.Bard

I apologize for the near incoherence of this. I'm suffering one of my classic bouts of insomnia, and my penchant for tangents and over-punctuating tends to be a little overwhelming when I'm like this. I wasn't going to post this tonight but I'm afraid that if I read it in the light of day, I'll never post it. Screw that.

Part 1:

(Warning, unapologetically high whinge factor in some places.)

So, I had kind of a shit day working.

I recently blogged about the fact that I'm now freelancing. How's it going? Not TOO badly, but it definitely could be better. Let's recap:

I started working on my first site whilst I was still employed with the crappy day job. Site went live in plenty of time, even though it was kind of a pain in the ass, working day and night. No worries. I knew it couldn't last, and a little hard work and lack of sleep never hurt a geek (particularly a career sysadmin nn/ ).

A week later, a whole bunch of changes come through for said site, which ended up amounting to an almost complete site redesign. Fun. The first time around I had taken over for another developer who just couldn't ship the bloody thing, so a major part of the work was that I had to get the site fixed, and ship it in a very contracted time frame. To make up for the lack of time, I wound up papering over cracks instead of actually fixing a lot of things. This, of course, was extremely stupid, and came back to bite me in the ass when I had to completely rework the site and deal not only with some of the awful stuff that I didn't find the first time, but also deal with the hacks I put in place the first time around.

Sigh. So I wound up writing a new template from scratch (this is Joomla, btw) to help avoid some of the snafu's from the original site. This helped a lot, and the redesign got done fairly quickly, although still late (I was still working full time for the crappy day job then too). Luckily, I was able to maintain good communication with my client, and the lateness was not a big deal. All was well.

Straight away after that, I did another site -- same client, different sub client (client of my client, long story) -- which has yet to launch, due to some other difficulties, which is another post (or novel) in itself. The past few days, however, I've been working on a new site, for the same "sub client" as the original site.

This new site is much simpler than the last couple I've done, and in fact it really only involves re-using some custom Joomla code -- nothing fancy, just a couple of views and a slight plugin modification -- that I wrote for the original site, along with a new template to suit the new site. Sounded easy, and it has been easy, aside from the fact that they want the site up yesterday -- don't they all -- but they can't give my client a list of req's, only keep asking for a few more things every day. So, it's made the hours go WAY over my original quote. Luckily my client realizes all this, and is cool about that.

Today, though, sucked it hard. I ran into a considerable problem, which cost me a few hours (which is a lot of time in freelance time). I was suddenly, around 4pm, just when I was starting to THINK I might be done working before dinner time (HAH!) got sent a link to a 50M mp3 file, hosted on one of those idiotic "file sharing" services (y'know, the ones where you have to "wait 60 seconds for your download to begin!"). The site I'm building is a site for local DJ's and people who like to go see local DJ's -- I've requested free tickets -- and the mp3 is apparently a full live set (I have yet to listen to it). So, I labored through the bizarre sequence of clicks to get to the file (someone please explain to me why this is a good idea for these services, is it so they can scroll through more ridiculous porn ads??) and finally got the file to my machine. Then, the good part: I needed to get the file to the server where the client hosts all their customer sites. I knew this would be a challenge, because of the extreme suckitude of their server, but wow.. This went well beyond anything I could have imagined.. The FTP server doesn't support multiple streams, the FTP server doesn't support resume, and, to make all this really interesting, the stupid upload dies repeatedly at the 100% mark. Yay. Tried several different clients, a few different methods. Yada yada. 4 hours go by!!

Finally, over a cigarette -- where all good geek ideas, peace treaties, and movie scripts are born -- I thought of an actual solution. I plucked it from the tree of inspiration.. (read: pulled it out of my ass): If their server is too feeble to let me upload a fucking 50MB file (y'know, less storage than your average remote control) then why am I repeatedly trying to make it so do? Host it elsewhere. But where? My web server? Fuck that. With my luck, they'll actually promote this stupid site and I'll wind up serving 5000 hits an hour of this bloody file. So.. What? File sharing site? Not bloody likely, try streaming a file from one of them (I actually did try, I had to make sure). Then, in desperation, I did it; I searched google for a solution. I should have just done it straight away, I know.. Shut up. Anyway, I quickly found ourmedia.org. It's pretty cool. The thing I really liked is that they have an upload client for Mac. Plus, I liked their site design. I don't trust flashy websites (and my threshold is fairly low, twitter even bugs the shit out of me some days). Somehow a simple, functional website is something I find trustworthy, but, I digress.. The funny / best thing about their download client, though, is that is also has an option to upload things to another site, other than ourmedia.org, which brings us to..

Part 2.

In this age of social-media-2.0-ajax-restful-web-servicey-RoR-googley-goodness (I know that made no sense, and is absurd, that's the point) we (read: "I', and, yes, I reserve the right to project my stupidity, among other things, on to you, dear reader) tend to forget the simple things. The sites and services that, while possibly not buzz-worthy, are still doing good, useful, amazing work out there, in many cases -- and this is one of them -- for absolutely nothing. This gem of a "web .1" site, has been quietly sitting there doing it's thing -- including such services as "the wayback machine" -- for 12 years (see: this link from the world's most reliable source of absolute truth) and we -- that's me, and, by extension, you -- completely forgot about it. In case you haven't guessed, or clicked the link back there, I'm talking about the Internet Archive (IA, for short). How we -- Ok, fine, "I" -- could forget about this is beyond me. The IA in short -- see the link above for the long version -- houses any and all sorts of "free" content (as in, publicly available, non-copyrighted -- they by the way do a much better job of explaining their mission than me). This was the perfect solution to my problem and, thanks to the handy-dandy upload client from ourmedia.org, and the fact that my client only wants to share live, non-copyrighted material on their site, makes this solution a perfect fit. I can easily handle the uploads for them, and thanks to a little joomla view I wrote, the links to their mp3's will automagically be displayed using the lovely 1pixelout media player. Awesome (well, let's hope the client think so, they're having a look at it tomorrow).

So, now my mind is reeling with possibilities. How, oh how, can I, we, you extend and make user of this resource in our daily lives and code.. My mind is still boggling, and I haven't really had a chance to brainstorm effectively (plus, I'm friggin tired) so I'll mainly leave the question open, with a couple of small exceptions of things you really should check out on the site if you haven't already:

• The aforementioned wayback machine. See apple.com as it appeared in the imac era, see sites you yourself developed many moons ago. SO much geeky fun.
• Their amazing library of freely available music (including a lot of cool bootlegs)

There's a lot more, and I wouldn't spoil it.

For homework, go to the site and find something you like. I can almost guarantee that if you haven't visited before you'll find something amazing. Also, tell me if you have any cool ideas of how to "wrap" the groovy content on the IA into something that is buzz worthy!

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.