For all those who are tired of seeing those inane posts and messages on social networks (and who of us isn’t guilty of this crime ourselves?) might find a welcome diversion courtesy of Copyblogger. Can you write a story short enough to post on Twitter, yet capable of capturing the imagination?
This is the challenge set down by Copyblogger, who have launched the first Twitter writing contest. There’s even an iPod Nano up for grabs.
The competition is open until Friday, so if you have a Twitter account, why not enter and challenge your creativity?
Whilst working on a design for a new site the other day, I was writing some Javascript to handle browser and screen sizes. This brought to light a frustrating problem with the way that Internet Explorer handles the onresize event.
Whereas Firefox and other browsers only fire this event when the application window is resized, Internet Explorer (both v6 and v7) interprets this event to include the resizing of the document body. Therefore, any browser window resizing results in two firings of the onresize event - one for the window and one for the body.
To combat this I scripted in an incrementing counter, and the relevant function is then only called the first time the onResize event is fired:
if(window.outerWidth){// FF
var dim = window.outerWidth;
dimCheck(dim, 725, 800);
}else{// IE
if(i == 0){
var dim = document.body.clientWidth;
dimCheck(dim, 625, 685);
i = 1;
}elseif(i == 1){
i = 0;
}
}
To ensure that subsequent window resizes function in the same way, the counter is reset again on the second firing. Whilst this is not the most elegant way of dealing with this problem, it does the job required of it.
History is one of my personal favourite subjects, so it naturally follows that my family history is an area that I take great interest in. Another member of my family has spent many years researching our ancestry and history, so that we now have an extensive family tree dating back to the late 17th century along some branches.
To be able to see details of my ancestors and their lives is to see the background of what makes me and my family who we are today. An example - I studied both French and German at school and of the two my preference was, and still is, for German, which I find I can pick up more naturally. It wasn’t until some years later that I found that we had German ancestors who lived in London. This is probably no more than a coincidence, but for me it brings my interest in things German much closer to home - it is now a part of my own makeup.
These members of my family tree were Lutherans, and it is possible that they were forced to leave Germany to escape Catholic persecution. Hopefully this is something we can discover more about in the future.
Then there were those in our ancestry who died at a very young age, and the parents, brothers and sisters who lived with the heartbreak of their loss. Or what about the boy who grew up in a workhouse in complete poverty but went on to build a life for himself in an age when there was no state assistance, and social standing and background were considered so much more important than they are today.
This is not to say that these discoveries have led to some great personal revelation or life changing experience, but it is something that helps to build my sense of identity. Knowing some of the smaller details of the lives of my ancestors and the surroundings in which they lived has given me a better awareness and appreciation of some of the positive things in my own life as well as things of which I should be thankful but perhaps take for granted amidst the din of everyday life.
Any family history will reveal details and events both large and small, joyful and tragic, and for me this helps to get some context in my own life when times are hard. Sometimes it is all too easy to get wrapped up in a personal problem, when sometimes it is better to take a step back and realise that in time things will improve, or that if I work hard at something I can change it for the better.
No doubt I shall be posting more on the subject of my family tree in the future, and I would be interested to hear from anyone who is doing their own research, or who has a story of their own.
If you ever find yourself watching the news and experiencing extreme déjà vous it may not be such a coincidence after all. You are quite possibly experiencing one of the phenomenons of modern media: over-repetitive use of certain words and phrases.
Take the word shocking for instance. This of course is a word that is used to describe any event that we find tragic, disastrous, disturbing, unpleasant, violent, sudden, unexpected, frightening and so on. Try watching any of the news bulletins on the BBC, who seem to prefer the word shocking to any other synonym, and shocking events may very well be reported. Don’t just take my word for it, see for yourself.
A search for the word shocking on the BBC website site yields 1,674 audio & video results alone. Taken in context of the total number of results to search through and that might not seem like many, but consider some synonyms for shocking and their comparitive audio & video results: startling (22), astounding (21), staggering (65) and appalling (239). So, of 2,021 total occurences, nearly 83% are of shocking.
The BBC are not alone, however, as results from Sky News are roughly proportionate (75%). If, on the other hand, we look at the same results for an organisation with a print background, such as The Guardian (31%) or The Sun (45%) the distinction is much less marked though still significant.
The great advantage that shocking has over its synonyms is probably impact value - this is a word that fairly rolls off the tongue and can be said very emphatically - more so than, say, appalling. This illustrates why the results we have seen are less for print media, where the advantage is less than that gained through screen media.
Something that is far harder to evaluate is how accurately this reflects our everyday speech. Do we simply attribute this to lazy journalism, or is this a symptom indicative of modern English usage? Personally I suspect that the truth lies somewhere in between - journalists like to use some words more than others because of their impact value, whilst we probably choose to use the same words more often in our everyday speech for the same reason. Because certain words and phrases have higher impact value, they are more easily imprinted upon us and, as a result, more easily called to mind.
When I first took up photography, I wasn’t very good at it. Many of the photos I took weren’t composed with much thought, or were snapped ad-hoq. Below is one such example, taken in the Lake District:
Had I taken my time to set up and been patient, there might have been a good shot to be had. Instead this was the result. So opportunity lost.
A couple of years later I was moving some files when I came across this picture again, and I ended up spending some time using it to experiment with creative effects. And this is the result:
By breaking the image into different layers and applying different effects to each, such as Découpage, Gaussian Blur and colour filters, I was able to convert this missed opportunity into something that, though not a classic, certainly has its value. I was able to learn some new techniques and turn the original into something a bit different.
This made me realise that whilst in years gone by these sorts of shots would have been discarded, with the advent of digital photography, and software such as Photoshop, we can still make some use of them. The ugly duckling might not become a swan (pardon the pun), but you might be able to create something interesting and different. Even film negatives can now be scanned and manipulated in the same way.
So before you discard the photos you’re not happy with remember that there might be something more worthwhile trying to get out. At the very least, they can offer the chance for some experimentation, learning and inspiration.
For example, applying new styles to a photo that didn’t turn out right might lead to inspiration for a future attempt with a slightly different approach, or lead to an idea that can be applied to other, better quality pictures later on.
Rather than wondering if a bad photo equals a wasted photo, perhaps we should be wondering if there is even any such thing as a bad photo…
I am a web designer and developer from West Sussex. This site is not dedicated solely to my career, but rather is intended to allow me to ramble endlessly on any subject that I find interesting, disturbing, funny, shocking, heart-rending, relevant, irrelevant, painful, joyous....you get the idea. [Read More]
Feeding time: