Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category

Five Years of Things

Posted on in Blogs, My Life.

Five years ago today I made the first post on this blog. 828 posts later here we are.

The posting rate has varied enormously but averages one post every 2.2 days. It was highest when I was self employed and working from home and lowest after Facebook and Twitter started to eat up some of the shorter, quicker posts I could have made.

Around 700 of those posts have also appeared on the LiveJournal version of the blog (which generates more comments than the main version, 882 vs 392), and around 250 have appeared as notes in Facebook.

I’ve moved host once, upgraded WordPress countless times, but kept more or less the same look and feel.

I’ve learnt how to code with XSLT, JSP and jQuery. I’ve also moved house, changed job, been to Venice, Amsterdam, Vancouver and Dublin, bought a lot of dinosaurs and gotten married.

Wales have won the Grand Slam, twice. Doctor Who and Star Trek have both returned triumphantly. Tony Blair and George Bush have left the building.

It’s been a busy five years, and that’s a very true thing.

About to get messy

Posted on in Blogs, Browsers.

‘cos I’m a muppet who doesn’t have a development version of this blog, things will shortly get ugly as I’m going to be redoing al the templates, css and javascript on the fly.

Updates

  1. Browser Support
    • As this is a personal blog support for IE6 is dropped from here on.
    • Supported browsers as of today will be what I have installed on this machine – IE8, Opera 9.6, Firefox 3, Safari 3.2, Chrome 2.
    • Support for IE7 will be added as and when I find it convenient to do so
  2. BTW, I’m not totally a muppet – I did back up the old files before I started
  3. Two hours later and the basics of the styling are back in place
  4. Nearly there, threaded comments look okay, moving onto the comments form.
  5. Comments form done, dinosaur pages skin done, cross-browser testing next…
  6. Looking good. Not a bad day’s work, comments and print stylesheet much better than before. CSS and JS reduced in size.
Very True Mood: (nervous) nervous
Very True Music: British Sea Power - Be Gone
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Playing

Posted on in Blogs, My Life.

I’m playing with the templates. I’ve modified the comments code to use the built-in WordPress comments function which means that threaded comments are now supported. As this limits me to the predefined but bounteous class names I wil need to rewrite the CSS to match.

Expect some disruption for a few days as my attention span is short and I may take a while to finish this.

Very True Mood: (annoyed) annoyed
Very True Music: British Sea Power - Something Wicked
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NaBloPoMoPoMo

Posted on in Blogs, My Life.

November. I blew it. (2008) nablopomo.com

Or National Blog Posting Month Post Mortem…

Well, it wasn’t exactly an unqualified success. Including this one, I made 27 posts in November – three short of the goal. Those 27 posts were made on only 22 days – so even further from the goal of posting every day.

That said, this was my most productive month since April 2006, which is no bad thing. For the first ten months of 2008 I’d averaged 6 posts per month, so the real goal of getting me blogging more frequently was definitely achieved.

I don’t think I’ll try it again in December but maybe sometime early next year.

 
Very True Mood: (contemplative) contemplative
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Posted on in Blogs, The World.

I follow quite a few blogs, some are friends, some are famous, some are funny, some are wise, some are thoughtful, some are hopeful.

I could post my thoughts. But really, they’d just be recycling all these other guys.

Now, that’s enough about that, how about some dinosaurs for tomorrow’s post?

Very True Mood: (pleased) pleased
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Deadpool, dead web sites

Posted on in Blogs, WWW.

The death of Studs Terkel on Friday means that Paul moves up to joint second place in this year’s deadpool game.

Annoyingly, I can’t update the web site, or upload some changes I’ve made to the templates for this blog because FTP to both servers is broken. One reports an authentication error and the other a timeout error. :-(

Very True Mood: (annoyed) annoyed
Very True Music: Arctic Monkeys
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Talk (a lot) like a Judoon

Posted on in Blogs, Doctor Who, Memes, My Life.
Judoon

It’s November so some brave souls are embarking upon this year’s NoNoWriMo. Good luck to you if you’re one of them.

I’m in no way dedicated enough to try an entire novel in one month, but I do want to write more so I’m declaring November to be my NaBloPoMo – I will be endeavouring to post at least once a day for the next 30 days.

“Na No Wri Mo Na Blo Po Mo” – I think I know how RTD comes up with Judoon dialogue.

Very True Mood: (cold) cold
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Oh, that’s not good

Posted on in Blogs, Browsers.

Why did no one tell me that the layout of comments form was seriously messed up?

Oh well, I’ll fix it over the weekend.

Update – Fixed, in so much that nothing overlaps anymore. A poke in the HTML reveals what an un-semantic mess my template has become as it’s been tweaked and twisted over the years. Time for a clean start perhaps.

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Copycats

Posted on in Blogs, Doctor Who, The World.

At the end of this post, Neil Gaiman reveals that Taipei airport toilets cater for Daleks. So does Victoria train station in London, as I pointed out four years ago.

Very True Mood: (amused) amused
Very True Music: British Sea Power - Like a Honeycomb
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Updates

Posted on in Blogs, Dinosaurs, Miniatures.

On the dino pages I’ve updated the lists to include the latest releases from Fenryll, some very old Metal Magic caveman now available via Mega Minis and a general update of the Jeff Valent listings.

Fenryll Cro-Magnons

As promised only two and half months ago I’ve now upgraded the blog to use the standard WordPress sidebar syntax which makes it much more widget-friendly. I’ve also converted what little JavaScript I was using to use jQuery as part of my ongoing learning process.

I’ve added a few new plugins to the mix: Sociable, Better Blogroll and MyTwitter.

Very True Mood: productive
Very True Music: Cheap Honesty - Skunk Anansie
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