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My partner, Cat Ashton is doing the photography for the Bolton Bazaar this year. The bazaar is a celebration of the cultural mix of Bolton’s communities. You can see some of the photographs from the rehearsals on this link.
There’s some coverage from the Bolton News in the run up to the event and there’s a Youtube video of the 2007 (no idea why there isn’t one for 2008).
The event runs over two days (7th – 8th August 2009), with “Walk The Talk” on Friday (entertainment, food and debate) and the actual Bazaar on the Saturday. The Bazaar is held at the Victoria Hall, in Bolton starting at 1830 (arriving from 1815) It gains a little coverage from the local press, but that’s about as far as media attention goes.
We’ve got 9 tickets for the Friday event and 9 tickets for the Saturday event to give away. I’d like to see bloggers attend the event and help gain some extra publicity for it. The more publicity, the more likely community driven events like this will continue.
Bloggers may cringe at this bit, but there is a dress code – “smart”. I’m taking this to mean smart jeans, jacket and shoes, make of it what you will. I will be attending both evenings, and will happily meet people in the MacDonalds around the corner from the Victoria Hall before the event to abuse their Wifi at around 1800. Although I’d like to see people attending both days, the focus is on the Saturday event.
If you would like to attend, holler as a comment here or reach me on twitter.
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This just dropped into my RSS reader. By the look of the title, people weren’t supposed to know just yet. It’s still on the cached RSS feed, but not on the website so by now its probably common knowledge.
Notable highlights:
[snipped since no longer relevant]
The row over Spinvox is something I may comment on at another time. I use Spinvox for my voicemail service, it’s brilliant and means I’ve got a more useful form of a voicemail in the form of a text message. I don’t really care if it’s handled by an offshore call-centre or using automated software, it fits a gap in my workflow perfectly. And that’s good enough reason for me to keep supporting it.
[UPDATE] It turns out it was all just a big whoopsy on the part of (Techcrunch)[http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/08/03/an-apology-for-an-accident-of-publication/]. Mike Butcher claims it was a draft obituary which somehow managed to leak on to the RSS feed. James has not left Spinvox, and the Techcrunch article was entirely speculative. The lesson to be learnt here is if you don’t want it on the internet, don’t put it there. Anywhere.
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For the past few weeks I’ve been using Google’s “iGoogle” service, a customisable home page with widget support. Gadgets are HTML/Javascript and fit in nicely with Google’s philosophy of everything on the cloud. If you’re running other chunks of Google Apps, such as Google Calendar or Google Reader, you’ll find iGoogle a nice unified dashboard to work from.
I’m an avid LiveJournal user, and have been since January 2004, but the lack of portability of the friends page – arguably the most vital resource for a LiveJournal account has griped me. You can’t access entries as an RSS feed, and until a few days ago there was no decent mobile solution.
This morning I received a nice e-mail from LiveJournal notifying users they’ve updated their mobile site to be more inline with the current crop of mobiles. It’s nice, displays full entries and has a straightforward UI. I like it. I liked it so much I wanted it on my iGoogle page.
So after a bit of griping with the Google Gadgets documentation I finally came out with the following code which works quite nicely. I present it to you in all its majesty:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<Module>
<ModulePrefs title="LiveJournal Friends"
height="400"
scrolling="true">
</ModulePrefs>
<Content type="url" href="http://m.livejournal.com/read/friends/"><br />
</Content>
</Module>
Impressive, innit?
Strangely, although Google provide wizards and templates for generating boiler-plate gadgets they don’t provide a way for embedding remote HTML content. There’s probably a very good reason for that, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is at this time of night.
If you want to add the gadget to your own iGoogle page, click on the button below. If you know anyone who does use LiveJournal, pass it on.
