Recently in Site Changes Category

In the hope that it will reduce the current waves of comment spam that I'm receiving, I've turned off comments for all entries published prior to January 2009, plus a few published in 2009 that seem to be particular targets. Movable Type doesn't expose a suitable interface for this so it was done directly using SQL (some scripts may exist but I don't know if they will still work in MT 4.3x). None of the entries that were closed had received any legitimate comments for some time anyway.

Seeing as it's a lovely sunny day, Christine and I are off for a day out in Morecambe. I haven't been there since I was 11 so it'll be nice to see how it's changed over the past few years.

I've had the plain red default MT4 theme for a couple of years now. So I've switched to the light blue variant of it. What do you think?

The switch was done with StyleCatcher, an easy-theme switcher built-in to Movable Type, so it only took 2 minutes and didn't require any re-building.

I've made a few more changes to the site, the most obvious being the 'Sign-in with Twitter' link on the comments. This means that you can comment here using your Twitter account, and (optionally) have a link to your comment tweeted when you submit it. This is through the Twitter Commenters plugin for Movable Type. You can also authenticate using Google, Facebook, AOL, Yahoo! or any other OpenID-capable service.

I've also re-enabled avatars by comments. It will try to use a picture from an authentication service first, then try Gravatar if you didn't authenticate. If you don't use Gravatar either then it'll show a blank icon.

Finally, MT-Notifier is now provided so you can subscribe to updated comments by email, should you wish.

One of the things that had stopped working for some reason on my old host was the sideblog, which essentially lists my activity on other web sites such as Twitter. It's now updating automatically again so you should see:

• My tweets on Twitter
• My Google Reader shared items
• My del.icio.us links (which I'm considering using more often
• My favourite videos on YouTube
• My activity on GetSatisfaction.com
• My loved tracks on Last.fm

It's like stalking me, but from one easily accessible page!

I'm aware that posting of comments hasn't been working, due to a variety of reasons (namely me not configuring MT correctly, server firewall being set too high and some changes that have occurred to MT's default templates). These are now fixed so you should be able to comment away to your heart's content.

At last, the move to the new host is complete!

I'm now hosting with Bytemark, a well-known hosting company based in York with data centres in Manchester and London. The domain is managed by 123-Reg - I've decided to keep the domain and hosting separate to make any future host changes easier.

The hosting package is quite different to the package I had previously. Whereas before I had a simple virtual host setup with FTP, email and databases, this package offers SSH access to a complete virtual machine running Debian. In other words, I can configure everything on the server essentially as I wish - even changing to a different Linux distro if I wanted to.

I'll be sticking with Debian for now. It brings with it Apache 2.2 and MySQL 5, and I have the ability to add things like FastCGI should I wish to at a later date. I've also been able to install every optional Perl module that Movable Type can use, including ones like Image::Magick and XML::Parser which require compiled code.

I'm still using Movable Type 4.3x for now - it's still supported, with version 4.34 having come out a few days ago, and having tried MT5 for a bit I think it's a bit overkill for what I need it for.

The move to the new host wasn't quite as smooth as I'd hoped - some issues with having the domain released from the old host, for example, and the new machine that the site runs on had a disk failure last night, literally about 30 minutes after I updated the DNS to point to the new server. It's also taken some time to get used to configuring the server myself, rather than having a fancy-pants admin interface to do it for me. Suffice to say I've learnt a lot about the Unix command line over the past couple of weeks.

Hopefully now everything will work, but give me a heads-up if it doesn't!

If you can read this, it means the host move was successful and you're looking at the new neilturner.me.uk . Admittedly it looks almost exactly like the 'old' neilturner.me.uk but I'll get to work on a new design at some point.

This web site is now running on a new server (called 'raven'), and is now located in the UK, and not the US as before. I'm not entirely sure why it was located in the US in first place as the company that I host with is British, but never mind.

I'm under the impression that the server should offer better performance, but whether that's because it's on better hardware or just because there's less cable between me and it remains to be seen. Anyhow, it does seem a little snappier.

Those of you who read this blog in a feed reader or on Facebook will notice that each entry is now appended with a byline stating the name of the entry and where and when it was originally posted. This is just so that I can track where my content ends up and to ensure I'm properly credited for it, in line with the content license. A number of blogs now do this as some sites seem to republish people's content without the correct attribution or a link back to where it came from.

The byline is a simple code addition to Movable Type's default feed template.

I'm making some behind-the-scenes changes here. Basically I'm working to bring back long-neglected parts of the site that disappeared from public view when I refreshed the templates, but this time trying to do things in a way that can be updated easily. So I'm making greater use of Pages, rather than custom templates, and the new templates that I do make will be modular in the same way as the defaults so that any necessary design changes can be rolled out across the whole site more easily.

I'm not going to link to things until the whole lot is ready, but so far I have resurrected my sideblog (if you subscribed to the feed you would see this), re-written the colophon to bring it up to date and created a page for the blogroll to sit. This actually represents a large chunk of what I want to do so hopefully it won't be long before I roll it out. I know I've been neglecting this site over the past few months and so this is part of a plan to bring it back to its 'former glory', as it were.

I've been wanting to re-design this site for some time. The previous design dates from late 2005, and has been in place for the best part of 2 1/2 years. So here's a brand new look for the site.

I was planning a wordy post for this, but instead here's what has changed in bullet form:

• I'm now using Movable Type's default templates, rather than my homegrown solution
• I've upgraded to MT 4.2 Release Candidate 1
• I'm using the widget system, rather than hand-coding everything in long template files

I don't have the time or skills to come up with something attractive myself, and the default templates look good; I may make some colour alterations in future but expect the general feel to remain. With the widget system I can easily make my own widgets and re-order them as needed - the Google Adsense adverts are in their own widget, for example.

There will be some quirks with plugins, so please let me know if you encounter problems.

This might not be popular, as I know some people didn't like it last time, but I'm now including posts from my much-neglected sideblog in the main feed of this site. Unlike last time, they won't appear as a daily digest; instead, each entry will appear as its own item. I can't imagine this being much of a problem based on the amount of posts the sideblog receives now anyway.

Let me know what you think; I've managed to post twice there this week...

Just a quick word up about a wee change in the commenting form. Up until now there have been 4 ways of commenting on this site - 'anonymously' (where you simply provide your name, email address and web site URL if you have one), through OpenID, through LiveJournal and through TypeKey.

4 methods is a bit extreme, to say the least. However, LiveJournal sign-ins use OpenID, and TypeKey is now also an OpenID service, so they're not really needed. Therefore, you now have 2 options - use OpenID, or comment anonymously. This also means that the comments form is much more simple and doesn't involve the multiple tabs like before.

OpenID is the preferred method for commenting as it's easier to keep miscreants under check from my point of view - whether it be spammers or just general idiots. Once you've posted a couple of good comments using your OpenID account I'll flick a switch in Movable Type that makes you 'trusted' so that your comments will bypass the spam filters too, which means they will appear straightaway.

This doesn't mean that anonymous commenting is going away - to do so would mean I lose at least 80% of the comments I get here, but by using OpenID you're helping me sort out the wheat from the chaff. And you won't have to type in 'sausage' every time either.

Incidentally, Firefox 3.0 should have some kind of OpenID support built into it, which could be interesting.

I'm experimenting with a new design. Currently only the home page has been updated to use it, but your thoughts are welcome. I'm now using the standard Six Apart markup structure and a stylesheet based on the MT default, but with new colours and a third column.

I've not tested this in any browsers other than Firefox 1.5 and Internet Explorer 7, so it may be horribly broken in other browsers - please let me know if this is the case, with screenshots if possible.

Update: Well, it works fine in Safari 2, Opera 9 Beta and (shockingly) IE for Mac 5.2, but I haven't yet had chance to try it in IE6. Should hopefully get that done later, but no-one's piped up to say it's broken (other than in FeedReader) so that's a good sign.

I know, yet another change to the feeds....

This time it's only a small one - the recent comments feed now includes comments from both this main blog and my sideblog. This is done using David Raynes' Multiblog plugin.

In future I may offer a feed that combines entries from the two, probably with the sideblog entries presented as a daily digest as opposed to each entry appearing individually. I've done this in the main feed in the past but several people didn't like it, however if there's demand for it I'll create another feed.

Also, if you want to know what feeds are available from this site, I've updated the Web Feeds page to include all of the main feeds and the category feeds.

I've made two big changes to the Atom feeds tonight:

1. Category feeds are now using Atom 1.0 - they've been using Atom 0.3 until now, even though Atom 1.0 has been out for some time and the other feeds have been converted.
2. All Atom feeds on this site now support Atom Threading Extensions, which adds some extra metadata for dealing with comments and replaces a variety of RSS namespaces in the process. It means that the entry feeds (i.e. the main feed and category feeds) will link to the comments area of an entry, and also to comments Atom feed for that entry. And, if your aggregator supports it, the number of comments will be shown too. This extension has already been rolled out in Typepad and Friendster blogs and it is in the process of being submitted to the IETF for ratification as an RFC, like Atom itself.

These changes will be transparent to almost everyone, mainly because few services and aggregators support the extra features, but they may take off in future. I also closed the last of the RSS feeds on here when I turned off the feeds being generated for categories - they now redirect to their equivalent Atom feeds. This means that this site is officially an RSS-free zone.

For some months now this site has popped up a warning message to users of old versions of Internet Explorer (i.e. less than version 6.0, or any version on the Mac), encouraging them to upgrade. It links to the latest version of IE, but also mentions Firefox, Safari and Opera and links to the Browse Happy site.

Today I updated the script to improve its handling of users of IE 5.5 (who weren't previously getting the message) and also notify users of Firefox 1.0.x that they should update their browsers. Although 1.0.8 was released very recently, it was the last in the 1.0.x line and in future users should move to 1.5.x and higher. The upgrade notifications aren't very obvious in the 1.0.x line so some users may be unaware that a new version is available so hopefully this will encourage a few converts. Around 4% of the visitors to this site in the past week were using obsolete browsers - most of them 1.0.x versions of Firefox.

The message is not shown to Internet Explorer 6 users. These make up for 45% of my visitors even now and I do not want to alienate them for the sake of browser fanboyism.

Update: At the request of James, I have added a '[Do not show this warning in future]' link which hides the warning and sets a cookie so that it won't appear again in future (the cookie expires in a year's time). You'll need JavaScript enabled for it to work, though.

I've upgraded to OpenID Comments for MT 1.6.1, the latest version of the Movable Type plugin which adds support for OpenID and sign-ins through LiveJournal. The biggest change is that the plugin will now parse a FOAF file found at the OpenID server and retrieve an avatar should one be provided in it, which means that comments posted with OpenID will now have avatars. They haven't in the past because OpenID does not send email addresses, which are needed for Gravatar which provides the existing avatars.

I am considering re-organising the comment form to emphasise that I would prefer people (especially regular commenters) to use either TypeKey or OpenID. By doing so, I can 'trust' individual commenters which means that any comments they make will bypass the spam filters. Though the spam filters work well, and do favour regular commenters, it's possible for some comments to not get through if the comment comes from an IP address on an IP blacklist or mentions things like mortgages or medicines lots of times. This means I have to manually approve them, which usually only happens once a day and less if I'm busy - trusted commenters can essentially say what they like and it'll be posted immediately.

I will keep TypeKey as a separate option because it supports gravatars (I think OpenID Comments has an issue with pulling FOAF documents through TypeKey, possibly because it uses relative instead of absolute paths) and because it allows email addresses to be sent, which in turn means that commenters can subscribe to recieve notification of any new comments posted by email. I know that quite a few TypeKey commenters use this, though I will look into alternatives - MT-Notifier may support something that I can leverage.

I'm pleased to announce that this blog is now syndicated over at LiveJournal. Though the feed has been syndicated here for a while now, I've not been posting over there officially despite having had a LJ account for some time.

The technical jiggery pokery that makes this happen is ljcrosspost that copies all the posts made on my main blog in Movable Type over to LiveJournal using the Frontier XML-RPC protocol. I'm also using Kevin Shay's fantastic RightFields plugin to include my mood and what music I'm listening to with each entry. I'll be explaining how to set this up on your blog in the near future.

So why have I done this now? At least three of the bloggers I read regularly already do this, and I know there's quite a community over at livejournal.com who may appreciate being able to read my posts over there. It's all about my belief that you should be able to read my content in whatever browser you want, however you want, and if doing this aids that then great.

It does mean that I'll have to rename my journal soon - currently it's 'Neil's Non-existant Journal' because there never used to be anything over there...

Okay, so we still have a bit over 24 hours in 2005 but I've launched my re-design early. It's not hugely different from before in terms of code - a few new and redefined CSS classes and a bit of HTML code shifted around - which meant it was pretty quick to do.

Essentially, this is what has changed:

• Three-column layout. With the additions to the entry pages that I've been trying to make, the site started to outgrow the rather restrictive two-column layout I've been using for almost 4 years now. I'll hold my hands up and be completely honest by saying that this was also related to the advertising - the more I added stuff to the pages, the further down the pages the AdSense boxes moved. This has lead to a rather marked fall in revenue - we're talking quite a lot of money here - so I've made them more prominent by giving them their own column on the far right.
• New menu. The menu has moved from the top of the sidebar (again, a position it has held for a long time) to the top. This is to create more space on the sidebars, but also because I just fancied a change. I'm using Matt Mullenweg's Intelligent Menus to have the page labels highlighted where applicable.
• More related links on entry pages. To try to get people who visit through search engines to stay on the site, I now have links to related entries and those entries with new comments on all of the entry pages. The related entries list uses mt-relatedentries and pulls up the 5 most recent entries in the same category. It can also work using keywords, which would give a more relevant list, but due to the extra load this creates I've opted just to work with categories.

There is also a minor change to trackbacks, in that I'm no longer providing the trackback metadata block on pages. You can still ping entries by manually copying and pasting the trackback URL, but autodiscovery systems will probably not find it. This is an attempt at stopping trackback spam, since around 98% of the trackbacks I've had recently have been spam.

I'm still rolling out the design so if any pages look weird, please bear with me.

Update: I've changed the design slightly so that it works again in 800x600 resolutions (or rather 'should work'). It now looks a bit weird in IE6, with lots of padding in the middle and very little at the sides, however it looks fine in Firefox, Opera and Safari. So use those browsers instead.

Because I had a free afternoon and I managed to get an assignment finished earlier than I expected, I have converted the comment RSS feeds to Atom 1.0 feeds. There's some funkiness with the character encoding, namely that I've specified Unicode in the feed but the server keeps sending documents with no character set specified. I don't think this is a bug in Movable Type but rather some wrong with the server, and it only seems to happen with feeds published using dynamic publishing - my statically-produced Atom feeds are fine. With a bit of luck this won't affect you and technically the feeds are valid, it's just that the feed validator shows it as a warning.

Update: Aha - it is a Movable Type bug. Specifically when it is checking the Movable Type configuration file (either mt.cfg or mt-config.cgi, mine is the former), as far as I can tell it's not getting a value for PublishCharset and so it's not sending a charset, even though PublishCharset is defined in my config file and works in my templates. When I patched mt.php to hardcode it to display Unicode, everything was fine.

I've also redesigned the entry pages a bit to move some of the information about the entry to the right-hand side. The comments feed is now highlighted using the Firefox feed icon to make it stand out, and there's an option to receive emails when comments are posted, which uses a fancy bit of JavaScript that I'm quite proud of. The idea is quite blatently plaigirised from kottke.org and similar but since a lot of my traffic comes from people randomly browsing in from search engines it should hopefully explain what they are looking at. There are also now links to pages with active discussions (i.e. someone posted a comment there recently) in the hope that it'll promote discussion in those entries. I've been pleased with the discussions in some of the more recent entries (thanks guys) and hopefully this will continue.

It's December, and it's less than 3 weeks until Christmas, so that means it's time for this site's Christmas theme. So, what do you think?

Okay, so it's just clipart that's been converted to greyscale and then manipulated slightly to match in with the site colours, but I think it looks good and carries on last year's theme of being subtly festive. If you have no idea what I'm on about, try hitting Refresh or Reload to refresh the stylesheet.

I've also enabled LiveJournal and OpenID sign-ins on smaller world entries. I've been posting there a bit more lately so there's actually some stuff to comment on, and there's a feed, of course.

I've made a couple of upgrades to the site that may interest you:

OpenID and metadata

Those of you using OpenID or LiveJournal sign-ins will now benefit from the new features in OpenID Comments 1.5 which I've just installed. It will now autodiscover a FOAF file or Atom feed at your OpenID URL and use it to insert your proper name (if provided), as opposed to your URL or LiveJournal username. I'm sorry that it's taken me two weeks to get this new version of the plugin, but it's taken me until today to actually get around to subsribing to Mark's feed.

Subscribing to comments

I've been allowing those who have commented on posts to receive email updates of further comments for some time now, but I've now also added a form so that you can subscribe without commenting (see the new 'receive updates' section on the more recent entries). It's mainly for discussions like this one where you may not want to make a comment straightaway but may want to reply later as the discussion develops.

This is actually a big change in my thinking. For a while I've been against using email for notifications, instead relying on Atom or RSS because I see them as superior, but to be honest in situations like these I think email actually works better so I'm offering you the choice. I'm still providing comment feeds though - they're in RSS at the moment but they will be converted to Atom in due course. There is also the general comments feed which has the most recent comments posted across all entries.

I'm hoping these changes will promote some healthy and active discussions :) .

Since approximately 2.5% of my visitors are using an old, insecure version of Internet Explorer (i.e. version 5.5 and below), I have decided to start showing warning messages to users of these browsers asking them to consider upgrading, or changing to another browser. As mentioned in the previous entry, I'm also encouraging Mac users browsing with Internet Explorer to change to another browser.

While I hope a good number decide to switch to another browser, I am still presenting IE6 as a choice, because for some IE will remain the best browser for them. I'm also not pushing any particular alternative.

When Firefox 1.5 comes out, I will also push people towards upgrading to the latest release, especially those still running pre-1.0 releases (around 1% of my visitors are using Firefox 0.9.3).

I'll also point out that I'm not making any money from this. I know that Google is offering incentives to those in the US who encourage their visitors to download Firefox with the Google Toolbar, but I'm not part of that. I'm just doing this to try to make the internet a better place.

I've given up waiting for Bloglines to fix their support for Atom 1.0 feeds with inline XHTML, so I've switched back to using a block of HTML code escaped using CDATA. Hopefully this will mean that it now displays correctly in Bloglines without the whitespace issue affecting it.

Update: Ooops, made a booboo :) . Should be fixed now. Honest...

I've re-enabled moderation of non-authenticated comments as a temporary measure. This hasn't been triggered by any specific event - it's more to do with the fact that over the next few days I'm not going to be around much to clear up any damage that might get through. Though I do trust SpamLookup, I don't trust it completely.

This will mean that if you don't use TypeKey, OpenID or LiveJournal (or you've never used your account here before) then your comments won't be published immediately, and may take up to a couple of days before they appear. Sorry for the inconvinience that this will cause but I hope that you'll understand.

I'm aiming to disable the moderation on either Sunday or Monday, when I'm back from my weekend away in the Lake District. Just in case I have no time to blog between now and when I get back, I'll see you all later :) .

Since I'll be on the internet a bit more I've disabled compulsory moderation of non-authenticated comments (i.e. those not posted through a trusted TypeKey or OpenID account). This means that those of you posting as unregistered users should find that your comments go through immediately instead of needing to be moderated.

Bear in mind, though, that I have made SpamLookup more aggressive in order to enable this, so there's still a possibility that your comment may get moderated. I'm performing more IP lookups and have expanded the keywords field somewhat.

Thanks to an update to the OpenID Comments plugin for MT, you can now post comments using your OpenID or LiveJournal accounts as well as TypeKey, or just as a boring old unregistered user. The feature has been there for a while but it's taken until now for it to actually work.

You also now don't need to provide your email address when commenting. This is mostly down to a side effect of the OpenID plugin - OpenID doesn't provide email addresses, so if I require them all OpenID comments will be rejected - but I've found that those who don't want to provide their email addresses will use a fake one anyway. I would still like you to provide your email address, however, as it means that I can email you replies to your comments. It also means you can optionally get email updates when new comments are posted to an entry.

By the way, all of you TypeKey users are also OpenID users. Log in to your TypeKey account and update your details (you don't have to make any changes but you will need to submit the form). This will OpenID-enable your TypeKey profile page at http://profile.typekey.com/[yourusername] .

I've made a bit of a change to the site, namely the introduction of a little more Google Adsense advertising below the body of each entry on the entry pages, plus one after the third entry on the home page. I just want to know what you people think - does it stand out too much or distract from the main text of the page? Does it look like I'm selling out?

I don't want the pages to be dominated by advertising and people to put off by them, but some extra revenue from the adverts would be welcome.

Update: I think Joe has a point when he says that a lot of dodgy sites overuse Adsense advertising. When looking over the pages, I do feel it degrades them slightly if they're inundated with Google adverts. As such, I've moved the link units to the bottom of the pages. Sure, they're unlikely to attract as much interest there but I think it looks better.

I've been tinkering around today:

1. I've installed the Crypt::DSA Perl module, so signing in using TypeKey should be marginally faster. I've also updated some of the other external modules that Movable Type uses in case they make speed improvements too.
2. There's some small backend improvements to the tagging system. I decided not to go with Six Apart's official solution since it makes it difficult to have both tags and categories and I'm not about to turn my back on categories just yet. It basically makes every tag a category, which kind-of makes sense but doesn't really suit me right now. That said, it would have meant that RSS and Atom feeds for each tag would have been available had I implemented it - they're on my to-do list for my own code.
3. I've re-jigged the Further Reading block. Originally this was the output of a Technorati API query to show entries on other blogs that had linked to that entry. It still is, but it also includes trackback pings. Furthermore, if you send a trackback ping and then Technorati finds your post as well, then the URL will only show up once - I put all the URLs into a PHP array and weed out the duplicates. This also means that trackback pings are now no longer included in with comments and no longer contain excerpts.

Thanks to a bit of PHP and mod_rewrite techno-wizardry, tag pages are now at the much more memorable http://www.neilturner.me.uk/tags/[tagname]. So all my posts about Make Poverty History are at http://www.neilturner.me.uk/tags/makepovertyhistory, for example. The pages also have a link to Technorati's tag page for that tag.

Future plans for this are pagination of the results pages (not so much of an issue yet as only a hundred or so entries are tagged) and inclusion of my Flickr photos with the same tag in the results page (so a search for makepovertyhistory would also show these photos alongside).

I've changed the RSS feed so that it outputs the keywords/tags attached to a post, instead of the generic category. You can specify multiple category elements in both RSS 1.0 and 2.0, and hopefully this should mean I appear under more useful Technorati tag listings. incidentally I used the MTKeywordList plugin to get it to work.

I've also updated the keyword search script, which is a script I made myself in PHP. It now no longer returns every keyworded entry when you don't provide a keyword as a variable in the URL and is much faster because I've enabled fulltext for that column in the database (done using ALTER TABLE 'mt_entry' ADD FULLTEXT ('entry_keywords'); in MySQL). It's still using a very inefficient method but at least it's a bit faster now.

Around 15 months after switching to IcyBlue, I'm afraid I've got bored of it. There are also a few issues with IE which I'm unsure how to fix, and so instead of messing around with it I'm dumping it and switching to something else.

Since IcyBlue uses the same tag structure as Kubrick, and that Kubrick works well in a wide range of browsers, I'm using a design based on that. There will be much tweaking over the next few days I'm sure (like a smaller header) but I'm already liking the change. Apologies in advance for any bugs that surface in the transition.

The home page of this site should now look a little nicer when printed, thanks to a print stylesheet which will be rolled out over the rest of the pages in due course. Previously, the page would print out with no formatting, but now it retains some of it. The navigation links get shoved down to the bottom though I'm wondering whether to do away with them altogether. Your browser's Print Preview mode should give you some idea of what the page will look like now.

The stylesheet should also be used on handheld devices, like PDAs. This is after trying out this site on my Dell Axim to find it looking awful. However, I'm unsure if the version of Internet Explorer on here (a derivation of IE 4.01 for Windows) will actually understand the media="print, handheld" attribute. I'd love to use Minimo but it's not yet available for Windows CE-based devices like the Axim.

In any case, a whole range of sites seem to look horrible on it - The Guardian, especially. BBC News online thankfully works okay in its low-graphics mode.

Since I themed this site up for St Patricks Day last month, it's only right that I do it for the St Georges Day, what with me being English and all. (Although 'Neil' is apparently an Irish name)

Happy St Georges Day for tomorrow.

I'm finally putting MT's Keywords field to good use by adding keywords to entries, which in turn are listed on the entry pages as null links with the rel="tag" attribute. Think of it as the first steps towards tagging on here - there's lots more to do but this is a start. The categories are staying, however.

The likelihood of old posts getting tagged is quite low though, I'm afraid - with several thousand entries over 3 years it's going to take a very long time to tag every post.

Update: (Friday 15th April) Clicking on a tag will now do a search for other posts with that tag, like on Flickr and Delicious. The script is a quick piece of PHP and SQL I knocked up but it seems to work okay.

Just to let you know that the Terms of Usage have been updated and that I've also uploaded a Copyright statement which further outlines what content on here is copyrighted and how it is licensed.

Readers of the RSS and Atom feeds will now have any acronyms represented properly with definitions, like on the main site. I'm posting this here mostly because it's likely that a few previous entries will show up as unread for no apparent reason in Bloglines.

Also, if you're one of the 200-or-so people who are reading this in your aggregators, you may not have realised that the site is now back to its old blue self again. Albeit with a few easter eggs dotted about.

With St Patrick's Day coming this week, I decided to use the 'earthy' stylesheet that I've been offering with my templates and adapt it slightly to make it a little more Irish. Hope you like the new look.

Obviously this means that come Friday I'll have to change it again but I'm sure I can think of something.

I've updated my CV, which is available as a 14KB PDF file or a 34KB MS Word file. It mentions my more recent work experience and additional skills. And this time, I've spelled 'achieved' properly, too.

I'm testing the next version of the Nofollow plugin for MT, which now comes with a couple of options. This means that if you're using your TypeKey account here and you've been approved, any links you make will not get the nofollow treatment.

For non-TypeKey users, if you're a regular commenter then the link to your home page will not use nofollow but any links in your comment will do (hopefully the next version will let me that). Everyone else will have any URLs they post nofollowified.

In case you've missed the big announcement from Google , Yahoo and MSN, I'm now using the rel="nofollow" attribute on all links in user-editable areas. What this means is that any links that are posted in comments and trackbacks will not offer any link ranking benefit to the linked site, thus diliting the major incentive for comment spammers.

MT users can install a plugin which automatically modifies the relevant tags to make the trick work. Users of TypePad will find the change has been made automatically and a fix for LiveJournal is on its way. Wordpress users can install this plugin. For more, see Six Apart's announcement.

This is very, very good news. I don't expect it to entirely defeat comment spam but the spammers are going to have to get very crafty to get around it. That said, it's only effective if everyone implements it and gives the spammers nowhere to hide.

Note: If you're using SimpleComments, trackbacks will not use the new attribute by default with the MT plugin. You'll need to modify your links manually.

So, this is the new design. It's almost exactly the same as the old - about the only visual change is that it's wider than before, and that all the pages have a footer (it's not that interesting).

However, because it's now (mostly) compatible with Kubrick, it means that, should you fancy a change, you can use Kubrick instead. This is because there's a PHP-based stylesheet switched implemented (visiting this URL resets the stylesheet to the default) - your choice will be remembered in a 30-day cookie. Currently, Kubrick is the only other stylesheet on here but I hope to get some of my older templates added.

Note that if you're using Opera, Kubrick is the only theme that you can use. Since making the changes IcyBlue no longer renders properly in Opera. The code causing it is, I think, needed so that IE renders it properly, and as IE users outnumber Opera users I had to make the change.

There's still a few odd pages that will look terrible - I'll fix those in due course.

I ditched the 'new' design because of the Opera issue and instead shoehorned the old design into the Kubrick structure. I'm happier with it now.

As per this new entry on gravatar.com, Gravatars are being served up using 'wide', which is a distributed cache proxy. It should result in less strain being put on the main gravatar.com site. There might be a little funkiness, so let Tom Werner at Gravatar know if you encounter problems.

Made a few changes here lately which I thought I'd share with you.

1. The Christmas background is gone, for obvious reasons. At the moment I don't know if I'll replace it with anything, although I may look into having something subtle like before since it makes the content area stand out more. Any suggestions are welcome.
2. New TypeKey icons, shown when someone posts a comment with their TypeKey account. It's a simple task of replacing nav-commenters.gif in the blog base directory with a new image, which in my case is a slightly altered version of the Speech icon in Control Panel on Windows XP.
3. My comments are now highlighted. I've seen this elsewhere (such as on Mezzoblue and SimpleBits). In this case, it checks to see if my TypeKey account was used to make the comment, and if so, it applies a different <div> class to the comment. It also automatically pastes in a copy of my Gravatar stored locally, rather than contacting gravatar.com to fetch it, which is probably a good thing as (AFAIK) I'm the most frequent commenter here.
4. The Smaller World digests in the RSS feed now have less cruft - a simple '#' character which links to the entry on here rather than the category and comments link. It made the digests look very cramped. Sometimes you can have too much metadata.
5. Blogroll has been updated. No removals but a few additions. If you know I read your blog and you're not on there then have patience as if you're consistently worth reading you may be added in the next update, whenever that is.
6. And another one added today (Wednesday) - I've fixed the JavaScript issues with TypeKey, and done away with one of the JavaScript code blocks which has been replaced with PHP. Now, if you've saved your details in a cookie, PHP inserts the details directly into the page, rather than them being appended by JavaScript after the page has loaded.

I'm now including a daily digest of links from Smaller World in the main RSS feed. I've noticed quite a few people do this with their del.icio.us links, so I went about trying to imitate it purely in MT.

While it's not too difficult to paste a sideblog into an RSS feed, it is a little more difficult to do a 'digest', which in this case is one RSS item that contains all the entries from a particular day. The reason for this is that you don't want the current day's links to appear in there as this entry's content will change throughout the day, thus annoying those people who read their subscriptions several times a day. Unfortunately MT's features for specifying what days to show posts from is pretty limited - you can only select to show posts that are x number of days old. Therefore, I'm using the DateTags plugin, which gives you much, much more flexibility over when posts should be displayed based on their date. Thanks to that, I've been able to prevent the entries from the current day showing.

I then created a stub index template with the content and use an <$MTInclude$> tag in the main blog's RSS feed to paste it in. MultiBlog then handles the rebuilding of the main blog when an entry is posted, though I already had this set up anyway for showing the 5 most recent Smaller World entries on the sidebar on the home page.

So, what do you think?

This has to be the first time in a very long time that I've created a web page with a background image. I'm still deciding whether I like it or not. Either way, consider this to be the Christmas theme for this year. :)

I've implemented Gravatar here, which means that when you post a comment you can have a small avatar appear next to it. Several sites now have them - Stupid Evil Bastard has had them for some time and Redemption in a Blog is toying with the idea.

They're quite easy to implement - there are plugins for many blogging systems and Clagnut has some PHP code which is quite straightforward.

To have your Gravatar appear here, all you need to do is visit gravatar.com, create an account and upload an avatar to use. Then, when you comment on an entry, your gravatar will instantly appear. Providing you used the same email address before, it will also appear on older comments too (if you have changed email addresses, email me and I can fix old comments)

One note to TypeKey users: you will need to send an email address when commenting if you want to be able to use Gravatar. I have altered the sign-in link to require email addresses, however I have also created another link which doesn't ask for them - make sure you click on the default one otherwise your Gravatar won't appear.

Comment previewing should finally be fixed - I'm really sorry for all those of you who have tried to preview your comments and ended up losing the body of the comment. I've also tidied up the code on Smaller World so that you won't get unstyled pages when posting.

You may have noticed that adverts have magically appeared on some of the pages on this site. I've thought long and hard about advertising and have decided to join Google's AdSense programme to earn a bit of extra income.

I have deliberately chosen AdSense because the adverts aren't annoying and can, to some extent, match in with the site's look - indeed I've customised the colours to match in with the site's colour scheme so that they don't distract too much.

I've changed the way comments are displayed in the hope that they're now easier to read and that trackbacks don't look so hap-hazard. Please let me know what you think; here are some good examples: (1) (2).

I've also gotten rid of the dotted line that separates the content from the sidebar to see if the site looks better without it. Again, let me know your thoughts.

You can now use John Gruber's Markdown syntax in comments, as opposed to HTML. The advantage, at least to me, of supporting Markdown is that it generates valid XHTML - not all commenters abide by that. I'm still supporting basic HTML for those who prefer it though.

Since John's explanation of the Markdown syntax is very long and wordy, I've created this page with a brief guide to common structures. Admittedly it's mostly stolen from Jay Allen but I don't think he'll mind. The guide is linked from the comments pages.

I've spent part of the evening performing some miscellaneous tweaks to the templates. Here's an overview of what's changed:

• Since upgrading to Movable Type 3.12, I'm aware of there being a Perl error shown when a comment is moderated. I've now tried to hide this with a HTML comment tag as it's nothing to get worried about - everything seems to work fine regardless. I have a feeling this is down to an incompatibility with MT-Blacklist. Thanks anyway to the 4 or 5 people who have reported this over the past week.
• The comment RSS feeds are now auto-discoverable on the individual entry pages, as are the category feeds on the category pages. I've also given them more meaningful titles to help users of Firefox who may want to add the feeds as Live Bookmarks.
• I've started to modify some of the links which point to non-HTML documents to include type="" attributes. It's in the HTML 4.01 specification (and presumably XHTML 1.0 too) and can be used to alert the user agent that the content of the linked document may be something other than a web page, such as an RSS feed or a PDF document. I have browsers like Lynx and text-to-speech browsers in mind here.
• The RSS feed for Smaller World now includes <comments> tags so that you can view the comments attached to an article. Bloglines and most good aggregators support it. incidentally the main feed for the site also includes <wfw:commentRSS> tags for each item to point out the comments RSS feeds - quite what use this is I don't know but I thought I'd stick it in anyway.

As part of a series of new features that I'm hoping to roll out on my sideblog, I've switched the category archives to being built dynamically. Generating category archives seems to be a major bottleneck in MT so this should make rebuilds almost instantaneous. I may also do the same for the weekly archives but as they don't put so much of a strain on MT it's less of a priority.

The other big new feature that I'm contemplating is adding the ability to post comments and trackback pings to sideblog entries. I've had this idea for a while but I deliberately held off implementing it until dynamic templating had been introduced to MT. It wouldn't be too hard to do but I don't want to do it if no-one will use it.

There's a phrase used by programmers called "eating your own dogfood" - using the products that you develop on a day to day basis, so you get to see them from a user's angle. It's a great way to find bugs or problems with usability.

As those of you who viewed my Bloglines public subscriptions will have seen, I subscribe to my own RSS feed. This is so that if I do something which breaks it or causes quirky behaviour, I'll know about it.

The feed works fine in my usual aggregator (FeedDemon) but there's a 'quirk' with Bloglines which means that items show as 'updated' but actually don't appear to be. Anyone who's been reading the feed with full content in Bloglines will know about it. As Phil pointed out, it's because the summaries included the number of comments and trackbacks attached to the entry, which incremented whenever someone posted a comment. But you wouldn't see that if you subscribed to the full entries. So having items show as updated for seemingly no reason would obviously be quite annoying, and as such I've corrected it.

I've also fixed a bug which would cause a PHP parsing error should you post a comment with a name with an apostrophe in it (like O'Grady). MT thankfully includes a global tag attribute which lets you escape quotes for use in PHP strings - see the MT help file.

There were a couple of blogs that I regularly read that I realised were not already on the blogroll. Which is a pity because they're good blogs and deserve a bit of linky love, and I hadn't realised that they weren't already linked. So I've added them.

I know it's not a particularly interesting entry but it's one way of getting the index page to rebuild :) . Because the index is accessed a lot I'm keeping it static for now. I'm considering making a couple of the other templates dynamic but I'm really not sure right now.

I've come up with a bit of PHP which decides whether a particular commenter is a 'friend' or a 'foe'. If they are a 'friend', then when they post their URL with their comment, the URL will not be posted as a redirect. If they are a 'foe', then their URL will redirect.

A 'friend', by my definition, is someone who regularly offers useful or insighting comments. I have taken down the URLs of the sites of those commenters and then fed them into a PHP script, so that if they post a comment, the URL will not redirect. Any other URLs will redirect.

Update: The original code I posted wouldn't actually work. Use the new code below which does work.

I have now decided to upgrade to Movable Type 3.11 since it doesn't seem to have the major problems that the 3.1 release had that I read about. And, indeed, it seems to work fine, bar some Perl errors with MT-Blacklist.

I've also implemeted dynamic publishing for a number of the templates - namely the category pages and their feeds, the comments RSS feeds and the daily archives. They are almost unchanged - the only difference is that, depending on how your aggregator works, trackback pings may appear separately from comments in the comments RSS feeds, and word counts are no longer shown. This is because the plugins which provide the old functionality have not been updated to support the dynamic templating feature so I've had to strip them out for now.

Because rebuilding categories slows MT down so much, to have this built dynamically should make posting entries much faster for me. I've also enabled caching and conditional requests, which means that requesting the pages shouldn't be much slower for you either.

For now, all other templates, including the indexes, main feeds and individual entry pages, will remain static, as these are the files which are requested the most. Please let me know of any issues, but as far as I can tell, everything appears to be working fine.

Mike Wills over at Koldark's Komputer World has been sorting out his 404 and redirects page recently, and Jesse Ruderman has a new 404 page, so I decided it was about time I did some surgery on mine.

The page fitted the general look of the site, and explained that the page was missing and gave a couple of reasons why. It then asked people to email me if they thought the page really should be there (that's been there over a year now and to date no-one has bothered) and offered a link to the advanced search page.

In my changes today, I replaced the link to the advanced search page which a simple search form - the advanced search is above and beyond what the majority of users will need so this should improve usability. There's now also a link to the home page and I used Server Side Includes to add the main navigation bar, again giving the user more destinations to go to (incidentally that page I linked to is a great guide to SSI). Finally, a bit more SSI provides the 'error report' at the bottom which users who find errors can email me, if they ever do.

You can see the new page here. I might do the same for my 410 error page since I still get several thousand hits for deleted pages every month.

I've just spent a few minutes going through the list of URLs that generated a 404 error on this domain over the past month and adding redirects to my .htaccess file where necessary. Some were caused by misguided crawlers attempting to guess the name of my RSS feeds (use autodiscovery, dammit!), others were files that I'd since renamed but not updated all references to. Either way, the changes should mean I get a few less errors, and I'm posting this a suggestion for others to do if they have a bit of free time :) .

I've restyled the comments on the entry pages again. I've gone back to using Adam Kalsey's SimpleComments as I think the trackbacks look better mixed in with the comments than they do separately. Trackbacks now have a grey background so they stand out better. I'd stayed away from SimpleComments until now because I wasn't sure if it was compatible with MT3 - turns out it mostly worked but would display unapproved comments awaiting moderation. A new version, 1.2, has fixed that.

Trackback pings are now also showing up in the Comment RSS feeds, again thanks to SimpleComments. This will probably lead to some kind of character encoding nightmare as soon as someone using a non-UTF-8 or Latin-1 character set pings me, but, eh.

Because of some crazyness with my internet connection last night, I uploaded a colophon but didn't have chance to tell you all about it. Anyway, it's there, and has information about this site and what it's running on. Thanks to Hanni for reminding me to get around to writing one.

In any case, it's linked from the sidebar and should be appearing on all pages in the next few minutes.

In the comments for a post about the new features of MT3.1 one of the comments that was made by Carthik Sharma is that MT doesn't have RSS feeds for comments. Carthik is a former MT user and now a proponent of Wordpress - he's the guy behind Wordlog.

Indeed, MT doesn't have this by default, but it's trivial to add - you just need to create another Individual Entry Archive that displays comments in RSS format. Which brings me on to a question for you - should I add it?

The advantage would be that you could keep track of any conversations attached to entries more easily, but it would mean more processing on my side. Rebuilds don't take ice ages but they aren't too quick either, so it would mean that posting comments would be slower than before. I may therefore leave this until MT3.1 and have this as a dynamic template.

Also - RSS or Atom? I'd like to choose Atom because I prefer the format but I'll go with whatever you guys prefer. As for why I wouldn't include some kind of email subscription, that's because it's harder to implement (requires plugins) and adds in the problem of managing subscriptions.

So - your ideas please.

I've implemented categories on my sideblog, Neil's Smaller World. In case you were wondering, categories were the mystery feature that I hinted at back in, uh, February. In fact, the feature has been ready since March but I never got around to actually putting anything in place on the public side.

What this means is that all posts (including old ones) are now sorted into categories, and each category has its own page. For example, posts about Apple and Mac OS X go into an Apple page. There's also one for eBay Auctions, random Flash animations and general sillyness, amongst others.

What's more, each category has its own Atom feed, so you could get a feed with links to Linux articles, or perhaps news about Microsoft. I'm only offering Atom at present - if you desperately want RSS there are a number of Atom-to-RSS converters out there. I might introduce RSS if there is sufficient demand.

Enjoy!

This will be my last comment in your blog, since you are TypeKey enabled. Goodbye.

Okaaaay. I knew Typekey was controversial but I really wasn't expecting that kind of response. To underline the point I made yesterday, You don't have to use Typekey. If you don't have a Typekey identity, your comment will receive the same treatment as a Typekey comment. Typekey support is only provided for the convinience of those who use it.

Besides, not only was that the last comment that person made, it was also their first :) . I only found one comment from that entire IP range on here.

If you have a TypeKey identity, you can now use it here. Shoehorning the new commenting code into my existing templates took rather more effort than I'd like - at first, I used this Six Apart guide but it didn't work, even after copying the entire block and pasting it in over what I had. To make the issue more tricky, the Default Templates on movabletype.org haven't been updated to MT3, so the only way I could get a default template was to create a new weblog and then copy and paste from that.

I've made a few stylistic adjustments but the comments and trackbacks will look ugly for a few days until I get time to fix them. It's fast approaching 11pm and I'm one tired little student, so I'm not going to be doing anything more tonight.

I'm not going to stop people who haven't got Typekey identities from commenting any time soon - I've done this largely for convinience on the part of those who may perhaps prefer to use the service. Similarly, Typekey users will not get preferential treatment. I do currently require an email address from Typekey users, since I sometimes like to be able to respond to commenters. I'm open to changing this situation however.

Oh, and apologies for anyone who tried to comment on or ping the site earlier on and got an Internal Server Error in return - that was my fault. Sorry.

So while I'm sticking it out with MT3 for now, I'm also seriously considering Wordpress, and to that end, I've set up a test blog called Neil's Wor(l)dpress (what else?) which I'll have a play around with. It's certainly a very nice system, and very simple to install, but perhaps not quite so easy to use as Movable Type is once it's running. I'd put that down to the sheer number of options and tabs that are there, but then that does give it the upside that it is highly configurable.

Migration from Movable Type is very easy, thanks to a nice import script. I may well switch my MT template blog over to Wordpress (the irony... ) to see how I get on with it. Of course, then I'd have to make my templates Wordpress-compatible, which will take a little doing.

My host does offer Wordpress, along with b2, b2evolution, Nucleus, Drupal and pMachine through Fantastico, an auto-installer for various web scripts, but it only has version 1.0.1 - I went ahead and downloaded 1.2 release candidate 1. Which seems to work fine.

I also have my Blogger Test Blog, and it's likely that my templates will be available for that platform too before long. Arguably sooner, actually, as it seems that Blogger's template format is a little easier to develop for than that of Wordpress, and therefore should require less work.

I am considering a redesign of the templates section though - it's getting rather cluttered and more templates isn't going to do it any good.

I'm going to give MT 3.0 Developer Edition a whirl. Since WordPress won't do what I want just yet (run multple blogs on one installation) I'll hold out for a bit.

Things may be a little funky around here for a bit. Hang in there. Once it's running, I'll do a review and try to ignore the licensing aspect of it.

Update: Installed. Everything seems to be working fine, including all my plugins (with the exception of MT-Blacklist).

I'd been wondering why I hadn't been having many people performing searches on the site lately. Normally I get quite a lot (most of which are rather obscure and bizarre... ) but recently there's been very little activity. Then a colleague of mine said she couldn't vote in the poll on Scrapie - the button would disable, but nothing would happen.

It turns out the rather dandy bit of supposedly cross-platform JavaScript that I use to disable the buttons after they're clicked on (to prevent people from submitting them repeatedly) doesn't work on some versions of IE. I say 'some', but actually it looks like 'most'. So I've been removing it from this and Scrapie, and suddenly the number of searches has gone back up again.

I don't know what made me more annoyed - the fact that this piece of script wasn't as cross-browser compatible as it claimed to be, or that IE didn't like it. I suppose this underlines the point that you should throroughly test your sites in as many browsers that you get your hands on, especially if you're designing for clients.

In any case, if you're searching for the video of Paris Hilton having sex, then it's not here. Go on Google, eat that.

A few weeks back I blocked an IP address that was repeatedly pinging my Pinging Service Rundown article (possibly because someone thought it was another service to ping!), however I realised today that, since the person was a TypePad user, I just prevented anyone who used TypePad from pinging this site.

I've now unblocked the IP address and disabled pings on that entry - normally pings don't get disabled until 6 months after the entry was posted but I decided to make an exception here (besides, 17 pings should be enough :) ). TypePadistas should now be able to ping me again, and sorry for my stupidity.

I'm working on a cool new feature for the site. It's not ready for primetime yet, so i won't tell you what it is until it's finished, but the more eagle-eyed of you may be able to guess as there are a few clues lying around.

I think I may have fixed the bug users who wanted their details remembered in the comments form. The default code that comes with MT would only save your details for the current folder, which, if you are using MT's default method of putting all files in one folde, is no problem. But I'm not now - a new folder is created for each day of posts. As such, the cookie is only any use for that day's posts - post a comment on another day and the cookie is not retrieved.

Anyway, I'd noticed that Les didn't have this problem, so I checked out his code. Indeed, he had made some subtle changes which allowed the cookie to be set for the whole domain, so I've copied the code in the hope that it'll fix the problem here.

Phil has unleashed a trackback hack that only allows you to ping an entry once with a particular URL. This has the advantage of stopping multiple trackback pings, and potentially alleviating crapflooders. I've applied it here.

He also has another hack, which fetches the URL that is being pinged and looks to see if there's any trackback RDF data in it. If so, the ping is let through, otherwise it's blocked - therefore you would only be able to ping something if you accepted pings yourself. I didn't apply that because I'm a little bit more open and because it would mean a greater risk of trackback timeouts, which, by the way, you can help to prevent by reading my Stopping Trackback Timeouts at the both ends article.

Stephen Riha also has a more elaborate hack - if a duplicate ping is received, it examines the excerpt, and if it is different, the existing ping is updated; otherwise it is discarded. I decided not to go with that one as I don't think I'd find it necessary. But it's there if you want to use it.

I got bored of the previous header background so I changed it to one I took at the FND last night, which I was pretty impressed at. If it interests you, the song playing at the time was "The Opera Song (Brave New World)" by Jurgen Vries feat. CMC, which, as long time readers may know, is one of my all-time favourites. I'd have been on the dancefloor had it not been for the fact that there weren't too many of my friends out last night. Normally I know at least 40-50 people there but despite it being rather busy somehow many of the people there were random people I'd never seen before. Strange...

Other than going to a comedy night this evening, I have no real plans for today. I've been out most nights this week and had busy days on Wednesday and Thursday so a quiet day sat resting behind a computer screen is more than welcome.

Random entries are back! I originally added the plugin for them back in December 2002 but successive re-installations of Movable Type have meant that I'd forgotten to re-add it. This means that on the home page, below the 'On This Day' section, you'll have three entries randomly chosen by the plugin from the 1500+ I've posted over the past couple of years. New entries are chosen every time the home page is rebuilt - when I post an entry, or receive a comment or trackback, or when I manually rebuild the page.

Not really a useful feature but someone may get some enjoyment out of it all the same. You can get the plugin from David Raynes.

In other changes the title background image has been changed again - it's now a shot of the dancefloor from the FND on the 5th December last year. At the time the photo was taken there was an air-guitar competition on stage.

I've applied a hack to the manual trackback script so that it always prepends 'http://www.neilturner.me.uk/' to any trackback URLs. What this means is that the script can only be used for trackbacking entries on this domain, and not any domain. Therefore the script cannot be used for indiscriminately pinging random sites - I had nightmares of a trackback spammer using the script to peddle his porn sites with the only traces coming back to this site.

Unfortunately, I had to use a rather dirty PHP and MySQL hack to remove the domain from any trackback URLs sent to the script - the <$MTEntryTrackbackLink$> tag in MT always includes the domain, which would result in the script attempting to ping http://www.neilturner.me.uk/http://www.neilturner.me.uk/.../1234 . There's almost certainly a better way of hacking the script such that if the trackback URL does not include this domain an error is thrown, but my 1337 PHP $k1lLz don't stretch that far yet.

Update: Richard pointed out that I'd actually broken the script rather than fixed it. That's now sorted, I'd patched the wrong variable. Thanks Richard.

Ever sick and tired of having trackback pings timeout when you ping other people's entries? Or do you hate having to clear up after people who inadvertently send you multiple pings? Well, read on, for I shall hopefully have some solutions for you.

I've been through my trackbacks table and found out as many instances as possible where another site is linking to this one using an outdated URL, and set up a redirect for that URL. Now it's your turn, particularly if you happen to be called Jake, Richy or Andy. Here's my redirect list - if you have time, do a search for 'http://www.neilturner.me.uk/entries/' on your blog and then correct away. As a token gesture, I've also corrected any trackback links where the destination URL is wrong or redirects.

I also finished last night's entry, which I somehow managed to lose most of.

There's a new feature towards the bottom of the sidebar called 'On This Day', which uses the OnThisDay plugin to display entries from that day in previous years. Apart from general procastination, the main reason why I've waited until now is that it dawned on me that my second blogiversary is in just over two weeks time, after which the feature may well be quite useful. In the first few months of my blogging 'career' some of the posts weren't anything to write home about, so I suppose another reason why is that I didn't want to show you just how bad some of the entries are without a few more entries that are good.

Actually, come to think of it, I could do a 'blast from the past' RSS feed using this plugin. If I did, would anyone be interested?

I've changed the title background to something a bit less Christmassy and a bit more... err... New-Year-y. If you recognise the image it's because you may well have seen it before. It's one of my holiday photos that I've shrunk and cropped, but I think it looks cool. One of the advanages of using CSS for backgrounds is that changing the image takes just a couple of minutes at most for the whole site.

On the life front, things are going alright - today is my Dad's birthday (sandwiched as usual between Christmas and New Year) and I'm listening to a new CD box set that I bought yesterday with part of my Christmas money. And yes, I bought it in the sales - what can I say, I'm a stingy tyke!

On Boxing Day we went through to have dinner with the relatives, and I got my wireless card fixed up so that it would work in Linux (you may remember my rant on the subject) - turns out that I was missing a few packages, including the Mandrake kernel source code, which, controversially, was not on any of the CDs I downloaded. Fortunately it was on RPMfind.net and eventually the drivers compiled and were working by the end of the day. It wouldn't have been something I could've done on my own, however.

Tomorrow we go to see Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King at the usual place - it's not the cheapest place in the city but it's certainly the nicest and the main screen is equipped to the THX standard. On Sunday 4th January (ie next Sunday) they're playing all three films back-to-back from 1pm, ending at shortly before midnight.

As for New Year's Eve, no plans just yet.

The templates section has received a long overdue overhaul, with the introduction of a weblog for news updates, along with RSS and Atom feeds. This is mostly because I do get 2-3 emails per week from people who use these templates and I imagine people would like to be notified when the files are updated. Mailing lists are becoming a bit passe and since I have a copy of MT here I may as well use that. It's pingable but I've decided not to enable comments.

Bluefade has also been updated to version 1.02, and now has a new license. See the Templates page for more.

Thanks to a bit of PHP and a new table in one of my SQL databases, if I post an entry on a predefined 'special day', then the name of the event will be appended to the date. You can see this in action above, since today is Christmas Eve.

The code is very quick and dirty, in that I knocked it up in about an hour today, but if interests you, take a look at the source code for the home page and code for the date function. If you do implement it, bear in mind that I've not written anything that will let you manage the database - you'll have to add them yourself using phpMyAdmin or something. You'll need day, month and description fields, the first two being integers and the latter being 'varchar', plus an ID for the primary key - set this to autoincrement. It's not used in the script so call it what you like.

There's probably a Movable Type plugin that'll do this for you but you don't get the same satisfaction of having written something yourself.

A while ago I registered neilturner.org.uk, after noticing that it was available and not too expensive to register. However, it's taken me until now, 6 months down the line, to actually do something useful with it. It now mirrors this site, since my new host allows me to have a handful of extra domains linked into my account, and sending email to anything [at] neilturner.org.uk will send it on to me.

It's not particularly interesting I'll admit but at least it now has a purpose.

NTL have finally updated their DNS servers, so I can blog as normally now. It's taken them a while - the IP change should have happened early on Friday and sites like SamSpade.org were showing the new version soon afterwards.

The reason why I switched hosts now, rather than when my contract with 3050hosting runs out in March, is down to three factors:

1. I'm at home, which means that if I needed to transfer files manually (as I did in this case) I could do it over a broad-ish-band connection instead of 56k dialup, and it wouldn't eat time that could be better used for studying (or in the student union bar).
2. The site was about to moved to a new server anyway, powered by cpanel as opposed to Ensim. I might as well just have one move, rather than a move now and then another move three months down the line.
3. My host also realised this, and us such, put up a special offer (both hosts are part of the same company). By moving to DIYHost.co.uk before January 5th, I get the remaining months of my contract with my old host refunded, and the £10 setup fee for the new account waived - therefore moving now would actually be cheaper than later on.

The move does form part of the excuse for not blogging yesterday, but the other part was down to me getting the old laptop geared up so that my dad could use it. This involved removing all my documents, photos and music, uninstalling any programs he wouldn't use, and then setting up the computer for his email account etc. I've set the system up to use IE as the browser - yes, it is the spawn of the devil but it's what he's used to; however Mozilla Thunderbird will be his email client since didn't seem to be able to tell the difference between that and Outlook Express anyway. As a final step I ran Diskeeper, and now the system seems to be running well. Fortunately, having installed and configured everything myself on that machine I knew where everything was, which helps greatly when you want to remove things.

The DNS switch is in full swing, it seems, however since NTL have not updated their own DNS system it makes posting a little difficult. It's partly my own fault as I've tried to set everything up such that when the domain is working everything will look fine, but in this intermittent period the backend system here looks very messy. Still, it's an excuse for a night away from blogging - I'll write something tomorrow, probably.

If you can read this, then you're looking at the new version of the site. Although it's based on a brand-spanking new Movable Type installation, everything should be at the same location as before and I've imported all of the templates.

I'm now being hosted by DIY Host, which means I have effectively unlimited bandwith (350MB per day is the actual limit) and a whole gig of space. On the old account, the site was beginning to get too big for its 125MB belt and I noticed that its bandwidth usage, while being within in the 2GB limit, was getting higher.

The DNS will get sorted in time, but until then http://207.218.250.8/~neiltur/ will get you the latest version of the site. Some internal links may not work, as will some images, but this should be sorted once I've uploaded everything and the DNS sorts itself out.

In other news, that big box from DHL was my old laptop, complete with new fan and battery. It seems to work fine, and the hard drive is as it was when we sent it off (some vendors reformat it as a matter of course), so one of my Christmas tasks will be to get that to a state that my father can use. Which means uninstalling Linux...

I've put in an automated bot blocker, on the off chance that I may catch bots that are deliberately looking for security exploits on the site. I won't publicise which URLs will trigger it but you can probably guess what they are.

It shouldn't affect normal, legitimate users but if you find you find you are banned, send me an email with your IP address and the page you tried to open and I'll investigate.

Looks like I forgot to set the correct permissions on the mt-tb.cgi file when I reloaded MT, so you'll have got an Internal Server Error when trying to ping me. Sorry about that.

Anyway, it appears to work now. Ping me at will.

By accident, I came across the blogChannel RSS module. This includes a few extra tags that allow RSS aggregators to fetch your blogroll (in OPML format), read your own aggregator subscriptions, and link to a 'b-link' blog, or 'sideblog'. You can probably guess what I'd say next, so I'll save you from having to read it.

So potentially, if you subscribe to my main feed and are equipped with a aggregator that understands blogChannel, it should also pick up the Smaller World feed. That said, FeedDemon doesn't do this, and, to be honest, I don't know of any clients that do yet. But presumably if they did they would ask you if you wanted to subscribe to it, or something.

Mark has an article on the subject.

By the way, I'm now archiving Smaller World posts by week.

After Sunday's big rejig, I thought I'd summarise what has and hasn't changed, just in case you are linking to anything:

Pages that are in the same location as before

• Category-specific RSS feeds
• Category-specific pages
• Main RSS feed
• Any other pages that I haven't mentioned (although they may be out of date)

Pages that have moved but have redirects

• Monthly archive pages - a page located at /entries/2003_10.html will now be located at /2003/Oct/ (for example). 301 (permanent) redirects are in place.

Pages that have moved and won't have redirects

• Individual entry pages (due to the number of pages involved)

In future, if I have to reload everything I shouldn't have the same problem because the filenames are now not reliant on the entry IDs. Which probably explains why TypePad now defaults to that naming scheme as opposed to using entry IDs - hopefully future versions of Movable Type will do the same.

This should be the last post for the day, but I just thought I'd post about the 'Christmas' look that I've added to the home page. And yes, taht image was stolen of Google Image Search...

I've tinkered with the way comments and trackbacks are displayed, and would like some feedback on whether you like it or not. This entry probably shows the changes off best. Please let me know if it's an improvement, or if you have any issues with it.

I think it looks cool, but if you beg to differ, speak up!

Update: Thanks for the comments so far. I've adjusted the spacing so it isn't quite so spread out (although I prefer the 'uncluttered' look personally). Please let me know if this is an improvement.

Also, you may notice that I've provided permalinks to all posted comments and received trackback pings. They've been there all along but you had to scurry around in the page source to find out what they were. Additionally the number of words in an entry is included in the grey text on the entry page, along with the date and time that the entry was posted at. I have no idea whether it's useful to anyone but I thought I'd include it anyway...

Oh, and as it is, most browsers will print the page out without any styling anyway, so deforestation due to excess paper being used as a result of my sparse design shouldn't be an issue :).

After a prompt from Chris, I decided to hack MT so that trackbacks appear instantly on archive pages when someone sends a ping. However, the hack in question is considerably more yummy than that - it also lets you configure how often index templates are rebuilt. For example, while I want the index page to be rebuilt eveytime an entry, comment or trackback is posted, the WML page only needs to be rebuilt when I post a new entry. So in theory, the slowdown caused by the archive pages being rebuilt each time a ping is sent will be offset by the speed increase caused by some of the index templates not being rebuilt.

I'd appreciate the odd ping to this entry to let me know if it works, and, in particular, if any timeouts happen while pinging - you can find this out in MT by viewing the Activity Log after sending the ping. It worked when I tested it internally but a few external pings would just confirm that.

There is one bug - MT now thinks its version 2.63 and not 2.64, probably because Sean (the hackmeister) uses MT 2.63 so the hacked file will be based on that. I'll see if I can fix it myself; I imagine it'll be a relatively trivial change. Update: Yes, it was a trivial change - one character on line 10 in /lib/MT.pm :).

If you don't mind editing your MT files a bit then it's quite a worthwhile hack to make - it's not too difficult to implement and you get some new options to play with :). Bear in mind that if you use the ScriptyGoddess Comment Queue hack, or the Duplicate Comments hack, or like me you use both, then you'll need to reapply those hacks, but I've got all three running now and there doesn't seem to be any problems.

The one thing that is annoying me this evening is that Firebird has completely forgotten how to copy and paste, which is immensely annoying when copying URLs :-/. It's never happened before either. Hmmm.

Although I originally found out about it 2 months ago, today I finally got around to installing the Manual Trackback script for people who have weblog software that doesn't support trackback (like Blogger or Radio), but still want to send trackback pings. There's now a link on every comments section where trackbacks are enabled (or there will be when the entries are all rebuilt), which runs you through a simple PHP script that asks you for the details and then sends the ping.

It can be hacked to point at other servers - for example I was able to ping Reflective Reality with an entry from the ODP Weblog, seeing as Ciaran never included a trackback interface to it. That said, please don't abuse this script by sending loads of spammy pings to people, since, at least at the moment, it's the trackback equivalent to an SMTP server with open relays.

Anyway, the rain has stopped so I'm going to cash in a cheque, and then try not to spend money in town.

Apparently, every entry where comments have been enabled has had a typo on it since June. You could have told me about it...

Just made a few minor changes to the design of the front page. Any thoughts?

Note that if your browser supports stylesheet switching, you can get something near the old look by choosing 'Modern Page Style' from the stylesheet list. If you browser doesn't support stylesheet switching, you may need to get a better browser.

I'd better let you know that I'm in the middle of a tag change, which could mean possible downtime or strangeness over the next few days.

I've made the comment submission process a little more user-friendly. At present, once the comment has been submitted, it just returns to the entry page, giving no real indication of whether the comment was received or not. This is because under normal circumstances the comment would show up, but since I installed the Comment Queue Hack, it doesn't.

So, here's how I made it more graceful, just in case you're interested in implementing Comment Queue yourself. Note that this will only work if you don't use the Javascript popup windows (and instead have all of your entries and comments on the individual archive pages).

• In the Individual Entry Archive template, find the <input type="hidden" name="static" value="1" /> line and delete it. This makes Movable Type load the entry page once the comment has been submitted, which we don't want. You'll need to rebuild all of your entries after this change.
• Now open the Comment Listing Template, and delete most of the code in the body. All I have in there now is an <h1> tag with the name of the blog, a 'Thank You' heading and a message to say 'Thank you for submitting blah blah...'. And that's all you need. You can also delete the JavaScript in there too.
• Finally, you may like a 'Go back to entry' link, which you can acheive with <$MTEntryPermalink$> in an anchor (link) tag.

And that's it. Far more graceful, I think you'll agree :).

Seeing as Fox News has dropped its 'fair and balanced' fight, I've changed the tagline again. Which will now mean that Google will be dropping off people looking for lyrics to Flip & Fill songs, but, heh...

Thanks for your messages yesterday. I think most of us are over the initial shock now. The funeral service is on Wednesday.

In better news, I've managed to sell one of my textbooks to a bloke in Chestershire Cheshire (although his name isn't Andy ;) ). It's taken a while, but at least Amazon give you up to 2 months exposure as opposed to eBay's 10 days.

Not only is my mail client now speedier, but this site should be too. I've decided to dump the code that serves up the main page as XML in Mozilla, partly because it slows the page down, and partly because if I make even the tiniest mistake in my code, the whole page goes belly up. Too much trouble to be worth it, in my opinion.

Secondly, the entry and archive pages are no longer served up as PHP, and are now static HTML. That means they don't require preprocessing on the server so they should appear immediately. It should also make my host happier because I'll be utilising less of their CPU cycles :).

David Raynes has created a Perl version of the CommentQueue hack which I use for the pre-moderation of comments. Unlike the ScriptyGoddess PHP version, it has built-in entry rebuild functionality, which is great because I've never been able to get Tim's mt-rebuild script to work and so I've had to rebuild everythign manually.

While David's version is a little more basic, and doesn't yet allow for editing of posts before they're submitted, it certainly will save me a bit of time.

And finally, Bradford's email system is back up, so you can email me again :). I don't appear to have lost any emails as yet. Oh yeah, and here's a BBC news article about the university - a good one this time :).

Just a note to any Mozilla users - if the page looks wrong, hit refresh. I had to modify the stylesheet today along with the other changes and it may be that you're seeing a cached copy.

The change was only a minor one - replacing the uppercase selectors with lowercase ones, which is now required for Mozilla compatibility in this case. I may or may not update the downloadable template files.

Oh yeah, and there's a new tagline for the blog. If you've been following the FoxNews.com lawsuit lately you'll understand.

This morning I had a silly idea after reading Mark Pilgrim's XML.com article "The Road to XHTML 2.0: MIME Types". Now, on my site, I'm using XHTML 1.1, and according to the article, XHTML 1.1 has a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml, and not text/html. However, IE, being its usual ignorant self, does not understand what application/xhtml+xml is, so setting the Content-Type header to that will only end in tears for a considerable portion of my visitors.

Fortunately the article gives a nice bit of PHP code which will serve a application/xhtml+xml version of the page to any browser that asks for it. At the moment I think only Mozilla and its friends do but using this code means that it will work for other browsers if they support it in future.

So far so good. But Mozilla only likes well-formed XML - it can tolerate the odd missing tag in HTML, but in XML you get a rather ugly error message instead of your page. So I had to go through and fix all the errors in my code so that thing would display.

I then realised that I'd have to do this every single time I posted anything. So over to the MT Plugins directory for the Validable plugin which corrects many common markup errors for you. Phew. I thought.

But no. I then had to fiddle around with my blockquote tags since it was adding extra paragraph tags to them. Display-wise there was no problem but the W3C validator told me I had 30 errors - not good.

After another half hour or so of experimenting I finally found out what I was doing wrong and got it fixed. So it should all be fine and dandy now.

You may be thinking why I bother making it so difficult for myself - choosing the strictest DocType, making my pages valid XML etc. It's to prove a point - sites which are accessable and that validate can look good. You only have to look at the people who have used downloaded and installed my templates over the past few weeks to see that I'm doing something right.

On the bright side, the site now works and I found out what 'laceration' means :).

Just a quickie - Stupid Evil Bastard and Breaking Windows are now blogrolled. I've been monitoring them for a few days and I like what I see.

Been to Ikea today to stock up for going back to university. Yes, I am fully aware that it's only August 1st and uni is still 6 weeks away but my mother has a lot of work to do this month so she's unsure how much free time she'll have before I go back. And I'm not going there on the bus.

I did bump into one of my schoolfriends there, which was nice, and had to admire their computer security system - on the staff computers, there were sticky labels on the monitors saying "Password: IKEAWORK". Very secure indeed.

By the way, has anyone else noticed that 'blogroll' is only one letter out from 'bog roll'? I'd hate to think I had a roll of toilet paper on the side of my blog...

Added: Looks like some other people have been to Ikea :)

I'm now using Adam Kalsey's SimpleComments plugin to display the comments and trackbacks together in one rather lovely bundle, instead of in separate sections. Think of it as the comment version of peace and free love.

I'm still perfecting the display (which has meant at least 5 complete rebuilds of all 1101 entries... ) but I think I'm nearly there. Comments, and indeed trackbacks are welcome.

I've spent the day nursing a hangover after going out on the town for my friend Tom's 19th birthday party. I really did drink far more than I should've, to the point at which I actually threw up at about 6am this morning. That's never happened before. I did get into a moshpit though, and came out in one piece, which I was quite proud of - I don't know the song title or the artist but the chorus at the end goes like "F*** you I won't do what you tell me". Kim will probably know :).

Which reminds me, Kim, or rather her recent problems with Movable Type, forms the inspiration of a tutorial entry I hope to write up tomorrow. I need to do a bit of research and experimentation with it first though. Stay tuned.

I decided to stop showing IP addresses on the site, now that I have the comment moderation system in place. I only added it as a way of deterring people from posting silly things, but since I can now stop those before they make the public side it's unnecessary.

The amount of silly posts and flames has gone down since I introduced the moderation system - some people still persist but I've only had 2 or 3 cases in the past month. At one point it was that many each day, and unfortunately most were coming from BT Openworld dial-up, which meant that the only way they could be adequately blocked would be by blocking access to everyone on that ISP. While I hate BT's guts, I think that's going too far.

You know, even though I'm not taking part in the Blogothon, I've still made four posts this evening :).

The .htaccess file on the server has received another boost, and is now capable of blocking the bulk of the IPs used by the RIAA and MPAA. The list was obtained from this article on TechFocus (direct link).

Jake had already done it but when I checked about half an hour ago, more IP addresses and ranges had been added.

If you want, you can use my file, which has all of the IPs included plus all sorts of other things which block various nasties. I've removed the stuff that is specific to this site so it should be safe to use on your own sites.

As promised, I have added a Pie/(n)Echo feed for your syndication enjoyment. It is based on Mark Pilgrim's July 1st Prototype MT template. According to the Feed Validator, it contains no errors.

I will try and keep the template up to date as the format evolves. I have high hopes for this format and hope that its purely independent nature will bring it success. I just hope we don't have a Ogg Vorbis/MP3 case, where Ogg Vorbis, the better, open format, still could not take the crown of MP3, which isn't so advanced and is controlled by patents. Okay, RSS isn't patented, but a google search for 'Winer Number' will give you an idea of what the fuss is about.

I'm already liking the look of Pie - the use of UTC, proper support for encoded content (as opposed to a hacked on namespace as in RSS), and the fact that it should be quite widely supported when it's done, what with Six Apart, Blogger and most of the other blog tool developers taking an interest.

Note that to install the MT template, you also need to install the UTCDate and LastModified plugins. They're pretty straightforward ones, though - just a case of putting two files into your plugins folder.

The past couple of days have seen a number of changes to the RSS feed, so I thought I'd summarise these in a blog entry, just in case any of you are interested in what I've done.

1. I've tried to remove as many 'redundant' namespaces as possible. This means I'm using native tags like <pubdate> and <category> instead of Dublin Core tags like <dc:date> and <dc:category> . In effect, both are correct and widely supported, but the latter are actually in the RSS 2.0 spec. The template is now based on an amalgamation of Mark Pilgrim's RSS 2.0 feed with Creative Commons (which I believe is now the basis of the default RSS 2.0 feed in Movable Type 2.64) and Brad Choate's feed.
2. If an entry has comments, then the excerpt, which is shown in readers which do not support content:encoded (such as Agreg8 and FeedReader) will now show not only the word count but the number of comments.
3. The Slash namespace has been added to show how many comments an entry has in readers that support it. SharpReader is one such client, and indeed the author uses it himself on his own blog, although only the very latest version (0.9.2, released July 8th) supports it.
4. Fixed a bug in SharpReader where I'd removed the RDF namespace, which its XML parser didn't like since this is used in the Creative Commons declaration. Strangely enough, the Feed Validator did not spot this - I have emailed Mark about this but have yet to receive a reply. Either way, I have added the namespace so that it should now work in SharpReader.

Another new addition is the SmartyPants plugin from Daring Fireball, a site which has provked some discussion on OnlineBlog, mostly because of its design choices. But anyway, this plugin smartens up my quote marks, such that they look more natural. I could explain, but I'd only confuse you, and besides, the home page for the plugin has a far better explanation. It makes the text look nicer anyhow.

If you peruse the archives, you may well have noticed that several of the older entries have missing photos in them. The reason is the same as for the loss of the Blogger entries - they were on the same server, so they got lost too.

However, I have reposted a couple, including this one of me with Tim from Big Brother 3. It's mostly in answer to my friend Richard, who managed to get this photo of him and Timmy Mallett. I am so jealous right now.

I was asked by someone to remove the photo. Sorry to disappoint you.

More problems hit the blog yesterday, when my host forgot to set the permissions on my index folder correctly after the change. This meant that, while I could read the files in it, I couldn't write to it, so the index page of the blog remained static. That's now fixed, and should be the last of the problems.

I'm now back at home, and have had a good night's sleep to catch up on my recent defecits :).

I came across this hack on phil ringnalda dot com. It adds more functionality to the trackback notification emails, so that there is a link to the entry edit screen - the idea being that it is easier to remove unwanted pings.

The reason why Phil posted this is due to trackback spam, something I've not yet encountered (but then Phil has a much higher profile than me). However it will help me deal with 'over-pinging' - MT has quite a short timeout period when sending trackback pings and if no response is received in the allowed time, it assumes it failed and will then re-ping that weblog the next time the entry is rebuilt. So if your server isn't the fastest in the world (like this one has been recently), every time someone saves that entry, another ping is sent.

Talking of weblog spam, I've taken several steps to reduce the junk comments posted here. I won't say what they are, just in case the perpetrators find a way around it, but it seems to be effective so far. I will give you a clue though - it involves some Apache configuration.

I'm experimenting with a new design. I've yet to re-do the title bar so it's reverted to a basic text one for the time being, but most other things should be okay. I say should because I haven't had chance to check everything. In fact, I've still yet to check it in IE.

This new design will make nesting errors in the HTML markup more apparent, as I found out when I first flicked it on. These errors aren't detectable by the W3C validator, because the markup follows the rules, but it doesn't make sense in a semantic way. Those errors should now be fixed, but again, I'll need to check.

So... any comments so far?

Made a few minor changes to the main index template this morning.

1. The calendar got ditched. Other than showing that I'm a prolific blogger, it doesn't really serve much purpose. And in terms of HTML markup, it's huge, so hopefully nuking it will allow my bandwidth limit to go further.
2. There is now a countdown until I go on holiday, which is 2 weeks on Thursday.
3. And another holiday related update - the main index will now always show the last 15 entries, no matter what days they were posted on. This is because there will be two weeks where I will not be blogging, so under the default settings after the first week this page would be empty.

If you can't remember what I'm doing on my vacation, have a read of my ramblings from 13th April.

I've added not one, not two but three plugins to my MT installation today. Admittedly, two of them are almost exactly the same, but that they're from different sources.

First up is BlogPings from David Raynes, which is used to display the current total number of trackback pings received for all entries on the blog. MT already has a built-in function that does the same thing for comments, but not for trackbacks - this plugs the gap. You can see it at the bottom of the side bar - at time of writing, it was standing at 37 pings.

Then there is MTEntryIfComments, which gives you an extra level of flexibility when no-one has left a comment. Until now, I had a problem due to the use of ordered list tags on the comments page - if there were no comments, there would be an empty pair of tags, which falls foul of HTML validity rules. Thanks to this, if there are no comments, those empty ol tags will be hidden, and replaced with a message saying there are no comments. Cool, eh?

Finally, there's MTEntryIfTrackbacks, which is basically the same as the above, except for trackback pings instead of comments.

The addition of these two plugins should now mean that the individual archive pages validate properly, but I'll check to make sure when I have a bit more time to spare.

Since I now have a Google API key, I've decided to use it, if only for demonstration purposes. As such, you can now see a list of sites that Google thinks is similar to this one. It only returns 8 results (even though the corresponding search has 29) and not all of the links work, but then that's what happens when you get machines to do the work instead of people :). Humans do it better! ::-D

After reading today's Lockergnome Windows Daily I uploaded the beginning of what will be my CV. Just on the off chance that someone might be passing through and then decide that I'm worthy of a job...

To add: a CV is short for Curriculum Vitae, which is what British people call a Resumé.

There seems to be some server weirdness going on - it's affecting me as well as others. The server seems to be intermittently refusing connections, and even when it does allow them the database is being somewhat unco-operative, spewing out SQL connection errors at random times. I can't do anything about it, but hopefully normal service will resume as soon as possible.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been gradually updating each and every entry so that it has a category and an excerpt. Although categories can be assigned en masse, to add excerpts requires editing each entry individually and the republishing, which takes quite a long time, especially with over 500 entries to do. It's doesn't really fill you with excitement, does it?

It has been nice to re-read what I've said in the past, and retake some of the polls I've posted to see if I still get the same results. It's also given me a chance to fix spelling errors, broken links and invalid markup, too.

Currently, I've done the first 220 entries, which means that all of the 2002 posts are done. That just leaves around 4 months of posts from this year to do.

Just to let you know, I've configured Movable Type so that it does not add the Trackback auto discovery code to the main index page. This means that the data will only be discovered if you use the link to the actual page (as in /entries/000xxx.html) rather than an anchor on the home page (as in /#axxx). I seriously doubt any of you are using the second method, but if you are, this is your wake up call. The archive pages will still have the data.

I felt it was a little pointless having 700 bytes of excess code for every entry on the main page - assuming I enter two entries a day, that's 14 x 700, which is nearing 10KB excess code on the home page. As such, the page should download quicker and my bandwidth limit will hopefully now go further.

While browsing Phoenity, the home of a common skin for Firebird, Thuderbird, K-Meleon, Camino, Safari, w.bloggar and gawd knows what else, I came across Phoenity Smilies, which has various smileys in the same theme. And they look really cool :-D.

So, as you can probably imagine, I've implemented them here, since they're free to use and distribute. So, say hello to the new set:

:) :( ;) :-o >:-) :-D :'-( :-O :-| :-/

Cool, aren't they?

In an effort to organise my plans for this site other the next few weeks, and to let you guys know what I'm up to, I've written a to-do list which lists everything that I'm planning for the site. There aren't any timescales - with my exams starting in a mere 6 days I'm going to be squeezing blogging time around revision, so these changes will come when I have a bit of spare time.

I've hooked in Richy C's CacheRemote tool to cache the blogrolls on my server. This means that instead of contacting the BlogRolling server every time the page is loaded, it is only contacted every 15 minutes, thus putting much less strain on Jason's resources. It does mean that the 'updated' marks will now be as much as 15 minutes behind, but then in most cases they were 5 minutes behind before anyway.

Full details of how to add it to your site (PHP required) is included with the link.

Although it's only 12 days away now, I've decided to replace the JavaScript birthday countdown with David Raynes' MTCountdown plugin. It now means the home page of this site contains no JavaScript whatsoever. None. Nada. Zilch.

The date is added whenever the home page is republished - which is whenever I post an entry or one of you guys posts a comment. It may mean it is slightly out at some points, but it means that those of you who browse without JavaScript enabled can find out when I hit the final year of my teens.

(notice a common theme with the post titles?)

I've added support for <acronym> tag expansion in MTMacro, so that if I type an acronym, it gets a dotted line under it, and by hovering over it you can find out what that acronym means. Most of them are pretty obvious but not everyone can understand them, and it improves accessability for the site. I'm probably missing a few but adding them isn't difficult.

I've now got the main page back up to the XHTML 1.1 standard. I've been a little hesitant in the past because Mozilla would make the header larger if I went above 1.0 Transitional, which would mean you'd see a blue strip below the logo, but I managed to fix that with a single extra line in the style sheet.

The page now also uses Unicode, however I was forced to stop short of including the standard XML declaration which you are supposed to include in all XML documents. The reason for this is that IE inflates the text size when you do that, so the fonts were much larger than my liking. Quite why it does that I have no idea, but then we all know that IE's rendering engine sucks.

Finally, I cut another couple of unused lines out of the style sheet, so today's addition won't affect the file size. Both the page and the style sheet still validate though, which is nice.

I never realised Movable Type had support for rich text editing (ie giving you buttons for bold, italic and underlined text) until I once wrote an entry in IE. Sadly, the buttons are disabled in Mozilla. Or at least, they are until you hack the templates. Note: to get it working on my copy, I had to convert the second piece of JavaScript to actual HTML. I imagine it will totally mess up rendering on IE, but, well, heh.

Added: It also seems that the guys at BlogZilla had the same problem as me. Interesting.

Link was uncovered by the way of Asa, who thinks I rock. He seems to like Andy, too.

Yesterday, occasional commenter troworld brought up the idea of having a Kilp feed, to go along with my RSS feeds. Although he linked to some instructions, when I read through it, it did appear to require some effort to get working. Now that may have had something to do with me reading it at 7:30am, so my brain may well have been functioning at sub-optimal performance, but do any of you guys feel that this feature is warranted? It seems like overkill going through all of that just to satisfy one user.

It also annoys me the KlipFolio, the application that reads Kilp feeds, does not have better RSS support. Let's face it - RSS is now the de-facto standard for syndication of documents, and has been designed to be extensible so that new features can be added easily. Why bother creating a new format when a perfectly good one already exists?

Another question - do you really think I need 3 RSS feeds? I need the RSS 0.91 feed for compatibility with older/more basic feed readers like, err, FeedReader, and RSS 2.0 has more features. Should I ditch the RSS 1.0 feed? It does have a few unique things in it, but only a handful of readers actually understand its extensions, so I'm unsure if I really need to bother. Your comments are welcome.

I've made a big change to the blogroll. Firstly, there's now only 1, not 3 separate ones. The reason for this is that the miscellaneous blogroll was becoming quite large, whereas the other two were shrinking, and because for the second time I've had to move a blog out of one of the retired blogrolls (Tony has parted company with Lockergnome - the details are here).

I also feel a little greedy having 3 blogrolls when, as a non-contributing member of BlogRolling, I should only have 1 (I added the others while the option was still available for free members). And making three requests to BlogRolling's servers probably drains it more than making one larger request, so Jason should be happier.

It also allows me to do some cool things. Firstly, the rolls are now ordered by their last updates times, so the most recently updated ones are at the top. It does mean that those who don't/no longer ping Weblogs.com or The Pinger will end up at the bottom, but I think that's now only MozillaZine and Bunda.org.

Secondly, an OPML version of the blogroll is available - it's attached to this page using a link statement, ready for importing into your newsreader du jour.

Finally, the links are in groups of five so that you don't get a huge great list.

I've resurrected the referral script. I originally installed it in early January, but it's been gone for the past couple of months due to the server problems. It's nice to see where people come from, and this does the job admirably.

I'm employing the same script as before - Refer from Textism - but I may make some changes having looked at the source code. One of Refer's cool features is to output the data as an RSS feed, however it only uses RSS 0.91. My plan is to upgrade it to RSS 2.0 (or add it as a separate option), adding things like formal date fields and more metadata in the header. From what I gather, the script is uncopyrighted, so it's within my right to do this, and perhaps even sendthe updated copy back to the author as version 1.2.

I love open source tools.

I've edited the stylesheet to acheive two things:

1. To validate without any errors or warnings (which it does, see W3C's CSS Validator)
2. To be smaller - I don't use all of the attributes from the original MT stylesheet, so the unused ones can be removed. Doing so means that the sheet is around 400 bytes smaller. It may not sound much, but this file gets accessed 1000 times each day. Over a month, I can save 17MB of data transfer. Now that's more like it

I also restructured it so that it looked easier to read and removed excessive spaces, tabs and semi-colons, again to cut the bloat.

Of course, one surefire way to lower my bandwidth usage would be to stop writing anything. But that would get boring.

If it interests you, I've used 872MB this month so far, so I'm on target for about 1.1GB - well within my 2GB limit. Phew.

I've added a FOAF profile for myself: read it here. Mozilla users with the Site Navigation Bar enabled (View > Show/Hide > Site Navigation Bar and then select 'Show Always' or 'Show when needed') can open the Document menu, choose Meta and the select FOAF - this also lets you access the RSS feed and RSD file, along with the Search page, and makes navigating throught the individual entry pages easier.

Although I said back in January that I wasn't going to, now that a few more bloggers have them I guess now is time to jump on the bandwagon. It's only a very simple one made with FOAF-a-matic, but as with all RDF and XML-based technologies there's room for expansion, and I'll sort these out as I learn more about the syntax. Once that's done, you'll be able to find out my nearest airport, for example, though quite why you'd want to know I live near Leeds Bradford International Airport I don't know. It's not like it's a great airport, or anything...

New feature-let on the blogroll. Two of the blogrolls now have * by their names - theses are bloggers that I've met in real life (and will hopefully be meeting up with again in a few weeks). If you're not on the list, but game for a meetup, you know what my email address is. I don't bite. Really.

I decided to be a little crafty and have a go at styling the RSS 2.0 feed using CSS. Yes, you can tell I'm on easter holidays and have nothing better to do, can't you?

Anyway, as you'll see if you use a browser that supports it (Mozilla et al, and possibly Opera), not all of it is styled. That's down to its use of Dublin Core and content:encoded extensions, which of course use colons in the tags. This is annoying because CSS interprets a colon as specifying a pseudo-element for a tag, so it sees content:encoded as specifying the encoded pseudo-element of the content tag (like A:hover specifies the hover psuedo-element of the A tag).

I've tried using quotes, but to no avail. I think this is where XSL (the eXtensible Stylesheet Language) comes in, but after having a quick glance at it I don't think I'll bother - it looks hard. Blarg.

I've resurrected the smileys, and added a new one: :-p. I'll set up a reference guide at some point so that you can use them in your comments, along with the HTML tags that are allowed there.

Oh go on, you can have your comments back. But they'll be off again at the first sign of any abuse - you have been warned.

I've re-added the advanced search page for those of you who find the normal box on the left a little underwhelming. If you want your own, The Movable Type manual reveals all.

I did a little checking, and found out that the .htaccess file I spent so long creating on Tuesday was offset by 1 for all entries after 4th November. Blarg.

So I've spent part of this morning fixing that. Google seems to have started crawling the site again, so hopefully the old pages will magically disappear from its index shortly. Which underlines the reason why you should use 302 redirects where possible, as opposed to using refresh http-equiv meta tags. And that reminds me, the old site now redirects to this one in the same fashion - it's been 5 months since the move so I think most people who are willing to update their links have done so.

I don't quite know what happened, but somewhere along the line, something corrupted. I'm guessing it was the database, but I reinstalled MT entirely just in case.

I only lost one entry (which I'll repost later on) - the 351 others were fortunately salvagable, and I've successfully imported these back into the blog. The individual archives are now in a new location, because the file names will be different, so I'll be setting up redirects. I also lost all of the categories, but your comments and trackbacks were preserved.

I'll be bringing back the design too.

Ugh. That was 2 1/2 hours wasted.

Logging in today, I found that one entry had not one, not two, but 11 comments posted to it, all of which were the same. I imagine someone clicked the button, waited, and then clicked it again since nothing happened, and ended up doing this several times.

As a result, the comment posting forms now have a message advising you to press the button once, and once only. My server may be slow but it isn't forgetful.

I was hoping to add a script that disabled the 'Post' button once you'd clicked on it, but it didn't want to work. If anyone knows how to integrate this with MT's BakeCookie system, I'd be most greatful.

I also fixed an issue with the commenting form not remembering your details, even if you tick the box to remember them. In fact, I now have a 'beta blog' loaded into MT with the default templates, so if I mess something up then I can always cut and paste from that and 'roll-back' to something that works.

I had a read of your comments about the redesign, and have taken some of them into account. I'll agree with the over-use of white space, and as a result, the background is now purple (one of my favourite colours, along with orange). I've also made the page wider - yesterday's design was fine on a 640x480 resolution whereas this isn't, but then it does look a lot better on high-resolution screens.

And actually, I like this even better :-D. Some of the non-updated pages will look rather funky until I get around to fixing them, but any that were changed yesterday should look fine.

And any resemblance to the Neurotic Fishbowl is purely co-incidental.

Yes, the design has changed again. I really didn't like the old one, to be honest - I felt it looked rather cluttered and messy.

This design is loosely based on Textism, and sees the Tahoma font being replaced by a combination of Georgia and Trebuchet MS (or an equivalent font). It didn't take that long to do, since almost all of the formatting is now controlled by CSS, so most of the work involved changing the style sheet, which incidentally has been rewritten from scratch.

While it's still not perfect, I'm happy with it. There may be a few more tweaks as time goes on, but for the most part it's done, bar a couple of pages that aren't finished yet.

I'm staying in today. The weather outside is awful - the rain is coming down diagonally and it's freezing. I got drenched when going out to by a paper earlier on. So to pass the time, I might as well do some blog tweaking.

While perusing The Girlie Matters, I noticed that it had MTRefSearch enabled. This is, of course, a plug-in that Richy messed up improved, but it won't run on this blog because I use the old-style BerkeleyDB files instead of mySQL (or PostgreSQL, which is one of the new features of Movable Type 2.6 and is supported by my host).

Fortunately, Textism has the answer in the form of Google Hilite. This will work on any page, not just MT-powered blogs, as long as you have PHP on the server. It's not the same as MTRefSearch - all it does is highlight the terms on the page that match the search, rather than give a list of related articles to the search in question, but it's better than nothing.

I actually hinted at installing it a month ago, since the Referral script is also a Textism production (and it's due to have its databases flushed again - they're already up to 2.5MB :( ), but it's taken me until today to actually get around to it. It's amazing what rainy days can do to productivity.

Of course, what does my media player give me? "Too Much Rain" by the United Deejays. Except this isn't too much rain over paradise, sadly.

[added]
Just as I hit submit, it started snowing. And we're talking serious snow here. Typical how Bradford is the last place to get any snow in the country.

I decided to make myself a more active part of the blogosphere, by installing David Raynes' More Like This From Others and Pinged URLs plug-ins for MT. What this means is that if you ping me, and you also have MLTFO installed, it will show a list of related entries on your blog as well as the entry you pinged me with. It also means that if I ping you, instead of just showing the URL that I pinged, it will actually link to your article and pull the article excerpt from it.

This, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with David pinging one of my earlier posts, and that of the 3 blogs he pinged, mine was the only one without MLTFO installed. No, absolutely not. How dare you think such a thing? :)

I've implemented a swearing filter on the public pages, so that those of you who insist on using profanity in your posts won't upset those who are offended by such words. I will say that I've only censored two words, but it does mean I can now say ****ing **** without you being able to see it :).

Actually, I've added a third: ****. Which means that S****py Doo comes out wrong :-O

It's done via MTMacro, if you're interested. It'll also mean that the popup comments pages will have smileys :-D.

I made a couple of other changes - firstly the guestbook now matches in with the rest of the site (only the gallery and bio to do now) and I fixed a bug on the archive pages that may have stopped you from being able to post comments.

My stats are now showing over 3500 individual 404 errors over the past 12 days. I've checked as many links as possible, yet I couldn't put my finger on what is causing all of these errors.

Then an idea come from a comment Richy left on my customised 404 page article. A lot of his 404 errors come from browsers looking for favicon.ico. Now while the public pages use a link statement to specify a PNG image as the icon (since PNG is a better format), the Movable Type scripts do not, and I imagine that every time I load a page, Mozilla goes looking for this file, and of course doesn't find it. So I've added it.

Then I remembered seeing in the referral logs a few attempts to access robots.txt, which also doesn't exist (although I did add one to the old site back in August). Bearing in mind that the Googlebot is the third most popular user agent, taking in 12% of hits, I imagine that it generates a 404 every time it reaches this site, so that's a lot of 404s. Teoma and Inktomi's bots also rank highly, taking a further 4% of hits with them.

Which reminds me, I'll be resetting the referral logger at the end of the month. The database is nearly 1MB now, with only 4MB remaining on the server, and I imagine most of you don't look much beyond the first 50 entries anyway.

For those of you who enjoy staring at me while I use the net (why you do I don't know, but hey..), you'll be pleased to know that the webcam is now back online, and its page has been updated to match in with the new site style. Also, note the change of URL - it's now http://www.neilturner.me.uk/webcam/, instead of /webcam.shtml as before. There's a nice Apache redirect though, just in case you've linked it.

Why has it been offline? Well, firstly while at home I couldn't find a good place to put it, and also the small factor of not being able to find it until yesterday. I'll have it on from time to time.

I'm filing this under 'Blog Changes' even though the page isn't related to the blog, and is in fact the first non-blog page to be properly integrated on the site navigation bar.

Basically (a word I often overuse), I've updated the Contact page, so that it matches in with the new look, and also mentions the fact that I'm no longer accepting Yahoo IMs unless you're already on my contact list. This is because almost all of my recent messages through that network have been spam (no, I won't look at your webcam, I have enough problems with my own), and no-one ever contacts me that way anyway.

Although I still get spam via ICQ, I'm leaving that open as I do get some good 'out of the blue' conversations with people not on my contact list, and it'd be a shame to stop those. Fortunately I tend to not get any spam via MSN or AIM (I don't publicise my MSN address because I reserve it for people I actually know).

After a little tinkering, the site is now Bobby approved :). Admittedly the site only passes 'A' and '508', but I guess it's a start. To pass 'AA' I need to reconfigure the Comments and Trackback links so that they say something like 'Comments about Bobby approved', which would mess up the current design quite considerably. Still, in a re-design, it's something to consider.

I also corrected a couple of errors in the syntax introduced in the last redesign, most of which were forgetting to terminate input and img tagas properly.

If you are wondering what this was spurred on by, it was down to Checky, a validator add-on for Netscape and Mozilla, currently being featured in The Web Standards Project's Buzz weblog. It works well, even in an alpha build of Mozilla.

So, 6 days after installation, what do I think? I like it :).

It shows up some entries that Webalizer misses - Webalizer only shows the popular ones, which sometimes aren't the most interesting. It also looks nicer and doesn't require a login.

The only downside is that it's already taken up nearly 10% of the maximum database size, so I'll need to empty it out on a regular basis. Fortunately, Freedom2Surf includes an online database management tool (phpMyAdmin) with the hosting package, so that shouldn't be a problem.

You may have noticed that on older archive pages, the Recent Entries section on the sidebar shows older entries than those on the front page. This is because the entry list is bound to the page whenever it is published - basically whenever it is created, rebuilt or has a comment/trackback ping attached to it. And since every page isn't rebuilt every time I post a new entry, the lists tend to get outdated easily.

So, enter a solution: PHP. In MT, I created a new index template, which contains the code for the recent entries, and saved this as a file. The file is then attached using the PHP 'include' command. That way, the pages should all use the file, which is republished every time the indexes are rebuilt, including when I post a new entry.

Since hits to the individual archive pages make up a considerable proportion of hits here, I decided that I needed to get visitors moving around a bit, hence this update.

If you have MT, you may like to do this on your own server - if you don't have PHP you could always use Server Side Includes (SSI).

I'll admit that until today I'd never intended this, but here's a redesigned Neil's World. Actually, very little has changed; the whole design process took 3 hours, though at least half of that was with designs I eventually rejected.

The font size is bigger; I'm sure I'm not the only one who found the smaller font a little difficult to read. Secondly, I've tried to split the site into sections - this is still work in progress, but it should make the site easier to navigate, particularly as I add more non-blog related pages. And there's a new logo too - the photograph is one I took of Bathsheba, a small town on the Atlantic coast of Barbados when I was there during Summer 2000. It's the second time I've had some of my Barbados photos as the title; the first time was on the design I had during early summer last year (and was the last design to feature tables for element positioning).

I'm not totally sure if I like the new design, or if it was better than what was here before, but bearing I felt like a change. After all, the previous one had been in use since early August. Still, I needed to get rid of the Christmas colours before twelth night...

Although I've probably mispelled it, I now have a public list of referrals. The idea was blatently plaigirised from Tony who also has one, except I've customised mine so that it matches in with the site's template.

Installing it wasn't quite so straightforward. Firstly I had to enable mySQL on the server, which including setting a password, then waiting until this morning for the DNS to update - freedom2surf give the SQL server its own subdomain, but their DNS system only updates once a day at 09:30 UTC.

So then I configured the file, uploaded it, and then added the monitoring code to the pages. All of the MT-powered pages should now have it, bar the search results page which doesn't work with PHP since it's a CGI script.

Since I know almost zip about PHP, you can probably tell I got it from somewhere else, and in this case it was Textism. The site also offers a PHP script which highlights search terms on a page, so if I got to this page by typing in large blow up penguin into a popular search engine, those words would be highlighted on the page, like they are on Gay.com UK. A nice touch; maybe I'll implement it sometime.

While my parents are back at work today, I'm still at home, thankfully, and have spent to morning re-ripping a few CDs so that they use Ogg Vorbis 1.0. Several of my songs were ripped using the release candidate versions, and it has to be said that the output quality has improved since. I am strongly considering moving away from MP3 almost entirely now; I can only think of one program on my computer that won't play Ogg files, and the size:quality ratio is much better. Heck, even Windows Media Player will play them with the right plugin.

Since I've had 1390 hits where the page couldn't be found, I've decided to add a custom 404 page. Now, when the page doesn't exist, you'll see this friendly error page, instead of the standard Apache one. A post on the LG Help forums lets you know how to do it - as long as you have an Apache web server you're set.

Though for some reason the first time I added it, all the pages returned a 500 Internal Server error. I don't quite know why, but removing a couple of 301/302 redirect lines from the .htaccess file seemed to do the trick.

There's now a 'page mods' box towards the bottom of the sidebar, which will let you select which theme you'd like the blog to display in. Besides the current Christmas theme, there's the normal Blue theme, and an unstyled version. While this works fine using Mozilla and Phoenix, IE won't let you access the blue theme. That's Microsoft's problem, not mine.

The code, by the way, was stolen from the Mozilla 1.0 Start Page.

I also made another CSS change, based on the one I made on Monday - IE wasn't inheriting the font size again, this time on the newly updated sidebar headings. I also tidied the CSS files up a bit by removing some redundant lines.

If you're wondering why I go into so much detail about CSS changes, it's because I don't really mind you opening up the source code and seeing how I've done things. After all, this is mostly how I learn - to stop you doing that would be very hypocritical of me.

I've pruned the blogroll, removing one that I no longer read and a couple that have gone stale for a considerable about of time. If I've removed yours, please don't take it personally - the blogs I link to are ones that I like to read often, and it isn't necessarily a reflection on the quality of your blogging.

The new entry is Six Log, a blog by Ben and Mena Trott, writers of the brilliant Movable Type software. It includes information about new blogging technologies, particularly where they integrate with MT, and has featured Richy C's MTRefSearch plugin in the past, along with information about RSD, which I added to this blog a couple of weeks ago.

Woohoo! 200 entries in 3 months :).

This is another CSS change; I've finally fixed the long-standing problem with IE making the calendar font too large, causing the sidebar to overlap onto the text. Note that this is an IE problem; Mozilla, which conforms to the CSS standards, does not have this problem.

The nerdy explanation is thus: In Mozilla, the font in the table is inherited from the div tag used for the sidebar, as it should be. In IE, the div tag is ignored and the font is inherited from the page body. Although this means it gets the font name right, it meant that the size was wrong.

Anyway, all tables should display using a smaller font in IE from now on.

Just discovered the guestbook hasn't been working for some time. It should now be fixed, hopefully. So now you have no excuse for not leaving an (intelligent) comment.

Yes, I've changed the colours for Christmas. If you find them unbearable, fear not; for the original style sheet is still available. In Mozilla 1.2.1 (and above), go to View > Use Style, and then 'Original Colours'. The unstyled version of the page is also there.

I found out what I was doing wrong with the smileys. I'd put the opening and closing MTMacroApply tags in separate modules, which MT doesn't like. So, I now present smileys!!

:) ;) :D :O >:-) :(

They're the standard UBB smileys, as used on the ODP internal fora. Cool eh?

Well, beebware revealed his secrets, but unfortunately they didn't work. After installing the MTMacro plug-in, I kept getting a rather nasty error whenever I tried to rebuild so I removed it. I may try again at another date.

This should be the last post for today (post number 7!), as I'm off for a shower and then going to bed. See you tomorrow.

Yes, another blog change :). I was actually going to implement this yesterday, but the version was about to be updated so I decided to wait until today.

What is it? RSD - or "Really Simple Discovery". Basically Joe Blogger puts a special XML file in his base directory, which says what blogging tool he/she is using, and what its XML:RPC URL is. That way it makes it easier for other software to communicate with the blogging tool.

Ben Hammersley, one of the more famous bloggers and am occasional Guardian columnist, lets you know how to implement it into Movable Type and the official document is available at Archipelago. The next Movable Type release will have RSD support as standard, as Mena Trott explains.

Might as well add another plug-in - this time, if I've written an extended entry, it'll tell you how many words it is before you click on the 'Read more...' link. try it :)

Thanks to David Raynes, I now have a 'random entry' section on the sidebar. This is created using his MTRandomEntries plug-in, which is the first plug-in I've added so far. It probably won't be the last either.

The idea is that every time I publish a new entry, another entry will be chosen at random and shown there. Let's see how it works :).

I'm in the process of modifying the individual archive pages to include a section with URLs that I've pinged in that article. Can't really see the point of it, other than the fact it seemed slightly cool.

The idea was inspired by a feature on Ain't Too Proud To Blog, but the Movable Type user manual tells you how to do it, so it's not like I'm copying, or anything. No, really...

I've finally got around to uploading an image gallery containing pictures of me and my ugly mug. There's only 4 photos in it so far, but I guess more will be added in due course.

I'm not using any special software to make it, just plain old HTML and IrfanView to create the thumbnails. Comments and thoughts are appreciated.

I've spent the past hour or so trying to find something interesting to link to, and to be honest, I've failed miserably. Today hasn't been that interesting - I spent most of my time reading copies of the Guardian that I never got around to reading. Although I was intending to go to the Computing Society launch night tonight I decided I was too tired (I'm having trouble keeping my eyes open even now, and it's not even 11pm yet), and bearing in mind that I have to be up sharpish tomorrow some sleep be a good idea.

You may notice that I've changed the way archives are displayed on the sidebar; each month now shows how many entries are in it and links are now provided to the category archives. I'll add these to the rest of the pages once I can get a successful rebuild - unfortunately it's been timing out when building the individual archives recently. I don't know whether it's the server or MT itself - probably the server because it's fine in the morning when the net is generally quieter - but either way it's annoying.

The home page and individual post pages are now compliant with XHTML 1.1 - I'll work on the other pages in time.

I also had a little play around with Bobby, and have made a couple of changes to make the page more accessable. These include providing labels for the form elements (the 'links in new windows' and search box) and alternatives to the onClick JavaScript events. There is still the problem of the 'Comments' links all being the same, but this is somewhat unavoidable (though not completely).

I've updated the indivdual entry pages so that the trackback information is displayed on the page as well as in a popup window, with the aim of making people more aware that it exists.

And if you're interested, I've now submitted to BlogHop. For some reason, several of the sites in the directory category weren't really working; one only had 13, one seemed to be displaying 0 and another had been shut down. I didn't bother with the Open Weblog Directory because apparently you have to update every 2-3 days to stay listed; okay this is my fourth entry today but sometimes I'm not so talkative.

I've got a new guestbook! It's powered by Movable Type, like this blog - more information about how I did it is at the bottom of the guestbook itself.

So, what are you waiting for? Get signing!

I've now added a search engine to the site - it's a new feature in Movable Type 2.5. It wasn't as straightforward as it should have been; there isn't a template setting for the search pages, so I ended up having to upload a new template via FTP. And, since it's served up via a CGI script, PHP and SSI don't work, so I had to add some of the modules to it.

Anyway, there's now a search box on every page, along with a new Advanced Search page that should give power searchers a bit more to shout about. And I've finally fixed the Bio and Contact pages (they were broken after I enabled PHP on the server); however now the Webcam page is slightly broken. I'll fix that in due course...

In an effort to reduce the amount of server space this blog is using (nearly a third of my current quota), I've tried to use PHP a little more. If I'm successful, the blogrolls on the side won't have disappeared.

[added]
Okay, so the first time around they did disappear. But that was me being dense.

I've now upgraded to Movable Type 2.51 (not much different, mostly a service release), and have enabled TrackBack for all new posts. So, if you have an MT-enabled blog and find one of my posts inspirational, feel free to drop me a ping :).

You may also be aware that w.bloggar 3.0 has been released. Although it still doesn't work on my computer (something to do with my net connection I imagine, since it's fine at home), the new interface looks nice. A full list of new features is on the site.

There's a double rainbow right outside my window at the moment - part of the sky is clear and blue and part of it is covered by mirky clouds. Typical British weather - it just doesn't know whether to rain or not.

I've finally given in and joined BlogSnob; you'll now see the 'snobs' on the left, just above the t-shirt thing.

(and it appears I can't spell it either. That should be fixed now ;)

Talking of which, I'm strongly considering closing the store. No-one's bought anything, and it's taking up valuable sidebar space.

The templates have been massively overhauled to use Movable Type's Template Modules feature. It means that I can modify a bit of code in a module, and the change will be reflected on all pages.

After changing every templated page (6 in all) to accept the new RSS feed links, I felt this was gettign ridiculous. This means modifying the design should be a lot easier in future. If you move to Movable Type, I'd stringly recommend using this right from the start if you want your pages to look consistent.

Other new features include a button that automatically sends you to the page with my decoded Blogger Code, which itself has been updated now that I've been blogging for more than 9 months. The individual archive pages also display the post title in the title bar of your browser; I decided to add this feature as it may help Mozilla/Netscape 7 users since when you type in part of an address, not only does it give you the URL but the page title. If you're looking for a specific entry, its should be easier to find now. And it might reduce the number of hits I get for the search terms 'anecdotes' and 'extruding'...

And there's a new addition to the Blogroll: MozillaZine, an unofficial but very good guide to what's happening with Mozilla, Chimera and Phoenix, along with several projects on MozDev. Great for Gecko fanatics like myself :).

Talking of which, The Register carried out a survey into online banks and their browser support. It's worrying how many require IE for access, particularly as IE cannot be run under Linux, or anything that isn't Windows or Mac. You can read part one and part two on the site, and while I don't always agree with everything that The Register has to say, I am in broad agreement with them here.

A section in this week's Lockergnome Webmaster Weekly talked about HTML validity, and it included the following quote:

"Admittedly, I get nervous when I talk about this validator. I don't think I've ever submitted a "perfect" site. Virtually all of my websites that I've tested this way have failed in some way, shape or form. Am I the only one?"

Well, after emailing Mike to point out that I had a validating site, and that the ODP homepage validates, I thought I might see if I could get this page to validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict instead of Transitional. So I did :)

Most of the problems involved use of <blockquote> in one of the posts below, and with the use of the target attribute in the BlogRolling links. There was also the use of the border="0", which has been replaced with style="border:0px" .

So yes, it is possible to have an attractive page that validates :).

I've made some changes to the RSS feed. Firstly, there are now two shown - one is RSS 1.0 and the other RSS 2.0; the latter replacing the old RSS 0.91 feed that Movable Type provides by default. Thanks to Andy for linking to the information.

I have made a few changes to template provided by that page; the language has been changed from en-us to en-gb, it provides the full entry and not just an excerpt and I also added a link to my Syndic8 page in the header - more information is in the RSS 2.0 specification.

And you'll be pleased to know that I am providing valid RSS feeds :).

I've been fiddling again, so here's some new features for you...

• All entries are now split into one of 5 categories (I may add a few more but 5 seem to be sufficient at the moment), with the category shown by each entry. Clicking on that category shows you a list of other posts within that category.
• There are now some blog stats on the sidebar - this lets you know how many posts and how many comments have been added in total.
• The individual entry pages now tell you which number of post you're looking at, in case you were ever wondering

I'm also considering adding Trackback support for those of you who feel inspired by what I have to say, and I'm considering joining BlogSnob too, to get a little extra traffic. You only have to look at how few entries have comments to see how desolated this blog is...

Just upgraded to Movable Type 2.5. Haven't had much time to explore the changes since I have Monsterous Wednesday™ ahead (1 hour lab session and 4 hours of lectures), but I'll let you know what I think of it soon.

And no, the fire alarm didn't go off last night, thankfully.

Looks like adding PHP support has bonked the SSI for some of the pages. D'oh! So apologies for the ugly Bio and Contact Me pages.

I've loaded the 'Weblog Info' page into Movable Type so that it will now display some of the extra information on it (recent entries etc.). And I've also updated it - it mostly referred to the old site ("Are you planning to upgrade to Blogger Pro?")...

And finally some news. It looks like the next firmware updates to the iRiver players will support Ogg Vorbis! See the iRiver Forum for the post. Found via MODatic.net.

Got two new additions to the trusty blogroll - Kim's weblog (I couldn't think of another name for it) and WinterLyte, the personal weblog of Joyce who seems to be stalking me via the commenting feature (only joking, Joyce ;)).

Maybe it's a coincidence that both are female and both are students...

Also, you may notice that I removed the entry for Digital Dennis. The site doesn't seem to work and it hasn't updated since August 25th (accordinging to BlogRolling). Dennis, what's happening dude?

And Joyce, I hope you realise how envious I am of your MP3 player ;).

It's taken a while, but the main page now validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional :-D.

Most of the errors were in the first post, put down to the way Movable Type treats carriage returns and the fact that it placed paragraph tags around each paragraph (which conflicted with the list tags). The stylesheet still validates with no errors and no warnings.

I decided that now that most of this site is finished, I would close the old site. If you visit it now, you'll see that the index page redirects here, and any subpages have messages on them noting that the URL has changed.

This means that if any of you link to this, please please please update the URLs. I'll modify the 'BlogRoll Me' link in a minute or two to help you with this.

And after Andy reminded me, the XML feed now gives you the whole post, not just the first 10 words or so.

As you may notice I'm posting entries both in the old and new blog. This is because the old one hasn't been retired yet and because I need some content on the new blog so that I can see what it looks like with a few posts, and thus design around it accordingly. Admittedly I am working with the same design as before - "if it ain't broke don't fix it" - but there may be little tweaks that need to be made.

I have to say I prefer using MT to post - it actually looks okay in Mozilla, whereas Blogger looks a little goofed up. And I can't use w.bloggar to post anymore, either :(.

As for progress, so far this main page and the comments pages now use the new (as opposed to default) template, but the archives still look rather boring and plain, so that'll be my task for this weekend. Which looks to be rather quiet - a number of people in hall are going home for the weekend so I'm going to be lonely :(. I am considerign going across to Manchester on Sunday to see Tom, my mate for I don't know how many years (14, I think. Which, considering I'm only 18, is a loooong time.). He's just moved into a house with his girlfriend and a few mates, so it'll be interesting to see what it's like.

And in case you don't know, Mandrake Linux 9.0 was released on Wednesday. I'll download it when I get home; it looks good. It comes with KDE 3.0.3, Mozilla 1.1, OpenOffice 1.0.1 and a load more besides. And hopefully after a few sessions in the labs here, I'll actually be able to use it...

Maybe the end of next week was a little pessimistic. As Andy pointed out in the comment below, the DNS records have updated, so the site is now working, and I have installed Movable Type successfully. The site is now being built up - it will use the same template as this (intially at least) but will have the various extras that Movable Type offers over Blogger included.

I'm also impressed with Freedom 2 Surf's handling of my request - today I got a phone call from a real person confirming my order. Though I have noticed my account reports that I'm using 0MB of my 20MB quota...

Just added SafeSurf ratings to the site. If it interests you, I set language settings to '1' (some bad language), homo- and heterosexual references to '3' (technical references) and intolerance to '3' too.

Sometimes I agree so much with bunda it scares me. This post is no exception - several cases of people dying because their (or their families') religious beliefs prevented them from having blood transfusions. What really got me was the fact that a family of a deceased patient decided to sue the doctor because the patient died after refusing a transfusion, despite a court ruling that the doctor was not negligent (and rightly too). I dispair at people sometimes.

The article was especially interesting as in one of the ODP forums we were having a (somewhat lighthearted) discussion about Jehovah's Witnesses, who (generally) annoy me immensely. Everyone is free to believe what they want to believe, but I hate people who invade your personal space and try to inflict their beliefs on you. Same goes for the people who read bible verses in the street, and the Hare Krishna followers who stick Gouranga posters up everwhere. That's not to say all Jehovah's Witnesses are like that (and it seems to me to be a minority), but they do give the following a bad name. It's not like I spend my evenings preaching why atheism is great, is it?

[end rant]

I've fiddled with the template in the hope that the blog is now easier to read - any comments? The 'Permalink' and 'Back to top' links are now grey so that they don't stick out so much - unfortunately I can't control the Comments link as they use the default link colour. Well, there probably is a way of changing them, it's just that I've never got around to investigating it...

And another thing, when I post a new item, it should now update Weblogs.com properly - previously it was sending http://totalxs.dbpoweramp.com/index.html instead of http://totalxs.dbpoweramp.com/ (which it now sends), so those of you using BlogRolling.com wouldn't have seen it marked as updated. That's now fixed :)

Another mild design update - I have started using <acronym> tags here and there (mostly in the templated areas). Apparently it makes the page more accessable to users with restricted eyesight (I'm assuming better compatibility with screen readers). It means that Mozilla users will get a dotted line under acronyms, and will be able to get the full definition by holding the mouse over it.

Not done too much today, mainly clearing up the mess on the floor in the room I'm in at the moment (mostly CDs that I've ripped or that are awaiting ripping) and more ironing. I have also ripped and re-ripped a few more CDs; the Ogg Vorbis format continues to amaze me in terms of quality - one of the songs I did today at 128Kbps sounds just like the original. Admittedly the song wasn't complex (unlike some of the songs I listen to) so it didn't need a high bitrate, but it's nice to know that I've saved some disk space (the song was originally an MP3 at 160Kbps).

Just in case you don't know (and you should by now ;) I'm using dBpowerAMP Music Converter Release 9a with the Ogg Vorbis Release 8 codec add-on, supporting the Ogg Vorbis 1.0 standard. MP3 copying is handled by the Lame 3.92 encoder using --alt-preset CBR 160 (which is the most efficient way of creating a 160Kbps MP3 file). My Ogg Vorbis files are either 128Kbps or 160Kbps, depending on how much I like the song.

Tonight I'm going climbing with Ventures, and since I'll be leaving soon, I'd better get my arse down to Tesco to buy a pizza. Toodles!

I've done a little more design tinkering this evening, which means that:

1. Mozilla users will now see full width section headers on the sidebar (as intended).
2. The style sheet validates with no errors or warnings!
3. The non-blog pages now validate as XHTML 1.0 Strict :D
4. The pages now have links to ICRA, who I am keen to support.
5. There are links to the CSS validator, and links to the HTML validator on the non-blog pages

In fact, the new page I put up last night validated straight off - I didn't need to modify it at all :)

I've uploaded a page about this blog and the reasoning behind it - check out the new 'Weblog Info' link on the sidebar. Bare in mind that I was rather tired when I wrote it ;)

Just a little update to the site design - if you're browsing using Mozilla, you'll notice a little 'n' in the title bar (and the tab bar if you're browsing with tabs). It's like the 'favicon' thing, but here it's attached to the page using a <link> tag and the file is a (well optimised) PNG image, which is more efficient and more cross-platform compatible than the standard ICO format. Okay, so it doesn't work in IE, but then that only uses favicons when you add the sites to your favourites (hence the name...).

Talking of Mozilla, if what has happened to DaveZilla.com is anything to go by, it could receive a legal challenge over the right to use its name from the trademark owners of Godzilla. This could even affect the ODP, who use a 'reptile-like character' on almost all of the public pages (one of the more light-hearted perks of being an editor is the ability to choose which 'mozzie' is featured on each category). Eugh... don't you just hate it when this sort of thing happens? (thanks to modweb for unearthing that).

And if you haven't been to Chris' blog recently, then go, because he's got an awesome new design :)

If yesterday's change was too insignificant for you, how's this? Well, I did hint at a re-design ;)

I actually rewrote the HTML almost from scratch, which allowed me to experiment with using a tableless design, like on WannabeGirl and various other sites. Instead of using table tags to arrange the layout, sections are marked using div tags which are given absolute positioning using CSS. Although it means it looks terrible on older browsers, it does allow the page to load more sequentially, instead of one big lump. Or at least it would if Enetation's server wasn't so slow...

The Geek Code has gone, if only temporarily, because it looked messy when put on the sidebar -it may return at the bottom of the screen sometime in the future. The RSS link has swapped place with the 'Open in new window' script, and users of BlogRolling.com can instantly add me to their blogrolls, if they wish (please, pretty please :). And by moving the PermaLink link so that it is above the text, I hope that the RSS feed will parse it as being the correct link...

Oh yeah, the bank account. I haven't got it. I think I picked the single worst day to get a student account from Abbey National - they're changing the accounts tomorrow, as luck would have it, and it means I loose out on my £40 incentive/gimmick for joining. I'm still waiting to be approved as a result, but I'll find out either tomorrow or Thursday. Ah well, you win some, you loose some.

Despite that, I was very impressed with the service I received - I'm quite confident that I've made the right decision here. Well, assuming I get accepted, anyway.

I've changed the site code again. You probably won't notice, unless you have JavaScript disabled, in which case you will.

Basically, I've moved over to SSI, so the entire layout is controlled by external files. Each page now consists only of content - the rest is added on the server. That means I don't need to update every page when I want to change the design (which may be soon - I'm getting bored of this one :). The guestbook doesn't support SSI unfortunately, but I guess that's a minor caveat.

There is a good reason why I didn't do this sooner - until now I thought you had to rename all the file extensions to .shtml. Since I know some of you have linked articles, changing the extension would break all of the links. Fortunately, since this server runs on Apache, I was able to add a .htaccess file, which told the server to process SSI on .html files, and all was rosy. Thanks to newwave for that.

Two new ODP weblogs have been added on the left, one is bunda's, who I linked to yesterday, and the other is trystan's (aka Jaime) who is one of the ODP chat regulars. And, as you'll notice, its hosted on this server :). Though I won't make any claims for the design...

Thanks to fellow ODP editor g1smd, the webcam page now validates as proper XHTML 1.0 (transitional). While non of the Blogger-powered pages will ever validate (unless Blogger changes its software), it's nice to know that at least one page will, and I'll modify the rest in due course so that the site produces as few errors as possible.

The ODP itself isn't down today, but it is too slow to be able to do anything, hence my work here.

Just to let you know that I've added an ICRA PICS tag (with mild explicitives marked as the only 'bad' thing on the site - I might be in a mood, and well, you know...)

Okay, I'm off now, see you in August!

I've added a third blogroll for any weblogs that don't fall into the ODP or Lockergnome categories. There's three blogs there now, I'll add any that I find and enjoy reading.

I'm also about to start work on a links collection, consisting of non-blog sites that I like to visit, or think worthy of a link (such as useful software sites). Actually, such a page has been on the cards for a couple of months (basically ever since I culled them from the main page), but I''ve never got around to it.

Well, my hair is cut - I went for a number 2 around the edges and a trim on top. I also ended up doing a lot of shopping... The printer was returned, and I got a new pair of Rockport boots (interestingly the two are different sizes: the left is a UK 6 and the right a 7 - the shop mixed them up, but gave us 10% off), a new pair of Reebok trainers, a pair of Cotton Trainers cargo pants trousers, a paella pan and a foldable laundry basket. Oh yeah, and an ice cream from Thorntons...

TeX has also created an Xteq.com email address for me - I'm not going to tell you what it is, but you can probably work out already what it is anyway...

And now I've installed a commenting system :). Please add any comments you have, and if you like it, go to Enetation and get a system for your blog.

By the way, if you feel like linking to me, there's now a special image at the bottom of the sidebar specially designed for doing so :).

Back in mid-April, I mentioned about BlogRolling, and how I'd consider it at a later date. Well, that later date is now - the two rolls in the sidebar are now with this service. It certainly takes the backwork out of updating my roll, and I would now recommend it to anyone struggling to keep their links under control.

Just a quick update to say that the webcam and the guestbook now use the new look (and the navigation on the guestbook now works as intended). I'll do the other pages sometime soon.

Like the new look? It's inspired by RocketGrrl, a blog I found through Digital Dennis who in turn I found through C:\Pirillo.exe. Basically, Dennis posted a comment on Chris' blog asking about screencam software, so I decided to email him about DeskCam and Argus (Argus can also act as a screencam and actually offers more options than DeskCam). I came across RocketGrrl while reading Dennis' blog, and was very impressed by the design. While I've not copied it outright (I have neither the time nor the energy), I think the new look makes it feel more... 'summery'.

The photo at the top is selected at random from a choice of three - unless you have JavaScript turned off, in which case it is static. The photos were all taken by yours truly in Barbados from my holiday 2 years ago - the photos were developed onto Kodak PhotoCD so loading them wasn't difficult.

I may or may not post tomorrow - I'm going down to Norfolk for the weekend to see my auntie and uncle. See you then!

Just to let you know, I've uploaded the start of my photo gallery section, which will have examples of some of my photography. You can see some photos of when I went to Kilnsey in the first album here as an example.

Thanks to this article on Cramsession, I've got around to updating the meta tags for this site. So thanks to LG Tech Specialist for featuring it.

I've now moved the contact stuff onto its own page (with my ICQ, Yahoo and AIM addresses), and the main navigation box is now an imported JavaScript, so that it will be consistent across all pages :).

I've updated the old screencam page so that it redirects to this site, with the hope of attracting visitors back to the new site (the guestbook already does part of this). Another fortunate decision I made was to host the title image on my (Blogger-incompatible) ISP webspace, so the old site now has the new URL in it. Okay, so the robots won't know any better, but people might.

Today I've been up in the Yorkshire Dales (near Kilnsey), doing a spot of walking. Due to last year's Foot and Mouth crisis, we couldn't do much last year, but since the weather was nice, it was a perfect opportunity. It was also a chance to get some fresh trout from Kilnsey Park, though since the last time I visited, it has evolved from more than just a trout farm - it's now a large visitor centre. Quite a good way to waste an hour or so.

I've finally written something for the 'Bio' page. It's just a series of brief bullet points, but it'll give you a good idea of who I am. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

New sidebar link! I've now uploaded an adapted WinAMP Playlist, so that you can view a full list of songs that are currently in my 'My Music' folder. I've had one of these for ages, but I decided it might be a good idea to merge it with this site.

As I said, it's generated using WinAMP (I did try creating one using Windows Scripting Host but I couldn't get the entries to sort alphabetically, only in the order that they occur in the FAT), but with the template changed to match the site (of course :).

I've also fixed a bug on the Screencam page - JavaScript users should now only get a popup and not both a popup and the link opening in the main window. Non-JavaScript users should get a message telling them to turn the darn thing on :).

Just to let you know, I've updated the guestbook so that it looks the same as the rest of the site (ie purple and orange).

I also tried styling Bloggar with StyleIt XP (so that it would make more use of XP's visual styles). Did it work? Sort of. The dialogs now have the look, but the main screen is still... grey. Oh well, it's better than nothing, I guess.

The StyleIt app is actually very good - I'd recommend it to both users wanting their programs to look nicer, and to developers, wanting to.... make their programs look nicer. It alleviates the use for .manifest files, so you can have an XP-styled EXE without tagging on extra files - indeed the StyleIt app itself is a single executable file.

If memory serves me correctly, I found the program lying around on Axcels's Max Speeed Windows Tips, a site that I'd thoroughly recommend. Especially since its webmaster, George Gumbos, is also an Xteqqer and because his page links to this one :)

The Screencam is back! I downgraded to DeskCam Beta 3, and the program now works, thankfully. The author is aware of the problem, and will look into fixing it.

I also had a look at this program that Chris featured today. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. It seems unable to save the temporary screenshot, and it also isn't automatic, unlike DeskCam - you have to click on it manually to upload the image. But it was worth a try, I guess.

Just updated my BloggerCode, which you can read at the very bottom of this page. It is actually different to what it was previously - mainly because of longetivity. I think my GeekCode is still the same, and I don't fall into the social group where BearCode would mean anything - a 'bear' is a colloquial term for hairy homosexual men, and while I may have an ever growing accumulation of body hair, I'm not gay. At least, I wasn't when I last checked.

Talking of GeekCode, when I updated the template I mispelled the URL to the GeekCode site. It's now fixed, but only on the recently updated pages - the older pages remain as they are. I'll re-publish them when I make a later change.

And I've noticed that the Guestbook is still in its old skin. I'll change then when I have the chance.

Anyway, I'm off to sleep soon, so I'll see you tomorrow. Byeees!

So, how do you like the new look? Purple and orange are my favourite colours, hence the new scheme, but I feel it also makes it look a little less cramped. I'd appreciate your thoughts on this.

The sidebar has been re-arranged - my favourite links have disappeared for the time being (they may return on a separate page) and I've finally improved the Screencam page - although the image still resides on NTL's server the actual page is located here. There's also a Biog page, which will, eventually, have information about me, though that's still work in progress. And all the archived pages have been updated too, so the whole site should look spiffy.

While stealing some JavaScript for the Screencam page from Chris' blog (it now opens a popup window), I came across BlogRolling.com. It should make linking to other people's blogs much easier, though it is very much work in progress. I have registered, but will wait for the time being until the service has progressed slightly before actually using it on these pages.

New blog feature! I've stolen... ahem... copied some code from enarra's weblog, which you will notice above all of the postings. Up until now, all of the external sidebar links opened in a new window, and any other links opened in the same window. But now, you can use this cool checkbox for switching between modes for all links on the page :).

It's provided especially for the people who are too lazy to hold down shift when they click a link to make it open in a new window.

I've done a little more template tinkering, which includes adding Jake Ludington's blog and the 'Penguin Cafe', an ODP blog that I've posted to a couple of times. The guestbook template has also been updated to match in with the rest of the site.

Lately I've been checking out Razgo's Multimedia Site - it's actually quite a good resources for digital media news and software. You can even submit articles yourself for inclusion - a kind-of multimedia SlashDot, if you like. It's somewhat biased towards dBpowerAMP, but is useful nonetheless, and I've already submitted two articles.

On the subject of digital media news, The Guardian published an article this morning about The Maths Behind MP3. It's quite an interesting (and not too geeky) article about the algorithms used to create PCM Wave and MP3 files. It makes very interesting reading.

In case you haven't noticed, I've tinkered with the template too. As well as the aforementioned extra Illustrate link, I've added some more blogs. So say 'hi' to Sian, Julie, Gretchen, Kuja and Håkon!

You can now watch a live-ish snapshot of my screen! It updates every 5 minutes when the computer is running, so you can see what I'm doing.

Sorry for the recent lack of updates - I'll explain later today.

I've added yet another site of incomprehensible garbage to the bottom of the blog pages (well... the recent ones, at least) - this time, it's GeekCode. It's taken me longer to get this up since it isn't a straightforward as BlogCode (okay, yes, that's probably the point), but at least I'll join the vast majority of ODP editors who know have it. It'll also let you know more about me... that is if you actually understand it. Maybe if I'm bored I'll knock up some kind of Perl script that encodes/decodes GeekCode/BlogCode someday. Of course, I'll have to learn Perl in the meanwhile...

It seems that I've been serving up invalid XHTML to you guys... apologies. I've solved most of the problems, but I think a number of them are on the part of Blogger, so there's not much I can do there. Thanks to mwaf for pointing this out to me.

Today I've been Windows shopping - of the glass variety. Although almost all of our windows are double-glazed, two of them - including the main living room window - are not, so we're looking at getting them replaced. They do have secondary glazing but by having double glazing fitted they should retain more heat (especially as the living room has the thermostat in it) and be much more secure - when we were burgled 13½ years ago it was the living room window that was broken. Though since then we have had a burglar alarm and security lights fitted.

I also went with my parents to the York Farmer's Market - it's held in Murton on the first and third Saturday of every month, and the range of products available from there is quite impressive. And it's all good quality.

I think I've solved all of the template problems now - if you visited any time in the past hour you'll have noticed that either the sidebar text was too large or the body text was too large. Both should now be 'harmonious'. And if you're wondering, the pasta was delicious.

Where'd that sidebar come from? Yes, I've finally added a sidebar with my contact details and various links. Chris is the only person linking to me at the moment, hence the rather sparse 'Other blogs' section. If you link to me, drop me an email!

Talking of which, I've made use of E-Cloaker to convert my email address into UniCode to help thwart the evil spambots. And there's my ICQ number there too, should you wish to start a conversation/argument with me. And a guestbook, which I would be really happy if you could sign. It comes from Xavier Media, and is incredibly customisable, as you'll be able to see when you visit it. I'm not after your personal details, so don't publish your email address unless you want to, but I'd like to know how you got here and what you think.

Anyway, I'm about to sit down to Pasta Carbonara for dinner, made by mum using a Jamie Oliver recipe. See you in a bit...

Just another update - if you're interested I've just added some Blogger Code to the bottom of the pages.