Recently in Blogging Category

I have just ordered a new hosting package with a different hosting company. The package offers faster and more up-to-date servers for around £5 extra per month.

The switch will take place shortly, and will allow me to upgrade to the new Movable Type 5.01 which has just been released. MT5 requires MySQL 5.0 (released several years ago) yet my current host is still offering MySQL 4.1, as well as a very old version of Apache. There's also no support for persistent environments such as FastCGI which are key for getting the best performance out of Movable Type.

I'm aiming to have the migration to the new host complete by the 14th, which will be the 8th anniversary of the first post to this blog.

Here's a quote I found randomly on Dave2's blog (in the comments):

Neil Turner is the secret link that keeps the blogosphere together. If "Neil's World" were to disappear, I fear that the entire blogosphere would implode.

I suppose that's a good reason not to quit blogging then. Besides, I've been doing it for 6 weeks shy of 8 years.

(Yes, I know 'the news', I just choose not to join the echo chamber as I don't really have anything to say)

As I've mentioned a few times, I'm going to be away on holiday from the 1st July until the 13th, which means I won't probably be blogging between those two dates (unless I find an internet café). So that this blog isn't dead for 2 weeks, I'd like one or two people to log in a couple of times while I'm away and post something.

I'm looking for people who:

• Have their own blog, so they know what is involved
• Can write one or two entries about something similar to what I write about
• Have read this blog for some time

Experience with Movable Type version 4+ is a plus, as I'll also be asking you to look over the comments and remove any spam or inappropriate remarks, but it's not rocket science so don't worry if you've only used some other blogging package or service.

If you're interested, drop me an email, I'm neil at neilturner dot me dot uk.

Although I'm actually writing this in a slightly drunk state on Friday 1st May, this should, if I click the right buttons, be posted on Monday 4th May and will form the 7th consecutive day where I have posted something on the blog. I say this because my ReactOS entry should have been posted today, and instead I inadvertently published it straight-away on Friday night. Whoops.

The focus of this entry is mostly me looking back at the past couple of years and trying to work out why I didn't want to blog here. Having thought about it, I came up with several reasons, detailed in the extended portion of this entry, so feed readers will need to click through and have a read.

The more observant among you will have noticed that this is the 5th post in as many days. I'm trying to get back into blogging again, as over the past couple of years I've not even managed one post per week in some cases. This being said, I am actually writing this on Friday (i.e. yesterday) as a scheduled post, and it's likely that some of the following entries may also have been written well ahead of time.

A few years ago I was often able to churn out several entries per day, and while I don't think I'll ever return to that sort of frequency, I am aiming to make more use of this blog. After all, it's been going over 7 years so it would be a shame to quit.

It all makes sense now. The whole point of having a blog is that you can use it to post thoughts that are more than 140 characters long...

Since other people have been doing it, here is a selection of non-boring tweets from my Twitter account:

• 'Mandibles' is such a cool word, but I don't know why.
• Is it a bad sign that after 6 and a half years I still can't remember my ICQ number?
• Right now, I could really do with some mutant seabass with frickin' lasers on their heads.
• Tearing my hear out at the so-called 'HTML' produced by Microsoft Office.
• Misheard 'Maida Vale' as 'Made of Fail'. Don't know whether that's ironic.
• I wonder if there's a boss or a secret level at the end of this spreadsheet
• Eating a Mars bar that proudly claims that it was made in Slough. This is one of the few times you will hear 'proud' and 'slough' together.
• There are too many time travellers here for my liking.
• Okay, 'flu jabs are fine until your shoulder starts hurting. But I suppose it's better than having 'flu
• Applying for a job where the guidance notes are 16 pages long. Of which 8 of those pages could be abbreviated to "Must have common sense"
• And my copy of Wrath of the Lich King just arrived. That's my social life for the next month gone then
• Seen at the bottom of an email: "WARNING : This message originates from the Internet". Well where else would it have come from? Basingstoke?
• Come to the conclusion that Flyte is basically Milky Way in a posh wrapper and higher price.
• Been working here for a year and only now have I found out that we have a Christmas cupboard.
• Quote, paraphrased: "Yes, but you only sent the letter to us *last week*, and it was in Arabic..."
• £3.30 for a small glass of wine? In Bradford? My arse!

Some of those will make no sense out of context, and more to the point I can't remember myself what the context surrounding the time travellers was.

I know that quite a few people reading this are bloggers yourselves, and out of curiosity I want to ask the following questions. Please post your answers in the comments, or if you want to do it privately send an email to neil at this domain.

Questions

• What blogging package do you use, and do you host it yourself?
• What do you like most about your blogging package, and what can be improved?
• Have you ever tried any other blogging packages?
• Would you be willing to change to another blogging package, and what do you think would be the reason for you changing?

I'll post my own answers in a few days. If you take part, please be civil - no zealotry.

Other than the name change, which apparently most people didn't notice, I've made a few other minor changes around here.

First of all, the biggest change is an upgrade from Movable Type 4.2 RC1 to RC4, although in reality this hasn't change much but may fix any issues that people have been experiencing. I have also gotten rid of the Comment Challenge plugin; it was designed for a much older version of MT and hasn't been updated in quite some time. It therefore doesn't quite work with MT4.2, especially concerning authenticated comments (TypeKey, OpenID etc) so it isn't worth keeping.

Finally the sidebars now work on all entry pages - I think this was partly down to a weird bug in MT's new widget manager but I haven't been able to reliably reproduce it. Anyhow, it's working now.

I will be doing some further design changes, mainly to re-instate the sections to the site. But as next week is one of the busiest weeks for universities, with A-level results coming out a week today, it may be some time.

...did anyone notice that I changed the name of this blog from 'Neil's World' to 'Neil Turner's blog' a few weeks ago?

On Sunday, Dave at Blogography posted this:

Spam FAIL! The latest trend in comment spam? Copying somebody else's previously approved comment and working your website links into the text. This way, your comment looks legitimate, because it actually pertains to the blog entry. Of course, since I read every one of my comments and manually approve them, I know immediately if it's a spam-infused duplicate. BANNED! DELETE! All of the IP addresses of the commenters are coming from India, but link to US websites, which means this kind of lame behavior is somebody's job?! Lovely.

I've noticed this too, but the comment was from a Polish IP address for a Polish web site. I may have let it pass except it was a comment that I myself had made, and wasn't the sort of comment a Polish person would make. We have a lot of Poles in Bradford (for now, at least) but I don't think there are many based in York and Bradford, and still fewer who are still running a beta version of Windows Vista...

Incidentally, Akismet correctly identified it as spam but TypePad Anti-Spam didn't, thus cancelling each other out and letting the comment through.

RSS, Atom and feed technologies are great for keeping up with blogs, news sites, comics, or any other web site that is frequently updated. By aggregating feeds using a feed reader, you can get an overview of a wide range of different sites all in one place, and keep track of new content from many places with ease.

(Okay, I just re-read that and feel I have a missed opportunity in marketing. Either that or I really need to start making this site more personal again)

The problem with feeds is that there are millions of them and it's easy to subscribe too many - to the point at which it's impossible to keep up with them. Your feed reader becomes a swarm of unread items. You want to read everything but you don't have the time.

This has happened to me before. Back when I was a student and wasn't in a 9-5 job and playing online games for most of the evening, I had plenty of time to read feeds. But more recently that time has dwindled, and reached the point where I couldn't keep up with my feeds. I've had over 1000 unread items in Google Reader and found it difficult to get that figure down. So, here's what I did:

1. Stopped reading feeds that didn't really interest me. There are some sites that have really interesting weekly features, but the rest of the content really wasn't that great. Or blogs which have changed their focus to something that no longer interests me. Or my interests have changed and I'm no longer interested in, say, the best new Windows freeware utilities, since I'm now primarily a Mac user. Whatever the reason, these feeds were removed.
2. Stopped reading feeds which were interesting but that I couldn't keep up with. The likes of Boing Boing and Engadget are good examples - they are interesting but there are usually several posts per day which I don't always have time to read. And then once you haven't read it for a few days you end up with 50-60 unread items so you leave it out because you can't face reading that many items from the same blog. This happened a few times so in the end I just decided to cut my losses and unsubscribe, and hope that any truly interesting articles on them would get linked from elsewhere.

On the whole, I can keep my feed reader's unread items down to something sensible with only a small amount of reading each day by following these 2 principles. Even if I don't read feeds for a few days, it doesn't take me too long to catch up.

Thanks for the comments you've given so far. Right now the consensus is split between 'move host, stick with Movable Type', and 'stick with host, move to WordPress'. Because I have limited time this weekend I will stick with WordPress for the next few days, as it will also allow me to try it out. I'm quite liking the theme that I've found (and may see about adopting a similar one should I switch back to MT) and the whole application feels very snappy and clean; however, I have yet to import 4000 entries and 6000 comments so we'll see how it stacks up after that. But from what I have seen so far it's a world away from the versions of Wordpress that I tried 2 1/2 years ago and disliked.

As for the performance issue, I first had an email from my host last night and have responded today - we'll see what the response is. I'm primarily interested to see if it really is Movable Type that is causing the high CPU usage (I imagine it is but it could be something else less important), and whether shutting it off has made any kind of difference.

If you have any further comments about what I should do, please make them on the entry. I will read and consider all opinions.

This is a blog post I hoped I would never have to make. I have switched (temporarily) to Wordpress.

As those of you who have been reading this blog since the early days will know, I have been using Movable Type since September 2002 - a grand total of 5 1/2 years. I was one of those who defended it in 2004 when Movable Type 3.0 came out with its more restrictive licensing. I beta-tested several releases, namely 3.2, 3.3 and 4.0 (and would have tested 4.1 if I had the time). I have tried to answer criticism of MT on other peoples' blogs when I have felt it unfair. And yet, here I am, on a fresh installation of Wordpress.

The reason for switching is only partially MT's fault, however. Today I had an email from my host about the amount of CPU time this site is using - 110 minutes per day when my allowance is 30. I blame this on 3 factors:

1. In its default configuration, MT isn't the most efficient application out there. It's based on Perl, which when used through CGI is slow and draws a lot of CPU time.


2. However, my host doesn't offer me any ways to help to rectify this. Movable Type supports FastCGI and memcached, which can dramatically improve performance through caching.


3. I'm also a massive target for comment spam, and this causes a lot of load on the Movable Type scripts.

And it's this final decision I want help with. This is potentially one of the biggest changes that this blog has undergone since 2002 and so I don't want to go into it lightly, so please comment here with your opinions about what I should do.

Essentially, these my options at the moment:

1. Switch to Wordpress and stay with current host


2. Move to a new host and stay with Movable Type


3. Stay with my current host and upgrade to a higher package

There is also the fact that Movable Type 4.15 is in beta which will bring performance improvements, so I want to try it out before committing to a decision.

As for switching to Wordpress, it would be stepping into the unknown. I haven't used WP since version 1.5 and to be honest I wasn't massively impressed (again, long-time readers will remember I experimented with WP when MT 3 came out). Though I understand there are more plugins than you can shake a stick at, I am worried that I won't be able to do many things that I can currently do with MT. For example, I'd like solid OpenID support, the ability to cross-post entries to LiveJournal and possibly Vox, and support for static pages for things like the Atom feed and index page.

There's also the issue of security as I know that Wordpress has had more published security vulnerabilities than MT and several people I know have had their sites defaced because of flaws in WP. And last time I tried Wordpress (again we're talking 2004 here) the templating was difficult compared to MT which gives you total control over your pages; hopefully this has been sorted.

So what do you guys think I should do? And do you have any other suggestions?

The latest 'in-thing' for Bloggers seems to be disabling comments on their blogs. Joe Spolsky, of Joel on Software, first aired the idea and various other bloggers have jumped on the bandwagon. The argument is that having comments open allows people to make silly anonymous comments, whereas really they should be held accountable by posting on their own blogs.

I'm not about to go down this route. I don't get many comments nowadays, mainly because I don't blog much - I managed a mere 11 posts last month down from a high of 93 for the same peiod 4 years ago. But many of those that I do get are by people who do not have blogs of their own, and probably wouldn't go through the trouble of creating one just to post the occasional comment. I know that I for one would not want to make a new blog entry everytime I wanted to post a reply to someone else's entry, and I imagine it would become tedious for any regular readers who would just get a series of replies to other people's posts. Though I may not have much new content on here, I'm proud to say that much of it is relatively original, and not lots of 'me too' entries.

There's also the issue of tracking the conversation, and I don't believe the tools we have for this are anywhere near perfect. I disabled trackback on here because 99.8% of all trackbacks received were spam, and most of the rest were people mentioning my entries without really adding to the conversation (such as link blogs) so I really didn't see the value in keeping it. Apparently Pingback is more resiliant to spam but Movable Type doesn't support it so I can't enable it on here, and I'm not about to switch to Wordpress over what I would call a trivial feature. Technorati and the like are all well and good but integrating it with this site, to allow people to track the conversation, is easier said than done. I've tried it before and given up.

If anything, making commenters accountable to what they say is precisely why we need OpenID. OpenID makes it hard (though not impossible) to be anonymous when posting comments, and it raises the bar so that not anyone off the street can comment. As time goes on more people will have access to OpenID and so this could be one good way of allowing comments while keeping out those anonymous cowards who only wish to flame and bait.

Ironically, this is a reply to Dave Metzener, who has just disabled comments on his blog. As it happens, I would have probably posted a briefer and more specific version of this over there, but he's disabled comments so I couldn't. He'll have to do with a trackback.

Please feel free to comment on this entry, either here or on your own blog - I really don't mind.

Update: Dave responded to this post. Ultimately I suppose the decision to close comments on your blog should be up to you as each blog is different.

Back in July, I installed Comment Challenge, a plugin for Movable Type which adds an extra question to the comment form for those not using OpenID. Until the past few days, this has blocked around 99.9% of the comment spam I've been getting - I'm up to around 1 spam comment every 3 minutes now, but thanks to this plugin all I see is an event in MT's activity log which just needs purging from time to time.

Recently, more spam has been getting though, though we're still only talking maybe 0.2% here. It seems that spammers are now taking the time to manually enter spam comments on high-ranking pages, and doing so in a way that makes them look like legitimate comments - they usually refer to the subject of the entry but will have some spammy link as the provided URL. One dude in Pakistan entered around 8 comments over several hours here under various false names - his one mistake was to use the same IP address each time.

I'm still deciding what to do. I may remove the URL field altogether for those who haven't authenticated through OpenID, using Brad Choate's URLess plugin. I'm not going down the route of blocking all unauthenticated comments, nor do I have the time to manually approve all authenticated comments (especially as I am going on holiday next week). However, I'd appreciate some feedback.

5 years ago, I started a blog. It wasn't particularly good, or even particularly interesting, but it was out there, on the internet.

5 years on, and it's still here. It's changed somewhat - the URL, the design, the backend system have all changed - but it's still my blog and I'm still the one posting it. Had you told me 5 years ago that I'd still be doing this, I'd have been surprised.

I'm not going to do anything big, or announce anything major today - for a start it has come at a really bad time :) . But I just want to take the opportunity to thank everyone for reading this, especially those who have been reading from the early days.

Incidentally, I finally finished my dissertation yesterday, and had it laser printed today, ready to hand in tomorrow. That's one chapter of my life I'm very glad to have behind me :) .

Sunday is a special day. Long-time readers, and those that can be bothered to look it up will know why, but, provided that I'm able to post that day, all will be revealed soon...

It couldn't have come at a much worse time though - my dissertation is due in on Monday :) . It's almost finished, in that I need to spend about an hour doing some last minute adjustments and then get two copies printed. Once that is in, and I've sat my exam on Wednesday, that's me finished at university. Forever.

Kim, whose blog I've been reading for over 4 years now, is going through a rough spot. There's something wrong with her, but so far they're not sure what - it's not arthritis, but it could be all manner of other not-particularly-nice-sounding diseases.

She's been blogging her experiences of (in lieu of a better phrase) 'the search for the answer', and could probably do with some positive vibes being sent her way right now.

When it comes to podcasts, I have to say that I've been very late to the game. Though I own an iPod, I don't tend to download podcasts since most of the time I only listen to my iPod while going to and from campus, which takes all of 15 minutes - not long enough for your average half hour show. And since it's an iPod Mini, I can't watch video on it, or at least not without some third-party firmware which lets me watch it in very poor quality monochrome.

However, I have started playing with Democracy over these past couple of weeks, and taken a liking for a few video podcasts. Note how I'm calling them 'video podcasts' and not something stupid like 'vidcast' or 'vodcast', or 'vlodcast' which sounds like some cheap brand of vodka.

• RocketBoom - although I think Joanne Colan tries a little bit too hard to be funny (and her stereotypical 'British actor in an American film' style accent gets a little annoying) it's often quite interesting, if a little random at times.
• The Show with Ze Frank - again quite random and I'm sure Americans would get some of the jokes that I don't, but there's usually plenty to smirk at.
• MacBreak - probably only of interest to Mac users, but it does cover some cool things that you can do with Macs. And it's professionally edited too.

I do also subscribe to the The Scoble Show but I don't watch every episode - some of them are quite long and not all that interesting. Big tip: short and snappy keeps people's attention spans.

Anyone got some recommendations for other video podcast channels that I might enjoy?

As anyone who tried to access this site today will have noticed, it has suffered some downtime. This isn't my fault, for once, but the result of a problem with the server itself. Consequently I've also had no email either which is inconvenient to say the least (and it's still not yet up and running either) and the resources I'm hosting for my World of Warcraft guild have also been unavailable which made things somewhat difficult when it came to organising this evening's Blackwing Lair raid (which we've just started). It's still very slow and not everything's working but at least part of it is up, and I imagine things will get better over time.

In other news, I'm giving OpenDNS a try to speed up our ridiculously slow DNS lookups (though I'm now thinking this is an issue with our router and not the ISP), I had another driving lesson today which was mostly consolidation of what I learned last week, and played more on World of Warcraft, where I'm now level 50, out of 60.

Someone posted the following comment to the previous entry. You can read it in full, but here's an excerpt:

Now then, to the issue at hand. Your hari has promised to take you out to eat somewhere. May I suggest, having looked at the silhouette of you and your other half (though I am unsure as to whether this is the right phrase all things considered, perhaps 2/3 or 3/4 would be more appropriate), that you keep your distance and give her a full feed, lest you be the subject of a the next JK Rowling installment: Hari’s Potty and shes gobbling up Neil. I suggest that she present you with a more appealing girlfriend for your birthday present in order that you dont have to hide her identity, she is i assume not a crimefighter like superman or wonderwoman, so one has to presume reasons other than the safety of mankind for your decision to give her the pseudonym “hari”.

This isn't the first time someone has bitched about my girlfriend on here, but that time I deleted the comment. I'm letting this one stay, after discussing it with Hari, but I really do not tolerate personal attacks against me or my girlfriend. It's not nice.

Incidentally the IP address used to post the comment came from Leeds General Infirmary - maybe they are a mental patient there?

The world of blogging and podcasting has more than its fair share of buzzwords - blogs, RSS, trackback, pings and so on. Buzzwords are fine for those familiar with them, but they create a barrier for new entrants into the blogging world, which either leaves people confused or puts them off entirely.

Though there are already lots of buzzwords around, there's no reason why we should add more as they will only worsen the confusion. This is why I take issue with several 'new' buzzwords I've heard lately:

vidcasting

Vidcasting is video podcasting, and a vidcast is podcast that uses video rather than just audio. My question is, why does this need to be a separate term? Podcasting is starting to get mainstream recognition, so it's a term people understand, therefore stick 'video' on the front and most people who are familar with podcasting will know that it's a podcast but with video.

bleaders

Bleaders are 'blog readers' apparently. Apart from being a homonym for 'bleeders' (which implies that all people who read blogs also self-harm themselves... make your own mind up about that...) it is also completely unnecessary - what is wrong with just calling them 'blog readers' or even just 'readers'?

spamback

A spamback is trackback spam. Considering that trackback isn't a straightforward concept to begin with, introducing yet another term just makes things even more confusing. There's no need for it.

Though I wish they'd spend more time fixing their support for Atom 1.0, Bloglines has rolled out a ping interface, which means that your blog can ping Bloglines and have new entries appear almost instantaneously. If you're using TypePad, LiveJournal or Wordpress, you don't need to do anything, but others may need to add Bloglines to their ping services.

In Movable Type, select your blog and choose Settings, then the 'New Entry Defaults' tab. Under 'Publicity/Remote Interfaces', type 'http://www.bloglines.com/ping' in the box marked 'Other' - if there is text already there, add it on a newline after the existing text. Note that if this box already contains 'http://rpc.pingomatic.com/' then you don't need to add this new line because Ping-o-Matic will ping Bloglines for you already.

I'd been wondering why entries I had been posting lately had appeared on Bloglines so quickly - now I know.

As part of a series of posts running up to International Womens Day, I'm linking to a different female blogger every day, and explaining why I like their blog. Today it's the turn of Kazza at Kazza the Blank One.

I came across Kazza after she left a few comments here, and have been reading her blog ever since. She's also a regular over at Blogography and a few other blogs that I read frequently. Her blog's tagline is "Boring life of a geek" - how boring you find it is up to you but personally I find it quite interesting (but then I'm a geek too...).

As part of a series of posts running up to International Womens Day, I'm linking to a different female blogger every day, and explaining why I like their blog. Today it's the turn of Daisy at Chasing Daisy.

Though her blogging has been less frequent of late, I've always enjoyed Daisy's postings. Most of her entries link to other sites of interest, rather than being purely original content, but her links are always interesting and there's the occasional amusing image forwarded in an email too. Having a mutual liking of BBC Radio 4 also helps.

As part of a series of posts running up to International Womens Day, I'm linking to a different female blogger every day, and explaining why I like their blog. Today it's the turn of Kim at Revolving Duck.

Quite why I started Kim's blog I am unsure of, but it was some time during 2002 when I was still using Blogger and she was using this fancy all-singing, all-dancing blogging system called Movable Type that I was eager to start using. As it happens, I'm now using MT and Kim's graduated to Wordpress.

Kim is a student in palaeontology in Montana, as well as being a self-confessed geek who not only knows what Linux actually is but uses it regularly - not something many girls would be able to claim. She's also on the road to converting to Catholicism, which makes for interesting reading. Kim's style of writing is personal but also very witty and I always perk up when I see an unread item on her blog in Bloglines.

As part of a series of posts running up to International Womens Day, I'm linking to a different female blogger every day, and explaining why I like their blog. Today it's the turn of Meredith at Amanita.net, another female blogger who I've been reading for a long time now.

I first knew Meredith not for her blog but as an editor at the Open Directory Project where I used to volunteer regularly. Though I'm no longer active at the ODP I still enjoy reading Meredith's writing and her del.icio.us links, since she seems to find some really cool stuff. Lately she's been writing for NonFicWriMo and about her recent Geocaching experiences, but she also mentions her experiences of her job as a sign-language interpreter, and about being Jewish and a lesbian in a committed relationship. While her entries can be quite personal it makes for a sometimes fascinating insight into a life that is very different from my own.

On March 8th it is International Womens Day (and No Smoking Day in the UK) and Gia has challenged people to link to 5 female bloggers before then. Including today and the day itself, that's 7 days, so I'll link to one female blogger that I read regularly each day and say why I read them.

Today's blogger is Firda at Weblog Wannabe, who I've chosen because she was one of the first female bloggers I subscribed to back in 2002, and have been reading ever since. She manages to be both witty and interesting, and I've always admired her skills in web design. In fact, I dare say it was Firda's site that first convinced me to move from a tables-based design to CSS, three and a half years ago.

Firda is still blogging today and recently celebrated 6 years of blogging which is far longer than many A-listers. I still enjoy reading her posts and I hope you will do too.

Tomorrow, nominations for the Sixth Annual Weblog Awards (aka Bloggies 2006) close. Now, though I've been eligable for the 2003, 2004 and 2005 awards, I've never been a finalist. If you have some time I'd be appreciative if some of you could nominate me.

This weblog is eligable for the following categories:

• Best British or Irish Weblog
• Best Computers or Technology Weblog (though this blog covers much more than that, there's still a lot of computerry things on it)

You can also nominate it for a few others like 'best designed' or 'best photography' but I doubt it'll do particularly well; same for 'weblog of the year'.

I know this is just feeding my ego but to at least make the finals after all these years would be nice :) .

Via Les is How much is your blog worth?, which uses your Technorati ranking and the statistics from the Weblogs Inc./AOL deal to estimate how much your blog would be worth if you sold it. Here's my result:

Now that would do nicely. It would pay off all of my debts and provide a more than adequate deposit on a mortgage. And a dual-processor dual-core PowerMac G5 with a couple of 30" Apple Cinema Displays and a drool tray for when I'm using them.

incidentally I totted up how much I've earned in total from Google Adsense since signing up in November last year - I've just passed $1800 (about £1000). So my blog is allegedly worth about 100 times more than I've actually earned from it. Still, I'm not complaining about that extra grand in my bank account.

Over at Utterly Boring, Jake's published the 7000th comment. Over here I've had over 7000 comments (7015 to be exact) but only 6145 of those are published - the rest were deleted, most likely because they were spam. Indeed, the 7000th comment was spam. :(

As for trackback pings, I've had over 2500 pings, however only 738 of those were legitimate - the majority of comment spam I get here is through the trackback system. Note that these numbers only reflect this past two years (since December 2003) since that was the last time I did a full re-install of MT (whereby all of the entry, comment and trackback IDs were reset). Since then I've been doing database dumps so the IDs have been preserved.

Dave, I'm sorry to hear that you've decided to quit blogging. I really hope you change your mind; while you maybe didn't post as often as previously I still enjoyed reading what you had to say.

Dave's blog was hacked by using a known exploit in Wordpress 1.5.1.1. He's now quit blogging.

Oh cripes, tomorrow is the start of the Blogathon. I previously said I'd consider taking part, but being largely internet-less and also away at a family do tomorrow means I won't be able to get involved this year.

Of the blogs I read regularly, ***Dave Does The Blog is the only one doing the Blogathon, so go and sponsor him.

The Blogothon 2005 is coming on Saturday August 6th. I missed the 2002 and 2003 events (there was no 2004 event) but may consider doing it this year. That said, the prospect of staying up for 24 hours solid is not something that appeals to me, so, if you're interested in doing this as part of a team effort, please let me know :) . Remember, it's all for charidee.

(with thanks to Les)

I'd just like to congratulate Troy and Firda on their marriage on Saturday :) .

Troy's account of the day is here and Firda's is here.

Oh great. Now that we have the Blog-o-Matic, we no longer need real human bloggers - we can let the computers generate our blogs for us! Here's an example of an entry:

I thought of Farming

Sometimes I wonder no matter what cards you are dealt, you need to make peace on earth. How is this related to Farming, you may ask? OK. This morning life was a little more peaceful. Whatever. So that's that. Yeah, but it wasn't at all your typical mood swing or anything. I dreamt of satan himself. And here's why this matters...

Hmmm. Maybe we're not out of the job just yet, then.

I've rejigged the comments area so that TypeKey has a slightly greater prominence. I'd like to see a few more people using TypeKey as it offers both you and me advantages:

It's better for you because, once your account is approved, you can post comments without them being blocked for mentioning spam words or for using an anonymous proxy. In future I may enforce moderation for all non-TypeKey comments again so by using the service you'll be ensuring that your comments show up immediately.

It's better for me because once I've approved your account I don't have to approve individual comments that may have been moderated because of a false-positive in my spam filters. Banning users is also easier, as is stopping abusive users from posting here in the first place.

There have been accusations that email addresses linked to TypeKey accounts get more spam, but I believe this to be unfounded - it may be that those people have used their accounts on sites which make no attempt to mask users' email addresses which have then been picked up by spam crawlers. This site, on the other hand, does not ever make your address public, as per the newly-created Email Policy.

Some sites insist on TypeKey as the only method of commenting. I'm not about to do that any time soon as far too few of you use the service right now, but if I do have to apply more draconian limits to unregistered comments then TypeKey users will be able to avoid them.

While re-reading the introduction to my final year project, I came across the following sentence:

Wordpress is a much newer system and this is signified by its lower version number; at time of writing it is only at 1.2.1 whereas MT is at 3.12.

Just goes to show how long ago I wrote it. In any case, I'm rewriting part of the introduction so this will get fixed. Before I start discussing the design aspects of the project I look at existing systems, which is where this sentence comes in.

From looking at what everyone else is doing, the cool thing right now to do to your blog is to drop trackback and replace it with something like Technorati Cosmos. I'm wondering whether to follow suit.

The fact is, lately I've been getting very few legitimate pings. Of those, a number get filtered out by SpamLookup, which I've had to adjust to very low settings to actually make it useful. That, unfortunately, means I'm more vunerable to trackback spam attacks. I seem to spend more time sorting out problems with trackbacks than comments, even though I get far more comments (typically 5 per day) than trackbacks.

I've added a 'incoming links' section to the entry pages which polls Technorati for blogs that link to that entry - I'll see how that goes and if I feel it is better than trackback will make changes accordingly.

It's Dave's 2nd Blogiversary, and to celebrate he's giving away a whole range of prizes to lucky readers. Today's prize is one of 25 blogography.com t-shirts which are all available to buy too.

I wish I had the money to that sort of thing, but right now I have other things that I need to save up for :( .

This week's Roasted cartoon (from Sunday's Observer Magazine) is so true. I've had conversations in the pub like that - and I'm afraid to say I was the guy in the green too. (View full size)

(scanned in because the strip isn't available online)

A week on Thursday (March 24th, day before Good Friday) is Blogs in Action, a blogging conference in London hosted by Six Apart. It's at the Polish Club, 55 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PN, a stone's throw from South Kensington tube. Speakers include Dominique Busso, the CEO of VNU, and Neil McIntosh from The Guardian.

Sounds interesting, but I'm not sure if I'd be able to go due its proximity to the Easter weekend.

NRT over at the Ministry of Information has an interesting post about anonymity when blogging, and how his online persona is somewhat different to how he is in real life. It's something I can relate to to some extent.

I'm now running a beta of Wordpress 1.5 on my test blog. Specifically it's a nightly build from earlier in the month, and while it's only a beta, it seems to work fine apart from a couple of PHP errors in the upgrade script.

While I will reserve my final judgement for the proper 1.5 release, I will say that I am very impressed so far. incidentally I'm going to convert my existing WP 1.2 templates into WP1.5 themes to make them easier to install.

Oooh, Richard has a new site called Bradford Bloggers going - an aggregation portal for bloggers in Bradford. I was thinking about doing this myself using XML-RPC (like LazyWeb) but he's beaten me to it. :)

Gravatar.com is on a new host, which means it can go on serving gravatar images for a while yet. That doesn't stop me feeling guilty about contributing to its bandwidth problem though.

The problem with Gravatar as it is at the moment is best illustrated by this entry on Redemption in a Blog (which is now 5th in Google for 'Homer Simpson'). Here, you have a weblog entry which got lots of attention and had lots of comments posted to it. For each of those comments, a request to gravatar.com was needed. You then need to multiply that by the number of hits that page got. We're therefore talking about a lot of requests to gravatar.com.

So what I'm proposing is some kind of caching mechanism. Instead of the client grabbing an image from gravatar.com every time someone visits the page, the server has a script which checks for a locally-cached copy of the gravatar, and, if it finds one, displays that instead. Otherwise, it pulls the image from gravatar.com, and then caches it.

This could mean far, far fewer requests being made to gravatar.com. Instead of a gravatar being requested every time it is needed, it may only be requested once a day (we'll assume here that cached gravatars expire after 24 hours). That would amount to some sizable bandwidth savings.

To illustrate what I'm proposing, here's a flow diagram:

Now, all we'd need is for someone to implement this. I'd do it myself but my PHP skills aren't good enough. Any takers?

I'm now running Movable Type 3.14159, a test build of MT which applies some performance fixes when dealing with comment spam that I summarised here.

And yes, the version number is equal to Pi. Just goes to show that even after having a very hard week the Six Apart team still have their sense of humour intact.

It's been a while since I posted the 'comment leaders' - those that post the most comments on the site. After a bit of database cleanup (basically ensuring that people were using the same email addresses), I got these results:

1. Andy (177)
2. Quanta (138)
3. Richy C. (118)
4. Kim (91)
5. Richard (80)
6. Chris (63)
7. Dave (59)
8. Jake Ortman (53)
9. Hanni
10. Chris Burkhardt (46)
11. Mike Wills (45)
12. Ciaran (42)
13. Dave (41)
14. Sian (39)
15. Ken Edwards (37)
16. troworld (35)
17. Daisy (33)
18. Harry (31)
19. Arvind (28)
20. Richard (26)

If you're on that list, thanks for keeping the comment areas interesting, and keep on commenting. :)

Update: Gargh, I realised that I hadn't counted some variations of people's email addresses so after a bit of consolidation Ciaran moves up a few places and Harry enters the top 20.

When I started at Bradford 2 years ago, I never imagined that there'd be anyone else there who had a weblog. I've been proved wrong, and it now looks like there's quite a few. Other than me, here are the following others who are bloggers and students at the University of Bradford that I know of:

• Richard Kirkcaldy - E-commerce Technologies (final year)
• Andy Rogers - Computer Science (placement year)
• Tom Adams - Computer Science (first year)
• Trevor Morris - Internet Product Design (final year)
• Chris Wells - Multimedia Computing (final year)

Am I missing anyone?

You know, there's almost enough of us for a meetup...

incidentally, of the above, 3 are using CMSes that they've written themselves. Maybe that's saying something.

I'd been wondering whether John Naughton, writer of The Observer's 'The Networker' column (bottom of the end of the Media section) was a blogger, and indeed he is. I'm surprised it took me this long to try to find it, but anyway, he's now the 126th feed in my Bloglines feed list.

John Naughton is a columnist that "gets it" when it comes to open source. A few weeks ago he wrote about the problems with IE and recommended several alternatives, and this week's article which doesn't appear to be online makes a prominent mention of Firefox.

How do you like the Halloween theme? It's not as good as Les' but it isn't bad for 5 minutes work :) .

Furthermore, I've updated the templates so you can deploy this theme on your own blog now too :) .

I've had a couple of regular readers email this week wondering where my blog has gone, if I'm alive etc. I think I'd therefore better explain the situation.

Nearly two weeks ago, my host moved this site to a new server (IP: 70.84.250.212), which is a better machine and has newer software. The DNS was changed to point to the new server, however it appears a few ISPs still haven't updated their DNS records to point to the new IP. The server on the old IP has been taken out and so those ISPs with the old IP on their records are pointing people to a duff address.

Obviously if you can't view the site then you probably can't see this message, but, eh.

My sideblog, Neil's Smaller World has just hit 1000 entries, in just under a year (11 months). Not bad for an experiment :) .

To celebrate, I'm now allowing comments and trackbacks on articles, aided by the PHP port of Adam Kalsey's SimpleComments - this allows you to use SimpleComments with dynamic templating. Feel free to comment away :) .

Let's see - if I link to Scoble, will that be enough to get him to subscribe to me? :)

His Bloglines public subscriptions are really interesting as there's some blogs in there like Absoblogginlutely there that I really didn't expect. But yay for Andy for getting noticed.

incidentally I may well stick with Bloglines as my RSS reader due to its convinience. FeedDemon is a good application which has served me well for nearly a year and was well worth the money I paid for it but Bloglines is more useful to me right now. incidentally I'm subscribed to just short of 100 feeds.

Ben, Mike and Hanni have all volunteered to help moderate comments. They're all in different time zones too, which is a plus :) . Go and read their sites as they're likely to be far more interesting than mine for the moment. As for here, I don't think I need any more help right now though - four of us is enough, I think. :)

The exam this morning went okay, better than I expected, so hopefully I'll have passed it this time. As for the laptop, DHL are picking it up from my mum's office on Monday and it should be fixed within a week or two, so I'll be back on before the start of term when I really will need a machine of my own. Which is a relief.

Comments from non-TypeKey commenters are now moderated. This is a temporary measure in the hope that "Jebus", a troll who has nothing better to do than accuse me of sodomy and waste my bandwidth, might get the message and leave me alone. I've banned his IP but I think we all know how ineffective IP banning is these days, and I don't want to block all BT Broadband users.

Sorry to all you non-TypeKey users. Hopefully this will be a temporary situation.

It's been nearly 2 years since I bought this domain and so the time came to renew it. The renewal appears to have gone through okay as the WHOIS record now suggests that it won't need renewing until September 2006. Including VAT, renewing the domain only cost a little under £10, which is good as I've heard some registrars charge extortionate amounts for domain renewals.

If you're interested, it's currently costing me around £5.40 per month to run this site - that's approximately £60 per year for hosting and £10 every two years to keep the domain. It's partly why I haven't yet started placing advertising on here - donations are keeping the site going with no problems, although I may consider some Google AdSense adverts on the right-hand side in future to bring in a few more pennies.

On an unrelated note, Apple brought forward the shipping date for my iPod Mini, which therefore means it should be with me sometime this week. The Bank Holiday weekend means that it won't be here until Tuesday at the earliest though. I'm back in York this weekend to spend a bit of time with my parents and catch up with my friends from college - while I feel lucky to have so many friends at Bradford it's great to see my old mates again, some of whom I've known for over a decade and a half now. incidentally while I was here I upgraded my parents' PC and my dad's laptop to XP SP2 and they both took the update fine with no problems.

Now that I've announced the book, I've had a couple of emails on the lines of "So I'm guessing you're not switching to Wordpress now, huh?", and indeed I'm not. The book, however, is not the only thing that's keeping me with MT and I'd like to use this (rather long) entry as a list of reasons why I'm not likely to switch any time soon.

Found a blog by Nauman Leghari, who, if my map is correct, lives around 500m (as the crow flies) from where I'm living now. He graduated from a Masters course Bradford Uni this year and was awarded Microsoft Student Partner. So go and check him out :) .

Mark has posted about how he no longer uses an aggregator to keep up with blogs and feeds:

But really, you should ask yourself if you need to keep up with 100 or 200 or 1400 different "sources" of "content" on an hourly basis. Shouldn't you be spending more time with your family or something? Or, if you don’t have a family, shouldn't you be spending time building one? RSS won't get you laid.

I knew I was going wrong somewhere.

Since the last post was about getting rid of stale channels, it's probably quite fitting that this one is about various fresh blogs that I've started reading recently. It's been a couple of months since I last did it so here's some more procrastination material for you. They're all interesting in one way or another so I'd like to share them.

• Blogography - Dave2 has been a regular reader here for some time and a couple of weeks back I thought it was about time I read his blog more often. I'm not regretting that decision. Dave's currently on a tour of Hard Rock Cafes in Europe and hit his 100th in Nottingham this weekend. He got a cake and a signed t-shirt :)
• Chinwags from Abu Dhabi - the author, Arvind, is another MT-B beta tester and a MT junkie - he's also the guy behind Movalog which is also well-worth a read if Movable Type tickles your fancy.
• Cutting Through... - because it's the weblog for the company I work for. Mostly focuses on the subjects of blogging, wikis and feeds.
• Complete Tosh - the weblog of Neil McIntosh, assistant editor of Guardian Unlimited and one of the people behind OnlineBlog.
• Redemption in a Blog - I must have linked to this blog several times now but I don't think I properly endorsed it. Consider this an endorsement, especially if you're a Mozilla user, as it's well written and always interesting.

Ben Trott has sent out an email to everyone who bought a license for Movable Type 3.0 or who requested more information about the MT Developer Network, with information about the beta test period of Movable Type 3.1. Those who received the email were invited to fill out a form to show their interest, and names will be picked at random for the test.

Testing starts on Monday, ahead of the final release at the end of this month, with these new features included.

Just to tease you all even more, here's some screenshots of MT-Blacklist 2.0 RC6, which was released to the beta test team yesterday. I'll also guide you through the new features. Click on the screenshots to view them full size.

Yesterday's post about comment RSS feeds attracted some attention, and so this morning I have implemented the feeds on here. As a guide, this took me about half an hour but that including writing the template from scratch and testing it, so it shouldn't take one of you guys as long.

There's a couple of blogs I have in this installation that I want to keep out of the public eye. One was for a computing project and had 'confidential' information in it - or rather, information that was confidential until a few weeks back and can probably now be deleted as it's no longer needed - and the other is a test blog which includes all manner of randomness that I'd rather the likes of Google didn't pick up on.

Jay has announced that he needs more testers for MT-Blacklist 2.0. If you've been persuaded by what I and others have been saying about it lately then here's your chance to get on board. He's only taking serious offers though, and if your blog is running in a non-typical environment (on Windows using a SQL Lite database with lots of traffic and in a Chinese character set, for example) then Jay would probably love to hear from you.

My little-used Wordpress Test Blog got its first comment spam today. It's odd - I thought Wordpress was supposed to be somewhat immune from comment spam (perhaps through its relative obscurity in comparison with MT), but not only is it not but there aren't that many features built into the system to deal with it if you are hit. There's not even a mass comment editor like there is in MT3 (and MT2 with MT-Blacklist).

There is, however, a plugin called WPBlacklist which emulates the behaviour of MT-Blacklist in Wordpress and will let you import MTB blacklists to use as data sources.

Update:
I'm a dumbass. WP does have some good comment spam control features, as Steve pointed out in the comments. You can force moderation if a comment contains a high number of URLs or add some common spam words, again to force moderation. Both of these features are in MT-Blacklist 2.0 as well. There is also a mass comment editor too, although it's a little more buried than in MT.

Meanwhile, I've received some spam telling me that I'm paying too much for my hosting, and yet the plan they're trying to sell me is more expensive than what I have at present and doesn't have nearly as much disk space or bandwidth.

You may well noticed that I'm not doing Project Blog this year, based on the fact that I haven't been posting every half hour for the past 24 hours. This was mostly because I was out at a friend's 21st birthday party last night and so I wouldn't have been able to blog at the necessary frequency. On the plus side, I do have photos (click on them to enlarge) - the liquid in the third picture is probably best described as a combination of spirits.

In any case, the primary purpose of this post was to wish Daisy and Richard good luck with the final hours of the challenge. Maybe I'll do it next year.

Following Jay's advice, I've added blogspot.com to my local MT-Blacklist. It looks like various SEOs are creating blogs, filling them with poetry with links to porn/viagra/whatever sites interspersed and then spamming comments and referral lists with them.

Because I'm using the new version of MT-Blacklist, then in theory, any comments with blogspot.com URLs in them will need to moderated. They won't be blocked entirely though - they'll just need me to approve them before they're added. That way, legitimate users of Blog*Spot who want to comment here can still do so. That's the great thing about the new MT-Blacklist - you can set certain phrases which, instead of prohibiting the comment, merely queue it up for moderation.

Still, I find it a little ironic that spammers are using Blog*Spot, which is owned by Google, to try to improve their Google rankings.

Well, this is interesting. Christine of Big Pink Cookie and Molly Holzschlag of Molly.com have both switched to Wordpress despite being MT users for as long as I can remember (Molly even wrote a book about using MT). Both links via Photomatt.

I'm getting hit quite hard by trackback spam at the moment, and I haven't necessarily been able to keep up with it. As you know, I'm waiting for the new beta version of MT-Blacklist to come out (any day now) which should protect me but in the meantime I apologise if you come across any, especially as it seems to be rape and incest sites that are being linked (yuck... ) . Thankfully they're mostly hitting old-ish entries (trackbacks are closed automatically on posts that are more than 2 months old) so they shouldn't show up on anything recent.

In this case, IP blocking just isn't working because the spam is coming from a variety of IP addresses now. URL-based blocking, a la MT-Blacklist, should be much more effective once it's in place.

The fact that the email address used for submitting comments to the Comment Spam Clearinghouse is now in my address book is probably an indication of just how much I'm getting.

Finally, on an unrelated note, Daisy wins the Gmail competition by guessing 98p - the actual amount was £1.05 (although we found another 4p after that photo was taken). I think Daisy already has an account, so if Richy, who came second, wants to email me and confirm that he wants it then I'll offer it :) .

Someone at 200.141.76.227 has been giving me nasty rape trackback spam all evening. I'd block it, if I were you.

Update: You can also ban 207.8.131.172 and 198.26.123.36 (thanks Richy) or see Richy's trackback for a whole list of anonymous proxies/zombified computers which may be used for comment/trackback spam.

Today, for the first time, the number of visitor comments was higher than the number of entries. The comment that equalled it was this one by Quanta and the one which passed it was the next one by Pete. Yay for popularity :) .

This is a return of my occasional feature when I run down new blogs that I've recently started reading.

• Mog's Blog - Morgan did a review of FeedDemon recently and his Blog looks interesting.
• cheeaunblog - Lim Chee Aun created the Phoenity theme for Firefox (along with a whole host of other apps) and his blog is very interesting.
• Pink Socks - Hanni is a wonderfully friendly person, and has a very nice theme for her weblog ;) .
• Scribbling.net - I've often used Gina's articles for reference in the past.

Apparently today is International Webloggers' Day, to celebrate weblogs, those who produce them, and their freedom to do so.

[Via Chasing Daisy]

Yesterday, I released a version of IcyBlue for Blogger, making that template available for MT, Blogger and Wordpress now. Since many people are looking at alternative systems right now, I'm going to write this entry comparing the different template systems.

I just added this to my MT3 Review:

As for templates, the default RSS 2.0 template is now a 'non-funky' version that doesn't use any extra namespaces and simply uses native elements. It's pretty much the same as this template provided by Brad Choate except it includes the <link> element for better backwards compatibility. An RSS 1.0 template is still provided, and neither of the two offer full entries, only excerpts. The Atom 0.3 feed is the only to include full entries.

For no real reason other than curioisity, I went through my (newly reorganised) blogroll and took note of what CMS each weblog was using. Here are the results I got:

This is, of course, unscientific, but there have been 4 weblogs where their authors have switched from Movable Type to another system over the past week. What I didn't realise is that so many of my 'blog-buddies' used their own homegrown content management systems (shown as 'Other' in the table).

The MT3DE rollercoaster refuses to stop. Firstly, I suggest you head over to Six Log and read The Movable Type 3.0 FAQ. There has been a lot of clarifications, and some backpeddling with regards to the restrictions, such as:

• The removal of the single CPU restriction in the license
• Users of the Personal Edition can have up to 5 authors instead of 3
• There's an add-on package for Personal Edition which adds one more author and one more user for $10. You can buy multiple packages for more weblogs and authors.
• 'Weblog' now seems to apply to 'sites', in that, apparently, my main blog, sideblog and templates blog would now count as one weblog. Therefore, I'd still have two spare under the free license.

The latter restriction seems to suggest that Six Apart don't want you setting up weblog communinities (such as lockergnome.net or LonghornBlogs) without paying a license fee, and really they aren't going after Joe Weblogger who just likes to have different parts of his site in different weblogs. That's good, and does address most of my concerns.

It also looks like Six Apart have sent an email out, either to all donators or to everyone who registered for the beta test (I fall into both), admitting they could have handled the situation better. I was also told that:

As a thanks for your work and interest, you'll be getting a significant discount on Movable Type 3.0.

Details are apparently on the way next week. Interesting. I also need to retract my earlier comment about donations - I donated $20 and therefore do qualify a discount. I thought I'd donated less than that, hence my rant.

Jay Allen, as ever, has a good analysis of the announecment. Meanwhile, Mark Pilgrim has switched to Wordpress and explains why.

Jay has a good, albeit somewhat speculutive entry about MT3DE which, having read, does make me feel a little better about the whole situation. What annoys me slightly, however, is that this kind of entry is coming from a weblogger and not Six Apart themselves.

Remember the furore over TypePad when it was announced? The blogosphere was full of fear, uncertainty and doubt for a week or so before Six Apart uploaded an FAQ which answered people's questions. In which case, I'd have expected 6A to have taken that on board and ensured that there was something official (and easily accessible) which fully explained the situation. As it is, we've had some vague promotional hype which has been scattered about sixapart.com and movabletype.org and that's lead to all manner of rumours appearing.

While I'm talking about movabletype.org, has anyone else found it more difficult to find information since it was redesigned? It was never the most easy-to-use site before but I had to jump through hoops to find some information that I was after earlier. I'm also not too happy about how easy typekey.com is to get around either.

Although my initial rage is mellowing slightly, like Les I still think that the new restrictions on the number of authors and weblogs are a Very Bad Thing. While these restrictions aren't hardcoded (and yes, I have checked myself), I'm still against the principle.

There's nothing hard coded. I just downloaded the new version and my install with half a dozen authors and a couple dozen blogs works fine just as it did. The licenses are all on the honor system.

That's a quote from this rather active MeFi thread about MT3 Licensing. So if I did upgrade, I wouldn't be in such a bad position. But still, Wordpress is looking like a much nicer concept, though any move will have to wait until the bulk of my exams are other since the transition will probably take quite a while (including setting up redirects and whatnot).

In any case, if I do, this entry has some handy links to help me.

After reading Les' account of the new licensing for Movable Type 3, I'm seriously considering not upgrading and sticking with 2.661.

Blogrolling.com has quite a large security flaw that lets you edit other people's blogrolls. It has already been used to comedy effect - blogsforbush.com now has a link to John Kerry's campaign site.

It does, however, seem apparent that whoever decided to post the details of the flaw didn't bother to inform Tucows first.

Update: The flaw has been fixed. I originally found this via Dan Gillmor and Wizbang rightly argues that Dan's featuring of this before the flaw was fixed was unprofessional and put people's sites at risk.

Had my first legal threat over content on this site today (albeit an informal one). I decided to comply, however. I won't go into it, but in any case, there's one less entry here.

Let's be honest - memes are a great way of producing content when you're really stuck for ideas. "23 Questions" was a good one that quite a few people did, including a few who don't tend to do memes that often (from what I can tell), and I guess it's because it isn't aimed at specific cultures (last week's Friday Five, for example, was great if you had a job, but useless if you didn't).

So, here's an idea. Let's come up with a one-off meme, a bit like 23 Questions. In the comments below, suggest one or two (no more than two) questions that could go in this meme. With a bit of luck, we'll have a good meme going in a few days - once there are enough questions I'll post them in a new entry for everyone to answer. How does that sound?

Questions can be about anything, but try to make them questions that could produce interesting answers and that most people can answer. I'll put two of mine in if we get enough. Post away!

Update: The questions are up!

Checking my stats yesterday I noticed I was getting a few referrals from Kinja, Nick Denton's new meta-weblog guide-type thingy. It turns out that they're syndicating my contact via their Tech channel, along with other greats such as BoingBoing, Wifi Networking News, Dan Gillmor, A Whole Lotta Nothing, Scripting News and Gizmodo. As you can imagine, I'm flattered :D .

Looks like I'll actually have to write about something useful now, then.

I'm a bit busy today (getting my fine head of hair trimmed back and going shopping) so I haven't really got time to go through all of today's pranks, but Ben has a good summary. Also check out StopDesign and MezzoBlue, who have made far too much of an effort today.

In case you didn't hear the buzz earlier in the week, Technorati has had a re-design, and a mighty fine one at that. The site looks a lot cleaner and more professional, and it's much easier to use, which is always important. And as ever, the data is licensed under a Creative Commons license (attribution, non-commercial).

One of its new features is in the members area. If you have claimed one or more blogs, you can log in and view its ranking among the 1 949 561 other weblogs that Technorati was monitoring at the time of this post. So, here are my rankings:

• Neil's World - 1124, with 191 inbound blog links
• Neil's Movable Type Templates 3434 with 89 inbound blog links (this will be high because anyone who has used my templates is encouraged to link back as part of the license)
• Neil's Smaller World - 103316 with 4 inbound blog links (I think most people read this through the RSS feed so this will be lower)

When you consider how many weblogs it is watching, to be only just outside the top 1000 is pretty good going, I'd say. Thanks to everyone who has been linking to me.

Just passed 500 entries on my sideblog, Smaller World. That's not bad considering I started it on the 11th November last year - that's just over 100 entries a month, or an average of around 3 entries a day. Quite good considering I originally started it as an experiment.

I've posted a couple of times about a new feature on the site and I can now reveal that said feature is part of Smaller World. It's not earth-shattering, but may be useful to some of you. Alas, it's still not really ready for primetime - I'd like to wait a little bit before going ahead with it.

Blogrolling reckons I'm on 22 other peoples' blogrolls, which is nice. Okay, so it's somewhat short of the 115 I need to make it to the Blogrolling top 100, but still, it's nice to know that people like what I write.

Of those that are linking to me, Blogged seems to be another interesting British Blogger, who I've added to the aggregator, along with Memoirs of a Geek. If I like them then I'll add them to my blogroll sometime soon.

Now, the rain has stopped, so I'm off for a sandwich and a Guardian.

Scoble linked to an article on Timzilla about Sony's online music store and how it sucks. Turns out Timzilla is also from York, my home town, and according to his ICBM data my parents live a mere 2 miles from him. Small world, eh?

Anyway, that's another RSS feed to add to the aggregator.

I linked to Jake's mini guide to pingable update lists yesterday on Smaller World, but I thought that today, I would write an entry comparing these services and whether you really need to ping them all. So, here goes...

I'm redesigning a site for someone. I won't reveal the details yet (since the site will have to be accepted after it's done) but I need a backend CMS. The main person who will be updating the site isn't particularly computer literate, so it needs to be pretty easy to use.

I'm leaning towards Movable Type as it should fit the bill, but I'm unsure what the arrangements are with regards to Perl on the server. It's a standard Apache server. The current site uses PHP, and presumably has a MySQL database somewhere, so that's not a problem.

So, if I can't use MT, what do I use? I had a look at WordPress (the successor to b2) but from the screenshots it appears to be a bit overkill. TextPattern also looks cool but I don't know anyone who has used it before. I was also thinking about Sofamatic, the backend for Scrapie.co.uk, which works but would be difficult to port to another server since its custom-made for the site. So basically, I want a PHP-based CMS that is open source, gives me a high level of control over the output, can have multiple users, and can be configured such that a relative novice can update it.

There's no real deadline for this but I'd like to get a testbed site running soon, which will be on this server. Any suggestions are welcome. I'll work with MT for now.

So, I wasn't nominated. Again. But on the other hand quite a few notable blogs were, so here's my take on who I want to win, and who will win. Read away...

Today is the second anniversary of my first post to this blog! Over that time, I've managed:

• 1528 entries (including this one)
• 1102 user comments
• 151 trackback pings

Most of all, I'm impressed at how long the site has lasted - I've run a number of sites prior to this and not one has survived as long as this one. It's probably a testiment to Movable Type (and Blogger) that my interest has remained for so long.

Today I go back to university, ahead of my (written) exam on Friday on SQL. I'm going back today to give me time to settle in beforehand. It also meant I could download today's MS Security patches on a reasonably fast connection. Also, last night I moved MT's files so that it is running under cgiwrap , which apparently makes the whole thing more secure. I would have had it there originally but I didn't find the option until a couple of weeks ago.

Through BlogPopuli I found a couple of blogs, both of which had suspiciously similar content about pensions and financial planning. More suspiciously, a lot of the links on the blogs pointed to the same site, which was showing as 'visited'. Indeed, I had visited the site in question - they'd submitted multiple mirrors of that site (a company offering financial management) to the ODP and I'd been clearing submissions from some of the categories that they had spammed. Compare and contrast the following (which aren't linked directkly to avoid referals, spammers don't like their tactics being publicised):

• Exhibit A - http://mjrfm.blogspot.com/
• Exhibit B - http://mjr-news.blogspot.com/
• Exhibit C - http://www-financial-advice-uk.blogspot.com/
• Exhibit D - http://mjrfm.qlogger.com/

Of course, this isn't a new practice, but in the past it's either been unethical porn sites or... well... unethical porn sites that have been doing it (the latter has also been guilty of referer spamming too).

In any case, a quick check at the ODP revealed that at least one of those blogs had been submitted to us, but hadn't yet been reviewed. I can guarantee now that they won't get very far with them, but it's a worry

Since I started using FeedDemon a few weeks ago, I've not really kept the blogroll up to date with some of the new blogs that I've started to read. So, today, I've added the following:

• Blue Goo Ate My Mom - a blogger from Canada (and friend of Firda).
• Brainstorms and Raves which often includes some useful blogging and web design tips.
• Kasia in a Nutshell - a down-to-earth Linux female user
• Belle de Jour - winner of a Guardian British Blog Award
• The Scobleizer Weblog by Robert Scoble, a rather enthusiastic Microsoft employee
• Nick Bradbury - author of FeedDemon and TopStyle, and HomeSite before Macromedia took ownership of it
• Magne! - a fellow ODP editor from Norway
• Mezzoblue - lots of HTML and CSS stuff going on here.

There's also my 'watch list' - blogs that I've started reading in the past week. These haven't yet made it to the blogroll but are ones to watch.

• Leticia McKenzie - 17-year-old girl from the US who openly writes about her fantasies, albeit under a pseudonym
• Dave's Rants - a blogger from Ireland who trackbacked me today. His blog looks quite good, so into the aggregator it goes.
• From the desk of the Evil Meta - another ODP editor who also helps with the ODP Weblog.

Richy has started an interesting discussion about marking out blocks of text so that robots do not index them. The idea is that we could put something like <!-- robots:noindex --> tags around blocks of text, say comments sections on weblogs, and have Google, or any other crawler not index them. The idea is a good one, but it got me thinking and I came up with two ways of doing this now in MT.

One cool feature of BlogStreet is 'Visual Neighbourhoods' - it allows you to visualise the relationship between weblogs, and you can end up was some quite interesting localised maps of the blogosphere. You do need Java and a lot of free memory though.

The screenshot shows the relationship between this site and several others that link to me, or that I link to. Cool, isn't it?

Belle answers back to the negative emails she's been receiving since winning:

If you think the Guardian chose poorly, why not show them up and write something compelling? Reckon your life is more interesting, your insight more relevant, your wit more sparkling? Proud resident of the moral high ground? Think you can make me laugh with pleasure at your clever turns of phrase? That's what the Web's here for. Prove it. I look forward to adding you to my sidebar.

You go girl. Well said.

I've resurrected the Search page which lets you search the site with various extended options. It's based on this template from the MT documentation, but rather than copy and paste the code willynilly, I've been through and tried to make the code more standards compliant, and also more accessible. While a basic form is very easy to do, I'd never used tags like <legend> and <fieldset> before, which are used to indicate groupings of form elements and are encouraged in accessable design. From a standards point of view, <fieldset> is a nice tag to use because it is a block level element and has more semantic meaning on a form than <div> or <p>.

As I'm a generally kind and generous fellow, I'll let you use the code on your own page - the search template is here. I'm actually working towards making most of my templates open like that - keep an eye on this folder for the files. Unlike my downloadable templates, these will be 'live', in that if I change a page on the site the file there will change too.

The Guardian British Blog Awards results have been announced, and, as expected, I didn't win this time (or last time). Maybe next year.

On the other hand, this time I had heard of some of the entries. London Underground Tube Diary was a runner-up in the 'Best Specialist' category, which I'd come across a few times, and the winner Pepys' Diary will be familiar to anyone who was interested in blogging at the beginning of this year.

Belle de Jour, which I hacked up an RSS feed earlier in the week for, won 'Best Written', and quite rightly too. I wish my life was as interesting, and my writing skills as good as hers are.

LinkMachineGo, a daily link collection that this site has been featured on in the past, also got a mention.

This is perhaps an indication of how often I check my activity log, but I've only just noticed that weblogs.com now replies with the following message if you send more than one ping from the same weblog within a 30 minute period:

Thanks for the ping, however we can only accept one ping every half-hour. It's cool that you're updating so often, however, if I may be so bold as to offer some advice -- take a break, you'll enjoy li...

I'm assuming the missing words at the end are 'life more' - pity the string gets truncated. Still, it's a bit nicer than the rather blunt messages you usually get from other pingable sites.

Update: Actually, it appears this message has been appearing for some time now, but because my pings to weblogs.com usually time out this hasn't appeared. It seems to be a bit more responsive now, which is good.

While I was writing this message a bloke from DHL delivered a rather large box addressed to my dad, which had been shipped over from Limerick in Ireland. I'm wondering whether it's my old laptop that's been fixed and returned, but since it's not addressed to me I'm not going to open it.

It seems both Gretchen and Ben are having site trouble. I found an alternative URL for Ben but no such look for Gretchen, whose other site www.gretchenpirillo.com has also disappeared. Very strange.

Meanwhile, I've been amusing myself with Muffin Films. Like Rathergood.com but less offensive and more... er... muffinly.

Update: Ben's site is back (check the comments), and Chris explains what happened to Gretchen's site, for which I have to pretty much echo Scoble on the matter.

Smaller World has now hit 101 entries, after running for around 3 weeks - not bad, considering it was originally an experiment. I think I'll be keeping it around for a while - it's been great to blog interesting things that normally wouldn't be worth a whole entry here.

That image shows how many posts I've made in each month since I started blogging. It's particularly interesting to see that my postings have increased as a result of switching to Movable Type as opposed to Blogger.

As you know, BlogRolling got hacked, and several bloggers (in particular Dave, Ken and Les) have suggested that they would want to use something similar, but perhaps on their own site - basically a decentralised system that doesn't rely on one site. Therefore, if that sites messes up, you're okay. So, here's a thought barf on the subject - basically transferring my thoughts to the computer in a not-necessarily logical order. It's also known as brainstorming or the more politically correct 'mind-mapping', since the former may be offensive to those who suffer from migraines, apparently. Anyway...

Someone hacked BlogRolling.com and Jason isn't best pleased. A backup has been restored but for 7 hours all Blogrolling users had their blogrolls replaced with links to one particular blog, which now appears to be down, probably because of all of the traffic. From what I gather from various other sources is that the site affected is nothing to do with this (a message was posted there before it died), however some people still sent angry messages accusing the site owner of being a hacker and various other undesirable things.

Let's hope Jason gets everything fixed and that Laura, the owner of the site in question, doesn't get her house firebombed or something. And that the hacker that did do it does.

I'm experimenting with a side-blog, which I've named 'Neil's Smaller World'. It replaces the list of recent entries on the sidebar, which wasn't all that useful anyway, but also has its own URL and its own RSS feed. Which in itself is interesting because the <link> element points to the article it links to, not an entry permalink. This was done using the Collect plugin for MT and the following code:

<MTCollect tags="a">
<MTCollectThis><$MTEntryBody$></MTCollectThis>
<MTCollected lastn="1"><link><$MTCollectedAttr attr="href"$></link></MTCollected>
</MTCollect>

I have no doubt that there's an easier way, but Collect looks interesting so I wanted to try it out on something. It may be possible that I can tell you not only how many words, comments and trackbacks an entry has, but also the number of images and links too. But I'll save that for another time. In the meantime, enjoy the four links I've put in there already. I'll try to keep it running but if I lose interest then I'll dump it.

As part of its Stop Fees NOW! campaign, the NUS has set up a campaign blog with updates from party conferences and the like. It's done in Blogger Pro and they're working on an RSS feed.

The national demonstration against topup fees is two weeks on Saturday down in London - I'm debating whether to go or not. It's apparently only £1 to go so I may consider it :).

Oooh... Bill Bailey has a blog. He's the slightly odd comedian who is a panellist Never Mind The Buzzcocks and occasionally appears on Just A Minute on Radio 4.

Only one entry there so far, but, heh. Credit goes to Chasing Daisy, who also links to FlashBlogging, an idea based on the Flash Mobs concept. Interesting.

Now here's an interesting webring: Leeds Blogs. It's for blogs (duh) based in Leeds and the rest of West Yorkshire (although apparently Harrogate may also be considered). While I'm technically living in York, I still spend 7 months of the year in my little room in Bradford, so I've applied to join in the hope that it will count.

It appears that I am not among many bloggers in the area - there only 4 other blogs in the ring. Still, I shall have to read them and see if they are any good :).

Before I forget, it's exactly a year since neilturner.me.uk came on the scene :). This means that I've been using Movable Type for a whole year now, which, despite two reinstalls (one of which was unavoidable) remains my favourite blogging system.

In total, I've been blogging for 20 months now - the first 8 in Blogger and the remaining 12 in MT. The second anniversary of the blog is in January.

Another interesting fact - this is entry #1234 .

I found this by chance through SEB - The Banned Books Project. Normally I wouldn't link to things like this, since I'm not really a book reader, but seeing as Solonor has used my template, I thought I might as well give him some kudos.

There are a couple of bugs that have surfaced in the template (namely a missing <div> tag somewhere) which I will fix in due course. I will also unleash this altered template that I'm using now as 'Bluefade Classic'.

This bit of code will allow me to claim ownership of this Blog on BlogStreet :)

It's been a while since I last had a tutorial up here, so here's a new one about the <ttl> tag in RSS 2.0. It's an optional element that gives to the 'time to live' time, in minutes, for the channel in question. It might not sound that interesting, but if you have a very popular RSS feed, it may save you a bit of cash on bandwidth costs.

The Syndiction Format Formerly Known As Atom 0.2 is now out, and Mark has a variety of specs, example feeds and Movable Type templates for you to enjoy.

As you'd expect, I've updated my Atom feed to conform with the new spec, which validates in the newly updated Feed Validator. I have made a few changes; namely the language has been changed from 'en' to 'en-gb', my email address uses escaped characters to protect it from email harvesters and like Mark I use the Dublin Core <dc:subject> element so that post subjects appear in the feed. Currently that's the only way it can be done, apparently - no allowance for post subjects has been included in the spec as of yet.

Of course, I'm still unaware of any newsreaders that understand Atom, but then it is only at version 0.2 so any that add support now will only have to recode when 0.3 comes out, and again with 0.4, and so on. Once it hits 1.0 I imagine it will become more widely adopted, although the popularity of RSS means it's likely that it won't become the de-facto syndication format. Probably a bit lig Ogg Vorbis to RSS's MP3, or PNG to RSS's GIF - the better format but without the same awareness.

Like Meredith, I am claiming this blog for my Technorati Profile.

And yes, the title for this post was inspired by 2 Unlimited.

According to the BlogShares top 500, I'm ranked #227. My share price is a ridiculous $1323.45 and the blog is worth $43,204.73 in total. Does that officially make me a 'D'-list blogger?

This year's Blogathon is officially over, having raised $92,871.45 - a pretty impressive amount, by anyone's standards.

Unfortunately Firda had to drop out because her mother became ill and had to be taken to hospital, however I will still be honouring my pledge. It's only fair.

Sponsorships are still open and will be until some time on Tuesday, so you can still pledge money if you want.

It's getting late, so I'm going to steal Andy's post about this subject:

Discovered that Blogroots has a page created from other blogs that discuss blogging tools. By editing MovableTypes Categories, every time you post about a weblogging post, it automatically trackbacks to the blogpopuli page. Instructions (which are easy to follow if you are using MovableType are available at Blogroots : TrackBack How-To

As you can imagine, I've added that as a feature. Adam Kalsey, Richy C and Six Log are already in on the act, so I'm in good company.

While I was there I also found this Manual Trackback script, which I'll add at some point for those unable to ping me. But not tonight. Tonight, I need sleep. Badly.

There's a Movable Type Global Meetup on August 11th in various cities around the world, according to Movable Type News. The nearest one to me is in London, and, although I probably could go, I'd ideally like to wait until I know that a few other bloggers that I'm familiar with are going. Of the three bloggers on my blogroll that I've met before, Richy and Kevin are Movable Typists (Kevin is also my cousin's husband, which is why I've met him before... :)), but I imagine they'll both be working, what with the 11th being a Monday. There's also Andy, Richard and Sian who are Brits and MT users who I've yet to meet, and there's Ben who's a Brit living in Sweden but moving to Italy.

The annoying thing about Meetup is that the map links point to Yahoo Maps. Which is fine for US users but useless for Brits since Yahoo doesn't offer that service to the UK audience. I want London, UK, not London, TX.

Oh, in case it interests you, this post has an ID of 1111. Even though it's only #1089.

This is my first post today, so, as you may be able to guess by the time, I'm not taking part in this year's Blogathon, although I have pledged US$10 to Firda. I'd toyed with the idea of taking part, but I'm not the sort of person who can stay awake for 24 hours solid, unfortunately. I was also hoping to take part in a group weblog with some of the ODP editors but we never really got anything organised, and also the editor forums have been offline for the past 3 days because the server they are on is being replaced (they should be back up in a couple of hours though).

So what have I done today? Well, the intention was to visit the open day at the Great Northern Railway works in Doncaster, to take photos of the various steam trains there. Instead, I ended up taking picture of canal boats in Manchester. I'd better explain, hadn't I?

This is a handy tip for anyone using Movable Type that should make posting and rebuilding entries a little quicker. Follow these instructions, and you may shave a second or two off the time it takes to generate your templates.

There are two default templates which come with Movable Type that, by default, are rebuilt every time you publish or update an entry, even though the content of the files doesn't change. So, to speed things up, we're going to tell MT that we only want these templates rebuilt when we specifically tell it to.

The first is the RSD (Really Simple Discovery) file. This is a new file, introduced in MT 2.60, which tells other content management systems what you are running and what APIs your CMS supports; in MT's case, these are the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs, so that they know how to communicate with each other. This file only needs to be rebuilt when you upgrade MT to a new version, so we can safely stop it from being rebuilt incessantly. To do this, log into your MT installation, open your weblog and then click on 'Templates'. Select 'RSD', and then clear the tick in the box besides 'Rebuild this template automatically when rebuilding index templates'. Then click Save.

The second template is the style sheet. Now, if you're like me, you will actually update this quite a bit, but there's a rather cool tweak you can do that will actually rebuild it when you save it (instead of having to click Save and then Rebuild). It only works if your style sheet does not use MT template tags in it, but I can't imagine many people will have ones that do so it's probably not an issue for 99.9% of you.

Do the same as you did for the RSD template, but in the 'Link this template to a file' box, type in 'styles-site.css', or whatever the filename of your style sheet is (it should match the filename in the 'Output File' box). Now, whenever you click 'Save', the style sheet will be rebuilt automatically.

You can actually do this with any template in MT that doesn't use MT tags - there aren't any there by default other than the style sheet, but you may have added your own. Otherwise, if you do that with pages that do use MT tags, your pages will be full of <$MTEntryBody$> tags (and the like) instead of your actual entries.

It appears that even Greenpeace are getting in on the act by launching a weblog. It's a nice bit of table-less design (unlike the main site) and isn't as 'pushy' as I'd expected it to be. It's powered by Movable Type 2.63 too.

It also carries the following disclaimer:

The opinions expressed on this website are the entirely personal opinions of various members of Greenpeace who should probably be busy working on some highly important and time consuming project but instead choose to make their opinions known to the rest world in the naïve belief anybody else wants to know, and those from outside Greenpeace foolhardy enough to venture into the debate. The opinions have nothing at all, absolutely, whatsoever, for all time and in any way, shape or form at all, anything to do with Greenpeace, probably never will do, definitely never ought to, and should not be construed to be so. In fact, we wash our hands of it all, completely (especially Gillo's bits).

Glad to see someone in the legal department has a sense of humour.

A couple of blogs on my blogroll have been posting about Tom Watson, who, as well as being a Labour MP for West Bromwich East (as in the eastern bit of West Bromwich), is also a blogger. Today I found another one through this entry on Simon Willison's Weblog, this time for Richard Allan, a Liberal Democrat MP for Sheffield Hallam.

Not only that, but Tom links to an article on Guardian Online which goes through politcal blogs. As it is, they are the only two MPs with blogs, but there are other political blogs with a UK focus.

Now all I need to do is lobby my local Labour MP, Hugh Bayley, into setting one up :). Actually, his site isn't too bad in terms of content (even though it uses a standard Labour template), with plenty of news about what he's been doing for the citizens of York. It's also why the next general election is going to be a nightmare for me - I want to vote LibDem, but Mr Bayley is such a damn good MP that I don't want to lose ham. Bah.

The Bush administration is close to reaching the 66% mark of its 4 year term (according to Is it over yet?) so naturally we'll start to see the campaigns for the elections in 2004 take shape.

Howard Dean, who seems to be the forerunner in the Democrat presidential campaign, has a blog, cheesily entitled Blog for America. A wise move that should bring him brownie points in the online world, at least. It's even powered by Movable Type, and has geeky things like trackback enabled. And there's comments too.

Of course, I'm bound to have my criticisms, and other than the name which I find immensley patronising (even though it is aimed at Americans and not anyone else), the style sheet does not work properly in Mozilla - all the text is in Times New Roman and uses the default link colours. IE users get a rather more attractive Verdana and Georgia look. I've not looked at the sheet in detail, but I reckon it's a server issue as the stylesheet is sent as text/html instead of the more logical text/css . Mozilla cares about these things, you see.

Link found via BlogDex, which has admittedly been tracking it for nearly 3 weeks, but hey, I've been on holiday, so nyah.

It's taken a little over a week, but now all of the old Blogger entries are imported and published. I'll apologise now for the quality of some of my earlier posts, as to be honest, for the first few months I was blogging complete drivel. But you may find something useful in there. Some of the quite frankly useless posts have been removed though, and others have been edited slightly.

Part of the reasoning behind my republishing of the old posts is that some of them were quite good (particularly the later ones), and it would be a shame to lose them. By republishing them here, they are back in view of the public, and may even be of use to someone. Well, I can but hope that will be the case.

I still have the job of republishing some of my earlier Movable Type entries, which lack categories and excerpts - that will wait until after my vacation.

Remember when I started playing with the Google API? Well, I've updated the page again, and the list of links is somewhat more interesting.

Richy and Quanta feature on there, as does Lockergnome Bits & Bytes, and the old blog of ODP meta editor enarra (it's now at sparklemint.com). So far, predictable.

Then there's Digital Man's Outtakes, a US blogger who also seems to read Lockergnome, and has several of the 'usual suspects' on his blogroll. It looks like he's just had a birthday too.

The 'Swaelu web design cooperative' also features on the list, but it appears to be down. However, SQLServerCentral does work, although quite why it appears on the list I don't know - after all I use MySQL for this, not MS's offering.

My ICQ Unified Messaging Centre also appears. Fun.

Finally, we have another UK blogger in the form of More A Way Of Life.

The list this time certainly seems to be somewhat more relevant than before, when the links it found were rather random. I'm sure someone will offer a better explanation, but perhaps Google's algorithm has just got better or something?

Meanwhile, I'd like to welcome Lost Pilgrim and David Raynes to the blogroll. They've been there for a few days now but I never got around to announcing it formally.

Having gone through the archives, it looks it isn't just me who's had a problem with their permalinks being somewhat less than permanent. I've had to fix links to C:\Pirillo.exe, Inside Gretchen's Head and bunda.org - in the case of the latter, the permalink format has changed twice. I've not even started on Absoblogginlutely...

You could argue that I'm being fanatical about this but then maybe this is my ODP editing side showing through. Broken links aren't useful for anyone, so I do like to be able to fix them. Fortunately Movable Type does have a search facility, so I can search for a blog URL and find all references to it, and then make the corrections.

Only 100 of the old Blogger entries remain for processing, which means 260 or so are now done and the archives now go back as far as March 14th. If it weren't for the fact that I've had a number of dead links to fix, I'd probably already be finished, but hey, a dead link isn't much use to anyone, is it?

I'll aim to get the remaining posts ready for when I go on holiday. Tomorrow I'm probably going to Leeds so I'll have a little less time, and the weekend will most likely be spent running around like a headless chicken when I realise I don't have half the stuff I need to go away with.

Yeah, I've been hooked in on the Big Brother thing again this year. In fact, I could probably create a Big Brother category based on the posts that I've imported from the old blog. But anyway, I digress.

During my travels today, I uncovered an unofficial Big Brother 4 Blog, which seems to offer an interesting commentary, even if it does read like a Sun reader with an axe to the grind. But at least it's MT-powered.

Now all I need is a 'Which Big Brother 4 Housemate Are You?' poll, and I'm done. I'm almost certain to come out as being Jon though. The fact he doesn't have a blog himself is quite surprising.

Re-editing my old entries is taking its time, but I've now completed June and have the final 7 days of May done, up to my 18th birthday last year. It's been great looking back at what I did, and there have been some interesting posts, such as my views on the first anniversary of 9/11, switching over to Mozilla full time, going to university, getting my A-level results, going on holiday...

Although there's also a lot of posts where it appears I was blogging just for the sake of filling space (the word 'boring' and its friends crop up a fair bit), some have been genuinely interesting, and it's been nice to be able to read them again.

I didn't make this too clear last night so I'll explain: the Blogger entries are imported into the database, but only in 'Draft' mode, so they won't appear on the public side until I change their status. I'm doing this to each entry individually, so that I can do the following:

• Fix any outdated or invalid markup (back then I didn't know so much about HTML semantics)
• Add proper titles to every post
• Remove a few entries that are no longer worth keeping, such as one linking to an eBay auction that had been deleted, without any real commentary
• Add excerpts to every post
• Categorise every post

My progress so far is good - all of the entries for July, August and September are done, plus most of June, so the public archives now go all the way back to June 13th 2002.

There are still 218 entries to add, but I'll get there eventually.

However, I shouldn't have been so mouthy about disk space. I'm using over 80MB now, so I only have 40MB of free space. Though that was after clearing 10MB of records from the Referral logger.

I can't remember if I mentioned it, but some time ago the site which had my old Blogger entries got hacked, and everything was lost. However, seeing as I have more disk space now, I've decided to import them back in, which means the archives will now go all the way back to January 2002, and will be searchable.

That is, they will be searchable once I publish them. Because Blogger is more 'primitive' than Movable Type, the entries have no proper title (just the first 5 words), no excerpts and no categories, so I'm going to go through each and sort them out. It'll also be a good chance to look back at my first 8 months of blogging, although I seem to remember some of the earlier entries were on the lines of "Today I ate some cheese. Do you like cheese? (Comments: 0)".

It'll also explain why the entry ID for this entry jumps from 671 to 1030 - I've added another 360 entries.

A few weird things may have been going on today here, but don't worry, everything is largely under control. You may have noticed that the 4 previous entries suddenly disappeared - this is because I was still posting to the old server and not the new one, since the DNS hadn't updated, and the new server contained a snapshot of my files from Wednesday and nothing more recent. Fortunately I exported the new entries so they're saved, along with the comments, and have now been imported back.

Andy has moved Absoblogginlutely to a new URL: http://absoblogginlutely.net/. It's now MT-powered, too, and running on Apache rather than a Microsoft-based solution.

He says he will update both sites for the time being, but you'd probably be best updating your blogrolls now :).

I think Carol's Chaotic Collection of Curiosities holds the record for the longest blogroll I've ever seen. Still, at least I'm on it :).

Jake informs me that this blog is now worth $7 000 on BlogShares. I just hope that it indexes MovableType.org while I'm on the Recently Updated list - the outgoing link value is $25 000 :-D. That'll boost the value a bit.

Looks like my friend Anthony Kinyon has stepped into the blogging world. I'll see if I can convince him to switch to MT :).

2.64 seems to be running fine, by the way - as I said, it's a maintenance release so there aren't really any new features, but it should be less buggy. Not that it was terribly buggy in the first place, but the fewer bugs, the better.

I am now top of Google for "Neil Turner"! Yay! :-D

You may have read about how the web's most well-known tech tabloid, The Register, published an article about weblog 'noise' on Google. The idea is this: weblogs, with their "idle chatter", get in the way of 'real' results, so they should be removed.

Google has said that it is planning a weblog search engine, but it has never said that it will remove weblogs from its database. Doing so would be difficult - I'm sure as soon as any decision like that was made, there would be pages telling you how to make Google think your site is legitimate.

Ben Hammersley poured some sense on the flames earlier in the week, making the point that sites which make it easy for Google to index their content. The Guardian have always done this, by way of a simple design that is easy for the crawler to interpret, and a robots.txt file that only blocks out its Breaking News section - everything else in its archive, which spans 4 1/2 years, can be indexed. No wonder Guardian articles appear so often in results.

Weblogs have a similar approach. By default, they come with very basic designs, which have been formatted with correct header and paragraph tags. These can easily be read by Google's crawler. Most blogs update frequently, and just about every blog has a blogroll, so there's plenty of links between blogs, thus leading to potentially higher page ranks.

It's not rocket science - any site can do this. Even I can do it.

The whole discussion is summed up in a column by Neil McIntosh in today's Guardian Online entitled 'The Blog Clog Myth'. To be honest, I never take anything I read in The Register as being entirely accurate as Fred Langa said last year, it is merely a tabloid.

The creator of the CMS behind Gay.com UK came across my burnt trouser snake article, and has written a blog entry about it, which was awfully nice of him :).

It's only fair that I give him a heads up. Interestingly, he's yet another person to have received a flying visit from Morbus Iff (mine was last month). It seems like you only have to say 'AmphetaDesk' and he's there before you've even blinked.

Remember yesterday when I complained that I'd not written much for LG B&B? Well, I pushed through 6 entries today. Most of them are from BBC News Online, but I got a couple from The Register and CNet News.com. Yay for me.

You may already know that there's a new version of Blogger on the way, but until recently you couldn't test it. Fortunately you now can, so I resurrected my Blogger account (I had to retrieve my password since I've not used it in over 6 months) and had a fiddle around.

The new interface is great. Unlike the old one, it actually works well on Mozilla, and isn't boring and grey. That said, it's more of an evolution rather than a revolution, so users who are migrating to the new system won't have too much trouble finding the options.

It also outputs some nicer code - here's a test page that I knocked up using one of the 5 built-in styles (no doubt more are on the way). Certainly, the prospect of getting the pages to validate by the W3C specs is now a possibility, although it's use of the line break between paragraphs means it may not do so well in the accessability arena. But it's a step in the right direction.

It's not enough to make me go back to Blogger though - I love Movable Type too much.

Now that the referral script is running, I've been getting a better idea of what people type in to get here. Apparently, I'm #2 on Google for 'my weblog', ranking a little above Aaron Swartz who runs the Google weblog.

Interestingly I also got a referral for the search term 'anti-paypal' from a user on paypal.com. Perhaps Paypal's staff were scouring the net for bad publicity. As it was, it was probably triggered by this rather random comment on an entry where I complained about Paypal not wanting to use my bank details; a problem now alleviated by the introduction of Switch on the service.

I also seem to get referrals from people looking for product keys for Windows XP and Server 2003, which probably relates to this entry.

Mark Pilgrim, amongst other many other things, linked to this set of buttons yesterday. I've seen them around - Ben uses them, for example.

Ben only uses 3, which link to his RSS 1.0 feed, FOAF profile and position on GeoURL. I've found that I could link to rather more - 21, in fact. No kidding.

Because there are indeed 21 images to load, I've made this an extended entry, so you'll need to open it to view them. Here goes....

It's almost exactly 7 months since I started using Movable Type, and now I've finally hit the big five-oh-oh. Yay :).

Strange. The counter at the bottom of the sidebar says that there are 481 entries, yet MT itself reports 484. What happened to the other 3?

Update: Thanks to Richy's comment, I found the cause. 3 posts from February were stuck on 'Draft' status, so they wouldn't have shown up on the public side. That's now fixed.

Congratulations to Paula Radcliffe for winning the London Marathon, by the way. Nice to see a fellow asthmatic beating the odd world record here and there.

I just bought 800 free shares in AbsoBlogginLutely. My theory is that by linking to him again his share price may go up and thus my portfolio should improve too :).

I'm already cashing in on the news that Chris Pirillo is no longer at TechTV - I originally bought 5 shares at $14.13/share and now they're worth $38.09 each :-D.

Something tells me that BlogShares is going to have a major effect on the world of blogging as we know it. Whether it'll be good or bad I don't know, but I'm a little worried that people will now send pointless trackback pings to highly-valued blogs just to try and boost their share prices, or do what I'm doing... :-o

Actually, Andy does often post some quite interesting things, so you may well like to check his blog out more often. Several of my posts have been reposts of stuff I've read on his blog.

And finally, this post is coming to you from Mozilla 1.3 on my Mandrake 9.0 partition. I thought I'd check it out for a bit.

After failing to win a Bloggie for 'Best Designed' weblog, Kymberlie has won an Anti-Bloggie for 'Worst Meme Bandwagoner', whatever that means. Congratulations... I think...

The full list of 'winners' (losers?) is at http://www.antibloggies.com/3/. And I didn't win one of those either.

I want to cry.

So, the Bloggies have finally been announced. There are a few small surprises, but on the whole, I think the winners were very deserving of the awards. The full list of winners (and the prizes they have won) is on Farivue, but here's my commentary on the subject:

Cripes. Google has bought Blogger. I didn't see that one coming.

Ben has got a nice brief analysis with links to more blogs on the subject, and at time of writing, at least 79 other blogs are carrying the story. Also check out Slashdot.

If it interests you, this is the 350th entry.

Wahey - OnlineBlog gave me a link from their Bork Bork Bork Article! Thanks :D

It seems that just about everyone on my blogroll decided to update their blogs yesterday. So far today, I've read new anecdotes from Chris, Gretchen, Jake, Lori, Tony, Richy, Jeremy, Meredith, Kymberlie and Kim, along with the Google Weblog.

It might also have something to do with the fact that I wasn't using the net much last night since I couldn't connect. Unfortunately Bradford only has 240 dial-up lines, and all of them tend to be in use in the evenings, so it can take many attempts to get on. Which is frustrating, but then again, it is cheaper than using an external ISP.

Gretchen reminded me again why I still have that link to her on my blogroll. She's looking for suggestions for how to climb the BlogRolling top 100 - she's at #8 at the moment but has aspirations for the top spot (don't we all...).

Anyway, in amongst a rather witty post that had me giggling in parts are some ideas, and I imagine she'd welcome your comments. And there's some meringue pie there too, amongst other 'things'.

Of course, I'm not even in the BlogRolling top 100 - to get there, I need another 80 links from you people, on top of the 10 I already have. Hmm.

There was a time when I could spend a good half hour browsing through the BlogDex top 50, picking out interesting articles that other bloggers have linked to, whether they were humourous, technology-related or whatever. But now, even with Popdex, I find barely anything of interest on either. Why? Because of this damn war with Iraq.

The lists are now full of news and commentary about dossiers, smoking guns, weapons inspectors, presentations and all sorts - at time of writing, I think a mere 5 out of the 50 articles on Blogdex's front page are not related to the fight to topple Saddam.

While I'm sure it's great for all you warbloggers out there, it's as boring as hell for me. The war doesn't interest me much, mainly because the arguments about it have dragged on for so long that I've almost switched off from it. In general, I'm anti-war, in that I'm worried about the levels of civilian casulaties and what the US will do to Iraq if/when Saddam is removed. Don't get me wrong, Saddam is a tyrant, and a quite frankly insane one at that, but the Iraqi people surely aren't.

So come on, let's talk about nice, friendly, happy, peaceful, funny things.

Okay, apologies for the title. Um, anyway, what I'm trying to say is there's a new recruit to the blogroll - The Neurotic Fishbowl That Is My Life. I've been reading it on and off for the past few days and decided it was worthy of inclusion. It now means it's the 10th link in the 'other' category (funny how miscellaneous categories are always the largest) and the 23rd overall. It's also the second blog on the blogroll to be written by someone with a name derived from Kymberlie, or Kimberly, or Kimbear...

My trackback statistics depress me slightly. Over the past 20 days, I've had all of 5 pings, and all of them are from beebware. Ping me, dangit!

You may also be interested in this petition: "Licensing of Live Music in England and Wales". You must be a UK citizen to sign it, but I strongly recommend you do. If the law is changed, bars that have live music without a special license may be fined up to £20 000 or their owners sent to prison for 6 months, which is kinda stupid, IMO. Thanks to Vick, a friend from college who I met up with again recently, for forwarding that link.

Gretchen has just come up with another classy article, this time she's dreaming about Movable Type.

Oh come on, even I'm not that sad. I may dream about one of my friends presenting a children's TV show on Channel 4, but that's different.

Oh yeah, you may want to check out the nominees for the 2003 Bloggies, and vote, if you feel like it. Firda and Chris are both nominated, so I'll be voting for them. The nominations are quite good too - certainly most of those that I've seen are deserving of awards.

In fact, Chris is up against Slashdot, so he needs all the hope he can get. Go on, vote for him, you know you want to :).

A new feature on this blog comes in the form of ComeBack, based on an idea by David Raynes. It allows comments to be sent to posts in the same way that trackback pings are currently sent; the idea being that if you were reading a post via another site (or perhaps via a news agregator like NetNewsWire or AmphetaDesk), you would be able to submit comments from the application and have them appear on the blog.

While take-up will almost certainly be quite slow, it seems like the near feature, and with a bit of luck future MT releases will include it as standard.

You can download it from David's site, where full installation instructions are given. And yes, that was me who initially couldn't get it working - one of the 4 files necessary to get it working was missing from the archive, effectively locking me out of MT until I disabled it. It's fixed now, anyway.

Another enhancement is the addition of a list of related entries on each entry page - this is another vain attempt to get people browsing around the site a bit more, and comes courtesy of the related entries plugin. It's used by several other Movable Typers so it should work fine...

It's exactly one year today that I started the old blog with this entry. During the past year, I have

• Changed hosts twice
• Changed blogging tool once (from Blogger to MT)
• Made a major change to the design 6 times
• Posted more entries than I'd like to think
• Gained several regular readers (hi Kim, Richy, Andy, Quanta, Ciaran, MODatic and everyone I've forgotten :))
• Inspired at least one other person to start blogging

All in all, I'm happy with my blogging, and hope to continue it for as long as I can. Thanks for reading - after all, a blog is nothing if no-one reads it.

Ben and Mena have announced a new feature for the next version of MT: improved text formatting. It will make it much easier to create entries with special formatting, which can only be a good thing. SixApart provides the juicy details.

It's New Years Eve, so I guess that means I have to do one of these 'looking back' posts. 2002 was an interesting year: it was the year that I:

• legally became an adult (in the UK at least)
• moved away from home
• chose, and later attended a university
• got a computer of my very own
• did poorly in my A-level exams
• stopped using Internet Explorer
• was rejected for a bank account, then got one from another bank
• started a weblog, then restarted it again
• got a webcam
• visited France and Belgium, over 3 separate trips abroad
• gained a social life
• watched my first DVD
• first ventured into Linux
• made new friends, and lost some others
• started to learn Java
• witnessed another of my cousins getting married
• became an editall at the ODP, and met some of the editors in person

As for looking ahead - I'm unsure as to whether I'll be going out tonight, to celebrate the new year, or if I'll be staying in with my parents. I have exams in mid-January, and again in June, then a long summer when I'll probably find myself a job. Then in the autumn, my grandparents celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary. But other than that, I have no idea what 2003 will bring.

Ciaran has a new post on his blog journal, but actually it was me who posted it :). He's up in Scotland at the moment, and sent a txt msg to me to ask me to update his blog journal for him.

Ciaran uses his own, homegrown blogging system, instead of a software package like MT or b2. He wrote it in Perl, and it currently supports trackback and pinging to Weblogs.com. The entry composition form is a combination of a LiveJournal-esque style and MT - you can specify a current mood (happy, sad etc.), current location and what music you are listening to, and there's provision for extended entries like in MT. Entries are saved in text files on the server.

Although it is a mere 13KB in size, compared to Movable Type's 2MB when fully installed, it doesn't yet support editing or deletion of posts - those have to be done manually. But it has the potential to be a good basic blogging system, if Ciaran keeps it going.

For those of you who don't read Revolving Duck, you're missing on a wee bit of a saga. Basically Kim's server burped on Movable Type and denied any access to her CGI-bin folder, making her blog pretty difficult to update.

Well, she's now using b2, the same software as DaveZilla. Unlike MT, it's powered by PHP, and is a little more instantaneous; the pages are generated when requested, rather than saved statically when an entry is published. I still prefer MT, but b2 is certainly the next best thing; certainly, it's better than Blogger.

Just come across my page The Blogging Ecosystem, which shows all of the blogs I like to, and those that link back. Okay, so BlogRolling already does that, but only if the other person is using BlogRolling, so this is a little more useful. It's also better than Google because it only shows blogs, and it seems to be able to interpret BlogRolling JavaScript code, which Google cannot.

You can also look at Dive into Mark's Recommend Reading page, which includes a few blogs that I recognise and do (very) occasionally read, such as Doc Searls, Aint Too Proud To Blog and Lockergnome Bits and Bites.

Talking of which, I think Randy's blog is up for the chop from the Blogroll. It was last updated on September 12th...

You know what? I think Tony's on to something with the Creative Commons license. Certainly, that's the license I'd like to follow - maybe I'll implement it sometime.

It seems that the saviour of Christmas, Santa Claus, has his own blog. Allegedly.

(thanks to Gretchen for the link)

...being third on Google for "large blow up penguin".

As well as being the first day of advent, and the day when parents finally come to terms with the fact that Christmas really is coming and there's nothing they can do about it, it is also World AIDS day, and so I feel it is only right to Link and Think.

Although I am, to the best of my knowledge, HIV Negative, and do not know anyone who has admitted to being HIV Positive, I imagine that to find out you have the HIV virus must be devastating. The fact that there is no real cure, the fact that you know you will die a slow, painful and premature death should the disease take hold, the fact that you can't have intimate content with others without protection - to have to face that must be terrible.

While sadly this can't be said about countries in the third world, it is probably fair to say that in the western world AIDS can be stopped, or at least marginilaised, if people were more responsible and didn't get into situations where HIV can be transmitted.

Millions of people die from AIDS every year worldwide. This shouldn't happen. Please, think.

www.worldaidsday.org

Ciaran has enabled TrackBack on his blog, so I'm trackbacking him to see if it works. It's especially cool when you consider that he wrote his blogging software himself, instead of being a lazy arse like me and using something that has already been written. But then again, I don't know Perl. Well, not yet anyway.

Despite thinking that I had already added myself to GlobeOfBlogs.com, it appears I haven't. So, naturally, I've done something about it.

The directory is quite good because as well as listing your blog under its physical location, it can also be listed under up to 5 topics, plus under birthdates, gender or name.

The other news is that I have a son :). Well, at least I do on BlogTree; beebware has added this as one of 7 parent blogs.

7 parents? That must have been one big... never mind.

Interestingly, six of the blogs I currently link to had updated within the past 3 hours (at time of posting). We all must have got brainwaves at the same time...

I think Chris is about to explode. Allow him, Cheyenne, Hoopty or indeed Gretchen to explain.

Maybe I need to add an 'alcohol' category to this blog...

Thanks to a link on beebware's site, I've submitted my link to yet another blog directory: The Pepys Project. It sorts blogs by country, and you'll be pleased to know that there are over 130 blogs in the UK listed there. The site is approaching 1500 links; if yours is #1500 then you get a special mention on the Milestones page, which I suppose is nice.

Actually, the ODP has a very good list of Blog Directories, maybe I should work through some of them...

When Richy trackbacked the last entry, it originally came up with 3 pings. Similarly bunda previously pinged an entry 6 times accidently. Hmmm... I wonder if there's a bug in Movable Type somewhere...

(and yes, I've created a new TrackBack post category, since this is the fourth post on the subject)

Richy C, aka dmoz editor beebware, now has his own blog! Actually, he's had it for a week or so, but I only found out today, due to 6 referrals I've from there this month.

Anyway, since I have actually met Richy, and he posts so many comments, I might as well add him to the blogroll :).

On Monday, Tony's grandfather passed away. My thoughts are with you, Tony.

Yay! Kim's blog is back! :-D :-D

Actually I have quite a bit of respect for her, what with all of the photos of her on the site. I'd never do that, mainly because I'm not nearly as attractive as her but also tend to be less photogenic (as evidenced by my generally gormless look on the webcam, and yes, I have had it on today). In fact, some of the photos that have been taken of me over the past 2 months have been quite awful...

Interestingly, in the 8 weeks that I've been here, last night was the first time I've been out on a Saturday night, basically because most of the clubs around here are full of ugly, desperate thirty-somethings at the weekends. However, Gaudi's still seems to be able to put on a student night, and a cheap one at that; we went in just after 9pm when it was still free, and all drinks were 2 for 1 right through the night. VK Blue for £1.20 a bottle? Get in there.

Gaudi's was where I spent most evening in the first two weeks, but I haven't been there much since. We finally made it back there on Monday, and last night was the first time I had ventured into The White Room, which is the club upstairs and is covered by the same entrance fee (but we got there early so we didn't have to pay :)). The music is pure cheese but generally happy, up-to-date commercial cheese, unlike some places (*cough* Walkabout *cough*).

So I'll be going back there again probably next week. Tonight I'm unsure of the plans as I think we're boycotting Bar:Me over their inflated prices. Actually, Gaudi's have a good Sunday night line-up...

When I logged in to check my stats this morning, freedom2surf said I was using 0MB of my quota. Does this mean I have some more space? ;)

(Actually I think it's connected with Webalizer, which is down for maintenance at the moment. But it's a nice thought)

Wahey... post 100! And it's only taken just over 6 weeks to get here, too :).

You may also find this interesting: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2415095.stm.

Andy linked to an article that made me realise why I love blogs so much. I now present The Worst Tantrum I've Ever Seen.

The best part is the comment at the end :)

Just had another look at the BlogRolling Top 100, and it made me depressed. The blog at #100 is Little Green Footballs (these are American footballs, by the way), and that has... wait for it... 112 links from other BlogRolling users. The #1 site is still Ain't Too Proud To Blog, with no less than 259 links. Bleugh.

This blog, by the way, has all of 5 links; the latest linkee being Technicolor Day - thanks! Still, it's only 5 behind Frankly, I'd Rather Not, which is somewhat reassuring. And Chris Pirillo links to my blog. So there.

There's yet another Weblog directory on the block, this time in the form of BlogWise. I'm posting about it because I just got accepted into it, and the email told me to post about it :).

(found via WannabeGirl)

It looks like Kim has given up her blog :( . 'Tis a pity, but she gives a good explanation as to why.

It seems that the old GBlogs site is no more - for those that don't know, this was a kind-of Weblogs.com for UK-based blogs (except it still used a spider which visited your site instead of your site making an XML-RPC ping). Anyway, popular UK-based blogger and occasional Guardian columnist Ben Hammersley is attempting to recover it by way of GBloogle (think GBlogs and Google). It's been around for a while - it would allow you to search those blogs on GBlogs which had updated within the past 24 hours, but will now host the former GBlogs site too. Wahey!

Something to follow-up yesterday's RSS post: I checked Syndic8.com's statistics, and found that only a few blogs are using RSS 2.0. I imagine this will grow over time, but 0.91 still seems to be the most popular.

Okay, so if Chris and Gretchen can both put a boogying George Dubya Bush on their blogs, then so can I. Sort of.

For ages I've been wondering why etoile's blog hasn't been showing as updated, despite the fact it's powered by Movable Type 2.21. Now I know why - I was linking to http://journal.amanita.net/index.php instead of http://journal.amanita.net/ - the latter is what is sent to Weblogs.com when she posts an update.

D'oh. Anyway, it works now, which will probably mean I'll be checking her blog out more often; since I link to any blogs I like reading, I can use the last updated feature of my blogrolls to see whether it's worth reading them.

This is (another) quick heads up for bunda, who has also recently made the switch to Movable Type. His past few posts have been really thought provoking, relating to issues surrounding the dominance of the Christian faith and the way atheists are treated in American society. Makes good reading.

The Guardian's Best British Weblog Awards results were announced today, and before you check, no, I didn't win, sadly. In fact, of those shortlisted, Naked Blog was the only one I remember actually going to in the past.

The were 300 entries in the competition, which, in a way, surprised me - I was expecting many more considering that roughly half of all UK households have access to the internet at home, putting the potential UK internet audience at 30 million. But, having said that, I know that many didn't enter; whether that was related to the decision by the author of PlasticBag.org to pull out, or due to the fact that people either didn't know about it or didn't feel as if their weblog was worthy enough I don't know.

Next year's competition promises to have categories for entry; maybe I'll have more luck next time. :)

I think it's about time I revealed something: this weblog is doomed. In fact, if all goes to plan, it will be retired by the end of next week.

Why? Because I'm moving to Movable Type! What's more, the site will be moving to my own domain www.neilturner.me.uk, which I purchased along with a good quality hosting package yesterday evening.

The new host will be Freedom 2 Surf; I've probably mentioned them before since they offer a good deal. The domain is also registered with them. And, for one year's hosting, it's goign to be less than �40, with the domain name thrown in. One of the big pulling factors was the fact that they accepted Switch (my ATM card) as a means of payment, so I was able to sign up there and then online.

The site won't be functional for a while because I'll first have to wait for the DNS records to update, then I'll have to get Movable Type uploaded and configured. But once that's done, I should be in business.

As for this weblog, it will be retired, but it is not my intention to delete it. I only have 20MB of storage on the server (though I can buy extra space), so I won't initially be moving the old posts across.

And yes, I do know there are issues between MT and f2s, but this is more to do with server space than a host problem :).

I BlogChalked. You can now see the chalk marking at the bottom of the sidebar - I would have done it sooner but the site/my connection wasn't working properly at the time. I was reminded by rapunzel's weblog (yes, another ODP blog), you see...

So, one year on. It was exactly 365 days ago since I came home from college, and, as usual, visited Eurodance, to read that a plane had hit the World Trade Centre in New York. I quickly switched on BBC News 24, to see replayed footage of the second plane hit the towers. It was then I knew that this was an act of terrorism. I spent the rest of the afternoon watching in horror as the Pentagon was hit, and then the towers themselves collapsed.

I remember seeing Tony Blair speaking at the TUC conference shortly after the second plane hit, and George W. Bush addressing the US.

I also remember seeing the newspapers the next morning, which all had pictures of the WTC in flames - some not even bothering to have headlines since the pictures themselves told the story. I spent the whole of the 12th at home since it was a day off (unrelated to the attacks), watching the TV news to get any further developments.

Over the subsequent months, hardly a day went by when I didn't hear some reference to September 11th, whether it was a reference to the stock market, religious issues, airlines, advertising, whatever. The past few weeks has seen an escalation in coverage, with the first anniversary approaching, and although I'll admit that the build up was a little excessive, today's news, at least on this side of the atlantic, has been well balanced, with coverage of other stories only being slightly affected.

Has the world changed as a result? Slightly. The business world has seen changes, with the reduced dependability on airline travel, the Enron and Worldcom scandals, the loss of many workers in business during the attacks and the subsequent rollercoaster ride that has been the stock market over the past year. Patriotism has risen again in the States - whether that is a good thing or not depends on your opinion. Afghanistan has certainly changed - the replacement of the oppressive Taliban regime with a democratically elected leader is one of the good things to come out of the attacks, though the loss of many thousand Afghan civilian lives isn't something to be proud of.

Has it affected me personally. Maybe, I don't know. And if it did, it would only be very slightly.

The big discussion now is what to do with Ground Zero. I hope it will become a green area, with some kind of memorial to those who died; I think it would help those who lost loved ones to have something permanent to visit and pay respects. And there should be a donut stall. Non-ODP editors: don't ask.

Just a quick thank you to everyone who has been giving this blog a good rating on HotOrNot - I'm now up to 8/10 :). If you haven't voted, then please feel free. You can also monitor my score on the sidebar, if you so desire.

Just had an email:

Hello.
Spotted your blog on blogornot (noted you are from York). Hello from a Harrogate blogger !

Matt
www.dragondrop.org

It's a small world, isn't it? :)

You know, writing the "Will you ever get bored of blogging?" question on the Blog Info page was probably a bad idea, since I've been a little bored of it. Hopefully it's a passing phase.

So what's happened? Well, things. Yesterday I changed my email address. I'm now using MyRealBox.com as an email account - it's a free service provided by Novell (of all people), mainly to serve as a test bed for the commercial packages. Despite not having guaranteed uptime, it looks like quite a good deal - as well as a webmail interface, you get POP3 and IMAP support.

I'm also moving away from using Outlook Express as my email client, and instead giving Mozilla Mail a try (which is now upgraded to version 1.0.1 RC1 - a few minor but useful modifications). I'm actually very pleased with it - it's faster than OE and the interface is nice.

Today I had to ring up Bradford University - I still hadn't received anything from them about my place so I thought I'd better check. Turns out that the message hadn't come through properly from UCAS - one computer said I had confirmed the place, the other hadn't. They're now in sync, so I should be receiving the registration documents in due course. I've sent in the accommodation form today.

I also got a cheque for �25 from my grandparents for making it to university (you'd think they had better things to spend their pensions on, but I admire their generosity), which I went to cash into my Halifax account. Which was interesting since I've never cashed anything into a bank account before. Fortunately the woman at the Halifax branch was understanding, and it didn't take all that long in the end. I added another �25 out of my own wallet (I seem to have lost the ability to spend money recently...), so I now have the magical �100 in my account which entitles me to a debit card. Hopefully that'll arrive soon.

By the way, Ciaran finally updated his blog - see http://mystationwagon.com/~ciaran/journal.cgi. Note that this is a temporary URL - the Nobody Wrecked My Station Wagon URL will be back shortly, I expect. Except this time it'll be on port 80 instead of 20000...

Oops... there appears to be in echo in here - this was an exact copy of the post below...

BlogRolling.com gets better and better. Now, you can add a RecipRoll, which includes all of the blogs that link to you, and also view the 100 most recent additions to people's blogrolls.

There's also the top 100 most-linked to weblogs - top is Ain't Too Proud To Blog with 165 links, closely followed by Chris (155) and Gretchen (106). BingPinkCookie.com (106) and Blogatelle (98) are the other two that make up the top 5.

The blog in 100th place, Tres Producers, has 27 links to it, so that's my target. Come on, link to me, pleeeeease?

Will I be adding a RecipRoll? Erm... no. Why? Well, out of the three blogs that would be on it, there would be this blog (I link to myself, apparently...), Chris and another blog that I really don't like - I tend to disagree with most of what he has to say. While I'm not naming names or sites, it's probably because he is a patriotic American and I'm an open-minded European. Well, that's what I think I am, and I hope that comes across. Like Bill Thompson, in this Register article, and subsequent follow-ups in The Guardian and again in The Register.

Although I've seen links to it all over the place, it was only today that I came across BlogTree, through a link in Guardian Online WebWatch. I normally read Online in print form, but it didn't arrive today, so I've had to make do with the website version, sans images.

Anyway, BlogTree. It's a project aimed at uncovering the genealogical links between weblogs. You may not think that there is such a thing, or if there is, it's something incredibly complicated, but actually, it's simple. You select one or more blogs that inspired the creation of your blog, which then become your parents. Your siblings are blogs which share the same parent(s), and your children are blogs which were inspired by yours.

AFAIK, it was Chris and Gretchen, who, way back in January, inspired me to create this blog, so they are my 'parents' (fitting that I choose a husband and wife, eh? ;). I have a few siblings, but so far I'm childless. If you like, you can view my 'pedigree'.

incidentally, Gretchen is both a parent and a sibling. Now how does that work?

In other news... dmoz is back up (it was actually down for an hour and a half, instead of the 3 hours we were originally told), I've eaten all of the fudge, and Abbey National still haven't rung. They really are pushing the 48 hour response time - they've got 2 hours to get back to me at this rate. Hmph.

Just got a message via AOL from Dennis, thanking me for linking to him. No problem! In return, he's linked to me... maybe a Google PageRank of 7 is more likely now...

Oh yeah, and I just got an email from Neil McIntosh, deputy editor of Guardian Online over a slight problem on OnlineBlog regarding its permalinks. Thanks Neil, I feel priviledged :)

Here's a rather interesting subject specific blog: Don't Link To Us!. It features commentary on sites that prohibit links to it from other sites, or prohibit deeplinks, or... well, whatever really. Dixons, the high street electrical dealer is an example, as I found out back in January.

Finally... another BlogRolling.com user has blogrolled me! Here's a thanks to Slobokan, presumed blogmeister of Slobokan's Site O' Schtuff, though whether he has linked me because he like reading, or because Chris and Furo link to me is perhaps open to debate (Michael - if you're reading this, feel free to enlighten me here).

His blog is interesting, if a little messy (like most Movable Type blogs it has links galore on either side and takes up the full page). I did, however, like the 'Boycott Schtuff' section on the right - apparently he's currently boycotting AOL, the American stores Best Buy and Home Depot, Saudi Arabia, and, er... Florida. Well, someone has to boycott it, I suppose.

I'm gradually working my way through the fudge - it's actually really nice. It's the homemade chocolate covered type, in a variety of flavours: vanilla, chocolate, banana, mint, strawberry and coconut. I would have bought some of the alcoholic fudges (containing rum, whiskey, Irish Cream and gawd knows what else), but I, erm, didn't. Maybe next year, if I end up going.

And the bank account? Still no phone call. But then they did say 48 hours, and that was only 24 hours ago. I just hope they don't ring up asking for a 'Mr Turner' - I've already told a certain caller in the past that 'Mr Turner is not available' when the call was actually for me and not my father...

I just entered The Best British Blog Competition for the fun of it. Let's face it, I'm not going to win, despite what cbowar told me (Do any of the Spice Girls have blogs? If not, you're bound to win.). Though with PlasticBag.org out of the running (see the article and interview), maybe it won't be so difficult after all?

Oh yeah, and I gave up trying to get RSSify to recognise the blog link as being the actual entry and not the first link it found - it would mean:

1. another redesign
   - or -
2. including the Enetation links.

And besides, apart from Syndic8.com and AmphetaDesk, there isn't exactly much that uses the RSS feed anyway. And since Blogger pro is still only $35 (that's less than �24), I might well upgrade to that, which now has RSS support built in. It's certainly developping into a killer Blog tool.

While poking around the likes of BlogDex and Google Backwards Links, I realised something about BlogRolling.com. Don't get me wrong, it's a great service... but... it doesn't do much for the sites you link to.

The thing is that when BlogDex or the GoogleBot index your pages, they can only understand 'static' content - any code that is attached using JavaScript gets ignored. And, of course, this is what BlogRolling uses.

What this means is that these bots are not following the links that you include in your blogroll, simply because the bots cannot see the site links. That's why my BlogDex report is looking somewhat sparse, and why Chris' link to my blog doesn't show up when you look up my backwards links on Google. It also means that my PageRank could be higher than it actually is...

Of course, there are solutions here. Google could make their GoogleBot understand JavaScript (though it's unlikely), or BlogRolling could add support for SSI (server side includes). Maybe I need to drop a few hints over there?

Just checked BlogRolling to see if anyone links to me - it appears that only Chris does. Come on guys, give me some traffic!

In case you're wondering what happened to Ciaran's journal, you can read it here. It'll be in its old location soon, I expect.

Oooh... Blogger Pro looks cool. The Penguin Cafe weblog seems to use it, and it includes all sorts of tasty features. Maybe, just maybe, I'll upgrade to it someday. Yes, I could use Movable Type or another free agent, but I feel rather partial to Blogger. And Evan Williams is a cool dude.

The Blogs vs Journals debate resurfaced in my mind today. After finding a new link on Gretchen's blog, I submitted this page to Globe of Blogs, which is another one of these Weblog indexing thingies, though it does categorise by birthday, location etc., which I guess is cool. Anyway, one of the conditions of submission is that your site is not a journal, and it offers a link to the relevant article on Diarist.net.

Ciaran has decided that he definitely has a journal, but as for this site I'm not so sure. I guess it is a weblog, since I link to stuff I find interesting on the 'net. But I also write loads of stuff about me and what I do, so it's also a journal. Typical me - never quite fitting in to any one group :)

After a quick chat with Ciaran on #ODP, I've taken a chainsaw to a post I made on May 4th, for two reasons. Firstly, providing too many links to the Verisign article will probably reduce its PageRankН, and not increase it (it's still at 6). Secondly, Ciaran pointed out that the link I made to his journal entry about said article will become dead in a few weeks, since it merely anchors to the home page and not the entry itself, so that has been fixed.

I've also gone off CrazyBrowser. It's a great browser, and I won't be uninstalling it, but it doesn't integrate with the Google toolbar. Which, at present, I can barely live without.

Just had a really nice email from Gretchen - I asked her if she could link to my blog (and if Chris could update his link too :)). Not only did she reply, but she covered all the points that I had made, and the tone of the email was very friendly. Don't you just love it when people do that? :)

Ciaran just pointed out to me that I said that today had been a 'god' day. Oops.

Apologies for the late arrival of last night's post - unfortunately Blogger was having a few troubles so the page never reached the server, though it was added to Blogger's own database so fortunately I didn't have to retype.

I'm in the LRC at college at the moment - Computing has been cancelled since my teacher is away so I'm just making use of a little free time on the 'net. It also allowed me to print off this article about Canal+, the French TV station, as well as its related article. I tried it at home but it appears my Epson printer may have developed a fault. Having talked with Richard from FutureCom it appears it could be a common problem - he had it too. Basically, it prints the first page, then wheels it through, but keeps on going. It doesn't draw down the next bit of paper, and even pressing the power off button does nothing - I actually had to unplug the printer from the mains to stop it.

Today is No Smoking Day in the UK - it's an attempt to reduce the 40,000 people who die prematurely from smoking related ilnesses every year. And being an asthmatic, I'm all for it - why should I have to suffocate on other people's smoke?

By the way, if you understand French and follow the link to Canal+, make sure you visit the page about Les Guignols - it's the TV show that I attended in Paris, and the web site is very funny. A knowledge of French politics might also be useful.

I've been reading a couple of other blogs today - namely MisterMittens.com (brother of Randy "Furo" Nieland) and Ramblings of a Code Monkey, and found this parody of a MSKB article (beware of strong language). And if you're wondering why I'm browsing around, it's because the ODP is still suffering technical difficulties, making it almost impossible to edit. Apparently it's due to a huge amount of tasks in the catmv queue, though don't quote me on that - that is what a certain meta told me and therefore it isn't an official staff announcement.

You know this laptop I keep talking about? Well, I still don't have it - it looks like it could be a birthday present at this rate (put Saturday 25th May in your diaries!) - but I need a name for it. I follow the great tradition of naming my computers, usually after past girlfriends. Currently I'm using Marianna, and my old 486 was called Jane. Trouble is, I've not had any girlfriends since then (3 years...) so I need some ideas. I'm thinking of a girl's name, preferably 2-4 syllables and ending in an 'a' - Melissa is my current favourite though with a computer virus having the same name it may prove difficult. Any ideas are welcome.

New sidebar link! I've linked to Ciaran Hamilton's weblog - Ciaran is a fellow ODP editor who regularly haunts the #ODP chat room. That makes two weblogs :).

The Observer ran an article by Andrew Sullivan in their News Review section (which doesn't appear to online sadly) about blogging, and included the obligatory mention of Blogger.com. While Bloggler is by no means the best blogging system out there, it certainly is the most popular, and for all its faults I still love it. In fact, I'm very tempted to part with some money for the Pro version, though I'd like a look at Radio first - Randy Nieland uses it for his Furo.com blog. Yup, now two of the Gnomes have blogs - Chris is still keeping his C:\pirillo.com blog going. In fact, if you count Gretchen, that makes three of them.

Maybe I'm in a minority here, but I've only just discovered Computer Stupidities - a collection of mostly true stories of stupidity on the part of the less computer literate out there. Some of them are very amusing, but it sometimes beggers belief at how stupid some people are - even my parents aren't that stupid. In fact, my grandfather is probably more PC-literate than some of the people there.

Talking of amusing PC web pages, have a look at this spoof MS site about 'MS-Linux'. Never knew that GPL = Gates Private License...

Over at the ODP, after spending the morning sorting out Doncaster Business & Economy I updated UK Localities with the new localities that I've created in both North and South Yorkshire. Or rather I requested the updates - I'll have to wait for someone to add them. I'm now about to set down to create UK Millennium Projects, a future category which I'm putting together. Not an easy job, but someone's gotta do it...

Hello, and welcome to my world - a world filled with music, computers and other generally weird things. Please fasten your seatbelts and return your seat to an uptight position, as this may be a jerky ride...

I intend to use this page as an outlet for my thoughts and opinions, and will try to update as much as possible (after all, what's a blog that lies unused?). I'm not going to give much away about my personality yet, since you'll hopefully find out all you need to know (and more) about my life as you read on.