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 to 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 if 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 reworking 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 the 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 outdoing 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 to be 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 notes 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 rebuild 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 to or 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 websites. 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 content to experiment with multiple content generation tools and to give me traffic to look at web analytics 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 realm 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 over the years (some large, some small), but it is only now that software is readily 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 that allows me to explore the software’s capabilities (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 Movable Type instances, but for the life of me, I can’t find anything. And today I have launched Man of the Moment, which uses 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, it 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