Tag: Blog

Happy New Year

A bit late due to being down south but Happy New Year to everyone. Last year ended on a bit of a downer with some family deaths…in fact there were a lot of people I knew off who passed away and that sad fact can only be tempered by the amount of births with Roy already announcing another for this year. As per usual I have no resolutions for the year or major goals (although a little weight loss would be helpful) although I will try to keep in touch (and visit) more friends than I normally do. Be warned!

So – 2005. My best bits?

Music
MadonnaA close thing for my favourite album but Madonna just snuck it. I loved almost every track on the album and could listen to it straight through time after time. Not bad for a 47 year old. Other’s I loved included Amerie, Chemical Brothers, Franz Ferdinand, Gorillaz and Hard-Fi. Coldplay’s X&Y was also a grower – at first I wasn’t sure but it has turned into an essential album. KT Tunstall was also listened too loads this year but that was definitely a 2004 album.

Games
Project Gotham Racing 3Project Gotham 3 was my favourite game – there are very few that I try and complete but this was one of them. A strong single player mode and great online options make this an easy winner. Other greats – Geometry Wars, Call of Duty 2 (even I’m surprised at the quality of this game), GTA3:Liberty City Stories, Wipeout Pure and Halo 2 sneaks in for most played game.

Film
Batman BeginsThis year was a little weak for me with regards film. I loved Batman Begins although that is probably more to do with my Batman fixation than the quality of the film. Notable mentions – Crash, War of the Worlds, Sideways (maybe last year) and A History of Violence. Not seen King Kong or Munich though so this list will probably change.

Here’s looking forward to more in 2006.

 

Site Stats

I’ve been wanting to have some sort of site monitor tool for a while. One that will tell me who’s visiting the site and when and some other bits and pieces about their visit. Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been trying two out – Delineate and Mint. The most obvious difference is that Delineate is free (for the moment – it is in beta) and Mint costs $30.

Delineate Visitor LocationsDelineate is accessed remotely from your webspace. The information is presented clearly and with a lot of depth. For example you can see all the visitors to your site, the browser and OS they used and which specific page they visited. The site also makes good use of Google Maps to try and map their location. A nice feature is the last 100 visitors to your site mapped – good to see it really is a world wide web. If you wonder why they visit you can also see the search terms used to find your site. I really like this app although I’m not so sure about accessing another web app remotely – would prefer to host and see the stats local to my site.

Mint - SparksMint falls into that category. Once you’ve paid your $30 you download the app and install on your host site. One limitation is that the $30 only covers one domain name – if you mange other sites and want to use Mint it’s $30 per site – pretty steep. Once installed and configured the beauty of the website really hits home. Fast and configurable the layout will adapt to whatever browser size you use as long as it’s not IE – Mint doesn’t like IE at all. Out the box Mint has as much information as Delineate. However Mint is expandable via the Pepper API. This allows other dev’s to code small add-ons to Mint, for example Outclicks which monitors outgoing clicks from your site and XXX Strong Mint which displays visitors IP address. Nice.

Although costing $30, Mint wins hands down. I love it’s expandability and the fact that it’s hosted locally. I’m also surprised by some of the results so far. 74% of visitors are still using IE. Most shocking 66% are using a res less than 1280×1024. Nevermind – get Mint – thoroughly recommended. If your not fussed about expandability and hosting remotely then save $30 and go for Delineate instead.

 

WordPress Upgrade

WordPress released version 1.5.1 which I have just applied to the site. Hopefully everything works including that 1 pixel problem in IE just for Ricky. There seems to be more info and also increased effort to guide those upgrading and letting them know what to expect. Upgrade thread is worth following for instructions and also feedback on anything that breaks.

Just need to figure out why the Super Archives plug-in works in IE, doesn’t apply the style in Firefox and also generates javscripts errors. Joy. Although the archives in IE do look spiffy.

Site Tweaktastic

Made a few more little changes. First up is the name. Got fed up with ‘pessimism and hope’ so re-named to the original ‘iand.net’. Was so tempted to move domains to ‘turned on by technology’ but resisted due to costs, hassle and a nagging doubt that I would get bored with that domain and want to switch to something else. So the tagline for the site is ‘turned on by technology’ but who knows what I could be turned on by in the future.

Inspired by the name change I sorted out a wee-mee image for gravatar and the favicon. Next was the updating blog roll which I’ve missed – ended up back with blogrolling for that one. While on links I’ve removed the redundant ones and also pushed the links section down to the bottom right. Tidy.

Finally…a contacts form has been added and a stats page re-introduced. Sorted. GeoURL is also back up so you can stalk local bloggers. Soon I’ll have a look at Plogger which looks to be a nice simple gallery…although Flickr may be the way to go.

Tweaking

Added a fair bit of ‘stuff’ to the website this weekend but all behind the scenes. The Archives are now a bit more funky and you should now see some Gravatar links if you post a comment. I’ve also been tweaking quite a bit of the php that drives the site – there should be context sensitive sidebars and also the times are a bit more friendly although I keep on missing dates as they are peppered throughout the code. I’ve also added in a Plugins page so you can see what’s been added to the default WordPress engine. Most importantly I’ve added in lots of interesting content. Ok – I’ve added a couple of drab posts but what do you expect?

Joking aside – I tidied up some old posts with images that weren’t displaying properly. I also removed some work posts that while I thought they were innocent enough with hindsight they were better off deleted – you never know who might read it.

So that’s it – I’m ready to add more dreary posts about the films I’ve been to see and games that I’ve played. Which makes you wonder why I and others blog…this quote summed it up for me.

“Blogging in itself is stupid, really, and self indulgent (or perhaps that’s just my approach to it). But it’s a hobby, and we are a nation who love our pointless little hobbies. It’s no more corrosive than other hobbies. Or rather, it shouldn’t be.�

Thanks for the quote Gordon – shame about the snide piece in The Sunday Times.

Upgrades

Finally got WordPress 1.5 installed. Nice. Freshened up the template as well which is the default with a different logo but it keeps things simple. Now got to go through the plug-ins I had installed to see what does and more importantly doesn’t work with 1.5 – the joys of early adopters! Did manage to hack through some Mysql to get the activity plug-in working – joy.

Blog Updates

Just a quick post to say that I installed Gallery a couple of weekends ago and it looks like it may have screwed up a bit of the site (dodgy htaccess rules) so apologies for any hassle cause and thanks to Graham for the heads up. My Gallery installation can be found here – it will be updated soon with some photo’s from yesteryear, including university days which are a very long 10 years ago. Gallery has been moved to Flickr which is far better than hosting locally, stores all image sizes possible and allows you to tag, comment and organise your photo’s. Should have moved ages ago..

I also seem to be suffering from some comment issues. Lewis had mentioned this ages ago which was fixed by refreshing my comment blacklist but Gordon was having issues earlier today (again thanks for the heads up). I’ll look into a different comment spam solution later in the week – I’m hoping the above issue may have caused comment issues as well.

Finally – some small updates on the right hand side including a sideblog powered by del.icio.us all in preparation for a WordPress 1.5 upgrade in the not too distant future. The links are pretty predictable but the Gran Turismo kid is my favourite so far.