August 2007 – Urban Giraffe

Made for Karaoke – The state of Chinese music

Ktv Party World

Recently I’ve been trying to find examples of good modern Chinese music. It’s been a hard search. Most Chinese music appears to be made entirely for the karaoke market. The reason for this is probably one of simple economies – the karaoke market in China is huge. Almost everyone takes part in it, both men and women, young and old. Karaoke centres are vast buildings with hundreds of private rooms where people go to sing on all manner of occasions – with friends, lovers, even on business.

TV is also full of karaoke-style shows. At any moment of the day it is likely that somewhere there is a TV station in China broadcasting amateur singing. It’s taken very seriously, with big competitions and major prizes. Often a popular karaoke singer will go on to start a successful pop career. It even goes deep inside the state with CCTV7 broadcasting the unintentionally funny army karaoke show (or at least, that’s my interpretation of it).

HeadSpace2 3.2 – Modules, importers, and mass-editing

This is a biggie so I’ll try and not write too much. HeadSpace is now running at version 3.2 and has had a thorough overhaul and feature boost that is designed to push it past other meta-data plugins. This includes:

Modularization – everything is now a module and can be enabled or disabled and re-ordered. You can decide exactly what meta-data you are interested in and how it should look
Site modules that affect the whole site and add Google Analytics, Mint, StatCounter, Crazy Egg, and more
Much better tagging, with a smart auto-suggestion that matches similar words
New modules for custom ‘more tags’ and no-index capability
Mass-editing mode that allows you to edit all your meta-data from one page
Importers – now you can easily import data from other meta-data plugins directly into HeadSpace. This includes UTW, SEO Title Tags, and All-in-one SEO

Phew!

28 Weeks Later

I’ll admit a certain liking towards end-of-the-world movies. For me there’s something irresistible in seeing what happens when everything goes wrong and Bruce Willis doesn’t manage to save the day. It was with delight that I watched 28 Days Later, a 2002 movie by Danny Boyle and Alex Garland about a horrible blood-spitting disease that strikes Britain. Maybe it was the bleak London vistas, maybe it was the unrelenting music and in-your-face video, or maybe it was just the fact that it was a great budget movie that packed a big punch.

With this in mind I looked forward to 28 Weeks Later, the sequel, with great anticipation. Both Danny Boyle and Alex Garland took a back-seat this time, leaving the movie to Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. The story starts 28 weeks after infection, and we are introduced to a Britain where the infected have all died of starvation. The American army has been called in to take control of the situation and reintroduce the surviving population back. Gone are the original actors, disappointingly with no indication about their whereabouts. Instead we have Robert Carlyle and his family as the main protagonists, as we follow them into London, entering a survival centre, and then escaping the aftermath as a good situation goes badly wrong.

Inside WordPress: A series of WordPress guides

I’ve started a series of WordPress guides which I’ve titled ‘Inside WordPress‘. My aim with these is to explain different aspects of WordPress from a practical point of view. That is, they will be focused on showing you how to do things rather than telling you what to do. I’ve already made a start with several guides explaining some of the more simpler aspects of WordPress, as well as some going a little further. The guides will not always be aimed at beginners and, if there is enough interest, I already have plans to dig deep inside the belly of the beast.

The series contains the following new guides:

And I’ve added existing guides into the mix as well:

As with everything else readers are invited to give feedback and ask questions. If there are any areas of WordPress that you are unsure about or would like an in-depth explanation of then please do suggest – it may just be used as the basis for a guide!

Interviewed!

In a curious turn of events I was recently interviewed by Dane Morgan of Blogstrokes. Dane posed a lot of great questions, resulting in answers such as:

Giraffes… hmmm, I’ll make it orange.

Should you wish to check out the interview then head on over to the interview page.