Pete Hindle's Repository of Stuff

This blog should be considered defunct by it's readers, as I've moved my online operations over to http://petehindle.com

Have you forgotten how to blog?

No. I've been studiously ignoring my personal blogs for a few different reasons.



Why are you giving up being an artist?

I want some money. Art doesn't pay.



But your work is in (insert show here)!

I'm not getting paid for any of the shows I'm in, apart from the touring show in
the Big M. Which I got paid €200 for, which doesn't cover my rent. You should
also note that anytime you see my work, this is stuff that I sent off at the
start of the year.





I heard you went on holiday to Berlin. How was that?

Yes, I went to Biggleswade to see my parents, Berlin to relax, and Hull to start
my own company. I enjoyed hanging out with my parents the most.



Start your own company?

Yes. I said I'd start my own company doing blogging. There's nothing like
saying your going to do something professionally to suck all the fun out of it.



What's not fun about blogging? It's great!

Says you, monkeyfucker. I've been using Drupal to blog with, and it's a bitch.
Also, I know who my audience are - and how technically literate they are. So, in
order - hi Dad, hi Sam, hi Brenda, hi Tom (sorry I've been slack in getting in
touch, say hi to the wife), hi Mum (who has got the email from Dad about this
and is reading it at work whilst drinking coffee), hi Keri. Of course, if people
weren't so damn stupid about how to work an RSS reader, that list would be a lot
longer.



What are you going to do now, in terms of this blog?

Once I've figured out how to make http://petehindle.com point to
http://petehindle.textdriven.com, I'm going to make this blog what it says at the top:
a repository. I have no great urge to make art at the minute as I've pointed
out, and I can't stand the idea of programming. Therefore, I'll let this site
sit and moulder for a bit as I listen to Joanna Newsom whilst playing World of
Warcraft.



Wow, WoW? Looking 4 healer, Stokads! Cn u hlp?

If you ever talk to me again I will bury you in my garden, you idiot child.



That last bit didn't make any sense...

Well, it didn't make sense if you aren't into the internet. I've always said
that I'm five years ahead of my generation when it comes to the internet, and it
really shows in the art world, where most of my contemporaries are too lazy to
learn how to work a modern computer. Frankly, I'm tired of feeling like the
straggly-haired prophet, shouting "but computers will put you in touch with a
larger audience!" to an unresponsive audience of paint-stained idiots who can't
see that people such as Warren Ellis have shown the way already. He's not the
internet messiah, he's a very naughty boy, but he's a very bright, naughty boy.



Always look on the bright sid-

Fuck you sideways. I've seen people break in many different ways this year, and all I
want is to get paid, do you hear me? I just want to be comfortable for once, and
not feel guilty for every penny I spend, whether it's my money or someone
else's. I want to be recognised for my enormous intellect. I want to be rewarded
for my skill with computers. And I want to be able to afford an xbox and play
Halo 3. Is that so bad?

note that this entry is messed up as it's been put through the wringer of Drupal's text entry system, and this is absolutely the last thing I'm ever writing in Drupal. If anybody knows a good drupal exit script (preferably to wordpress) let me know

I'd like to say a big 'hi!' to anybody dropping by from the A-N unedited site.

Because the A-N site is so antiquated, I've had some trouble making my entries there do and say the things I want them to do - like web 2.0 mashups, linking to some websites, and inserting images into the body of the text. This entry will be updated with links and other relevant stuff, and might even turn into a users guide for posting on A-N's user content site.

Firstly, here is the location for the RSS feed for my A-N blog. If you have a Yahoo! ID you can clone this at their Pipes application, and create a pipe for anyone you like. Here's one for Cathryn Jiggens. Go nuts, I dare you.

I'll add some more info to this page in future, but for now, I must write a blog entry. It was my frustration with their site's setup that led to this page being created... mustn't lose track of the project!

For the next two weeks or so, I will be blogging over at A-N magazine's review's unedited... however, it seems that the software they've used to set up their blogging is about as friendly as a dead rat, hence I am directing readers over there to somewhere over here so as to see a picture.

EDIT: I found it! Its in the edit function after you create the post, so you need to go back into the post to add an image in. Freakin' whoop: obviously hyperlinked images via html are too hacker for them.

I have avoided talking about my personal situation here, but there are some points when you just have to draw a line. And for me, that point is when you get back at 1am in the morning to find that the upstairs neighbours are having another really loud party, and that you have a cockroach infestation.

I've had a really terrible year so far. Even if this wasn't the year that I saw my first corpse and had my first experience of being at the scene of a major accident, it would still go down as the year that I lost my regular sleeping pattern owing to my upstairs neighbours. In fact, right now they seem to be throwing a party for the Polish people of Fenham (and earlier they where playing screamingly loud death-metal). But... roaches?

I had no idea that this year could get any worse. I thought that my birthday was going to be the high-point of the worse-ness, seeing as it falls exactly in the middle of the year. But it turns out that having my shower break, getting caught in a torrential downpour, having some of my clothes stolen or destroyed, and having people walk in on me whilst I'm sleeping was not the worse thing. The worse thing is knowing that I'm sharing my living space with an insect that survives nuclear blasts, shits pheromones, and absolutely will not stop.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sanitise my flat...

This is the text of a talk that I gave at A-N magazine as part of a job interview, in which I look at their user-generated content section. It doesn't represent any actual policy by A-N, merely suggestions that I made to them.

Hello, I'm Pete Hindle, and I'm really happy that you asked your interviewees to talk about this subject:

How would you promote greater usage, encouraging artists and students in particular to participate, and what suggestions would you have about managing the large volume of usage that may result.

because I think the answer to this is something I'm deeply concerned with: getting artists to represent themselves effectively via the internet.

This is actually three questions -

1. How would you promote greater usage?
2. How would you encouraging artists and students to participate?
3. How would you manage a busy website?

For the past few years, I've been heavily involved with community-led websites. I help to run two email networks for creatives in the North-East, and I'm also one of the Admins for the Flickr group Angels of the North, where you'll find photographs from over five hundred people, all featuring various aspects of the Tyne and Wear region.

These are online spaces that function as meeting rooms for many different types of people, and there are a wide, wide range of these different meeting rooms, which are used to draw many different interests and communities together. You can find online communities devoted to wine and food, comics and books, writing and photography, and - of course - every topic of computing, including swivel.com, the online spreadsheet community.

However, from my own personal experience, I would say that there is a definite lack of quality discussion available online about the practice of being an artist. Before I talk about my suggestions for the online section of A-N magazine, I want to share with you a quote.

"Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development."

Julius Frontinus, First Century AD.

As you know, A-N Unedited provides artists with a place to comment on issues around their practice, such as ongoing projects and exhibitions. Anybody who wants to can create content on this part of A-N's website, some of which will be reprinted within the pages of the magazine. This is a degree of flexibility which could not have been foreseeable until very recently.

I think this is best represented by the blogs section.

The A-N blogs sections is supposed to be project-led writing, a documentation of a specfic project. My personal favourite is the woman whose doing the residency in the wind turbine factory, Ania Bas. Like many others using A-N unedited, Ania already has a few websites somewhere else, but A-N is a great platform for her to reach out and make an impression on a larger audience.

In order for A-N to maintain that position as a great platform to reach an online audience, I would suggest that the magazine looks at other online services. Blogs are available for free from many different websites, such as Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal and Vox.

These websites offer a community to their users, encouraging those logged into the service to comment on other blogs. Some of them also allow the use of domain names, meaning that an artist can set themselves up with a website like petehindle.com for around eight pounds. And they all have a degree of cross-compatibilty with other web services, such as Flickr or Youtube.

In order for A-N to maintain it's position as an online centre to find out about artistic practice, and in order for it grow, it should offer services similar to these larger networks. A-N unedited would benefit from instituting more community-based features for it's online contributors, such as comments on a blog post or reviews, because they are a type of reward which makes users become more engaged with the website.

The more engaged and active your community becomes, the easier it is to encourage other people to join. I would say that if you want to promote greater usage of A-N's unedited side, turn it over to the community that are creating the content, and allow them to connect with each other.

This is also a key part of getting graduates and students to contribute to the Unedited section. The reason that websites such as Myspace and Facebook are so popular amongst young adults is that they allow them to have a presence on the internet that belongs to them, and it allows others to get in touch with them.

Adding a community aspect to the existing functions of A-N unedited would make A-N's website seem more familiar in terms of what a young adult is expecting from a website with a log-in, but with the additional bonus of being able to act as an online form of professional representation, in a way that the other sites I've mentioned can't.

In terms of the additional volume of usage that this would create, I have two different types of suggestions - technical and social. Any form of social situation can cause problems, even online, and I would suggest that all users are able to report content that they are uncomfortable with.

My technical suggestions would be to use a content management system such as Drupal, Joomla, or Mambo. I personally have some experience with Drupal, which is the technology that Nasa use to run their website. It's extendable, it can cope with thousands of users, it's free, and it's also used to power the Furtherfield.org website which you mention in the current issue.

What might not have occurred to you is that by reconfiguring the Unedited website to offer these extra services - such as professional online representation - you would be able to generate revenue by charging for different levels of service. One example of this would be Flickr's 'pro' users, who pay a small fee each year in order to be able to upload more images.

So, in summing up,my suggestions for the future of the Unedited sections of the website are:

Promote greater usage by:

• Let users comment on blog posts and reviews
• Allow users to create a community

Encourage artists and students to participate by:

• Allow them to use the site as a professional internet presence
• Promoting the online community of A-N Unedited

Manage the expansion of the site by:

• Let the users report questionable content
• Use an expandable, stable CMS
• Consider charging fee for some parts of the service