![[Picasso Slide]](/staticimg/uffish_minipicasso.gif)
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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
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Get On, Clip In, Fall OffRandom bletherings of a dilletante cyclist. |
Having had a (totally justified) complaint from my hosting people about the load the comment code on this site was causing on the server, I had to disable the commenting stuff recently. After cleaning out (I am not making this up) 96000 comments from the database earlier I'm now back up and running again using Akismet to filter spam. I hope this time things will be a little less crazy...
And yeah, yeah, I know. No postings. I should probably just start going on about cycling a lot or something. That Fabian Cancellara's a class act, eh?
I haven't touched this blog much recently (lack of reaction to stuff you post tends to lead to apathy), but came back today to find about 14000 pieces of comment spam in the last month. Ouch.
I've finally given up and turned off comments - as it seems that there's no reasonable solution to the comment spam problem out there which doesn't involve Typekey (I'm using the MT antispam plugins already) it's the only thing I can do in the meantime until I have time to look at how to run this whole thing again from the ground up.
I love spammers. These amoral bastards have ruined just about every good thing that the Internet's generated in the past decade. I was on Usenet waaay back when spam was first invented and remember the hoo-hah it caused then. I don't think anyone back then seriously expected just how destructive an effect spam would be having by the year 2007. Spam carries a lot of the responsibility for the Internet having gone from a place of openness and freedom to locked doors and paranoia. Remember the days when if you needed to you could relay mail through just about any host that came to hand? Seems almost unbelievable now, doesn't it?
As alluded to earlier, I've decided to try an experiment with this blog. I want to keep it moving, but make it possible for me to maintain it in a reasonably finite amount of time. I also want to try something... different. So here it is.
I'll take suggestions for subjects. I'll then either pick one of those subjects or (if enough people vote, which they probably won't) let people choose them for me by voting on them. I think having the subjects chosen by other people has far more potential to be fun, but I guess it depends on how many suggestions come in. Every day (that's the fantasy target, which I have no delusions about my capability to reach) I'll spend exactly ten minutes - no more or less - writing what I know about that subject, based entirely on what's in my head - no use of references or Googling allowed.
Hopefully most subjects will be ones I know at least a little about. I get the feeling, though, that the ones which will turn out much more fun will be the ones I know nothing about and therefore have to bluff frantically.
It'll be factually unreliable, it'll probably be downright silly, but it'll hopefully be fun. I've got a suggestion for the first entry in the series, which will follow... well, shortly.
Enjoy, and please do let me know what you think of the new format.
Having had a few spare minutes recently, I've installed a wiki to play with. It's running under MacOS X Tiger Server on my Mac mini, which is sitting on top of my main home machine. It's therefore on the wrong end of my ADSL, but feel free to play with it, edit things, etc. Mediawiki is really rather nice.
Also now available is www.legroats.org, intended to become a resource site for people doing Land's End to John O'Groats trips. There didn't seem to be very much on the subject available on the net, so I thought that plunking down a domain to attempt to pull things together would be a worthy exercise. Of course, right now it's in that rather tragic state where there's a fully set up set of bulletin boards with nothing in them but a "Welcome!" message from the site owner. I hope to get at least one more post in there someday. It's just vanilla phpBB at the moment, but I hope it'll evolve into something more useful. I also hope it'll inspire a few more people to do trips like the one I'm planning...
If you're reading this, hello. After a reasonable amount of hacking about and wrangling, you're reading this not only courtesy of a long-overdue upgrade to Movable Type but also on a shiny new dedicated (albeit cheapo dedicated) server.
(and incidentally - help may just be at hand for people who have been driven to enough despair by comment and Trackback spam to turn comments off entirely. MT-Spamlookup does a number of clever things in an attempt to moderate or just plain block the stuff.)
This is my hundredth entry, apparently. I'm going to mark the occasion by, er, not having anything interesting to say.
Sorry. I'll try to be more interesting in future, I promise.
I'm taking something of a break from hard-nosed reporting for the next couple of days (it's possible I might post anyway, but I wouldn't hold yer breath) due to moving home.
Why is that when you come to move, you always find you own about three times as much stuff as you thought you did? Still, it seems my computers have survived the journey - the only drawback is that I don't have broadband in the new place yet so I'm going to have to rely on some arcane piece of technology called a "56kbps modem" for the next couple of weeks, at least when I'm at home. Oh, and my stuff's still in boxes and bags and whatever. Oh, and a lot of my stuff isn't even here yet.
Still, it could be worse. I could be stuck on the end of a 300bps modem, and anyway, I used Demon many years ago quite satisfactorily with a 2400bps modem. It just needs a little more patience, that's all.
I've done a little bit of tweaking to my MT templates today. Mostly adding furniture, but there's now also a category archive available for making stuff easier to locate as the archive grows (provided I don't do what most people seem to do and lose interest in a couple of weeks, which hey, we can't rule out).
One thing I have added is a little site emblem, and some people may be asking "What the hell's that thing at the top of the page?". If you're reading this via an RSS feed, they mean this thing (well, a smaller version of it, anyway).
British folk who are, let's face it, older than me may see it for what it is - the old Picasso tuning signal slide used in the sixties by the Independent Television Authority (ITA), who were responsible for providing ITV's transmission facilities until they became the IBA (Independent Broadcasting Authority) in the early seventies with the introduction of independent local radio. The IBA's engineering division was privatised as NTL, er, sorry, ntl: in 1991.
The Picasso slide, while not a perfect test card due to only having a limited number of components, at least gave people something to look at as their sets warmed up before the start of the day's programming and reassured them that they were actually watching the right transmitter. Each main transmitter had its own variant in the early days of Picasso's deployment, and the version I'm using replicates this. Later, things were changed so that the slide carried the name of the ITV company whose service the transmitter carried with the caption in a narrower typeface. The slide finally disappeared with the advent of colour in 1969.
So now you know. Fascinating, eh? The only reason I'm using it is because I find the asymmetric design (hence the name) strangely appealing.
Following complaints from some quarters that article extracts in the RSS feed were not long enough to satisfy, I've taken advice from my spam and enlarged them. People viewing this stuff via RSS will now get the full body of the entry, with the exception of entries which are long enough to spill over into an extended entry. These will be clearly indicated by a "More" link, so that shouldn't be too confusing.
Given the rather disparate subject matter I cover I'm also working on providing category indices as well as just the front page and archives - as soon as I get my head round the Movable Type tagwork necessary to make it so.
(edit 14:55 - Not that bleedin' easy it wasn't. My head aches from trying to fix the XML so things worked as expected. Should be okay now.)
As should be obvious from the targets of some of the hyperlinks in the last couple of entries (not to mention the image link that's, er, over there.. no, down a bit, above the Movable Type logo, that's it..) I've taken the opportunity to enrol in the Amazon UK Associates thingy. All this means is that if anyone visiting this site happens to follow one of those links and buys something, Amazon pay me a teeny tiny percentage. Given that hardly anyone other than me reads this site anyway and that those people who do read it (most of whom share my surname) are far too sensible to throw money away on frivolous e-commerce activities I don't exactly expect to make millions, but the chance to get a few quid off a DVD or two isn't something to sniff at.
And anyhow, as I usually link to Amazon when mentioning things like books, all this means is that if I say something like "Everyone should read John Simpson's excellent book on Iraq and anyone happens to buy it, Amazon get to throw me a few pennies for the sale they'd have got anyway.
With the running costs of this site being what they are (anything up to ten whole pounds per month), I obviously need all the help I can get to keep serving up this mostly unread mishmash of narcissistic, badly-proofread blather.
I've had it pointed out to me by TOTKat that an evil German has set up a Livejournal syndication for this site. I understand this means that if you're a Livejournal user, don't have an RSS feed of me in your newsreader already, and would like a break from the usual Livejournal flood of items about people doing their laundry and sending each other surveys, you can add uffish_mpk to your Friends list so you don't even have to remember to visit this site in person.
How's that for service, eh?
As a long-term geek who can remember when web browsers were plain text and Mosaic was the latest in hot software, it was a difficult decision to make that maybe I'd get more web content put in place if I used some kind of content management system rather than simply hand-coding the HTML. There are two reasons why I eventually came to this decision:
1) I am lazy
2) I am very lazy
Okay, there's also a third reason, which is that I have the graphical design abilities of a peanut, and in this day and age look is everything. I simply don't understand enough about CSS or graphics or design to make a web page look half-decent, and having a piece of software that makes it look pretty for me (and I like Movable Type's defaults enough to not worry about needing to change them much yet) removes my usual block to producing web content, which is the time spent staring at a text editor with nothing in it but a pair of <html> tags wondering where to start. This way, I just have to start ranting and this neato rant-management software takes care of filing my ranting for me. Hurrah!
There! In a fit of boredom I've redone my website again, and this time I'm playing with Movable Type to produce some kind of regular-posting-thing. It's probably a big lie to say things like "Check back often as there's loads of cool stuff coming soon!" because, well, things like that usually turn round and bite you when the cool stuff fails to materialise, but at least this thing's nifty enough to have an RSS feed so that anyone who's really desperate enough to know when anything's posted here can plug it into NetNewsWire or similiar and watch that for the rare occasions when anything interesting appears.
The Wikified content is, of course, still available through the link that should be, uh, somewhere on this page. Enjoy.
Ultimately, the problem with running anything like this is that it's often quite difficult to find something interesting to say on a regular basis. I therefore solemnly promise that in the absence of anything interesting to say I will not fall back on personal trivia like how the hoovering went or many cups of coffee I've had today (four, as it happens), or post my personal answers to any of the millions of surveys that are out there for those who can't think of anything else to put in their journals, but will instead simply shut up. If I ever post anything about what country I am or which books from what someone out there with terrible taste thinks is an essential reading list I've read, please have a stern word with me.
