Keane Ingram : Drupal website

I gave in to the hype and bought a Kindle. I ordered it the day they started accepting pre-orders, but unfortunately it didn't arrive on the release date (last Friday). It did come the next day though so can't complain too much, the main thing is that it arrived before my holiday. I'd read about how good the screen was but I didn't think it would look that much like paper. I thought the welcome screen was just some paper stuck to the screen before realising it was actually the screen itself!

I've loaded it up with most of the free classic books available on the Kindle store on Amazon, and I've also downloaded a fair few from Project Gutenberg. It's definitely going to help with my attempt to read the BBC Big Read Top 100 as I've now got almost all of the books that I needed to finish - only Swallows and Amazons and Katherine are nowhere to be found. I've already finished Anne of Green Gables and will probably try one of the longer ones next, Bleak House or Ulysses.

The Kindle also comes with an 'experimental' browser, which isn't brilliant but it does the job as well as it probably can considering the screen limitations. Hopefully I'll be able to use it to update my blogs while I'm away and check my email and Twitter etc. I got the one with free 3G so it won't cost me extra :-)

One thing I found annoying was that it didn't seem to document anywhere how to delete a bookmark from the browser. Eventually I found something online which suggests pressing left on the 5-way control with the bookmark highlighted, this then gives you the option to delete it. Pretty obvious when you know how but quite frustrating when you don't!

One of the many RSS feeds that I read daily via Google Reader is Kotaku. a news source for games. However, their basic RSS feed only provided article titles and one line. I recently found out about their 'VIP' feed which provides the full article in the RSS feed, which is much easier to read, especially as I mostly view Google Reader using Gravity on my Nokia 5800. However, I've found that a lot of the articles aren't relevant or interesting to me (such as deals only available to people in the US, and the notes that the editors leave each other at the end of their shifts). So I wrote some code to filter out certain tags. For now this is hard-coded, so I have to add the tags manually in the PHP script, but if this gets too bothersome I may update it so I can pass the tags via the URL. But for now it works pretty well.

My customised feed can be found here.

Previously, I've used Google's search page as the homepage for my mobile phone, as it's a handy thing to have quick access to. However, the page I use most often is BBC Mobile to check on the news. It's good that the BBC provide a mobile page, and they do allow you to customise features such as location (for weather), favourite football team (to get news on them), number and order of items etc. What I didn't like though was the big splash article at the top with the day's feature on it, plus there's no way of getting rid of the 'customise' and 'search' bars.

So I decided to create a new homepage which would kill two birds with one stone. What I've done is take the BBC's RSS feeds and display the top 5 news, sport and entertainment articles on one page. Underneath this I've put a search box for Google. So now I have a shortcut on my phone which displays the top news and gives me a search option too.

It was harder than I expected to parse the BBC RSS feeds. For some reason SimpleXML wouldn't accept the feed, and I tried an RSS plugin which also rejected it. So I've manually parsed it, using regular expressions to find the relevant links. I'm fairly happy with how it works, there are some links which won't work (e.g. for Newsbeat articles, but I can't find a mobile version of those anyway).

If anyone is interested, the URL for my homepage is http://www.keanei.co.uk/bbcmobile/.

I've tried a few things to get rid of the DRM from the audiobook I downloaded, but to no avail - guess I'm not going to be teaching myself Chinese any time soon! Oh well, at least I've earned £6 for my troubles. It seems so ridiculous, I just want to listen to the thing on my phone, but I'm planning on changing phone soon so would have to go through everything again. If I really wanted to rip them off I could just find a torrent or something, but by making things so restrictive they're punishing the people who actually pay for the products.

Speaking of new phones, it's looking like a choice between an HTC Desire and a Samsung Galaxy S. It's definitely not going to be an iPhone 4, thanks to Apple's cack-handed way of explaining away the reception issues. Both the Desire and Galaxy S have their plus points, but I'm probably leaning towards the Desire at the moment...

Update 3/8/2010: I've deleted Audible's software now and stopped my membership. Whilst the DRM is so restrictive I'm not going to go back there.

I've taken advantage of Audible's free trial to download a teach-yourself-Chinese audiobook (well, that and the £6 cashback offered by Quidco!) However, it's so complicated to download the file, and the DRM means you have to jump through several hoops just to listen to the damn thing. I certainly don't want to install iTunes or anything onto my phone just so I can listen to it - and it certainly means I'll never actually buy anything from them because it's ridiculous to expect all this software to be installed just to listen to a sound file.

I've had this site set up for quite a while now, and whilst I haven't really made much effort to dig deep into the source code, it seems like everything is more complicated than it has to be. My WordPress site is so much simpler to use, it is simple to install updates, add-ons, themes etc. However, for Drupal it seems everything has to be done manually, to add a theme or extension you have to download the code, upload it yourself, make the changes etc. I'm guessing that some people would prefer to have this level of control, but it would be good if for example to update the code you only had to press a button to do it automatically.

So for now I can't see any reason to explore Drupal much further. Perhaps in future I'll find a reason why to use it rather than WordPress. I've seen some websites claiming that Drupal has some advantages over WordPress, so I'll have a look at those soon and see what I can do with it.

I've written a review about Glastonbury on my main blog, which can be seen here. I'm still not fully recovered I think, although that might also be because it's been so hot at night recently so Nicky isn't sleeping well.

Nothing much is going on at the moment. The next thing on my list of things to think about is my phone upgrade, which is due at the end of August. I've currently got a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, but I've had enough of Symbian so have been looking at alternatives. The two obvious choices are the iPhone 4 or an Android handset. I'm kind of against the iPhone for a few reasons. Their explanation of the loss of reception experienced when you hold the phone the wrong way was really kind of childish, if they'd just admitted culpability then it would have given a better impression. I also don't like how restricted the phone is when it comes to installing apps that must be approved by Apple. The lack of Flash is a bit daft too.

With Android, I guess the opposite is true, as I've heard there are thousands of 'spam' apps blocking up the Market. But there's a bit more choice regarding apps. I've a feeling Android is really going to take off and will eventually overtake Apple, so I'll probably go for an Android set. The one I'm looking at currently is the HTC Desire, which seems to tick most of the boxes. But I'll have to see what offers are around at upgrade time, and see if T-Mobile are willing to offer any discounts, as my loyalty to them is zero.

Been back from Glastonbury for a couple of days now, but am still absolutely knackered! Had fun but could have done without it being so swelteringly hot. Will write more about it when I have an opportunity...

I'm getting really bored with the World Cup now. Partly this is down to England being rubbish, and partly it's down to the standard of football on offer. I've still seen almost all of the games but I'm not as excited as I might have been in previous years. The vuvuzelas are annoying and detract from the atmosphere, maybe it's affecting the players too (although that's a pretty crap excuse).

I'll possibly not be that bothered if England don't get out of the group - will be watching the game at Glastonbury on Wednesday afternoon, but if we do qualify then I'll have to find somewhere showing the game and hope it doesn't clash with anything - if we finish 2nd in the group then the next match would clash with Slash on the Sunday :-(

I've recently been having trouble with my Netvibes homepage - I use the Netvibes Customize widget to get rid of the header and footer, but recently the page has been timing out. So to rectify this I've taken a copy of the widget and hosted it on my own site - I might also tinker with it a little to get rid of the grey bar at the top of the page.

Spending most of my time at the moment watching the football and abusing my ear drums (damn those vuvuzelas!)