Life of Wiley

Yesterday whilst travelling up to Leeds on the train (Virgin have nicer trains than GNER by the way) I was listening to the This Week in Tech (or TWiT) podcast. A regular guest to the show is John C. Dvorak who is famous for getting no spam, however he’s clearly been having a problem with comment spam at his blog. Someone at his hosting company has come up with a simple fix for eliminating comment spam generated by bots. It’s so simple in fact, it’s a wonder no-one’s thought of it before.

Clearly this only works for the Apache web server. If you can’t alter Apache’s configuration then you may be able to add the directives into a .htaccess file if your hosting provider allows it.

If you’re running a b2evolution blog, as I am, then you will need to alter the file name in the location tag to something like:

/blog/htsrv/comment_post.php

Went to a birthday party on Saturday (Happy Birthday, Alison) at one of those children’s indoor activity centres. I’ve been to loads of parties at these places in the past; what makes this stand out is that the party was for adults only and it was we who got to swing, slide and tumble.

Welcome to the House of Fun indeed:)

This is one of my pet peeves of road use, along with failing to indicate especially if I’m a pedestrian crossing at a juntion.

Courtesy of Tom’s View of the World

The son of Zebedee and Salome, the parish church in Bushey, and a mighty fine restaurant opposite the above mentioned church!

Last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I was wondering how it was possible to make Ajax-based web services accessible in the sense of making them friendly to screen readers. It may be that this is very straightforward as I haven’t researched the matter yet. But I was thinking about this because of the service I’m developing that could be used by the Methodist Church and I’m sure they will have a particular keenness for accessibility. If you want to talk a look at what I’m doing you can access it here. Basically it’s a search engine written around the Google Maps API using Ajax to get the data from XML and javascript to refresh portions of the browser. So far, the only data it has is for the churches in Watford, so type Watford into the search box and see how it behaves. (The name, incidently, may not stick!)

Anyway, this thought about accessibility got me thinking about accessibility in the church itself. In our own church we’ve been talking about putting in toilets suitable for wheelchair users. We also have a ramp for negotiating the step up into the building. We have not, as yet, spent anytime thinking about how people can get to the second floor, but I’m sure this will have to follow. But this wasn’t what concerned me; what concerned me was our approach to accessibility in worship.

It seems to me that, for most churches, accessibility stops at the installation of a hearing aid loop. I’ve been to one or two churches that are able to offer a few large print hymn books, but after that that’s your lot.

Increasingly churches are turning to multimedia as an aid to worship and the use of digital projectors. These can be useful as worship aids but special attention needs to be paid to accessibility when using them. People who are blind or partially sited will struggle with these projectors and if we rely on them at the expense of giving out hymn/song/prayer sheets then we are excluding some sections of the congregation.

Of course the biggest problem in catering for all comes down to expense. Installing suitable sound systems with appropriate hearing aid loops, having available large print or braille books, installing ramps, lifts and disabled toilets all cost significant amounts of money; but then so do digital projectors, laptops, screens, carry cases and all the necessary cabling required to present multimedia rich content. It makes me wonder whether churches who are keen to embrace the digital age approach it with these issues in mind, and whether they are, by accident or ignorance, excluding members of their congregations or potential members.

Just lately I’ve been reading about Web 2.0 and how I might be able to develop some simple applications for use with the Methodist Church and the brass band community. As a result I’m always looking into what other people have done. Two examples I came across this week are Meebo and Pandora.

Meebo is a universal IM client that is browser based and implemented for Web 2.0. It is a great example of what’s possible, being able to drag the sub windows around is awesome. However, I struggle to see the benefit. It’s reason for being is that it “lets you get all of your IMing done in one place”, which is just what Trillian and others do, but not in a browser window. Personally I’d prefer to leave my IM as a separate window from my browsing window (tabs or no tabs) as they are completely different interactions. With IM you can be dipping into often if you’re holding a conversation with someone and having this in the browser will mean frequent interruptions to your browsing, switching tabs or windows. I suppose the benefit may be that it’s one less application to install and keep updated as you just need the browser, but will the web service be able to handle video and file exchanging?

On the other hand Pandora is great. This is part of the Music Genome project and it lets you create your own “radio station” based on either an artist or song that you like. It will then generate a dynamic playlist that can be adapted as you go along by rating the tracks you hear. From what I’ve listened to so far it seems pretty good at matching up styles and is letting me hear bands I would never have heard of. I suppose the same argument may go for Pandora as it does for Meebo if the likes of Apple add similar functionality to their media players. Check it out, the first 10 hours are free, but then there’s a subscription after that.

Yesterday I preached for the first time in about 16 months as I’d taken a sabbatical to give more time to the children.

I’m glad to be back preaching, I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed it (and how exhausting it is). Yesterday’s service was at Abbots Langley Methodist Church with a congregation of about 2 dozen. I’ve uploaded the sermon to the site if anyone cares to read it. It made sense to me when I wrote it but there were a couple of moments during it’s delivery that I thought, oh I need to explain that a bit better, or establish the linkage more between sections.

very friendly!

Of course I already knew this haven’t lived in Aberystwyth for 3 years. But I had it reinforced last week when I needed to call Atlantic Electric and Gas to pay a bill before they cut us off. The lady in the call centre was very pleasant and chatty and really defused me (who goes into discussions with service providers when under the threat of disconnection in a chatty frame of mind?)

At the time we were considering where we’d go for a short break and we’ve now decided that we’re going to Cardiff (where Atlantic are based). We had already been considering this destination as we have friends there and it has been substantially redeveloped since we were last there, but it’s nice to have that warm feeling from chatting to a complete stranger that you’ve made the right choice.

So, good customer service from Atlantic!

The other day my son, having just watched Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, was in the right mood for “lightsabre practice”. By it’s very nature lightsabre practice requires an opponent and I was only too happy to oblige. The problem was we needed the right mood music; no problem, hop over to the iTunes Store and 20 seconds later we’ve got Dual of the Fates accompanying our decidedly unchoreographed lightsabre practice!

As you can see I’ve finally put the new version of the website live. It’s mainly style changes though there are some changes in the structure too. I’ve removed some stuff that I wasn’t doing any more like reviews of books and restaurants. If we find anything worthy of mention it can go in the blog. Also I’m going to move the video files into the gallery where they really belong. Finally, I’ve removed the feedback form as it never got used and it’s starting to become a honeypot for spam.

It all seems to work okay in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Drop me a line if it doesn’t work in your browser.