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

technology photograph vintage bw oil oil_spill history disaster nature machine man catastrophe natural_catastrophe

✖ Via

Wikimedia Commons: Lakeview #1 oil gusher, Kern County, California, USA, after the well had partially subsided, the derrick removed, and the well surrounded by a sandbag berm. Photo by W.C. Mendenhall, US Geological Survey, 1910

The Lakeview Gusher Number One was an immense out-of-control pressurized oil well in the Midway-Sunset Oil Field in Kern County, California, resulting in what is regarded as the largest oil spill in history, lasting 18 months and releasing 9 million barrels (1.4×106 m3) of crude oil. In what was one of the largest oil reserves in America, pressure built to an extreme due to the quantity of crude oil in the area. (wikipedia)

• Oct 29, 2010 link notes tagged: technology photograph vintage BW oil oil spill history disaster nature machine man catastrophe natural catastrophe

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

✖ Via XKCD no 802: “Online Communities 2”

XKCD updated his famous Online Communities map (the first one was released in 2007). Tumblr appears North of the Photoblogs island, in the Sea of Opinions. About this map:

Communities rise and fall, and total membership numbers are no longer a good measure of a community’s current size and health. This updated map uses size to represent total social activity in a community ― that is, how much talking, playing, sharing, or other socializing happens there. This meant some comparing of apples and oranges, but I did my best and tried to be consistent.

Estimates are based on the best numbers I could find, but involved a great deal of guesswork, statistical inference, random sampling, nonrandom sampling, a 20,000-cell spreadsheet, emailing, cajoling, tea-leaf reading, goat sacrifices, and gut instinct (i.e. making things up).

Sources of data include Google and Bing, Wikipedia, Alexa, Big-Boards.com, StumbleUpon, Wordpress, Askimet, every website statistics page I could find, press releases, news articles, and individual site employees. Tanks in particular to folks at Last.fm, LiveJournal, Reddit, and The New York Times, as well as sysadmins at a number of sites who shared statistics on condition of anonymity.

Previously on Skandalon

• Oct 06, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: art technology design poster data visualization map representation social community Internet statistics illustrator XKCD humor Tumblr census

✖ Via Life ― Hosted by Google: “Full frame of movie audience wearing special 3D glasses to view film “Bwana Devil” which was shot with new “natural vision” 3 dimensional technology.” photo by J.R. Eyerman, Paramount Theater, Hollywood, California, November 26, 1952.

This photo is well known, though it’s origin is not. It appears on the cover of the English translation of Guy Debord La Société du Spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle, tr. by Fredy Perlman and Jon Supak, Black & Red, 1970; available online). It was originally taken by Life photographer J.R. Eyerman (1906-1985) at “the premiere screening of film ‘Bwana Devil,’ directed by Arch Oboler, the 1st full-length, color 3D (aka ‘Natural Vision’) motion picture” (Life.com). I don’t know for sure if it ever appeared in Life Magazine itself, though it was later used in 1984 on the cover of the brochure that accompanied an exhibition of photographs from Life Magazine held at the International Center of Photography (New York) and entitled: The Second Decade, 1946-1955 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984; used copies still available online).

Here’s what Thomas Y. Levin has to say about this photo in his essay “Dismantling the Spectacle: The cinema of Guy Debord”

This picture, taken by J.R. Eyerman, has since become a veritable cliché not only for the alienation of late consumer culture but also for the ten years following World War II: it appears, for example, on T-Shirts, bags, and buttons as well as on the cover of the brochure that accompanied an exhibition of photographs from Life magazine held at the International Center of Photography (New York) and entitled: The Second Decade, 1946-1955. Few realize, however, that this depiction of the latest stage in the drive towards cinematic verisimilitude exists in at least two versions: the one, employed for the cover of the Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, Black & Red, 1970, repr. 1977 and 1983), depicts its elegantly attired audience in a virtually trance-like state of absorption, their faces grim, their lips pursed, in the other shot of the same audience, however, the 3-D spectators are laughing, their expressions of hilarity conveying the pleasure of an uproarious, active spectatorship.

(‘Dismantling the spectacle. The Cinema of Guy Debord’, in On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time. The Situationist International 1957-1972, MIT Press : Cambridge 1989, pp. 72-123; available online at the Media Art Net website.

I first found the reference to this photo via Beetle In A Box Tumblr blog, though it needs some correction : the photo did not appeared in any of Life Magazine November issues of 1952.

• Oct 06, 2010 link notes tagged: art photograph photographer film movie cinema 3D vintage BW crowd audience spectator spectacle Debord entertainment America 50s technology vision Debord society

✖ Via staff: The new Tumblr Queue is live!

In addition to the much refined interface, you can now drag to reorder your queued posts.

Sorry for the delay. It took longer than we were expecting to port your existing queues. If you notice anything acting funny, please let us know.

I’ve tried to try it by queueing one of my draft post : it disappeared. Maybe it’s the timestamp on the draft post. I’ll wait a couple of days before giving it another try. I’m not the only one with issue : read the comments below the post (below the notes)

• Oct 05, 2010 link notes reblogged from staff [via] tagged: technology Tumblr queue feature

art technology color web application design generator palette

✖ Via Color Scheme Designer 3 by Petr Stanicek ©, version 3.1, 2010

Generator of color schemes and palettes to create good-looking and well balanced and harmonic web pages and any other color design. This is the brand new, rewritten version of the previous color generator. The application is moved to its own domain since this version. (Webdesigners)

Color Scheme Designer 3 is part of the Webdesigners tools series.

See also Adobe’s Küler and the Multicolor Search Lab

• Oct 04, 2010 link notes tagged: art technology color web application design generator palette

art design poster museum collection epistemology order typology class classification artefact technology adapter interface translation

✖ Via Frank Grießhammer: “Adapters” (portofolio) [click for hi-res]

This is Frank Grießhammer’s personal collection of adapters. See more at his Adapter Museum online.

Frank Grießhammer was born in 1983, and has studied in Saarbrücken, Florence and The Hague. He graduated in 2008 in communications design from HBKsaar, with the thesis project Kiosk Fonts, a platform for student writing projects. (Linotype.com)

First spotted via Stüff Stuff.

• Oct 03, 2010 link notes [via] tagged: art design poster museum collection epistemology order typology class classification artefact technology adapter interface translation

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself. By this act of finding itself by itself, then, the [working] consciousness becomes its own meaning-or-will; and this happens precisely in work, in which it seemed to be alien meaning-or-will.

✖ Via Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, Cornell University Press, [1947]1980, p. 27

Here’s the original French version:

L’homme qui travaille reconnaît dans le Monde effectivement transformé par son travail sa propre œuvre: il s’y reconnaît soi-même; il y voit sa propre réalité humaine; il y découvre et il révèle aux autres la réalité objective de son humanité, de l’idée d’abord abstraite et purement subjective qu’il se fait de lui-même.] Par cet acte-de-se-retrouver soi-même par soi-même, la Conscience [travaillante] devient donc sens-ou-volonté propre; et elle le devient précisément dans le travail, où elle ne semblait être que sens-ou-volonté étranger. (Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, éd. Gallimard, Paris, 1947, p. 31)

A complete PDF copy of this book is available online. A French version of the ‘Introduction’ of this book is available here.

• Oct 02, 2010 link notes tagged: technology work world production subjectivity other self alienation slave master Hegel Kojève philosophy consumption consumer capitalism creation art

art illustration illustrator critic evolution technology apparatus human time perspective universe

✖ Via Techno Tuesday: “How Far We’ve Come”

Previously on Skandalon: Andy Rementer

• Sep 24, 2010 link notes tagged: art illustration illustrator critic evolution technology apparatus human time perspective universe

When creating a post, you can now attribute its content (eg. a pull quote or image) to a source outside of Tumblr. That source gets clearly attributed everywhere that post is reblogged on Tumblr. The bookmarklet will automatically set the source, confirming that the current page is in fact the content’s origin.

✖ Via Tumblr Staff: Fixing Content Attribution (Once and For All), September 3rd, 2010

Looks like a nice technical improvement. But the basic argument is all wrong. First, the content attribution problem ―which is not exclusive to Tumblr― is not fixed at all. Second, the bookmarklet may automatically set a source but in no way will it be able to confirm that the page reblogged is the content’s origin.

If you’re surfing ffffound and happen to stumble upon a nice picture, the bookmarklet will display this : “fffound.com photographed or created this image”. Which is wrong, as wrong as before.

The fact is that no simple software implementation is capable, for the moment, to replace human judgement. The problem remains : if one wants to know the “source” of any content, one will have to make the effort to think and to do some research. Unfortunately, this condition for attributing the right source to a content seems to contradict one of Tumblr’s main tagline: “Tumblr makes it effortless to share anything you find or create” (Why Tumblr).

• Sep 04, 2010 link notes reblogged from staff [via] tagged: Tumblr attribution blog bookmarklet content interface research source technology adequate references

An especially disturbing section of the book delves into a lawsuit brought against Eli Lilly by survivors of a rampage by Joseph Wesbecker, who was the company’s worst nightmare: a Prozac user who went on the rampage in 1989 with an AK-47. Fortunately for Eli Lilly, the 1994 trial was concurrent with the O. J. Simpson trial, the facts were carefully manipulated, a secret settlement was made between plaintiffs and the drug company even as the trial continued, and Prozac avoided a warning label about possibly violent or suicidal behavior. All the particulars of this remarkable legal travesty are laid out here.

✖ Via The New York Times: “Exploring a Dark Side of Depression Remedies” by Janet Maslin, June 29, 2000.

The quote above is an excerpt from the review of the book Overcoming the Dangers of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Other Antidepressants With Safe, Effective Alternatives by Joseph Glenmullen, M.D. (383 pages. Simon & Schuster). On the same subject, read also “Papers indicate firm knew possible Prozac suicide risk” by Tom Watkins, January 3, 2005:

An internal document purportedly from Eli Lilly and Co. made public Monday appears to show that the drug maker had data more than 15 years ago showing that patients on its antidepressant Prozac were far more likely to attempt suicide and show hostility than were patients on other antidepressants and that the company attempted to minimize public awareness of the side effects. (more)

Previously on Skandalon: Eli Lilly and Co.

• Sep 03, 2010 link notes tagged: technology rampage lawsuit antidepressant drug Prozac depression suicidal suicide homicide violence psychiatry pharmaceutical science industry capitalism individuation

art science technology book photographer photography food meat recipes chef restaurant blumenthal

✖ Via Domic Davies: “Saddle of venison” from the Fat Duck Cookbook

Domic Davies is responsible for the photographies displayed in the famous Big Fat Cookbook:

In this enormous, beautiful book, we hear the full story of the meteoric rise of Heston Blumenthal and The Fat Duck, birthplace of snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream, and encounter the passion, perfection and weird science behind the man and the restaurant.

Heston Blumenthal is widely acknowledged to be a genius, and The Fat Duck has twice been voted the Best Restaurant in the World by a peer group of top chefs. But he is entirely self-taught, and the story of his restaurant has broken every rule in the book. His success has been borne out of his pure obsession, endless invention and a childish curiosity into how things work – whether it’s how smell affects taste, what different flavours mean to us on a biological level, or how temperature is distributed in the centre of a soufflé. (from the editor’s website)

See more excerpt from the book over at Daily Icon. Visit The Fat Duck official website (before being a book, it’s a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the UK). Learn more about chef Heston Blumenthal on Wikipedia. If you can’t afford the full version of this book (it sells at around 150$ dollars on Amazon) don’t worry : there’s a lowered-price edition of it, selling at around 30$:

The cookbook hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “showstopper” and by Jeffrey Steingarten of Vogue as “the most glorious spectacle of the season…like no other book I have seen in the past twenty years” is now available in a reduced-price edition. With a reduced trim size but an identical interior, this lavishly illustrated, stunningly designed, and gorgeously photographed masterpiece takes you inside the head of maverick restaurateur Heston Blumenthal. Separated into three sections (History; Recipes; Science), the book chronicles Blumenthal’s improbable rise to fame and, for the first time, offers a mouth-watering and eye-popping selection of recipes from his award-winning restaurant. He also explains the science behind his culinary masterpieces, the technology and implements that make his alchemical dishes come to life. Designed by acclaimed artist Dave McKean—and filled with photographs by Dominic Davies—this artfully rendered celebration of one of the world’s most innovative and renowned chefs is a foodie’s dream. (Amazon)

In any case, be sure to take a look at the Big Fat Undertaking blog: someone actually attempting to do more with this book than looking at the picture.

• Sep 01, 2010 link notes tagged: art science technology book photographer photography food meat recipes chef restaurant Blumenthal

The other thing that irks me about the Tumblr backup app is that is is just that, a “backup” and not a way to export your blog in any way that another blogging platform would be able to import it. It still doesn’t solve the problem of what is practically a data lock in. Sure, I can go through every file and copy and paste into another blogging platform, but with anything more than a trivial number of posts, the time this would take become prohibitive, and given the ease of publishing on Tumblr, it is likely that most people will have more than a trivial number of posts.

✖ Via Deanacus: “My Problems With Tumblr” August 6, 2010

About Dean Harris:

Blogger, internet enthusiast and amateur web designer from Brisbane, Australia. (Dean Harris).

• Sep 01, 2010 link notes tagged: technology social media Tumblr backup migration problem plateforme