You may have noticed that the front page of KnowIT (here) uses a thumbnail image for each post. That thumbnail is provided by the Thesis theme I use.

Thesis Thumbnail image custom field.

At first I would add a Post Image to each Post and allow WordPress to create a thumbnail from it. That’s very handy, as it’s automatic.

But before long I realised the automatic thumbnails were each between 30 and 50 KB. At 10 images per front page view that was 300 to 500Kb, and made the page slow loading.

It’s a lot more work, but now I create the thumbnail image myself and add it as a Post Image Thumbnail. Each thumbnail is now around 7Kb. That’s reduced each page load by a good 400Kb, speeding up the blog and reducing bandwidth.

For reasons I don’t want to spell out here, I wanted to find out the exact names for those custom fields.

How to find custom field names

Here’s how to discover those names:

Some meta_key names for my blog.

1. Make sure at least one Post on your blog uses the custom filed you wsh to find information for.
2. Visit the hosting Control Panel for your blog.
3. Open PHPMyAdmin and select the correct database.
4. Click on the postmeta table. It probably has a prefix, such as wp_. That lists all the rows in the table, probably 30 or so per page.
5. Scan the column called meta_key until you see the name you need.

For example, in Thesis you can assign a specific post image, post image alt text, post image thumbnail and alt text to each Post. I wanted to find the specific meta_key names.

After viewing the postmeta table I soon found them:

• thesis_post_image
• thesis_post_image_alt
• thesis_thumb
• thesis_thumb_alt

Now, with the exact names available I can go ahead and construct a search or use them any other way I like.

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The building itself was rather daunting and unfriendly — not the kind of place to ‘invite’ you in. So the Brooklyn Museum started reaching out.

Brooklyn Museum.^*

Not content with offering better seating, free evening lectures and movies, they decided to use the Internet.

Shelley Bernstein, the Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum, explained more in her talk at the recent Webstock conference. Her talk was called Fostering Personal Connection to Place.

Bernstein talked about some of the numerous ways the museum uses the Internet to help visitors be more engaged.

The YouTube response

For example, when they ran Black List, an exhibition about race, they installed a couple of laptops in the gallery and invited people to record a video of their response.

The laptop sent the videos to YouTube.

This meant that the exhibition became more than just the voice of the museum, but a focal point for wider discussion.

Share the journey

The museum staff use both blogs and Twitter, to communicate not only to, but with their visitors.

They don’t use an impersonal ‘institutional’ voice either, but instead make sure the writer of each piece is clearly named.

Nor do they only write about the ‘good stuff’. They share both good and bad news; their triumphs and their mistakes.

mummy#4 08.480.2.

They recently live tweeted about the cat scan of some mummies. In a way, the cat scan process became an exhibition in its own right.

The audience became part of the journey, and discovered only moments after the staff did that the ‘male’ mummy was in fact a female. (Or maybe vice versa.)

Te Papa did a similar thing last year with live video of their giant squid inspection.

Amplify the community’s voice

When the museum had an exhibition about graffiti they put up a special wall for visitors to graffiti. Then they took photos of the wall each day and posted them to Flickr.

Many of the graffiti artists also took their own photos and added them to the Flickr exhibition.

And so, the exhibition moved beyond the bounds of the museum buildings and drew in the public, amplified their voices.

Tag you’re it

The museum have a ‘posse‘ — a group of people who add information to collections the museum put online.

For example, the ‘official’ information about an art work will include the name of the artist, media used, date, and so on.

But viewers may add tags or descriptions such as ‘mystery’ or ‘foreboding’.

In some cases, online visitors have been able to highlight errors or confusion in what the museum knows about works.

Bernstein spoke with a passion about her work. She also gave us many more examples of how the museum are using the Internet in other ways to engage with their community.

The video of her 45 minute presentation will probably be added to the Webstock website soon. I’d urge you to watch it.

You may also like to read my article that was published in the NZ Herald — Webstock: Amplifying the community’s voice.

Written by Miraz Jordan for, and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, March 2010. This article has been modified for publication here.

^* Building image from the Brooklyn Museum website, and used under a Creative Commons License.

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I guess when paper was invented it was a rare, precious, and costly thing. And probably for hundreds or thousands of years after that.

It was probably both hard and costly to make, and not the kind of thing you used lightly.

Now we engage daily with mountains of inexpensive paper, whether it’s in the book we’re reading, wrapping products we buy, or drying our hands.

Cheap as chips

Is this rubbish bin networked?

A similar thing is happening with computer chips. At first costly and scarce, they’re now becoming ubiquitous. They show up in cameras, cellphones, washing machines, perhaps medical bracelets, swipe cards and elsewhere.

The cost of computer chips is almost low enough to start using them in all kinds of objects.

Network power

A computer chip can be very specialised. For example, it would be easy to imagine a chip that could be attached to a rubbish bin on a public street. The chip could detect if the bin was full, or if the bin had been pulled away from its support.

Now imagine that chip could report back over the Internet, to alert the Council to empty or repair the bin.

Ubiquitous computing

If computer chips are really cheap, and easily networked, perhaps we’ll start to use them in many more places, for many more purposes.

This is a scenario that Adam Greenfield explores in his 2006 book: Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.

Greenfield also spoke at the Webstock conference recently. I was fortunate enough to participate in his ‘walkshop’. That was a workshop where we walked around a couple of blocks of Wellington streets, considering some of the technology around us.

Surveillance cameras

Spot the surveillance camera.

I have to say I was astonished at how many surveillance cameras Greenfield pointed out. Have you noticed them in your nearest town or city?

I’ve never been entirely sure what the small blue ‘flying saucers’ attached to walls or poles were. Now I know that they are often cameras, claimed to ‘keep the streets safe’.

But do we know who is collecting the recorded images? What they’re doing with the images? How long they keep them? Is there any data to prove the cameras do keep us safe?

Why not add a chip?

If computer chips are sufficiently cheap, and easy enough to network, Greenfield suggests we may start adding them to things, just in case they’re useful. It’s a kind of ‘Why not?’ approach; for another $5 why not add a networked device to track ’something’.

We might track temperatures, air quality, rainfall, visitor numbers, traffic flows, who runs red lights, who breaks the speed limit, how many tall redheads use a particular intersection.

Living in a world of data

Of course, the data may be totally benign: if we understand traffic flow, perhaps we can reduce pedestrian injuries from vehicles.

But there are obvious worrying implications too, such as when we detect that Person X always buys a bottle of wine on Fridays before visiting a certain address.

An inevitable progression

It seems inevitable that networked computer devices will become ubiquitous in our lives. It also seems obvious that they may be used for good or ill.

You can read more about Greenfield’s concepts of ubiquitous computing in my NZ Herald article: Webstock: Cheap as chips — your networked chair or at his blog Speedbird.

Written by Miraz Jordan for, and reproduced from CommunityNet Aotearoa Panui, March 2010. This article has been modified for publication here.

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Even though I’m self-employed and can determine my own schedules I’m enormously reluctant to sleep during the day. Even if I’m very tired I struggle on, trying to work.

Napping.

It’s silly — I know that when I do nap it refreshes me and I work better. There’s some deeper conditioning though that urges me to try to work through it.

Recent research shows that napping can boost the brain’s learning capacity:

In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.

At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.

[Via : Midday nap markedly boosts the brain's learning capacity.]

It looks as though I need to overcome my resistance to napping, and just go with the flow.

Photo courtesy of PicApp Photo Galleries.

Do you nap in the middle of the day? How does that work out for you?

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If I’m writing, then I’m using TextExpander:

A TextExpander snippet.

Save time and effort with TextExpander! Whether it’s a simple email signature or several paragraphs of a standard response, you’ll love how easy it is to use TextExpander to avoid typing the same thing over and over.

I use this so much that I almost can’t type without it. If I find myself using someone else’s computer I keep stumbling over things ‘not happening’: my most frequent typos remain unchanged; my 3-letter abbreviation for my email address doesn’t expand to its 21 character full version; and I can’t write any HTML at all.

The other day version 3 of TextExpander appeared, and a few things have changed.

Where TextExpander used to be a System Preference Pane, it’s now an application in its own right. It also has new fill-in-the-blank snippets that ask for text. This allows you to enter text that changes, while leaving the cursor after the snippet.

A TextExpander fill-in-the-blank snippet.

For example, in writing the previous paragraph I typed the trigger text ,em after the word cursor. That expanded to the HTML code: <em> </em>, with the cursor placed between the tags. Then I typed the word after at the cursor. Next I had to move the insertion point after the tags to continue typing.

With the new fill-in-the-blank approach I can set the cursor to appear after the tags. Before the trigger is fully expanded though, a dialog box invites me to enter the text that will appear between the tags.

This will be a big time saver.

I do a lot, if not most, of my writing in HTML. I have dozens of snippets set up for the most common tags I use, along with common phrases and typos. If you do any kind of writing on a Mac, I suggest you give TextExpander a try. I can’t do without it.

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I’m looking forward to seeing this free app on the iPad — Welly Walks for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad:

Welly Walks screenshots.

Wellington is a cosmopolitan capital loved for its culture, coffee and cuisine. Explore museums, art galleries, nature, historical buildings, boutique shopping, award-winning restaurants and cafes and much more, all within a compact downtown area that takes only 20 minutes to walk from one side to the other.

I haven’t tested it on an actual walk, but it seems to have nicely comprehensive information, maps and photos of the main walks in Wellington, New Zealand.

For example, each screen on the Mt Victoria part of the walk imparts interesting tidbits, such as the Māori history of Mt Victoria (Tangi-te-keo).

It tells us that the hill was named after the soul of Whataitai, a taniwha (water monster) that could not escape the harbour (then a lake). Its soul flew to the top of the hill in the shape of a bird and proceeded to tangi (weep and mourn).

Hence the name Tangi-te-keo — tears of the bird called Te Keo.

I love discovering these snippets of information about Wellington, and am looking forward to using this app to help me learn more about the city.

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It looks almost like a real comment, doesn’t it? Especially since it was on a Post about my dead Time Capsule:

Less obvious spam.

The back up feature saves costs for having to buy a back up system hardware but two years is not long enough…hardware should at least last for 5 years…

It doesn’t really contribute anything to the Post it’s attached to though, and it just doesn’t feel quite right. I unapproved it, but didn’t mark it as Spam.

Until the next day when a suspiciously similar comment appeared. The comment text was different, but the email address and URL were modelled on the same pattern. I unapproved that one too, then noticed that both comments came from the same IP address.

WordPress Comment Blacklist.

I popped on over to the WordPress Discussion Settings and added the IP address to the banned list.

Now, 10 days later, there’s another similarly patterned comment from a different IP address. Spammers!

This time I finally visited the linked sites. I found all of them use dummy WordPress blogs with the Thesis theme and affiliate links to Thesis, and also to an ‘internet marketing specialist’ called GetSalesLeads.

These people appear to be the spammers.

All 3 domain names they used in the comment spam on my blog were owned by folks called AdCard — who also appear to be the ones behind the Sales Leads crowd.

I’ve now added christchurch.co.nz to my Comment Blacklist settings. I suggest you do the same. These guys just make me sick.

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New Zealand is a long way from anywhere. It’s 2,000 Km to Australia and 11,000 to California in North America. That’s 2.5 hours flying to Sydney or 12 hours to Los Angeles.

The Pacific – New Zealand is east of Australia.

The Internet though gives us instant access to far away people. I can talk by Skype with friends on the other side of the world, exchange emails in a moment, share a Google Doc.

Twitter tells me within moments about earthquakes in Chile and snowfalls in the South of France.

And for more serious business uses the Internet, and good access to large quantities of high-speed data is crucial.

At the moment our international Internet traffic is served through the Southern Cross undersea cable:

The network is almost 30,500 km in length, including 28,900km of submarine cable incorporating around 500 optical repeaters (placed every 40-70km to boost signals), and 1,600km of terrestrial cable. There are nine cable stations (two each in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and the US mainland, and one in Fiji) and an access point in San Jose, California.

We Kiwis live with data caps. For instance: my Internet plan allows 20Gb of traffic per month. If we exceed 20Gb before the rollover date then every extra Gb costs another $3. We think several times before downloading a full-length video, or a large software update.

Broadband will only ever be as fast as the narrowest point.

But news came this week of a plan for a new, additional undersea cable. Pacific Fibre plan to raise almost 1 billion dollars to lay a new, more direct cable that will give us plenty of bandwidth:

The New Zealand and Australian governments are investing heavily in fibre to the home. Those investments will be futile if our international bandwidth remains the same. Right now 90% of our internet access requires international connections — addressing international bandwidth is paramount.

The prices New Zealanders and Australians pay [for Internet bandwidth] are high compared to international benchmarks.

The face of computing is changing. Next generation devices, like Netbooks and the iPad, are providing cheaper entry points but will consume significantly more bandwidth — data (including photos, movies and emails) is not stored locally, but instead is stored remotely in a ‘cloud’, accessed via international broadband.

Unless we address the international bandwidth issue, New Zealanders will not get affordable access to services and devices increasingly common in the rest of the world.

Pacific Cable plan to have the new capacity in place by 2013. That’s only an ambitious 3 years away. They plan to provide inexpensive, unlimited, ultra-fast broadband for all.

More, cheaper bandwidth and speed make all kinds of applications possible:

• Lightweight fun: watching sports matches, movies or TV.
• Education opportunities: virtual visits from experts, or collaborations with distant learners or colleagues.
• Video consultations with medical experts.
• Sharing huge files, such as scientific data, movies or very high resolution images.

There are already hundreds of possibilities for using highs-peed high-bandwidth applications, and many more will become evident before this cable is in place.

This is an exciting project, with the potential to make a huge difference to the lives of Kiwis. I say: Good on you!

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Apparently Wellington’s going to be burdened with a rip-off of the famous Hollywood sign:

Wellywood — artist’s impression from stuff.co.nz.

A massive Wellywood sign celebrating Wellington’s success in the film industry will greet tourists as they fly into the capital.

But not everyone agrees on the sign, which will sit on a cutting above Miramar wharf in the seaside eastern suburbs. …

Sir Peter Jackson said … “It’s Kiwi tongue-in-cheek humour at its very best, but beneath the leg-pulling is genuine pride. ” …

Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast said the giant sign would capture the essence of the capital.

[Via : A sign of success for Wellywood hills | Stuff.co.nz.]

How embarrassing: here we are a creative people in a centre of arts and innovation, and what we do is make a copycat sign to celebrate success.

I don’t see it as tongue-in-cheek humour at all. Referring to Wellington as ‘Wellywood’ is one thing, but ripping off an iconic sign is quite another. It just seems flat, stale and to suggest a poor imitation, try-hard wannabe.

Our film industry deserves much better.

A better idea is the Pillars of Argonath, as Mike Riversdale explains.

Update 11 March 2010 — there’s hope yet that the sign will be abandoned:

Hollywood Chamber of Commerce president and chief executive Leron Gubler says the staggered Hollywood lettering is trademarked.

“If they do that with the Wellywood sign then I would think that would be a violation of our trademark…I am checking that with our attorney,” he told The Dominion Post.

[Via : Wellywood sign could breach trademark laws | NATIONAL News.]

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For the past week or so I’ve been a bit under the weather with a chest cold. It started with an ‘odd’ throat, then went straight to a deep cough. After a few days of that I also had the ‘fuzzy head’, but am glad to say I missed out on sneezing.

Nevertheless, I haven’t been up to much for most of the past week. Which has meant I’ve been reading more fiction than usual.

Luckily I had quite a good stock of Elizabeth Moon (affiliate link) novels to keep me very well entertained.

I’ve been reading 2 series: Vatta’s War and the Serrano series.

Military in space

Moon’s novels feature strong and interesting women, in space, with a strong military influence.

The Vatta’s War series begins with the Vatta trading family, and moves into the formation of a quasi-military fleet whose role is to counter pirates. The lead character is Kylara Vatta, who at the start of the series has been thrown out of Space Academy for a rather trivial seeming wrongdoing.

It turns out that Ky develops into a cunning and strategic leader who deals to well-organised pirates, even though outmatched.

I haven’t yet finished the Serrano series, and have unfortunately missed the 3rd book altogether. It’s an entertaining and solid read though, like the Vatta series. The lead characters, again, are military women who prove to be excellent leaders.

Careful and interesting writing

I must commend Moon and her editors on a job well done. The novels hang together well, with good pacing and nicely drawn characters.

On top of that, I’ve noticed only 2 or 3 typos total in the 10 or so books. The editors have been paying attention. It makes for a feeling of quality where it counts.

The stories are engaging and immersive too. I haven’t been too thrilled to be feeling unwell the past week, but it’s been a great pleasure to spend time reading some very fine sci-fi. My only regret is that with one and a half books to go I’ve pretty much run out of the sci-fi this author has to offer.

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