projects – ptworld.net

MakeStaticSite on GitHub

Paul — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 15:03:44 +0000

Work has continued on MakeStaticSite, the Bash utility to create static snapshots of websites, refine and deploy them — just through a single command.

Now at version 0.22.2 and available for download, recent updates include:

improved support for search engines through the generation of a sitemap based on actual file output, matched in each web page by the canonical URL specified in the tag. This sitemap is also cited by the site’s robots.txt file.
more robust handling of workflow, so you can use MakeStaticSite in conjunction with other scripts at various stages, to undertake other management tasks, such as reviewing accessibility or link checking.
more systematic treatment of options to clean WordPress ahead of being crawled by Wget. These small steps also point the way to broader support for fine-tuning CMS output.
Support for deployment on Netlify Content Distribution Network, which is where the site is now hosted. It’s expected that other CDN could be handled similarly.

We’ve even updated the animation on the Home page, extending the SimTerm plugin in the process.

Now that MakeStaticSite has been used successfully over a period of several months, it has been placed under Git version control. I am pleased to announce that I’ve created a repository on GitHub
https://github.com/paultraf/makestaticsite

In surveying approaches to generating static sites, I have not been able to find anything similar, and there is a myriad of ways in which it could be enhanced. Compared with some Jamstack approaches, the performance is slow, but building this site, which is quite substantial, only takes a few minutes whereas the MakeStaticSite project site takes less than a minute. For most purposes, this should be fine.

The use of the command line is an obstacle for some, but there are various ways in which a GUI could be provided, even Web CGI, which might be security concern on a public-facing server, but far less so on a personal computer. The beauty of using shell scripts is that you can quickly achieve desired results without being tied to any framework. So, please give it a go!

Introducing MakeStaticSite for website deployment

Paul — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 14:53:20 +0000

(from a technical perspective)

Launch of MakeStaticSite.sh Website

November 2022: A website dedicated to MakeStaticSite is now available at https://makestaticsite.sh/. It provides the latest version of the software, released under AGPL, along with various documentation to help getting started.

Motivation

The process of developing this website has evolved considerably. On setting it up a few years ago in the conventional manner using WordPress, I duly familiarised myself with routines for maintaining security and improving performance on a hosted platform. However, there were several aspects that weren’t ideal: the live content was hosted remotely, albeit with backups; updating the site in situ, particularly for major redesigns, was inconvenient; and performance wasn’t always as good as expected. Observing that most of the content was not dynamic in nature, I resolved to develop the site locally and then, as a separate process, deliver it as a largely static site.

The rationale for generating static sites has been around a long-time; I first tackled this more than 20 years ago, when I needed to generate a CD ROM from a CGI/Perl multimedia website. Nowadays, the field is mature; a Netlify blog post (Netlify is a cloud-based service where many static outputs end up) gives many valid reasons, rooted in the need for more responsive work processes. Typically underpinned by a simple language called markdown, there has been a surge in solutions; hence, options for Jamstack abound. However, the processes tend to be heavily oriented to developers at the expense of content authors, issues I know first-hand from enabling web access to museum collections.

I wanted instead to support existing content management processes, i.e. to continue with creating and managing content in WordPress, and then ‘at the press of a button’ generate and publish a static copy online. There are already some solutions, including dedicated plugins such as Simply Static. Tim Nash, having observed increasingly complexity with the Jamstack options, has described how he used WP2Static via WP-CLI, the WordPress command-line interface, for a (relatively) simple and compact solution. But I hesitate over the use of a WordPress plugin to generate the static site. Apart from the ongoing issue of maintenance and compatibility with WP Core, plugins are not really necessary since a public-facing website should be de facto crawlable by a web spider and not require internal system information.

And so I turned to general-purpose tools I could run from the command line. Enter Wget, a ubiquitous utility for retrieving and packaging any number of web pages for subsequent viewing. I needed to configure it, add a few additional inputs, and then choose where to store the outputs. This led naturally to delving into (Bash) shell scripting to bring it all together and I continued the process, adding deployment options and invoking more commands, particularly WP-CLI to prep the WordPress output (and to include a version of the plugin, WP Static Search, revised to work offline). If you examine the source code of this page, you will see the result.

Pipeline

Shell scripting became a means to orchestrate the overall process, which is readily seen as a pipeline comprising a sequence of phases. For example, one phases runs wget for the initial capture, whilst another re-runs wget to more completely capture a site. In fact, many core web development processes can be incorporated, such as replacing certain internal-facing pages or sections with alternative content; and invoking command-line tools for validation and streamlining output. As of version 0.21, there are ten phases altogether; and command-line options allow you to control the start phase and end phase.

The flowchart below illustrates an emerging pipeline (for the latest perspective, please refer to pages on workflow and phases).

Setup

Configuration dialogue

The first step is to run the setup.sh script, which guides the user in an interactive dialogue to specify a series of options.

Initialisation

Configure

The system reads and processes configuration options

read runtime options
read configuration file options
prepare output layout

Prep the CMS

CMS-specific streamlining

Optionally use wp-cli to

ensure nice permalinks
remove query strings
remote shortlinks
replace with static search

(Currently WordPress-only, but modules could be developed for other CMS.)

Generate static site

Generate wget mirror (first run)

Run wget with the supplied configuration options

optionally incorporate further input files
optionally set up a zip files
store the mirror in its own directory with timestamp

Augment static site

Further processing with wget

Run wget with the supplied configuration options to fill in gaps

optionally crawl static files for further URLs
Filter the URLs to retrieve only assets (multimedia files, etc.)
Re-run wget on the additional URLs

Optimise static site

Further post-processing for deployment

Further post-wget processing

convert feeds to be XML files and modify references accordingly
Apply HTML Tidy to make more standards-compliant and use pretty-print (dependent on options)

An accessibility validator could be added here.

Create an offline zip archive

Create a custom zip based on the mirror

The mirror acts as the basis for a zip archive, ready for uploading with the site or other distribution channels.

Augment

Further additions

Optionally augment the static mirror with snippets, substituting chunks of HTML in particular places according to the use of snippet tags. These will augment the zip file also.
Additionally, allow the inclusion of further files that might not necessarily be static files.

Deploy

Finalise and deploy locally or remote

Optionally copy over additional

Optionally copy over additional files, which might be scripts to provide missing interactivity
Finally deploy on local or remote server using rsync

Extending the usefulness

MakeStaticSite is a prototype that was initially developed for individuals who are creating and maintaining websites on a personal computer. However, the question soon arose: how might a team of content authors and editors be supported? (The answer is: yes!)

For example, what if this site is to have multiple contributors? In this case, the most straightforward approach is to set up or continue hosting with a third-party hosting provider, in the usual way. This means those who are creating and managing content carry on as normal through the dashboard. The main change is to separate the editing environment from the public site, which can be achieved by restricting access by some means of web authentication. Then, run MakeStaticSite to deploy the static site to the public, whether on the server or remotely. This approach ensures continuity; the only additional consideration is how to initiate MakeStaticSite once changes have been made — from within the CMS or external to it?

An initial test has shown that once set up, the process of maintenance and deployment can be carried out entirely from within WordPress. This can be achieved by running the script under the terminal emulator WPTerm (MakeStaticSite has an option to run ‘unattended’, which makes default selections). This depends on appropriate support for MakeStaticSite on the server; for shared hosting, the versions of required components, particularly Wget, may be somewhat old and, of course, for any serious use with a third party, access to WPTerm should be properly secured as instructed. It’s preferable to keep the running of MakeStaticSite on a personal computer, an arrangement that has been used for fuengsin.org.

However, hosting with a third party means that the data is no longer immediately under our control; although a mixture of database replication and file synchronization can compensate, there’s some loss of independence. Perhaps a better solution lies in p2p networks, but that’s an area I have yet to explore …

For now, this tool serves my needs well and I hope it is helpful to others. Please refer to the MakeStaticSite project site for further information.

MakeStaticSite

Paul — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 14:26:59 +0000

Foreword

The issues of Website security and performance continue to loom large, with organisations large and small continuing to suffer severe loss of service following a compromise — whether a site gets defaced, Google results become hijacked, or, more seriously, personal data is breached.

As will be described below, MakeStaticSite already offers a freely available solution (which has been implemented for this site), but it requires a certain level of technical knowledge. However, further development is on the way to provide a Web-based service that will be simple and easy to use. A proof of concept has already been implemented and been successfully tested, which should pave the way for business investment.

What’s the problem?

Security issues arise largely from the way the content is generated and delivered to site visitors using server-side processing, which typically involves scripts and databases to select and deliver specific text, multimedia, and so on. For example, content management systems (such as WordPress and Drupal) are based on PHP and MySQL, which, if misconfigured, might yield not only the desired pages but be open to requests crafted to subvert the setup and yield unintended access. Thus, maintaining the security of such a setup is an ongoing process that requires continual vigilance, responding promptly to security notices with the installation of updates, but it’s a race against time and there’s no guarantee that all vulnerabilities will be spotted.

MakeStaticSite belongs to the class of software known as static site generators, which removes all the dynamic components from public exposure, replacing them with a set of web pages (plain HTML, CSS, JavaScript) that require no server-side processing. The pages are prepared beforehand in a safer environment, such as an individual’s laptop or a shared space behind a firewall, protected by strict access controls. This simplifies the delivery process as well as helping with security. Shell scripting is used, making available various tools to handle different aspects of the task. An introductory post provides an overview of the processes involved.

For developers and system administrators, MakeStaticSite provides a convenient means to set up and manage the automatic creation and deployment of static versions of websites. Such sites can be administered locally and then deployed remotely to some other hosting provider. Strictly speaking, this is not an archival tool as the output is not an exact mirror, but a version of the site that preserves content whilst aiming to remain current. For example, RSS feeds are saved and then renamed with .xml extensions, and further files may be added.

Anyone who has some familiarity with the command line should be able to use the tool to assist in maintaining their sites, though such an interface is off-putting to some. Further, a scripting-based approach has been chosen to make this tool widely accessible for developers to further fine-tune; a number of refinements are already included that augment the standard use of Wget, such as support for arbitrary attributes and, in the case of WordPress, the use of WP-CLI to prepare sites beforehand.

MakeStaticSite has been released as open source software, available under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 . For further details, please refer to the project site, makestaticsite.sh. Many thanks to various developers for sharing their knowledge on shell scripting, particularly on blogs and Q&A websites such as Stack Exchange and to those who have tested, commented on and otherwise supported MakeStaticSite.

Hosted Web Service

In its present form, it is technical in nature, aimed at developers and system administrators. However, as a further development, a hosted Web service is being developed, with a simple user interface.

The user logs in to a central dashboard to maintain their projects. By following a link or clicking a button, they can launch their CMS editor, build a static version of the site and browse the output.

How you can help!

At this stage, we are looking for investment. Please get in touch to try out the demo and to arrange for a presentation.

QMA Collections Intranet

Paul — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 14:47:11 +0000

Web-based Intranet for Qatar Museums (2012-2014)

Problem

The Qatar Museums Authority (via archive.org) had responsibility for a dozen or so new museums that were emerging to make Qatar a cultural hub for the Gulf. A single EMu database instance was set up with core data documentation standards, but access to EMu was limited to those who had registered user accounts on and access to the EMu client. Other museums staff, such as those in education, needed convenient access to essential information.

Solution

Inspired by the WordPress architecture, particularly its use of redirects, I conceived, architected and developed an intranet for the Qatar Museums Authority. This enabled Web access with custom views for each staff in museum, with session management integrated with MS Exchange. The user interface was responsive and implemented i18n, with instant toggle between English (left-to-right) and Arabic (right-to-left) — supported by a translation project to map all the necessary cataloguing fields. The resulting system was deployed to all the Museums and also the office of the Chair of QMA.

( Details … )

Architecture:

Multi-site architecture where each site (museum) has its own configuration; URL rewrites provide friendly URLs.
Authentication: integration with Active Directory
Authorisation: Per-site custom role-based authorisation supports Apache htgroups, EMu Groups (Registry module), and Active Directory LDAP

Features:

Customisable fields for the search and display of results and object pages
Data: XML template system generates a PHP XML template from the KE EMu XML schema
Presentation: self-contained XSLT transforms XML to HTML, kept separate from program logic
Session handling for runtime preferences
i18n internationalization English-Arabic (using gettext) – language toggle for each page
Image display configurable with IMu query optimisation
Responsive web design with collapsible columns with drag and drop panels, optimised for iPad.

Development environment:
*Oracle VirtualBox running Debian Linux, NetBeans, Subversion;
*Apache, LDAP, PHP (with IMu API), HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, jQueryUI.

( hide details … )

MHS/HSM Website

Paul — Tue, 17 May 2022 16:42:08 +0000

2009-2012, 2014-2020

Role: Systems developer (as a staff member of the Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford)

Brief: Develop and maintain the main Website for the Museum (but not the social media channels) and integrate the collections management system (KE EMu).

Solution: I oversaw the redevelopment of the WordPress site in 2010, mostly into one multisite instance, including previously disparate elements such as the collections search, and then its gradual refinement through to 2012. I overhauled the server provision, standardising on Debian Linux, in University data centres.

Security was enhanced at various levels, through content caches, script hardening, Apache mod Security with a fine-tuned ruleset, and integration with the University’s single sign-on system, first with Stanford Webauth and then with Shibboleth (to better support federation), registering and configuring a Service Provider (Apache module) and then configuring a WordPress plugin to invoke Shibboleth for authentication.

Subsequent work on the site focused on the design and instantiation of content, such as special exhibition sites (see example below). From 2017 onwards, it mainly concerned the digital preservation of legacy online exhibits during the migration to a centrally managed service, to which I also contributed substantially.

URLs
https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/ (main site until 2018), home page now redirecting to:
https://hsm.ox.ac.uk/ (main site from 2019 onwards).
https://blogs.mhs.ox.ac.uk/
Slides: integration of the collections database using the KE EMu PHP5 API.

MHS Home page 2012

MHS: History (with the ATBar)

MHS Collections Search

MHS Collections: Field Search

MHS Steampunk exhibition

MHS Steampunk exhibition – archive

MHS Steampunk Live Mannequin

The Renaissance in Astronomy

MHS Blogs

–

MHS Special Exhibition: Back from the Dead – Demystifying Antibiotics

2016

Brief: To provide a website to accompany the Special Exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science (since renamed, History of Science Museum). Content needed to be easy to maintain by staff in various teams.

Solution: Using the existing WP multisite infrastructure I was able to create a number of special exhibition sites relatively easily, using responsive off-the-shelf themes. The basic structure was up and running very quickly and could be refined on an ongoing basis. Care was taken to ensure that educational aspects, especially, were made accessible.

URL: https://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/backfromthedead/

Back from the Dead: Exhibition home page

Back from the Dead: Myth Busting question

Back from the Dead: Myth Busting reveal

Back from the Dead: Myth Busting (text version)

Back from the Dead: Feedback cards

Back from the Dead: Feedback cards (text)

Oxford University Museum of Natural History Collections

Paul — Tue, 17 May 2022 09:49:32 +0000

Gems of Earth and Air

February 2015 – May 2015

Brief: Oxford University Museum of Natural History Collections had amassed numerous separate PostgreSQL databases with limited online access. They were in the process of migrating all into a single instance of the EMu collections management system and needed a new unified web interface. Initial attempts had proved unsatisfactory in design and functionality. This beta site, aka Gems of Earth and Air, was to prove the viability through a subset of collections, according to readiness of collections data.

Roles: Consultant, systems architect and developer.

Solution: This was a bespoke solution using a full-stack development process. Working with the Heads of IT, Library and Archives, and digital collections at the Museum, I delivered a new, unified online system that brought together three collections (Life, Earth, and Archives), with narrative-driven browsing and fine-grained search. Following requirements elicitation in Balsamiq, I conceived a model-view-controller (MVC) architecture using the IMu API and Twig templates with Bootstrap for a responsive web site. Each stage was documented.

URL: http://www.oum.ox.ac.uk/collections/ (via archive.org)

OUMNH Collections Online home page

OUMNH Collections Online: Features

OUMNH Collections Online: Gems of the air

OUMNH: Advanced search of all collections

OUMNH Advanced search of Life collections

OUMNH Collections Online: Search results for Smith

OUMNH Collections Online: Record for entomology specimen

–

Jones’ Icones

Date: Sep 2014 – Oct 2014

Brief: Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History Archives & Library had received a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to make more widely available a rare collection of Lepidoptera paintings. This comprised an informational website and a crowdsourcing system to help identify hundreds of moths and butterflies from scanned images of 18th century paintings.

After initial attempts to develop a solution in-house had failed, I was approached as a consultant with the project on a tight timescale of about a month and a half.

Solution: For the website I first implemented a static site based on a responsive house style, with variations in colour and some differences in sections and content type. Most of the effort was on the second part: a customisation of DIYHistory, a system developed by the University of Iowa to crowdsource transcriptions, based on the Omeka CMS + Scribe theme + Scripto plugin + MediaWiki. I supplied documentation describing the development process, mainly in HTML, CSS and PHP, together with various issues for consideration such as watermarks and improving performance for hosting accounts.

The project was successfully completed on time and budget. Significant crowd-sourced contributions were subsequently made.

URL: www.jonesicones.com (via archive.org)

Jones’ Icones Online: Home

Jones’ Icones Online: Project’s Significance

Jones’ Icones Online: The Collection

Jones’ Icones Online: Visit the Collection

Jones’ Icones Online: Identify

International Association for Religious Freedom

Paul — Mon, 16 May 2022 10:00:18 +0000

June 2011 – April 2012

Following a successful tender process, I was contracted to overhaul the website of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF), a UN NGO having general consultative status to ECOSOC with HQ in the UK.

The brief: To amalgamate relevant content from three existing sites, each developed separately during different periods and in a generally unwieldy state, into a single site that was current, covered the organisation’s activities well, and which would be easy to maintain. The new site would provide comprehensive coverage of the activities, styled with a look and feel similar to that of the United Nations.

Roles: After initial general consultancy to assess the current status, I undertook all the technical aspects of the project, from systems architecture and development, through to user training.

Solution: Working closely with the Secretariat Administrator, I implemented a new site to replace all legacy sites. I used WordPress (Multisite with subdomains), creating a custom theme derived from an existing one from the IARF US Chapter site. I also delivered experimental support for mobile devices using a theme switcher (before responsive designs became the norm).

I also oversaw the migration to a new VPS hosting platform with considerable cost savings. Detailed documentation was provided for administration, development and content authoring.

URL: https://iarf.net/ (via archive.org)

IARF homepage (2015)

About the International Association for Religious Freedom

IARF at the UN

IARF Member Groups

IARF projects in India

IARF Contact Page

IARF Religious Freedom Young Adult Network

IARF Events

IARF Congress 2014

Projects

Paul — Sat, 09 Apr 2016 17:16:53 +0000

The projects I have been undertaking in the past 25 years or so span theoretical research, software development, policy, implementation and practice. Much is experimental and might not be realized as a product, but in seeking practical benefit, I try to retain what I’ve learnt as it may yet have some application later on. Many problems are recurrent and the approaches (and insights) may be similar at each iteration, albeit with different tools.

My main role has been as a problem solver / developer for/of web applications, mainly for the public sector, in both staff and consultancy roles. At a university, ‘off the shelf’ products are seldom sufficient out of the box: there is usually a considerable amount of customisation required, which motivates in-house solutions. Thus, I have worked individually and in small teams, particularly the (now closed) Academic Computing Development Team, allowing me to undertake bespoke full-stack development; wherever possible this is in accordance with open standards and using open source components (in the early days, CGI/Perl and then PHP, connecting to SQL databases; then XML and XSLT). These standards underpin the software I am currently developing. Nowadays, apart from Sigala, my development is oriented to customisations of popular systems such as WordPress.

Whilst most of my experience of development has been small-scale, I have also been heavily involved in an institutional project – WebLearn, Oxford University’s first virtual learning environment, for which I was involved in the procurement and subsequently was responsible for the operational management when it became a centrally-hosted production service. After a while, this involved crunching through tens of millions of event log database rows to generate summary usage figures.

I have also coordinated and managed a few projects, including RAMBLE and, more recently, digital asset management at the History of Science Museum.

For details of past projects, please consult my portfolio. Here, I only highlight the start of current work.

Sigala Research Knowledge Basis (2020-)

Problem

The Sigala project concerns the research, design and development of software systems to support sustainable social networking. There is a substantial body of theory underpinning the software development, but it’s been built up sporadically, initially documented in MS Word, with a few blog posts and the occasional presentation.

To put the research on a more solid footing is a project in itself; it needs to be maintained and disseminated more sustainably, whilst making it easier to manage. The form in which the research is shared needs to be convenient.

Solution

The references are being managed in Zotero, which not only supports bibliographic standards for records management and import/export, but also has a web-mediated infrastructure that supports shared working.

For dissemination, a WordPress site has been created locally and content migrated from the Word documents. A workflow enables convenient deployment of a static site on a remote server along with a zip archive of almost identical content. For added convenience, a WordPress plugin, WP Static Search (based on Lunr.js), has been extended to enable offline searches. Both of these software components will be released as open source software.

URL: https://research.siga.la/

Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing

Paul — Sat, 09 Apr 2016 15:26:48 +0000

Mobility has become the key characteristic of our period. Social and physical mobility, the feeling of a certain sort of freedom, is one of the things that keeps our society together, and the symbol of this freedom is the individually-owned motor-car. Mobility is the key both socially and organizationally to town planning, for mobility is not only concerned with roads but with the whole concept of a mobile, fragmented, community.

[Alison and Peter Smithson, Team 10 Primer, 1962?]

Today we have virtual highways in which mobile phones are the vehicles, which for many symbolise freedom of expression. But do these material enablers lead to mental crutches? How can such freedom be used for our well-being, particularly in education?

Mobile office (courtesy of a networked HP Jornada 720), July 2004.

I’ve been interested in mobile/handheld/portable computing on and off since the late 1970s, when as a child I used to play with pocket calculators (a Texet 880 and the ‘Little Professor’). Much later I came across general-purpose handheld computing with the Psion devices, but I didn’t own any until a trio of Hewlett Packard devices, namely: HP 320LX, HP Jornada 568, and HP Jornada 720.

Until about 2004, this was mainly a personal interest, where I wiled away many an hour in experimentation, until the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University gave some formal support, allowing me to bid for and subsequently manage an externally-funded project, RAMBLE (on top of my usual work, of course!). Seeing its growing importance, in subsequent years (mostly in my personal time) I promoted the strategic thinking around mobility and ubiquity, and gained sufficient impetus to set up at the beginning of 2008 a Mobile Special Interest Group at OUCS, that gained 20 members across the different sections.

This galvanised interest and led to some important university-wide developments; by April it had become incorporated in graduate skills training.

Screenshots from HTC Trinity, shown in a Graduate IT Skills mobile workshop in 2008

The links below provide an archive of developments from an earlier decade, which are still useful, especially for the rationale.

Using X applications on an HP Jornada 720 (2003) — just an intimation of what is possible. The underlying issue concerns thick vs thin computing, especially relevant concerning the delivery of Web content to handheld devices (compare e.g. Opera 9.5 with server-side solutions from the likes of Skyfire).
RAMBLE (2004-5) — Remote Authoring of Mobile Blogs for Learning Environments, JISC-funded project concerning mobile blogs and their integration in institutional learning environments.
Mobile Blogs, Personal Reflections and Learning Environments (2005) A broad overview from Issue 44 of the Ariadne online journal
Handheld Musings (2004-10) — a personal blog, with various thoughts, especially on OxPDA, an educational assistant to replace the Oxford University pocket diary.
OxPDA: Pervasive e-Learning in your hands (2005) — Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3, Handheld Musings blog posts.
From Portability to Ubiquity — What do we mean by ‘Mobile’? (2007)
OxMobile: Towards a Mobile and Ubiquitous Strategy for the University of Oxford (2008) — a report detailing context, present status and various project proposals to really start embracing handheld and mobile technology at Oxford.
Notes from an Emerging Mobile SIG at OUCS — A presentation I gave on my last day as SIG coordinator (I was shortly to leave the department to pursue full-time studies).
Erewhon (2008-9) This strangely named project concerns the development of location-based services, building on a number of initiatives at OUCS, and led to the production service, Mobile Oxford (m.ox.ac.uk), as presented at the 2010 ITSS conference and documented in the WebLearn VLE. It can be seen as a step to fulfilling some of the vision in OxMobile (Tim Fernando remarked that he has used the posts as a kind of checklist).

(My list of mobile devices has since grown to include the HP iPAQ 1940, Asus Eee PC (first and later generations), Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini, Amazon Kindle, Palm Phone, and iPhone SE.

Pause for Thought

So, what of the quote above? It reminds me of the phrase “car-owning democracy,” much cherished in the 1980s. However, it can be argued that the motor car was a symbol of an acquisitive approach has not led to greater well being — Avner Offer’s The Challenge of Affluence gives plenty of food for thought.

Will mobile devices with all their options for personalisation merely encourage a form of consumerism that fails to enrich us as human beings? What about personalisation as a general principle…? How many different ways of serving tea and coffee do we really need?