To be honest, I should be upset. Federico was evicted from Big Brother 2003 last night. But I am not. Why? Because I have just implemented my first piece of PHP code on this site thanks the wonders of the Scripty Goddess.

Earlier this evening I enabled the comments feature on the man of the moment section of the site. Now, thanks to PHP, I can show you the top five comments:

Of course it looks silly right now as there are no comments.

On this day…

2005: A World Of Hate
2003: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
2002: Joy and pain
2002: Not Great

So, I am having a little bit of a spring clean around here and you may notice that there is a new design. Over the coming days I guess I will have to make everything work properly so apologies in advance is something isn’t working.

Currently, my biggest problem is with the Man of the Moment project as all the images have thrown this new design (if you’re reading this in the archive, I hope it’s all fixed).

There were two reasons for this re-working of Listen To Musak. Firstly, I wanted a cleaner look than the old one. Secondly, I wanted to start incorporating more photographs without causing the download times (and bandwidth usage) to jump. I needed to find a way to do it. I think I have the idea now and the re-design will let me start!

Thanks to the beauty of style sheets and Movable Type, it’s only taken a couple of hours.

On this day…

2003: Luster

Well, I do occasionally look at my referral logs and see what’s sending people to my site. Nothing too strange, really, and usually very relevant to the content. As noted previously (see here) the Man of the Moment project (which is shameless, really) generates a good number of the impressions.

So, I thought I would look and see who are the top couple of men who generate traffic. And the top ten of all time is:

1. Julian Essex Spurrier
2. Dermot O’Leary
3. Matt Damon
4. Mark Owen
5. Justin Timberlake
6. Jonathan Kerrigan
7. Ben Affleck

Interestingly, Julian Essex-Spurrier is top of the list despite only one mention in my review of London West-End performance of The Full Monty. I hope his real site is actually ranking better than my one review across search sites.

However, If we looked at the past month, Jonathan Kerrigan is now out-doing the Ben Affleck in tight leather searchers and all the others! And I wondered why as there has only been a Man of the Moment project for Jonathan and Ben has been mentioned more in the general blog. To be honest, I am not sure as there appears plenty of web content for Jonathan Kerrigan (who I saw in Sleuth and was looking lovely in a nice tight black vest and shorts).

You could start over at the BBC’s Mersey Beat pages where there’s a page on Jonathan’s character Steve Taylor or read the transcript of his web chat. Then there are, what appear to be some fan sites: jonathan-kerrigan.co.uk; The Jonathan Kerrigan site at Geocities or www.jamespaullockwood.co.uk.

Fans of the BBC series Casualty can read more about Jonathan’s character Sam at The Casualty Files or the Casualty fan site at Tripod. Finally, the theatre story noting that Jonathan is to take over a role in Sleuth.

I might keep updating this chart for my own amusement.

On this day…

2005: All Change
2004: Do I Need Another Suitcase
2004: Unexpected Saturday Racing

The server crash caused all sorts of problems and I only just managed to salvage the data from the site. Now, the new host is causing me problems as I get used to the capabilities. I have been working on the re-build for most of the day and there are still large parts missing but I need to go to bed!

On this day…

2006: Helsinki, February 2006
2004: South London Jazz
2003: Daredevil

Well, ten days ago the server at my hosting provider crashed and, as they are ceasing their hosting business, it was not restored so I have spent the last week or so trying to organise everything. Hopefully, normal service will resume soon.

On this day…

2006: Removing Ice From The Plane

An FAQ is a list of Frequently Asked Questions about a particular topic. Here I am trying to answer some of the common questions about the recently announced Man of the Moment project which is part of this site.

Man of the Moment is a fan site for some of the hottest looking men around. Every couple of months a new man is selected to be the Man of the Moment. Usually you will find that the person in question is in the news for some reason and most of the selected men are in the entertainment industry. Thus, men in the television category tend to be on a current TV show; in the music category they may have a new record out and in the film category they probably have a new film in the works.

Jon, of the Listen to Musak blog, selects the men featured in the Man of the Moment section. It is not a public vote yet but there are plans for people to nominate suggestions. If you have any comments on the current selection, you can leave a message in the comments section for that entry.

Man of the Moment is a personal selection and the men are selected when there is something to say. There isn’t always somebody worth featuring every month.

No, Man of the Moment is created for fans but is in no way connected nor endorsed by the people featured. Most of the people are in the public eye and you will see links to other fan sites. It goes without saying that if people connected with the individuals concerned have any problems with the content of Man of the Moment they should contact us at once.

The pictures are all sourced from sites on the web. We do not own the copyright on any of the images and have not scanned any material ourselves. If you feel we should not be showing some of the images, let us know and we will remove them.

Man of the Moment is not designed to be a gallery or image collection, there are plenty of them on the web. The images are only there to show you who the people we are talking about are (and why they’ve been selected). Most of the entries have links to other online image galleries (however those links are not connected to Man of the Moment).

Of course. The idea behind the project came from the fact that the Listen to Musak blog talks a great deal about these people – the music, films or television programmes that feature the men concerned. It was originally designed to provide me with some content to allow me to experiment with multiple content generation tools and to provide me with some traffic to look at web analytic software. It also enables me to evaluate search engine/keyword marketing: all things that I have needed to do in my professional life but wanted a more personal environment to look into these things if I was going to do it for fun. I wrote a little more about that here.

Listen to Musak is my personal area on the internet – it’s a piece of personal publishing – something I think the internet is ideally suited to. Click here to see Listen to Musak content or click here for the Listen to Musak FAQ.

The blog is written by somebody from England so I use the British spellings of words.

Leave a comment in the comment sections if you want to know more.

The site has a privacy and ratings statement. Please refer to it if you have any concerns.

On this day…

2002: What is Man of the Moment?
2002: Is this me?

I have been writing online since 1993/4. I started off on bulletin boards and later moved into the realms of HTML. I used the name Musak on Monochrome back in 1993. I have always believed in the power of personal publishing to add to our society; maybe even to add to the power of democracy.

In the period since then, I have experimented with various sites but it wasn’t until Movable Type that I was able to easily manage a great deal of content and this site became, what is known as, a blog.

I have been involved in the development of several sites of the years (some large, some small) but it is only now that there is the software easily available to bring the content management of the larger sites to the smaller ones. Although this site is a useful creative outlet for me personally, it is also a little playground to allow me to look into the capabilities of the software (web log analysis, referral logs and content management to name but a few).

I have been looking for a way to experiment with combining several instances of Movable Type but, for the life of me, I have been trying to find something. And today I have launched Man of the Moment – which is using another Movable Type weblog to create and I am trying to integrate some of it into this site.

Man of the Moment is, therefore, a technical experiment and may not last very long. Of course, if is also a shameless way to get pictures of good looking men on the site. I suspect the quality of the men may determine how long I keep it going! So get a look while it lasts!

On this day…

2002: Man of the Moment FAQ
2002: Is this me?

And now they say go. My website has been online for a number of years (in fact, my first website was in late 1993 on the backend of the web servers of the company I was working for). Over the years I have kept up various parts of the site, taken others down and generally tended it like you would a garden that you let go “back to nature”. To be honest, I left it alone. Some of the more cringe-worthy stuff may be moved into this new look (but I doubt it) and my site devoted to pictures of satellite dishes has been, forever, lost (and, honestly, I am sad about that).

So it was time for a re-vamp. Time to do something different with my site and that’s when I decided that maintaining a site was hard work and there must have been an easier way. I had been experimenting with various Blogging tools for a year or so and never settled on anything I felt wholly comfortable with. Then, taking a walk down one of the web’s odder byways, I stumbled across Movable Type and decided that, if I was serious about making it easier to maintain my site more often, then this was the tool I was going to use. And so here we are Â…

I have now given myself the power to do this stuff quickly and efficiently. At last, I can update my site easily. But when it comes to the moment of truth I expect the next few entries to be pointless links to (vaguely) interesting stuff until such time as I find my voice again.

On this day…

2003: Leave Fed Alone
2003: Employment Law: Update

I wrote these words about why I have a web presence sometime back in around 2000. At the time as I running an incarnation of my web site that has long since vanished. I started building a personal site for myself at the back-end of 1993 when HTML mark-up first hit the scene and I had very little to do while working the night shift.

Over time, of course, many things have changed. A couple of years ago the craze we know as blogging planted small roots but grew quickly. Drowning, as I was at the time, at an internet advertising company I toyed with, but never fully developed, the concept of my blog. I played with blogger and thought of all the great site management uses it had (at one time I worked for a company that built a large, complex site with almost no concept of a content management system). Still, I kept a small site and thought nothing more of it.

When the internet business went into free-fall and I, fortunately, remained in gainful employment I once again investigated a blog. I thought that the hard times that faced the industry were worth documenting and I tried but soon tired of the project. So I turned the blog into a personal journal (rather, weblog) and updated it daily. Daily updates, of course, are beyond many of us and, again, I gave up.

Of course, the logical progressions is to what it has become today – an oft-updated collection of thoughts and ramblings (akin to drunken conversations in a pub, but without the sickening “what did I say” feeling the next morning). Without the self-imposed pressures of trying to do something daily, it’s a much better experience (from the author’s side).

It is, of course, a personal site. These are my ramblings and I can’t blame anybody else for the lack of interesting, entertaining or useful content. Still, it’s much more fulfilling than the static site with a few pictures of friends on it. It’s a place to vent, a place to keep things that I want to be reminded of in the future (or remember to do tomorrow). In my head it is some kind of journey that I have embarked on and don’t know where it will finish (but that’s what life is). In the grand scheme of things, however, it is an utterly pointless exercise.

It is a weblog (rather than a journal) for I comment on things that interest me. Some of those things, obviously, are directly to do with my life but, most content, is not a diarised version of my life. I have seen journals and web logs referred to a mini-soap operas before. You can see into somebody else’s life. Well, I don’t think this site will do that for you. It may give you an idea of what is in my mind right now, but then there are many things that I don’t comment on, so I suspect anybody reading this will get a wholly unrealistic picture of me. My favorite journals and weblogs are listed in the Give Us Our Daily Blog entry.

Despite what I said above – not really. If you didn’t read the link at the top of the page, do so now (I’m to lazy to copy the text and my impression count goes up). I think there is a great power in personal publishing. This is my little contribution.

On this day…

2006: Here We Go
2005: 2004 In Review
2005: Bruce Almighty
2004: Love Actually
2004: Review of 2003: December
2004: Review of 2003: November