Comments have been off on new posts for the last week or so. This is a goof on my part and is now fixed.

Hmm, there are some PHP warnings on my ‘write post’ page, seems that something is up with the LivePress plugin. Let’s see if this post works despite the warnings and if it gets copied across to Live Journal.

Friday night I was at the brixtonmassive’s empty all the booze bottles before moving out party. There was rum followed by whisky, which sent me to sleep. There was also discussion of dinosaurs, porn (and dinosaur porn) and the best way to get started as a serial killer. The dinosaur porn was more disturbing than the murdering.

Last night I was in the pub (The Phoenix, Denmark Hill) with Jo and Mike and we discussed the essentialness of frosted glass washbasins in bachelor shagpads.

Wow. Thunder and lightning and rain and hail. For protection, pink_weasel is hiding under the duvet and I’ve wrapped myself in the Doctor Who scarf she knitted for me.

Seeing as the installation of WP at Dreamhost.com came with 50 themes pre-installed, and as I need to hack a few WP files to make my theme work, I thought why not play around with the themes for a bit. So don’t expect anything to be the same place twice for the next few days.

I’m turning off comments whilst I move to a new host. See you soon.

A little while back some idiot left a stupid comment (now deleted as it keeps on bringing the idiots out from under their stones) on an old post, and you can see my response. Then a few days ago three more comments arrived right after each other, here they are:

Name: partyboy
Date: 10th September 2006

dear Steve Pugh

You're statment to the idiot named ffffff is
so very true, there are so many people out
there that really are dead set idiots. I live in
Australia and the people here are total idiots.

well thats my opinion so ffffff the people of
australia say that "your a fucking idiot".

Name: ffffff
Date: 10th September 2006

shut up stupid heads

Name: Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy Oi Oi Oi
Date: 10th September 2006

dear ffffff.

my little sister is more intelligent and can say
can insult people alot worse than you and some
of them cry, well i could imagine what you feel
like right now you sitting in a corner crying to
you're mother 

thanking you for a great laugh of you stupidity,
Ozzy Ozzy Ozzy Oi Oi Oi

All three came from the same IP address and gave the same e-mail address Both IP and e-mail were different than that of the original commenter, but the original did include the word ‘australia’ in his e-mail address, something that isn’t visible to other people on the site, so where did the Australia business come from in these follow up comments? I have an aussie stalker with a split personality. Or a group of dumb aussie school kids using my comments to play silly games with each other. Oh boy.

Very True Mood:  indifferent

And just when I thought August would be my least blogged month for a long time, I come and make three posts on the last day.

Things I saw from the train this morning…

1. A washing line with nothing on it but a single Santa Claus hat.
2. One of my colleagues waiting for a train, on the opposite platform.

Tomorrow I have an all day training course on how to carry out staff appraisals.

Very True Mood:  confused

As if I didn’t have enough to read, here are a few more blogs that I’ve been looking at lately.

Darren Naish: Tetrapod Zoology - Incredibly fascinating science stuff.

Yours in a White Wine Sauce - Military History that never was.

Too many Ideas - SFSFW stalwart Mark Caldwell’s computer art, writing and other stuff.

ThePickards - some northern bloke who’s related to some other northern bloke that I work with. Web accesssibilty and football rants.

The Flogging Will Continue - Daniel James, aka Captain Cleaver, the head of Three Rings on MMORPGs and the future of entertainment.

Very True Mood:  pleased

There’s a mirror of this blog on Live Journal (Or for LJ readers - there’s a mirror of this blog off Live Journal).

This evening I decided to make the LJ mirror look more like the real thing. I took a look at the LJ templating and styleing system (and the related documentation, or lack of) and decided that life was just too short. So I picked a style that looked somewhat like what I wanted (Flexible Squares) and then wrote a stylesheet to do the rest.

Some of the things that came out of this exercise are quite interesting and may be folded back into the main site design.

But, and there was bound to be a but, IE isn’t playing ball. There’s stonking huge gap between the title and subtitle in IE (at least in IE7b2, I’ll check IE6 at work tomorrow). Bugger.

Very True Mood:  tired

… because anyone who has ever seen my dress sense would know that fashion blogs aren’t something I read much.

Those fashion communications students I went to meet last week have launched their blogs. Go and have a look, but be nice.

• Fashion Beat
• The Fashion Adventures of Lola and Scarlet
• Fashion Made Me Do It

Very True Mood:  confused

Just been reminded that today I’ve got to go and talk to a group of students from Central St Martins about blogs. I have very little idea of what they’re expecting from me, so I’ve scribbled a checklist of semi-technical issues that new bloggers might find themselves needing to think about.

• Allow comments or not?
• Single or multiple authors? Show identity of individual post authors or use a collective identity?
• Allow themselves to make some off topic posts (the blogs in question will all be fashion focussed)?
• Frequency and length of posts.
• Post-publication editing and updates. ‘Stealth’ editing.
• Searchability, both within the blog itself and from web search engines.
• Update notification services.
• Tags (as in Technorati not as in HTML).
• RSS.
• Trackbacks and pingbacks.
• Linking to other sites and especially to other links. Permalinks for inbound links (and finding permalinks when linking out to blogs).

Have I missed anything? I’m not there to give them technical advice on LiveJournal/Blogger/Word Press/whatever they’re using, nor am I there to give design advice.

Very True Mood:  surprised