Just finished a four–month stint hacking Drupal to help finish the marvellous new Watershed website. A real pleasure to work with David, Oliver et al — good times.

After a long hiatus, finally a new post on my blog. And why? Well, because I’ve just made the new version of Commentpress public. Nothing to do now but wait for feedback — oh, and make a start some of the enhancements I’ve got in mind.

The latest project that I’ve done with Futurelab has kept up the tradition of being nominated for a New Statesman New Media award. Congratulations to the team on the nomination and commiserations that it didn’t win the award this year.

April fool’s day is, it seems, confusing for some. In my morning trawl around the net newswires, I kept seeing comments from people who were unsure as to the veracity of the stories that were being posted online today — and bemoaning the fact that this was how they felt.

It occurred to me that this was actually a Good Thing and that perhaps a campaign should be started to make every day a day when jokes can be played before midday, thus reducing the gullibility quotient of the population in one fell swoop.

Talking of swoops, my favourite prank today has to be the BBC’s flying penguins advert for their iPlayer. I hope they leave it up beyond the next six days.

Congratulations to the Create-a-scape team on the announcement of their nomination in this year’s New Statesman New Media Awards. They’ve been selected as finalists in the education category which apparently “go to the body or project that has made the most significant contribution to education through the use of new media technology.”

I worked with them on the support website for the project and through that have read most of the support material for it. I reckon they’d be deserving winners. It’s an excellent and innovative idea and I hope it goes far — good luck folks!

[Update] Create-a-scape went on to win the award last night (24th July 2007).

New Media Awards 2007 Winners

Congratulations!

Go on, you know you want to swap a car trip for something better — walk, cycle, hang-glide, whatever — perhaps even work from home for the day if your employer will let you. Whatever you do, register it on the site I just built with the chaps at Tijuana Design:

Change Your World website

Bristol Wireless network coverage (Jan 2007)

Bristol Wireless have completed their 5.8 GHz backbone infrastructure – it’s fully tested, legal and now – most importantly – live. It gives them a network coverage of approximately 15 sq. km, which they think makes it the largest community wireless network in the UK. Unless, of course, anyone knows otherwise, in which case you’re asked to get in touch with them and let them know.

Planet Tony on breakfast news

Nigel from Telepathy spotted Planet 10 — which we made together — spinning away in the background as Blair gave a speech on education recently. This was the speech if you have the inclination to read it.

I just have to big up Garrick Van Buren’s WP-iPodCatter WordPress Plugin. It’s allowed me (with a few modifications) to add videoblogging information to the standard RSS 2.0 feeds that WordPress spits out by default so that it’s compatible with iTunes. I’ve been busy debugging the Plugin this week, and it’s now up and running on The Spirit of Football site. If you plan on podcasting, videoblogging, vlogging — or whatever it’ll be called next month — through WordPress, check out this neat Plugin.

[UPDATE]

I guess I ought to mention that this has now been folded into the eminently sensible podPress plugin and I’d advise using that instead now.

The Haystack Admin System powers the new website for the Arnolfini, Bristol’s premier art gallery. Well, most of it, anyway. There’s a standard news system with a bespoke database for managing the events that the gallery puts on, from film to exhibitions, from dance to performance art. All that remains to do is to build the vcal exporter so that people can subscribe to the schedule from within a calendar application such as iCal. I’ll update this entry once it’s done. In the meantime, get down there – there are lots of interesting things going on.