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

Yesterday, I received a typical piece of link farming spam:

Dear Webmaster,

My name is Richard Volt, and I run the web site Online Dating with ManWoman.com.au | Find Your Perfect Match Online:
http://www.manwoman.com.au/

The other day I wrote you to let you know I’m very interested in exchanging links. I’m sending this reminder in case you didn’t receive my first letter. I’ve gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page:
http://www.manwoman.com.au/links/weblogs_3.html

…

Before deleting the message I clicked on the link to the page supposedly containing the link to my site (it’s safe to look at that page,I can’t speak about the rest of the site). As expected it did no such thing. However, I did spot one familiar link:

Stephen Pollard
A daily news commentary/blog, using newspaper columns and internet sources for analysis of the days events.

Now, it’s been stated that Pollard is an Ignorant Git, and who am I to argue with people who read his drivel regularly?, but in this case is he an innocent victim of the spammers? Or has he resorted to acting in cahoots with them in order to expose his hackery to a larger, unsuspecting audience?

[Update] - I spoke too soon, my site is linked to from the next page in the link farm. Damn, I was just too slow in getting around to dealing with my spam and it had been moved downwards by the flood of new submissions.

Very True Mood:  chipper

Today I made it as a blogger. Today I joined the upper echelons of the blogosphere. Today I received my first e-mail (complete with poor grammar) asking me to remove comments about an individual from my blog

Nataurally, I complied with this request because I wouldn’t want to cause any upset. It’s a shame really, because removing the person’s name means I have to remove a rather nice digression about some cool TV shows. I’ll have to have a long and careful think about making a nice, fluffy post about the same person in order to reintroduce that digression.

Very True Mood:  pensive

Bollocks. Forgot to turn off the iScrobbler plugin and now my Last.fm profile is full of all sorts of strangeness that pink_weasel was listening to this evening. I can’t delete them for a week.

When I first set up Very True Things, I set the character encoding to ISO-8859-1 instead of the recommended UTF-8 because I wanted to include the French Revolutionary Calendar dates by simply linking to the existing JavaScript file, which had all the accented characters encoded in ISO-8859-1.

When I added the Scrobbles plugin it fetched my play list from Last.fm, encoded in UTF-8. Obviously I have a lot of bands on my list with röck döts…

So I bit the bullet and converted the JavaScript to UTF-8 and I’ve just done the same with all the pound signs on the dinosaurs page. But there are a load of pound signs scattered throughout lots of other posts and they’re showing up as those very pretty question mark in a diamond symbols that Opera uses (or ugly square boxes, etc. in other browsers).

Any Word Press/PHP/MySQL experts got a quick and easy way to search and replace across the whole posts database? I can think of a couple of ways to do it but don’t really fancy any of them.

Very True Mood:  thirsty

I’ve added a couple of plugins to the blog to display music and books that I’m enjoying at the moment. Over there, on the sidebar, down a bit, below the categories and links. (Scrobbles and Now Reading plugins created by Rob Miller.)

Depending on which browser you use you may notice one of two things - FireFox users will notice that both of the new sections suffer from the random single-pixel transparent lines that crop up here and there on the sidebar. Still no clue what causes this. [Update] - FireFox 1.5 fixes this problem, I must update my home version.

And IE users won’t see any cover pics for the books. That’s ‘cos, even in IE7b2, the display was totally screwed up. Too late on a Sunday to dissect the CSS (and let’s face it with IE there’s not much chance of a happy ending anyway), so I gave up and applied an IE only stylesheet to hide the images. Blah. [Update] - Mac IE doesn’t use conditional comments and hence shows the images, incorrectly, but really, Mac IE?

[Update] - As Paul points out in the comments Safari is inserting a large chunk of empty space under each book. According to browser cam this happens in Safari 1.2, 1.3 and 2.0 but not in Konqueror 4.3.

Upgrade to Word Press 2.0.1 was fairly painless. Made a few changes at the same time

• the categories and archives lists are now (assuming sufficient DOM scripting support) collapsed by default but expandable
• allowed link category titles to be visible to reduce the number of naughty hacks I need to make to Word Press files
• removed the Merry Christmas message, only six weeks overdue
• reduced the default font size of the sidebar to 90% as it was overwhelming the actual content
• installed the Live+Press 1.99 plugin, which though written for WP 1.5 seems to be working more or less okay - I want to see if this post appears on LJ with comments enabled or disabled
• as a consequence, moods and music will now appear on WP posts and I won’t need to add them after the fact to the LJ copies

Very True Mood:  cheerful