D'log

Diamonds are for… 21 days:One of the West Midlands’ most successful creative industries – the £1-billion jewellery-making industry – could be wiped out within a month by an imminent EU ruling.

Diverse subsidies: An eye-opening article in this week’s Economist magazine, ‘Hefty subsidies have failed to make arts audiences more diverse’. Meanwhile, a forthcoming one-day conference in Wolverhampton… “looks at how cultural and organisational changes have achieved audience development”.

The rebirth of comics:A good overview from one of today’s Australian broadsheets.

BitPass coverage:The Washington Times explains BitPass in fluent non-techie journalese.

BitPass page up & running:After two weeks, my open ‘Freebies’ page has now mutated into my BitPass ‘Goodies’ page. You did grab the cool video-weblog template & comic-book fonts while you could? No? Then go and have some fun trying out BitPass micro-payments 🙂 Whip out your credit-card and blow a massive $3; then go […]

More beta BitPass:Five major & non-cosmetic problems I’ve so far encountered with setting up the beta version of BitPass: 1) your web-space provider must allow you to run scripts and have a recent version of PHP properly installed & fully available (one of my servers did, the other didn’t); 2) your web-space must allow you […]

Abroad:The New Yorker examines the motives & consequences of the French arts-workers strike. The Daily Telegraph‘s arts pages bemoan the culture-of-chaos that afflicts the queen of high-fashion design, Italy.

Microviability:Unique micropayments content needs to be… 1) items that can’t be (easily) found elsewhere on the web (so pay-to-view news is out unless you are a very specialist niche reporter). 2) made by content-producers who don’t have to face down their peers shouting “everything must be free, man!” (so Mods-for-games are out). 3) have a […]

BitPass working:I finally got BitPass working. It seems my problem was that while dabra.com runs Greymatter weblog scripts fine, the server configuration isn’t smart enough for the BitPass script. So I installed it on another web-space provider (www.f2s.net) and it went very smoothly and works fine. Still testing and setting up the page, but it […]

Amazing:England’s oldest continually-inhabited home.

New Landscapes:A further interesting conference; New Landscapes & New Art. I’d love to go, but it’d be too expensive and anyway co-incides with the start of the teaching year.

Bitpass bypass:I’ve given up on trying to install the BitPass scripts. I got very very far with the PHP, but then it “stalled at the last fence” and simply wouldn’t let users download the file they wanted. After trying everything I then went back to installing the CGI (again); but it just wouldn’t install, as […]

PayPal enabled:I’m having only limited success in configuring the PHP script to set up a BitPass account (a ’30 minute setup’ is turning into 30 hours); but I have managed to sign up for a PayPal account (15 minutes). There’s now an “any amount” PayPal button on my Creative Stoke site, if users would care […]

Cool UK academic conferences, soon: Narrating the North (The North of England in cultural imagination since 1950); Dialogues between Sculpture and Archaeology; Web Delivering of Music; Frauds, Fakes & Deceptions; Sex Object: Desire and Design.

Japan:A succinct summary of how the Japanese design industry works in Summer 2002.

Stoke-on-vanish – again:Another “erasure” of Stoke-on-Trent; it’s name is on the tiny map, but nowhere is it mentioned in the text or tables anywhere on the site. Odd; since the city is currently in the process of spending £153-million on its school buildings, and bidding for a further £120-million to rebuild the city’s secondary schools. […]

Design & beauty:Gain 2.0 has an interesting interview with Virginia Postrel, on aesthetics, design-values and economic success.

100 artists, one x-ray factory: The re:location web-site has updated with nearly 100 photos since it was last mentioned here.

Renoberator beta:The world’s first attention-worthy standalone comic-strip building software? It’s very early, very beta, and it only runs under Windows by using the Java Virtual Machine. It’s a long way from ” Adobe ComicShop v1.0″, but it’s a start.

Free stuff, for now:I added a new page on the left-hand menu. Free stuff is a half-dozen nice freebies; which I may well BitPass enable very soon.