Back in the tail end of 2010 I put a reading list together for 2011 with the intention of reading a book a month. Inevitably, it didn’t go well. I made some reasonable progress and added some more books to the list as 2011 progressed, but ultimately I didn’t achieve what I set out to do. What has surprised me, though, is that I do seem to be happy-ish with the changes reading some books has made to my life.

Of the original 12 books, I read three. That’s a one in every four. Poor show. I read an additional six books on top of the these original three, which sort of implies that my initial choices weren’t a good fit for the year, or the year brought things that I wasn’t expecting and it all got a bit derailed. I’ve read virtually nothing in the last few months, mostly down to to poor spare time planning on my part, but the mood hasn’t really been conducive to relaxing with a book. Perhaps that will change, soon.

A knock-on effect of this is that my 43 Things list is rather top-heavy with 13 books to read. This selection of 13 tomes represents a small part of the unread section of my bookshelf, but the point of a to-do list is that there’s some progress…there’s little to no logic (with my brain wiring, at least) of having things that are unlikely to get done in a reasonable time frame, so my plan is to shift the reading off the list until I can get my act together and start reading again.

Here’s the current list of the books I want to read before I cull the list back:

…and after some housekeeping:

That’s a single-figure reading list that represents about 1% of the total number of books in the house, so it’s unlikely I’m going to get bored. I’m not overwhelmed by the ‘in’ pile, or even the many books on the shelf that need to be read, but I would like to be a more practised reader of paper books.

This blog post has been a long time coming. Apart from the ever-so-slightly clichéd tack of a year-end update, I’ve had so many things whizzing through my mind that – frankly – I’m surprised I’ve even got this far. Truth is, I don’t know how it’s going to pan out and I know I’ll forget some stuff that I’ll have to tack on at a later time. This post focuses on websites.

It would be very remiss of me if I didn’t start by admitting I’ve neglected emmaandpete.com over the year. Being my own worst critic it’s easy for me to pinpoint a bunch of things that I want to change and improve across the site. With that in mind, here’s a sit-rep:

The Cooper Acres project is almost 500 days old and is, for the meantime, on long-term hiatus. The idea of a self-build project in the next few years is a pipe dream. It’s still something I want to pursue, but financial constraints are such that it’s not going to be soon. I’ll be taking the link down from the sidebar on the next website housekeeping run, likely in January. I’m in two minds about leaving the content orphaned or ditching it completely. With my SEO hat on, I’m very mindful of just killing content off without thinking about it, lest the Google robot be sad when it can no longer find my pearls of wisdom.

The two blogs (this one and Emma’s) are also up for the chop. One of the thoughts that’s been buzzing around in my head is to merge the two together into a single blog for the site. The sticking point is the numbers: excluding the Pragmatism podcast series, I’ve racked up a piffling 45 blog posts since the start of 2008, the majority of which aren’t worth the server power that’s required to get them on a screen. That’s poor to the point that it’s embarrassing. Emma’s managed about a hundred over the same time period. The other thought that’s getting more traction is to zap the blogs on this site and have them running on our own personal websites instead. That is to say, Emma’s stuff will migrate to emmacooper.org and my stuff will end up on the currently-shuttered petecooper.org – I’m even less attached to the content of my blog than the Cooper Acres project, so it’s more likely that old blog posts will be dumped. The podcast series, Pragmatism, will stay, as I’m cool with that. It’s possible it may be resurrected with the advent of a bit more focus on petecooper.org. Emma’s site has had a facelift this year and the results have been very encouraging. More on site construction and development later in this post. Gut feeling right now is to migrate both blogs away from this site and make more of our coupons and offers.

The coupons and offers we have associated with the show are saving many people a bunch of money, but so far I’ve not managed to capitalise in getting them out to a wider audience, which is a golden opportunity for some real game-changing things to happen. The presentation leaves a lot to be desired and that’s second highest priority for the next phase of the website.

…which leads me to the Emma and Pete Show, the top priority. While it’s not strictly a website thing, it’s the focus point of this site and things that aren’t associated with the show detract from the overall site experience, I feel. I still love doing the show (I’m sure Emma can say the same), and I want to do it more often. 2012 will be the year we get our act together and move away from the month-end squish catch-up session that always seems like we’re racing against the clock. Lots has changed in Cooper Towers over the last 12 months and, all being well, we’ll have lots to chat about in the coming years, too. I’m trying to move away from the self-imposed action plans of accomplishing something in a given (arbitrary) timeframe and I’ve done really well with this over the last year (see, even that sentence has some irony), so I see no harm in saying we’ll do more shows next year and not just the half dozen a month you’ve become accustomed to. It’s hard to put a number to it, but understand that I’m serious when I say I’m working on getting the things in place for more shows on a more reliable schedule.

Onto other websites, now. I mentioned petecooper.org earlier in this post, and it is my intention to have that as a personal website. In addition, I’ve also nabbed petecooper.co.uk which I’ve earmarked as a photography website, either as a straight up business site or a portfolio of sorts. The fine points of both are yet to be decided, but they’ll both be live, ready (and never completely finished) in 2012.

I rebuilt emmaandpete.com this year, then I built emmacooper.org, then I did a substantial e-commerce website job for a friend of mine that took over every working hour of my day and other things suffered as a result of my single-mindedness. And now, I’m pooped. My relationship with web design and construction is very love-hate; I am intrigued by the innards of how things work and the psychology of the browsing experience. I’m not good at it. I’m pernickety about how I make things and I have fundamental gaps in my knowledge (Javascript, PHP) and skill set (design) that prevent me from really enjoying it. The time involved with learning these things in a timely fashion is just not available or forthcoming. It’s a balance, for sure, but I have good feelings about what petecooper.co.uk and petecooper.org are going to look like. Every time I do a site build I learn new things, vow that I’ll never do it again, and occasionally threaten to get a proper job. Then something drags me back in and I’m hooked. The current wormhole that I’m getting deeply into is an unholy trinity of HTML5 Boilerplate, 960 Grid System and JQuery – wish me luck. I foresee many late nights in front a glowing Mac screen – which I think I’m OK with if I can balance ‘em with late nights away from my Mac.

More of 2011 in review soon.

Towards the end of my last employment, I was liaising with a particular member of another department. And then I wasn’t, because one day he was just gone. The company line was bland and uninformative – his colleagues had been asked not to discuss his departure.

It turns out that he had been arrested (and was later convicted) for a child pornography offence (I am not clear on the legal minutiae, but that’s the general gist). I do not attempt to understand, or condone, his actions – this story isn’t about him. It’s about the guy who sat opposite him for months, and with whom he had formed a friendly working relationship.

The guy who was left behind, and who found out what his friend had done when the rest of us did, was a friend of mine. He was also pretty cut up about what had happened. How could he not have known? How could he have been friends with someone who is (in the eyes of our society) a monster?

The glib answer people usually come up with is that it’s impossible to really know someone (although people generally ‘know’ that their loved ones are incapable of any wrong doing).

My philosophy is that we should stop looking at the world in black and white. People are complicated creatures, probably becoming more so as their lives become more complicated. We can think one thing and do another. We can think two conflicting things at the same time. We can be upstanding citizens with skeletons hidden in the closet. We are supposed to be different – mentally and physically – as those differences are the safety net that ensures our species survives when conditions change.

So when we’re looking at rioters and looters, a polarized position is of no use. We cannot assume that the people involved in the current disturbances are dole scum who have deliberately chosen not to take advantage of the opportunities a modern Western society offers and are merely seeking out violence or taking the chance to steal with what looks to be impunity. Neither are they all the unfortunate products of broken homes, who have been neglected by an uncaring and unequal society, and merely protesting (in an entirely understandable fashion) the fact that they have little to lose and no future to aspire to.

I am not a political commentator. I have read various opinions on what has caused the riots and how we can move forward. I don’t think that any one person has the answers. I don’t think it’s black and white.

I’m going through the rather arduous process of building a new theme for emmaandpete.com. It’s mostly done — I would say about 80% complete — but not applied across the whole site just yet.

I’m hoping it’s going to be easier on the eyes than the very dull grey colour scheme, a bit whizzier than the old layout and overall a nicer experience for you as a reader. If all goes to plan everything should be converted to the new layout by July 9th, 2011.

If you’re expecting more excitement about a new design, you’ll have to wait – doing this whole web development thing has reminded me how much I dislike it…and yet I generally like the end result. Weird, eh?

I’ve never had a particularly healthy relationship with social networks. My experience has been one of extremes and I’ve not been able to find the elusive balance to integrate it into my day.

I wanted to write ‘workflow’ as the last word of the paragraph above, but it’s a horrid word that just makes everything so dispassionate and business-like. Back when I was involved with Twitter it was deeply integrated into my day. I’d have a desktop client running, an iPhone client and tell a bunch of people about what was happening to me and mine. Having had a few months off, what strikes me now is how the immediacy of Twitter and its ecosystem essentially had channels running at different rates, rather like a network of rivers and streams. With the risk of this being an awful analogy, I’ll tell you how I see it.

There’re water streams tumbling down mountains at great speed, fed by fresh rain. These fed into larger, slower-moving streams, and these in turn fed into the larger-but-even-slower mainstream. Which ultimately end up in the sea…I don’t know, it gets a bit hazy at this point, even for me. When you’re in the fast-moving streams, you need to be able to keep up, which involves a level of commitment that, if not checked, can be damaging.

Despite not having an active Twitter account, I still occasionally check in on people that I used to pay attention to. Some are faraway friends, and some are more local to me. I see people yammer on about how amazing their life is and how great they are, then tout for business because they can’t pay the mortgage. I see people who are so resolutely stuck in their ways (or a rut, maybe) that they don’t seem to change from year to year. I see people who insist on posting link after link after link without any conviction or weight behind what they’re passing on. I see people who are so passionate and involved with their field of interest, be it work or play, that they’re genuinely interesting to listen to and learn from.

I don’t know how I was seen to the folks following me: I suspect bi-polar, manic, miserable, comedic, sanctimonious and confusing all fit the bill. Where Twitter fell down for me in the past, I think, was how I was using it: I was tracking people I knew in real life and had a better-than-average connection with. I was paying attention to their words and thoughts, but maybe a little too intently. I didn’t think that reading what someone is doing on their Twitter account is a substitute for proper (face to face) communication with that person…and I still don’t. Add to that the concept that Twitter people are, invariably, talking to more than one person at once, there’s essentially a broadcast element involved. Sometimes that involves a message being diluted for mass consumption, sometimes it involves a deliberately antagonistic or emotive angle on a status update to get a rise out of people. Ultimately, it’s just attention-whoring, for the most part. Look. At. Me.

I quit Twitter in January 2011. I very briefly signed-up again in early March, I think. It was a moment of madness that, in retrospect, I should’ve avoided. I had a new username, a new start, and an open mind about how it might integrate into my life. Within two hours of signing up I had a kid in Vietnam (I think) screaming that I’d taken his username and he was going to do bad things to me. Inevitably, his followers were equally insane and they started sending strange messages over to me with similar threats. Not in the mood for a fight, I just hid back under my rock and put it down to experience. Interesting to note that the username I had is available for registration but hasn’t been taken yet, which leads me to believe that I was actually imagining the whole sorry mess or someone was pranking me. Either way, it’s done with.

I want to like Twitter again. I used to, truth be told. It just took such a stranglehold on my life during a period of such misery and mental anxiety that I used it as a crutch to get me through some dark days. Having made the decision to ditch it back in January, I can honestly say I am far happier than I was back then. I have plans, achievements, and a more positive/pragmatic way of looking at things. I still don’t have many people I would consider friends or an active social life, but that’s entirely my own doing and I’m going to sort that out in time. I don’t expect to be Captain Sociable at any stage, but if I can find a balance I’m happy with then I’ll take that win. The friends I do have I value dearly, even if they’re on the end of a wire.

Don’t worry, this isn’t an arm-flailing rant about what people throw out.

Our back garden is home to a bunch of plants, chickens and cat poop. Two out of these three things are very welcome, one is not. In early 2009 we inadvertently found a way of keeping the cats at bay without really trying: fresh wood chips, and lots of them.

The folks over the road had some Leylandii they were having removed by a professional tree surgeon. Having put up with the noise of tree shredders over the course of a workday, I wandered over and spoke nicely to the chap doing the shredding. I asked him what was going to happen to these wood chips when he was done with them; he proudly told me they were headed to Didcot power station to be incinerated. This surprised me somewhat, not because I’m against burning wood for fuel and warmth, but I hadn’t really thought about the chain of custody for felled wood once it has left the owner’s garden. Clearly if you’ve got a wood-burning stove or pellet burner it’s a bit more clear cut, but I did wonder how long a truck full of shredded wood might burn for if it was added to a power station incineration pile. Not long, I imagine.

Anyway, long story short, twenty quid bought us a truck-full of wood chips. And we’re talking upwards of 5 tonnes at a conservative estimate. It took us a good while to cart the wood round the back into the garden, but eventually we covered the tatty bark chips with a lighter shade of wood chips. The cypress smell was glorious. To humans, that is, the cats made a sharp exit and weren’t seen for a while.

Which brings us up to date. The old chips are now nicely decomposing and have lost their lustre. It’s time for new wood chips. This time I decided to be more proactive and ask around the local tree surgeons if they had any spare. They do, apparently. They have lots spare. They were happy for us to come and collect as many as we wanted ourselves and make a charitable donation, but I’ve persuaded them to drop off a truckload in our driveway for a larger charitable donation. This is the ideal situation: they get rid of a large pile of wood chips, we get some new garden carpet, the Multiple Sclerosis Society get a bunch of cash and I get a warm feeling for for orchestrating the whole thing from a keyboard and screen. Nice.

The real point of this post is actually a bit more profound than be getting a few bits of wood: I’m finding myself using things considered waste more and more. It’s not gross or unpleasant, and I actually rather like the scavenging aspect of it all. Having build some garden furniture out of garage rood joists that were destined for a skip, I’m now scoping out wood reclaim yards to find even more things to build with. Good times.

Today was the first day in weeks (months, even) that I thought about my now-defunct music podcast called Bleepshow. Until the middle of 2010 it was a labour of love, something I really enjoyed doing and real escapism from the day-to-day life I was leading. A few badly-timed server crashes (yes, plural) effectively put the kibosh on its future and it languished for months. I made a conscious decision to put it to bed back in January following a pretty major life assessment and I felt much better as a result of letting it go relatively gracefully. Some things have to give while I build my confidence and strength back up to what it used to be, and that was one of the things that went.

Today was the day I got thinking about it again — the website itself, not the podcast. The podcast stands as a self-contained entity and seems to work for some people. Clearly I was doing something right as each show has had thousands of downloads over the few years it was running. Right now there are around 100 people subscribed in iTunes despite there not being any new shows for 9 months or so. That figure is more than the total number of Emma and Pete Show subscribers, and that has sporadic fresh content a few times a month.

The best discovery of the day was that the Bleepshow website has a PageRank of 4. This website currently has a PageRank of 2. I won’t bore you with the voodoo involved with PageRank, but a bigger number is better and moving to the next level up gets more difficult as you go along. I hesitate to compare it to the Richter scale, but it’s largely a logarithmic scale….sorry, I wasn’t going to bore you, ignore that. Now, bleepshow.com uses a page template which doesn’t have SEO in mind. It simply didn’t factor to the designer. Conversely, this site has a far more SEO-focussed template that I built myself. The PageRank 4 site has about 30% of the traffic, far fewer working pages, loads of 404 links, all sorts of mess behind the scenes and a general state of neglect. This site, the inferior PageRank 2 site, has more focus, more hits, more traffic, better SERPs placing, the whole lot. I suspect the bleepshow.com mojo comes from incoming links on a bunch of netlabel websites, something that a podcast with a varied style was good at getting…one way of looking at Bleepshow was as a promotional vehicle for the various artists and labels featured — quite often the artist and/or label would comment on their site about something on a Bleepshow, complete with an incoming link. There was no ulterior motive with Bleepshow: I did it for a laugh, a bit of fun, to spread the word about good (free) music…there were no intentions of making any money along the way.

Which brings me to my dilemma – what do I do with bleepshow.com? Some options:

- leave it to bitrot (zero time and effort required, it just languishes and gathers dust) – park it (small amount of time and effort, plus an immediate hit in the PageRank department) – take it offline (small amount of time and effort) – do some maintenance and fix the broken things (time and effort) – restart the podcast and capitalise on the subscribers (ongoing time and effort, likely ongoing positive results if I market it right)

Right now, I don’t know. I feel very proud of what Bleepshow achieved in its short life. I met some great people and genuinely don’t regret anything that happened, even the server crashes. Sure, it was a bind to fetch hundreds of gigabytes of music from the internet, but that’s part of the experience — the fun of finding old and deleted classics that most of the internet didn’t even know existed.

Here’s what I’d do if I ever felt like doing a music podcast again — and in the interests of disclosure this is not beyond the realms of possibility:

- make it 79 minutes long to fit onto a CD – have a numbered show format rather than a date format – make it a mixed/beatmatched show for the sake of flow and tempo – have more to say than ‘that was so-and-so, this next track is so-and-so” – make it weekly or fortnightly – have the recording it streamed/broadcast live at a given time

The truth is I love my music, and I love to share the music that I love. There’s a lot of love to give. Bleepshow as it stands gets to rest in peace, sure, but daughter-of-Bleepshow (yes, it’s a girl) is a twinkle in her father’s eye right now. Maybe it would be sibling-of-Bleepshow…I don’t know. There’s no podcasting incest going on here, no dark and dingy basements with covered-up pregnancies and weird, moustachioed women with overbites.

And it that’s not some bizarre imagery I’ve left you with, then I’ve failed, frankly.

I’m pleased to say that my first Typepad DMCA went very smoothly. Compared to some of the other companies I’ve had to deal with it was a walk in the park and everything is now sorted. You can read more about the background here, but the short version is:

• Emma wrote articles for her gardening website with a copyright notice attached to each one
• The owner of orlaphelan87.typepad.com (currently defunct) copied and republished selected articles verbatim without permission or attribution and attached affiliate links to same articles
• Emma got annoyed
• Pete put the smack down

As I say, it’s all sorted now, and full marks to Jen from Typepad support for her assistance with making it happen, but I wanted to share some interesting things that I found in the time I was waiting for things to happen.

Firstly, the way this person was using affiliate links was a bit different to the usual direct link(s) to a website or page. Normally there are text links to a given site with what’s known as keyword text. At a high level, if there are a shedload of links to a given site with similar keywords, that will have an effect in search engines. In this case it was something like ‘lawn care’ and ‘grass cutting’, both related to gardening…but these links were linking to completely unrelated forum profile pages, and the target website was linked from that forum page. The forum profiles were presumably created with the sole intention of not posting any content, but just existing as a link page to a target website.

So, the Typepad blog linked to a bunch of forum profile pages, and those forum profile pages linked to a single website. Two minutes of work yielded the following information:

• the forums where this person had dumped their links
• the target website
• the Amazon affiliate URL this person was using
• the person’s address, which I could look at on Google Local, and also see when they bought the house, and how much they paid for it
• their name
• a bunch of other websites they run (or ran), all using Amazon affiliate links to sell stuff

…which is a bit scary considering all the tools I had at my disposal were free and required no authentication to use. Had I not been the sane, sensible, mentally-balanced and very reasonable person that I am, I could have been speaking to this person at their house within an hour.

And no, they weren’t called Orla Phelan, and they weren’t born in 1987. They do, however, live in Draycott, in-between Derby and Nottingham. And the house they live in was bought in 2006 for £116,666.

There was a Plan B I had up my sleeve if there was a problem with Typepad and their takedown request. Thankfully I didn’t have to use it, but it went something like this:

• get in touch with Amazon, get the person’s affiliate account shut down (copyright infringement, a violation of the Amazon Associates agreement)
• get in touch with Bosch and explain this person is using their trademarks in a domain name (also dodgy ground if you don’t have permission)
• send a stern letter to the person, explaining that they have 7 days to remove each of 20+ articles copied without permission, otherwise they’d get an itemised contract with a non-exclusive republishing licence permitting them to use said article once only at an already existing website address…with a £495 + VAT fee for each article

Clearly this was a last resort option, save for the door-knocking and friendly warning (softball bat optional), but it was there nonetheless.

The other thing that cropped up in the research was the software used to scrape the website pages and republish: Readability (safe for work).This cropped up because an article on the offending Typepad site had an error message specific to Readability — having checked on Google for the origins, it turned up in one place: the Readability support forums. I’m not suggesting for one second that Readability were complicit, condoning or even aware of what was happening, but it does help me to understand the mindset of this person.

As a result of this whole incident, I am one more DMCA better off and it’s made me rethink content delivery for Emma’s new website, which I’m building at the moment. RSS feeds will have copyright statements in, articles will have copyright statements in. It’s a bit sad, really, as the majority of content we make for the internet, including what I’m writing now, is licensed with generous Creative Commons terms.

Maybe it’s just the non-licensed stuff that’s worth ripping off.

I don’t know if there’s some odd stellar alignment going on, but things appear to be fairly stable on the life front. Nothing’s breaking or leaking, at least nothing major, and the weather is getting better as spring clatters round the corner and makes its presence felt.

With that in mind, I’m resurrecting the Cooper Acres research project. The Cooper Towers building work is done and dusted and we’ve settled back into a steady work rhythm that will provide us with the cash to live a better life. I need a project that’s not work-based. I’m one of that weird breed of people who like working, and I’m currently OK with that. I do, of course, like to do other stuff apart from working, I’m just a bit useless at working out what those things might be. Having Cooper Acres as a research project will effectively be like working toward a degree or qualification, with the end result (the dissertation, if you will) being a physical house, rather than a paper, thesis or other such written wordplay.

I’m putting the finishing touches to a wiki hosted on this site. I originally had a wiki running on my own computer, but having it online has more benefits, plus it means you get to poke around in my research and braindumps. This stage of the project will have far fewer pretty house renders and plans. There’s not a lot of point in showing how a house will look when there’s no plot available. That’s not to say there won’t be occasional diagrams and what have you, but there’ll be less of the ‘OMG A HOUSE!!’ kind of posts.

I am acutely aware this is a very long-term project. Short of someone appearing and giving me many hundreds of thousands of pounds to build a house, this is going to be a multi-year gig. The things I learn can be used for my own projects and passed onto others, too, so it may even be a future career change…who knows.

I have a very love/hate relationship with holidays (vacations). My workaholic tendencies don’t really lend themselves to a week or more of ‘off’ time. The idea of going somewhere and staying in a strange and fascinating place does appeal to me, and yet there’s something in my head telling me that I don’t need to go there, and I should just hunker down and get on with what I was doing, and stop day dreaming.

I really like Iceland. It’s been on the list of the places I want to visit for some time. I’m not the kind of person to want to go to a given place just to say I’ve been there, though I’ll admit I used to be that way. Back in my early 20s I was working for Sophos and visited a big list of countries on the company dime:

• Australia (trade show and office cover)
• Canada (got drunk with my opposite number from their office)
• France (with the company founder in a little 6-seater plane)
• Ireland (got very drunk with one of the company sales partners, more than once)
• Mauritius (trade show [seriously – cocktails on the beach and everything)
• South Africa (got very drunk with one of the company sales partners)
• USA (Boston [a bunch of times] and Los Angeles [once])

…plus a week-long schlep around the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Qatar. I didn’t get drunk any of those places, in case you were wondering.

The thing is, though, I look back on that list of places and that’s all they are to me — a list of places. It may be partly down to the amount and frequency of beer consumed at the various trade shows and whatnot, but it was essentially part of a business lifestyle. I dread to think how many air miles I’ve got under my belt.

In the last 4 years since leaving Sophos, I’ve flown once. I went to Los Angeles with Jason Jarrett and Jimmy Golding for a podcasting conference and trade show in 2007. Jason got food poisoning and nearly died, but I had a marvellous time and learned a lot in a short time about how to keep people alive when they have bad food poisoning. Useful life skills, innit.

Back to Iceland. I want to go when I can afford it, and I’ve found the company I want to go with: Responsible Travel. Putting aside the air travel impact for the meantime, what I really like about the way these guys do holidays is the way they think of the destination and not just the passengers and profit margins. I won’t be staying in a generic chain hotel, there are real people with real lodges and guest houses. I’ve shortlisted these as potentials:

• Highland exposure photography tour
• Glaciers, volcanoes and waterfalls tour
• Northern Lights holiday

They’re all trips that will involve seeing as well as doing. I have no real love for sitting on a beach or by a pool sipping a Mai Tai in a Milton style. Having a camera that I enjoy using has put a different slant on holidays. The fun aspect has shown itself, something that I desperately need in my life.

Rugged landscapes, a terrain unique to the country, outdoor activities and photography add up to just about the perfect holiday for me. Time to start saving for a 2013 departure.