I'm blogging anyway

I would like to point out, before my highly controversial headline causes too much emotional damage, that people have been saying this for over two years. The invention of the blog or "web-log" was a step towards Web 2.0, which doesn't, as some people believe, mean shiny graphics with reflections and drop shadows. Web 2.0 is about user interactivity and content, encapsulated by current website giants such as Wikipedia and Facebook. But blogging has become a bit passé (he says, naively writing his second ever blog entry), probably due to the fact that the requirement for owning a blog is that you have at least two words in your vocabulary, for a username and password. This is perhaps a little unfair, but the truth is that the sheer number of blogs around became exhausting, and any useful information became lost in a syruppy sea of nonsense. To avoid this happening to my blog (too late Jon), I'm going to make the section headers as clear as I can. This will stop people wasting precious brain space with PHP snippets, and musical philistines from accidently recieving a dab of culture, etc. Just a quick warning: PHP will be mentioned later, perhaps near the end - who knows.

Happy new year, by the way!

I'm just about to write about music, ok?

I think I'll write about music. I have been picking out some of my most treasured albums to review for my music section, and so far I've written 11. They aren't reviews in the common sense, as I don't give them a rating: all of the albums that I include in the section are those that I consider to be essential. I haven't put the section up yet, as I want to have a good number of reviews before I post them. It will also take a bit of programming, as I want people to be able to search albums by genre, artist and release date. I'll post a news item when I put it up. Writing the reviews lead me to start thinking about the value of critiquing music, and art in general. Art is a personal expression, and the interpretation of it will be different for everyone. Producing a piece of "art" exposes you in a way that you don't get with something more scientifically orientated, as it is mostly down to the interpreter rather than the creator as to whether it is well received or not. But does this make critics pointless? Back on the subject of music specifically, can an album be said to be inherently bad if there is no standard definition of quality in music? You could argue that critics should rate albums according to how well received it will be by the general population, i.e. by how many people it pleases, but they certainly don't do that.

I'm still writing about music, believe it or not

My biggest problem is with people who arrogantly pass off entire genres of music because they don't like them. I dislike rap music, but what gives me the authority to say that it is all rubbish as a result? The fact that art needs to be interpreted personally has lead some people to create a secret idealism by which they are right and everyone else is wrong, which is the very definition of arrogance. I'm not saying we should love all music. My view is that, because of a variety of factors in our upbringing, particularly society and family, we all tend towards liking particular genres. Within these genres is music that we consider to be good or bad, depending again upon these factors. We can develop our taste in music by broadening out amongst different genres, and our personal definition of good and bad will begin to change. I'll bring this waffle to a semi-satisfying conclusion, don't worry. I believe that maturity in musical understanding is demonstrated by having taste that transcends genres and styles. You will certainly develop a favourite style, which is perfectly normal, but an open mind and willingness to try new music is a mark of maturity.

A bit about my site design

I'm pretty pleased. I've been chameleonic (quite proud of that word) in my designs over the past 6 months, and I've never really settled. But I think that the two themes I have now are keepers... almost. I like the night theme, but I'm not sure the day theme has quite made it. I'd appreciate your feedback, as it's very easy to get a design block (although it is, of course, all down to personal interpretation :D). By the way, if you were wondering, the day theme appears between 6am and 7pm, and the night theme the rest of the time. There's a Javascript style changer that works out the time at your location. Or, at least, it should. Please let me know if it doesn't! But only if you can tell the time. Also, is it obvious that the navigation wotsits to the right are minimisable? If not I'll have to think of a way to make it clear.

Non-geeks beware

Now for the nerdy bit. I've been playing around with the error page for my site, as my server allows me to upload my own. 404 errors are not particularly useful in themselves, as you'd rather be given a solution than a problem. On my old site I had a few broken links that stayed broken for quite a while, until some kind person told me. I realised that I could do something a bit more useful with the messages, namely working out what the URL of the broken link is, how the user got there and then automatically emailing me the problem. As soon as I get the email I can view the page that the user was on and search it for the broken link. All of this can be done with a little bit of PHP, as follows:

I'm not the world's best PHP programmer, but this seems to work. I get an email telling me how the user got to the error page, and where the error page is meant to be located. It was a mistake, in hindsight, to put this script on my error page at the moment: my foobar2000 tutorial, which is the most popular feature on my site, has moved location. But this hasn't filtered through Google yet, so I've recieved almost two hundred emails in the past day, mostly from my own server telling me how no-one can find what they want. But this will be a useful feature when the links are updated in Google, which should be happening very soon. Another slightly weird result of this is that I can see Googlebots crawling my site: I uploaded a new sitemap, which caused some activity from the bots. But they have been going through all the old links of my site, to check to see whether they're still there. And guess what? Yep, I get lots of emails. The eerie thing is that they don't seem to come from any tangible location, which I suppose is to be expected. Anyway, feel free to use the script on your site. Don't bother acknowledging me - who's going to see your PHP code anyway?

Thanks for reading, enjoy the site!