Early Modern Notes

Dear readers, there will be some slightly more substantial posts here again one day in the not too distant future. In the meantime, I’m thinking about wikis again (and using this as an excuse to blog at work, heh).

We hope to set up some kind of community site, most probably a wiki, to accompany the relaunched Old Bailey Proceedings. It’s intended to be a space for researchers to share notes, linkages, etc. User-generated content, social networking, all very Web2.0, I know.

So do you know of sites that I could be looking at for ideas? One model we already have is The National Archives’ Your Archives, which seems to be coming along quite nicely. There is also Footnote, “a place where original historical documents are combined with social networking in order to create a truly unique experience involving the stories of our past”, but this requires a subscription to access most of the material. Bah to that.

Suggestions gratefully received!

You may have seen the story about a group of creationists who want to build a Christian theme park in Lancashire.

It was already one of those suspiciously detail-free stories – nothing concrete about locations or backers, a lot of aspiration and ‘speculation’ – apart from the bit where the spokesperson admitted Wigan council has already refused them planning permission. So much hot air, then, I’ll believe it when I see it, etc. But a commenter at Pharyngula went and did a bit of digging, and found the charity’s annual report. And, oh dear, you’ve gotta laugh:

There’s a tiny graph on page seven showing, allegedly, the Appeal fund. They reckon they’ll need something over £3m, which is large by the standards of an individual but staggeringly low for serious TV production. They claim to have been promised £2m, although by who is not revealed – perhaps God promised them that much? – but they’ve received, at best, a quarter mil by the size of the “actual” bar. The real financial meat, however, is on page nine. They’ve received, by their own figures, a total of £2,310 over two years, £2,000 of which has come from the trustees of the fund. They’ve spent £1,999. They have £311 remaining. I have slightly more money than that in my current account at the moment.

Is cooked food dangerous?

Edited to note: so, these yummy baked sweet potato wedges with their oh so crunchily charred edges are going to kill me, then. Damn. *eats another one*

My mum might be a bit disappointed though.

The webhost has migrated me to a new server. With a slow shitty new control panel that apparently can’t cope with the concept of having the same user name for more than one database. And no phpMyAdmin. (Found it.)

Plus, I can’t currently download emails – and there’s nothing in the announcements to suggest why there would be a problem there. Not that they’ve had the courtesy to email me to tell me they’d started or completed the migration; all I had was an email last week that said it would be taking place ‘over the next few weeks’. [Worked it out. Had to change a + to @ in the account username settings. Like I say, some warning would have been nice.]

Looks like I’ll be needing to look up the suggestions you all gave me last month for new hosts. This control panel is going to drive me nuts.

Embedded audio file. With no stop button. (That I can find.)

You can stick that right where the sun don’t shine.

Think there are no ads on your blog? Absolutely sure?

This is amazingly sneaky. But quite clever.

Did you take the Blog Readability Test and paste the HTML code into your blog? It displays a cute image using an img tag. I’ve seen it on quite a few blogs recently. But…

But what happens if the image can’t be served? Ah, then of course the image defaults to its ALT. And what would that be?

“alt=”cash advance” Get a Cash Advance.”

And the linked URL for “cash advance”: cashadvance1500.com – owned, it seems, by .. someone who doesn’t want you to know who they are (it’s all obscured by proxies. Which all the best financial companies do, of course.) …

Now, what happens if the Blog Readability site goes offline, or stops serving its pictures? Loads of people suddenly have adverts for cashadvance1500 on their site.

And I reckon the Blog Readability test is completely random nonsense anyway. I tried it a couple of weeks ago and got ‘postgrad’. Today it’s ‘high school student’. I’ve posted a handful of times in that period. I don’t think the reading level has changed that much in that time, do you?

But if you particularly like the little picture and want to keep it, I suggest you delete that alt text and link. Unless you really want to advertise dodgy money lenders for nothing. And you’d better start being careful with those HTML snippets you get from Internet quizzes and the like, because I doubt it’ll be the last time we see stuff like this.

For those interested in the British Civil Wars, a symposium is being held next July in Hull.

In a lecture delivered to the Royal Historical Society in December 1983, John Morrill concluded with the observation that ‘The English civil war was not the first European revolution: it was the last of the wars of religion’. … This symposium aims to recognise the importance of Morrill’s interpretation, and to move it forward with reference to scholarship on political and religious thought that has emerged since 1983. While it will be partly concerned with the period of the 1640s, it also aims to draw out elements of the links and tensions between politics and religion that define the long seventeenth century. Central to the symposium will be a critical engagement with Morrill’s original argument: in what ways is it still persuasive, and in what areas might it be revised?

But what really struck me was that the organisers are using a WordPress.com blog as a website for the symposium. A smart idea: it’s free and not dependent on a university department’s web space, so interesting material can be left up afterwards for as long as you want; it’s simple to set up and can be used to post news and information about the event quickly and easily (with RSS feeds, of course), as well as paper abstracts and even copies of the papers themselves for pre-circulation (though that’s not something we do that much in history usually…). And then, think about the possibilities for discussions with people who can’t actually attend the event. And podcasts! And…

It’s a really obvious thing to do with a blog, when you think about it, isn’t it?

Update: And so, of course… I have to have one too, don’t I?