About

The Word

so·bri·quet

  1. An affectionate or humorous nickname.
  2. An assumed name.

I’ve been using the nickname (or, sobriquet!!) “sobriquet” online (for chatting, MSN, etc) since I first heard the word on Triple J one morning on the way to school. Since then, it has become this… my online presence.

The Site

Sobriquet.net is the personal webpage of Richard Rosalion. The main purpose of this page is to share my music, my photos and other random things with my friends and family, and anyone else who’s interested!

The Author

Who am I? I’m a student at Melbourne University, currently studying Science and Information Systems. I also work in the IT industry (for a recruitment company, a computer network support company, and more recently doing casual work for a law firm), doing whatever I can, and learning about whatever I can’t yet do!

I’m really into music. I like listening to it, and I LOVE making it. I’m a singer, guitarist and pianist. I’ve also learned drums for a few years at school. I write music for guitar and piano (lyrics to some of my songs, and MIDI files of some of my piano compositions can be found in the downloads section ). Among my favourite bands/artists are Ben Folds, The Whitlams, Regurgitator, The Prodigy and Green Day, but I listen to all kinds of music.

Before Melbourne Uni, I went to Scotch College, and I’ve also studied at La Trobe University, where I studied Auslan. I seem to be one of those really disturbing people who loves to learn (note here that there is a HUGE distinction between learning and studying - the latter of which I suck at, I prefer passive learning), and if it weren’t for all the work involved, I’d gladly be a perpetual student.

Anyway, that’s all for now, except these words of wisdom:

It may be that your only purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

The Technical Stuff

This site is hosted by the lovely people at Dreamhost.com, and uses the WordPress publishing platform. gallery.sobriquet.net is powered by Coppermine Photo Gallery.

The wordpress theme is a loosely modified “3k2” (which, itself, utilises k2. All images in the header are mine, and are selected randomly using a slightly hacked version of Photo Matt’s random image script (I wanted to make sure the header image wasn’t cached so it would actually CHANGE regularly). Coppermine photo images are inserted into my older blog posts via a modified version of Texx’s Coppermine WordPress plugin created by Brad Guilford at 55 Rue Plumet. The photos page page on the site is thanks to fAlbum which takes photos directly from my flickr account.

Email notifications are handled by the Subscribe2 plugin. The coordinates attached to each post are handled with GeoPress. The tag cloud and tag pages are created with the help of the Ultimate Tag Warrior (by Christine Davis. Most of the icons used in the 2nd and 3rd columns are from the Silk icon set from FamFamFam.

Finally, the buttons (the XML and W3C buttons on the sidebar) are based on images by Jeremy Hedley.

The Feeds

As you can see on the sidebar of every page, there are some buttons labeled “XML Full Posts”, “XML Comments”, “XML Photos”, and “OPML”. You may be asking yourself, what ARE these links? Well, basically, RSS allows you to grab content off my site (and plenty of other sites which support RSS), without actually visiting it! Using an RSS aggregator, you can grab all your news, and site updates in the one place.

For a detailed (but probably a bit techy) description of what RSS is, visit the RSS (protocol) definition on Wikipedia.

If you want a program that will help you view the RSS feeds, try visiting google. If you want to view RSS feeds on the web, try Bloglines or Google Reader. Most modern RSS agregators will also support OPML, which allows you to grab all the main feeds from this site in one go!

For more information about RSS Feeds, try Six Apart.