (like this one). However, in order to generate a proper title, one will most probably want to get rid of any HTML tags and special characters within the truncated part of the post. I extensively wrote about this problem on Stack Overflow. Since I don’t have much time at the moment, I’ll wait to see if anyone comes out with a workable solution. Otherwise, I may give it another try myself this summer. Until then, Skandalon will remain as it is. I’ll probably update it from time to time, if only to point out to new posts published on Aphelis.

If I’m leaving Skandalon, does that mean I’ll stop following my Tumblr friends? That I’ll stop reblogging them? Fortunatly (for me and for you), Tumblr is not a gated community and the dashboard is not the only way to follow blogs.

Since day one, I found that “following” many Tumblr blogs –using Tumblr’s “follow” tool– wasn’t doing any good to my dashboard. It would become overloaded with posts and information, making it virtually unusable. So I decided to restrain myself to follow only a dozen blogs or so. However, there are more than a dozen interesting Tumblr blogs out there. The solution was simple: I subscribed to as many RSS feed that I wanted to and follow those from within a feed reader (I’m currently using Reeder for Mac 1.0 Draft 8, by Silvio Rizzi). That way I can follow fifty Tumblr blogs without missing anything. I can even flagged the posts I like while keeping this information stored on my computer and synchronized online with my Google Reader account (to my knowledge, there’s no way to backup of all the posts one “liked” on Tumblr: if one loses its account, one loses the archive of the post he or she “liked” in the process as well).

That’s about it. Upcoming posts on Aphelis include, among other things, a more extensive piece on what I’ve been calling “adequate references”, an interview with American photographer Jason Eskenazi and hopefully some more detailed information about a workable solution to export posts from Tumblr to Wordpress.

Happy Holidays to everyone: enjoy the family, the food and the snow.

• Dec 25, 2010 link notes tagged: Tumblr technology communication Skandalon blog platform export Wordpress

art vintage ad technology communication television future past evolution consumption shopping girls woman

✖ Via

x-ray delta one photostream on FLickr: “Shopping by TV” from the Populuxe album.

• Oct 19, 2010 link notes tagged: art vintage ad technology communication television future past evolution consumption shopping girls woman

art communication history technology geography space united_states history vintage representation collection ressource map territory frontier rumsey_map_collection

✖ Via David Rumsey Historical Map Collection: “United States” by David H. Burr, 1833, published by J.H. Colton (reference: Ristow, p. 315, P-Maps 888)

This is the first year of Colton’s map publishing business. Ristow says that Colton published his first map in 1833, Burr’s map of New York State; this U.S. map must be as early. The graphic style is similar to Burr’s Universal Atlas maps, engraved the following year. With six detailed and elegant inset maps showing the environs of Albany, Boston, New York, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Baltimore & Washington; plus a small inset map of South Part of Florida. Outline color, folded into dark teal leather covers 13.5x8 with “Burr’s Map of the United States Published By J.H. Colton & Co. New York” and a decorative border stamped in gilt. Prime meridians: Greenwich and Washington.

About this collection:

The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 25 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century maps of North and South America, although it also has maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1700 to 1950s.

Digitization of the collection began in 1996 and there are now over 21,000 items online, with new additions added regularly. The site is free and open to the public. Here viewers have access not only to high resolution images of maps that are extensively cataloged, but also to a variety of tools that allow to users to compare, analyze, and view items in new and experimental ways. (About)

Previously on Skandalon

• Oct 07, 2010 link notes tagged: art communication history technology geography space United-States history vintage representation collection ressource map territory frontier Rumsey Map Collection

art comic illustration illustrator humor obscenity curse google censorship language english expression ineffable incommunicability communication

✖ Via XKCD no 798: “Adjectives”

If you mouse over the comic over at XKCD website, you get this comment:

‘Fucking ineffable’ sounds like someone remembering how to do self-censorship halfway through a phrase

Previously on Skandalon

• Sep 27, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: art comic illustration illustrator humor obscenity curse Google censorship language English expression ineffable incommunicability communication

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

✖ Via Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Wildside Press LLC, [1897]2003, chap. V, p. 56

In Following the Equator, this quote is attributed to the Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar. Those quote serves in part as a promotional tool for Mark Twain’s previous novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, published in 1894.

Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar — MT came back to Pudd’nhead and his homespun ironies a few years later, when he used more of these maxims as chapter epigraphs in Following the Equator (1897). He came back to Pudd’nhead in this way in part, obviously, because he hoped to continue to promote the novel, and in part because of the popular attention the first batch of Pudd’nhead’s sayings had received. But whatever boundary had separated Sam Clemens’ experience from Pudd’nhead’s voice is even more permeable now: it is harder than ever to attribute what Wilson says in these “new” aphorisms with his character as it is developed in the novel. So it makes sense to think of the “Pudd’nhead” role as another of the disguises (like “Mark Twain” itself) Clemens found useful as a rhetorical resource. (Mark Twain in His Time)

The whole “new” Wilson’s calendar is available over at the Mark Twain in His Time website.

• Sep 15, 2010 link notes reblogged from chasingthales [via] tagged: art communication representation metaphore author novel maxim noise animal exageration claim

Like so many others in this day and age, they fought against the pressures of modern society to maintain a happy, respectable and responsible family life. Andy … was a model employee, hard working, personable and well liked.

✖ Via Guardian.co.uk: “Family found dead in Hampshire home were deeply in debt” by Matthew Taylor, July 27th, 2010

The quote above is a statement by John Underhill, former managing director at the firm where Andy Case used to work, before he killed his two daughters, his wife and himself.

• Sep 10, 2010 link notes tagged: communication mass murder family debt nexus nexum slave critic insurrection news UK violence death modernity society life potentiality stress pressure happiness economy

art illustration illustrator communication information order disorder chaos struggle man human theory time representation graphic data visualisation chart

✖ Via Mondorama 2000: “L’Homme lutte contre le désordre croissant du monde” (Man struggles against the growing chaos of the world). L’ère atomique - Encyclopédie des sciences modernes - Tome VII : information et communications constitution et diffusion des messages, Abraham A. Moles, éd René Kister, Genève, 1960. Unknown illustrator.

Used copies of this book can still be find online (e.g. AbeBooks).

• Sep 02, 2010 link notes tagged: art illustration illustrator communication information order disorder chaos struggle man human theory time representation graphic data visualisation chart

Tumblelogs have two key features that help users create an enormous backlog of posts in a very short time – “notes” and “reblog”. Through the latter button, users can simple click and reblog content found on another user’s site. This is one of the things that has made Tumblr such a hit among the masses, it is also one of the reasons that it is not in Google’s good graces. Search engines like Google use two key factors when creating rankings for searched sites: content and backlinks. Since Tumblr makes it so easy to copy content found on other blogs, it takes a lot more effort of on the part of a Tumblelogger to achieve a high ranking in results … because reblogging can easily become a duplicate content nightmare.

✖ Via SEO Facts: “Tumblr Takes a Fall in Google Search Rankings”, August 23, 2010

A follow up on my post about Tumblr’s SEO problems. See also Sochable: “Tumblr’s Biggest Strength is its Biggest Weakness to Google” by J.D. Rucker, August 22, 2010.

• Aug 27, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication social media Tumblr SEO Google search engine blog community

The purpose of science is to get paid for doing fun stuff if you’re not a good enough programmer to write computer games for a living (Schulman et al. 1991). Nominally, science involves discovering something new about the universe, but this is not really necessary. What is really necessary is a grant. In order to obtain a grant, your application must state that the research will discover something incredibly fundamental. The grant agency must also believe that you are the best person to do this particular research, so you should cite yourself both early (Schulman 1994) and often (Schulman et al. 1993c).

✖ Via Annals of Improbable Research: “How To Write A Scientific Paper” by E. Robert Schulman, Vol. 2, Issue 5, Sep/Oct 1996

About Improbable Research:

>Improbable research is research that makes people laugh and then think. Improbable Research is the name of our organization. We collect (and sometimes conduct) improbable research. We publish a magazine called the Annals of Improbable Research, and we administer the Ig Nobel Prizes.

First spotted via Neatorama.

• Aug 26, 2010 link notes tagged: science communication research academia paper publication humor how-to knowledge grant

Humans like to believe they control the tools they use, even if Socrates, Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Illich are among those who have argued that often they do not. From the alphabet to clocks and printing, every major new technology has profoundly altered the way in which humans think. The digital gadgets on which we now depend, Mr Carr explains, have already begun rewiring our brains.

✖ Via The Economist: “Fast forward. Fear of a fried future” book review for Nicholas Carr’s essay The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, Norton, 2010, 276 pages

An excerpt from this book was published in Wired magazine back in May:

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. (Wired: “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains” by Nicholas Carr, May 24th, 2010)

About Nicholas Carr:

Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, which is “widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement,” according the Christian Science Monitor. His earlier book, Does IT Matter?, published in 2004, “lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis,” said the New York Times. He is working on a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which will be published in 2010. Carr’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. (Bio)

Three things: 1) It’s yet another good reason to try and differentiate between information and knowledge (one could say that information is to knowledge what grapes are to wine : its raw material); 2) It would be a mistake to think that gadgets or the Internet are changing our brain configuration. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s an incomplete statement. What then, should one ask, caused the gadgets to change? What caused the Internet? 3) The form of this post can be understand as an illustration of what the content of the post is about.

• Aug 25, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication gadget Internet epistemology order medium media tool McLuhan apparatus brain knowledge information determinism cause effect book author

art photograph photographer photomontage image representation manipulation simulacrum animal humor technology telephone communication

✖ Via

Higher Pictures: “Untitled” by Alfred Gescheidt, vintage gelatin silver print, 1961

In an age when Photoshop seems to be a de facto part of nearly every photographer’s creative process, the ways of in-camera and darkroom trickery - montage, collage, double exposure, hand-retouching and re-photographing - are in danger of becoming a lost art. Alfred Gescheidt was a master of all these techniques and more, although his name has, rather unjustly, become largely unknown in recent years.

Once described by former New York Times photo editor John Durniak as “the Charlie Chaplin of the camera”, Geischeidt amassed a rich body of photographic work that was unique, satirical, idiosyncratic and at times even hallucinogenic. (Field of Vision: Alfred Gescheidt)

• Aug 23, 2010 link notes tagged: art photograph photographer photomontage image representation manipulation simulacrum animal humor technology telephone communication

✖ Via Tom Scott: Journalism Warning Labels

It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there’s no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy journalism and other questionable content.

I figured it was time to fix that, so I made some stickers. I’ve been putting them on copies of the free papers that I find on the London Underground. You might want to as well. (more)

About Tom Scott:

Tom Scott is a geek comedian. He won the 2008 Kevin Greening Award for Creativity at the Student Radio Awards, once got in trouble with the Cabinet Office for his version of their Preparing for Emergencies site, and has been described as a “sometime internet funny man” by The Register.

He runs the British part of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and accidentally got elected as president of his students’ union after running as “Mad Cap’n Tom”.

His work has been shown on BBC One, Channel 4, and at the paraflows net-art exhibition in Vienna. (About)

First spotted via Information About Information

• Aug 22, 2010 link notes tagged: technology communication critic humor media integrity news journalism information bias judgment health mind

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society [1] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

✖ Via Condition of the Working Class in England, by Frederick Engels, ch. VII: “Results”, 1845

First published in Leipzig in 1845. The English edition (authorised by Engels) was published in 1887 in New York and in London in 1891. Source: Panther Edition, 1969, from text provided by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow. Transcribed by Tim Delaney in 1998. (more)

A similar (not identical) argument motivates various “murder by proxy” theories regarding mass murders. See for example Going Postal by Mark Ames (2005) and the documentary Murder by Proxy. How America Went Postal.

• Aug 22, 2010 link notes tagged: communication society community murder mass murder killer murderer killing spree proxy murder by proxy blame bias determinism book author responsability representation

✖ Via Wikimedia Commons: “His Master’s Voice” by Francis Barraud, 1898

The dog’s name was Nipper:

In 1898, three years after Nipper’s death, Francis painted a picture based on a photograph of Nipper listening intently to a wind-up Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph, substituting a disc gramophone for the phonograph. On February 11, 1899, Francis filed an application for copyright of his picture “Dog Looking At and Listening to a Phonograph.” Thinking the Edison-Bell Company might find it useful, he presented it to James E. Hough who, in a move that would eventually result in Edison exiting the record business altogether, promptly said, “Dogs don’t listen to phonographs.” On May 31, 1899, Francis went to the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company with the intention of borrowing a brass horn to replace the original black horn on the painting. Manager, William Barry Owen suggested that if the artist replaced the entire machine with a Berliner disc gramophone, the Company would buy the painting. A modified form of the painting became the successful trademark of Victor and HMV records, HMV music stores, and RCA. The trademark itself was registered by Berliner on July 10, 1900. (wikipedia)

More info about Nipper over at DesignBoom.

• Aug 17, 2010 link notes tagged: art painting painter communication technology phonograph gramophone animal machine interaction relation recording logo vintage culture history

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got… an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. […] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And, again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled, and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

✖ Via The Washington Post: “Sen. Stevens, the tubes salute you” by Alexandra Petri, August 10th, 2010

Sen. Ted Stevens who died in a plane crash last Monday is known, among other things, for having coined the phrase “a series of tubes”

“The internet is a series of tubes!” This was the gaffe heard round the ‘net, igniting a response that spanned every news outlet from Fark to the New York Times. The phrase became a badge of pride. Stevens’s quote showed up on the Colbert Report and the Daily Show. Experts confirmed it. People remixed his speech. The “tubes” even have their own Wikipedia page. Google briefly incorporated them into a program as an easter egg. They took on a life of their own, ensconcing themselves in online lore. The Internet was not a big truck! It was a series of tubes! And it was proud. (more)

• Aug 12, 2010 link notes tagged: technology metaphor tube medium media Internet container content representation analogy form epistemology communication