I follow around sixty bloggers and blog sites on topics that include the arts (artists blogs such as Martin Greenland‘s blog); alot of web, mobile, application design and programming commentary; Institutional IT views from Brian Kelly, Mike Ellis as well as long form writing about online marketing, data visualisation , typography and graphic design.
There are history and archaeology blogs too. Paul Barford’s Portable Anquity Collecting and Heritage Issues and the Heritage Journal.

Why blogs matter to me

I’ve seen and met many interesting people that share my interests, work in my field, or both. Their weblogs provide me with an astonishing wealth of written, visual and auditory entertainment, information and commentary on the things that matter to me.

Such wealth, archived online. Ready to entertain, inform and inspire the next visitor.

Its Alexandria on speed.

Re-birth of the Author

I came to blogging proper in late 2006, I’d begun study for a computing MSc and had begun to dip my toes into Open Source development. I installed WordPress and have stayed with it for the sense of control and ownership of content.

I write about my interests – visual design, photography, painting, history, heritage issues, archaeology and on occasion personal things – usually the joys.

I also write about the events I’ve attended and the technologies I am using, evaluating, or developing in my role as a Higher Education web developer or for other projects. I enjoy sharing the things I find out and on occasion they assist others too.

Ideas of March

This month I’ll be writing about the personal goals and challenges I have ahead of me. I’ll be rounding up the threads about the recently launched Guerilla Gardening the Institutional Web Course Finder UX project I kicked off many moons ago, and perhaps write some more on the PHP frameworks I use.

Sir Jacob Epstein, by George Charles Beresford. Image in the Public Domain.

At first glance you would think they had relocated the town’s Local History library to the ground floor gallery, and given it a lick of paint. Yet their ‘Jacob Epstein and Blackpool’ exhibition, which closes today, is a rare delight.

The show presents press cuttings from the national and regional newspapers charting the journey Epstein’s huge Derbyshire alabaster sculpture ‘Adam’ took to reach public display in the town in the Summer of 1939. A tale of money, power, morality and quite a few sixpence pieces.

A complete and widely representative story is presented – From the news of the plan breaking, support and opposition for it, to the installation of the stone colossus in a converted (and tastefully re-decorated) high-street shop. Press and public response to the show, tales of long queues, floorboards under the strain (of people, not stone) and vast sums of money then follow. Finally, they show where Adam went next, and of the creation of the sculpture’s counterpart, Eve.

The story’s shot through with class and regional divisions, the sensational amounts of money outlayed by the sculpture’s owner and by the eager public queueing to see it, and the artist’s own concern over the appropriate setting for the commercialisation of his work.

Through a Northern Window - Adam and Stonehenge

Comparisons are made with Stonehenge (would you take that on tour?), and the horror of vandalism is widely reported.

It also presents a fascinating insight into late 1930′s Britain. Newspaper opinion pieces were as diverse and popular as they are now. One cutting (written by a clergyman, and clearly no fan of Epstein) refers to the great work Hitler had done in dealing with ‘degenerate’ art.

The exhibition is enriched with a video installation and examples of newspaper mock-ups advertising this, and the promoter’s other Blackpool attractions.

This was my first visit to the Grundy, but it’s clear from this and the other exhibitions in the current programme that they’re worth keeping an eye on.

IWMW2009 Keynote 1 Tuesday 28th 2009 University of Essex, Colchester

I’ll be getting around to blogging in more detail about the things I’ve seen, heard and participated in, such as Agile development , Scrum, site search evaluation, course finders and killer apps as well as system management techniques and discussions on how best the sector communicates in future, regionally, nationally and broader still.

The food, people and low-flying geese have been great too.

We still have lots to come this morning, with presentations about how the BBC produce websites and the products of the Developer Lounge event.

On second viewing its clear the show has less to do with the Hill than I’d previously thought. Rather it uses the Hill -aptly- as a jumping off point for a whistlestop tour of the complex, making a couple of stops for reconstruction footage before closing with a possible date for the mysterious mound’s construction. With that in mind it’s difficult to compare infotainment telly with comprehensive analytical survey.

“We can’t say that the Beaker People built Silbury Hill”

the show stresses the importance of Beaker folk to Silbury and their influence on changing times in Britain. Mike Parker-Pearson explains common Beaker burial techniques, with accompanying 3-D clip while Mary-Ann Ochota is shown some typical examples of Beakers found in the British Isles.

It must’ve been the Beakers then? Yet they conclude that: “We can’t say that Beaker people built Silbury Hill”.

We can say “In view of the amount of evidence for Beaker activity within the Wider landscape it is surprising that no beaker evidence comes from the mound itself.” (Analytical survey, page 69)

The striking thing is that the survey is more entertaining. Full of the detail archaeos, students and amateur megalith botherers like myself would love, but laced with references to anecdote and folklore, the old petrol station at the foot the Hill, countless stylised depictions and descriptions through history, and even attempts to make Silbury into a garden feature!

I’m currently reading Mike Pitts’ Hengeworld, and came across this interesting little statement which puts some perspective into the BBC show’s obsession with foreigners “who swept across Europe with their fine pots, loosing arrows into the air”^[2]:

“it would be true to say that though Beaker People can still be found in books or heard about in guided tours, for the past twenty years or so few practising archaeologists have believed in them. Instead the fine pots and other artefacts are thought to be a still visible manifestation of some lost fashion, ritual practice or social phenomenon that spread from one community to another, subtly changing as it passed.” (Pitts, page 88).

http://www.eternalidol.com/?p=426

1. The investigation and analytical survey of Silbury Hill. Archaeological Investigation Report Series AI/22/2002.
2. Pitts, M. Hengeworld. Arrow Books. 2000. Archaeological Investigation Report Series AI/22/2002.

Bassist Abby Travis

This is my design for this year’s ‘Megameet’, an informal gathering of people with themodernantiquarian.com in common. It’s been a while since I designed anything for print, and given a little over a week to realise it I ought not to complain about the outcome. Somewhere between those old Railway posters of sunny England and a Clarice Cliffe pot.

The image is oil on cardboard, with some colour adjustments (the sky was originally signal red!), taken into Illustrator for the typography, which uses the ‘Pete-Boy Vikings’ font, seriously but sympathetically cut up for my own use.

Tesco shareholders have not backed proposals to improve welfare standards for chickens championed by TV cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

The chef wanted investors to adopt new standards for rearing birds, but the plan got fewer than 10% of votes at its annual general meeting in Solihull.

Hugh’s Speech is available here at Chickenout.tv.

Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP.

He is to force a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency which he will fight on the issue of the new 42-day terror detention limit.

update: 4 hours later, the Party machine has rolled on. The top news item at conservatives.com reads “Dominic Grieve appointed Shadow Home Secretary” (Yawn).

Interestingly their site became quite flakey when the story broke, impying they’re not used to much traffic – is it any wonder.

Ed Tudor-Pole. He likes Black Jacks.

Ade Payne

Jethro Tull