Jonathan Savage

Here’s a visualisation of this blog curteousy of Wordle. Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

As some of you will have noticed, this blog has moved from being hosted on the UCan.tv server to a company called Blue Host. They came highly recommended by a friend and colleague who also makes great software synths. Hosting with Blue Host allows you unlimited installations and pretty much unlimited traffic too. And all for around £4/month. Installing common blogging software some as the mightly WordPress is easy too. They use a tool called Fantastico and it is literally a few clicks to get the installation done. Tools like this sometimes come in for a little bit of stick (see with Wikipedia article for example) but I’ve found it a very easy and realiable process. If, like me, you don’t want to spend hours manually installing stuff (and all the difficulties that presents for a non-techy person), then this was, literally, ‘fantastico’.

Of course, I’d encourage all of you to get blogging and share your experiences of teaching, music, arts, technology or anything else. Whatever you do, I highly recommend WordPress as the leading open source blogging piece of software. It’s child play (just as well).

Apologies, I think I made it really hard for you all to comment on posts. A friend pointed out that you had to register etc etc in order to comment on things. So, I think I’ve made it easier now and unchecked various buttons in the blog administration. You should be able to comment freely without registering. The first comment you make will be held for moderation but after that it should all work without any delay. So please argue, disagree, extend ideas and – basically – just comment freely!