's nice, that.
Good work, sir.
That's very nice, could do with more stuff to click though, and it's not immediately obvious where to get any actual content either.
Yeah, I realise that, hence the likelihood that once all the kinks are worked out, I'll update it with better visualisations and some interactivity. That Protovis library integrates with Jquery hover libraries well, so I'm thinking of using layers graphs showing each type of activity, for example.
Out of interest, is anyone getting a double pop of fonts on FF 3.6? It happens occasionally, where it loads the fonts twice and shows Proxima Nova, then Helvetica, then Proxima Nova again. Can;t figure it out.
That's great fun, awesome job. You could flog summat like that.
It's actually built as a system that can be configurable per user, but there is some stuff that would need some work. I'm definitely thinking about it. There is a lot thats specific to me, (the London/Tokyo data is separated by date ranges for example). It also has no control panel, (the blogging is done via Marsedit, and the rest is DB only).
If I can work out a nice way of abstracting it out, I might do.
It's really nice mate.
I'm actually surprised that nobody's created a suite of libraries already that fetch and cache your 'activity' data from various sites. I know there are things like sweetcron and stuff that aggregate, but they're not exactly data driven.
On a pedantic note: maybe your lastfm stats should be 'plays' rather than just the number of songs (as the rest are activity stats, and activity on lastfm would surely be plays rather than the library).
Very clever stuff, interesting, and it looks great too mate. Nice work on the design.
Cheers mate, thanks for the feedback. I've been hearing rumblings about various similar projects bt had a lot of good feedback, so may look at releasing it and hoping others push it forward. I don't have time to do it myself.
On a pedantic note: maybe your lastfm stats should be 'plays' rather than just the number of songs (as the rest are activity stats, and activity on lastfm would surely be plays rather than the library).
I agree, I'm still thinking about Last.fm being in the main activity panels, since it isn't activity in the same sense as everything else, its not created. It also skews the graphs a lot because of the sheer volume. As I said, it's conceptual right now and will hopefully evolve.
Really chuffed. Just received the proof copy of my grandad's book from Blurb.
Just need to proof it all now to make sure there are no mistakes that I've missed, and the cover needs a slight tweak in balance, but other than that I have to say I'm really impressed.
I'll post up some pics later.
After about 8 years of faffing, it's finally done.
Just through Blurb Mike. The quality's great to be honest.
I have to say my eyes have been opened up a lot to the whole publishing model, I've done a lot of reading and it's a proper scam. Not just from a publisher point of view.
Did you know that all bookshops and publishers operate on a 'returns' policy, like newspapers? In other words, if I'm a bookshop, and I want 100 of your books, I buy them, and then if I don't sell them all within a specified period (say, 6 months) then I can return them -- to the publisher -- for a full refund? And that Amazon take 55% of the RRP of any book-sale (that's how they can do 50% off on so many things, it only comes off their margin). And how weird is it that books (unlike CDs, DVDs, etc) have to have their price indelibly stamped on them? And that's the price that publishers/bookshops negotiate on?
It's ridiculous, and thank god for the likes of Blurb and Lulu making it possible for people to get their stuff out there without having to mortgage themselves. The first print run of my grandad's book, that he got done in 2002, cost him nearly £2.5K for 500 copies, payable up front, no arguments. The local bookshops that bought it from him didn't pay a penny up front, they just gave him a couple of quid for each one sold. It's a fucking racket.
On day one, we've sold 8 copies of the book -- it may not sound like a lot, but given the lack of fanfare (a facebook post, this post here, and an email to about 40 people that expressed an interest) it's really great. And it's cost nothing to do (apart from a considerable chunk of my time to design the book, that I'm delighted to have given).
Gecko: Amazing news about your mom's book -- got a link?
PS: I didn't really pimp it above, but it's actually a really great book my grandad's written -- I've never really read a genuine first-hand account of the experiences of a non-elite, non-officer class soldier during the war; particularly one that fought on the front line for so long and saw liberation.
At least I've never seen one that didn't have a big, dramatic story arc (there's no 'private ryan' in this story), rather just the day to day experiences of a soldier. It really throws some light on the absolutely horrific situation these young guys were thrown in to, and also shows the simple heroism of normal guys in extraordinary circumstances. Recommended ;-)
The 10 Craziest Business Practices of the Book World
See 1) Selling Returnable. Unless you have a 'special relationship' with your seller, all books are sold to bookstores as returnable goods. If they don't sell, they can send them back. This is changing with some publishers, Harper Collins started a non-returnable publishing group a couple of years ago, but they're doing it by cutting back on the actual price of the books themselves (which they're doing, in turn, by cutting advances to publishers).
Aaron: Unless you've a special deal (which you may have I guess), I'm pretty sure waterstones can send you a crate of books back and ask for a refund -- if they so desired.
The paperwork's with Nielsen to sort out an ISBN, but it's only really for catalogue reasons. This isn't really being done as a money making exercise, it's a very long-tail thing. The website behind the book actually gets quite a lot of traffic (sad as it is, I think a lot of the generation of men that fought in the war are dying, and their relatives are looking to find out more about them/it) and I doubt we're going to be aggressively marketing the book.
The financials don't work out with bulk-buying from blurb (postage is pretty much a multiple of the number of books at around £4 per book) so it just stops making sense unless you sell the book for a lot more than you'd be able to sell it for. I can't see many places wanting to stock it if they have to pay £10 a book. The alternative is to try and find a print on demand service in the UK that offer quality as good as Blurb. If we sell enough through Blurb then we may do a small run of books with colour photos with a UK printers or something, but for now it's a suck it and see thing.
The financials of Amazon just don't stack up as I've got publishing setup at the moment, and I've read quite a few blogs from folk basically saying that if you're a small self-published author, Amazon's great for getting your word out, but it'll pretty much cost you money.
Put it like this: Right now, the 'RRP' of the book is £10, which means Amazon will pay £4.50 for each book. For me to get a book here, at cost price, from Blurb, it'll cost £8.50. Sums don't work. For the sums to work, we'd have to up the RRP, which means it's less likely to sell, which means ... etc.
That said, Amazon have a self-publishing arm called Createspace which looks worth investigating, though it's US only at the moment. That said, once I've got the ISBN I could set it up in seconds as their PDF specs are the same as Blurb's. Worth a shot.
Ebooks are a different thing altogether, and when I have the time I'm going to properly look at getting an e-book out there too.
It's all very interesting, I'm still learning obviously, but it's a weird and very old-school industry.
I don't know anything about the retailers being able to send the books back. I don't recall agreeing to such terms and I'd certainly have something to say about it if they tried.
Unless you specifically discussed it and agreed an exception, then from what I've been told it's an absolutely bog-standard part of any book distribution deal. Books are returnable. Most self-publishers (from what I've read) have no idea, and it was only chancing on that article a week or so back that even alerted me to it.
As the article says:
Taking returns on your entire inventory every day is the business equivalent of low self-esteem. People who run a business this way shouldn’t be in business. They should be in therapy.