Drafty Dec 23. 050
If like me you often have ideas for blog posts but never get round to actually writing them, you’ll have a bunch of ‘drafts’ in your CMS of choice.
Well, it’s time to clear out the drafts, but before I delete them all for good I though I might summarise some of the less pointless topics in a little blog ‘medley’.
Opera is kinda good; spawned by the realisation that this ain’t a half bad browser when I recently downloaded the latest copy sans banner ads, although I can’t see it drawing me away from Firefox, there are way too many great extensions for that spunky little thing.
Ditching Skype in favor of a fixed line; What I’m in the process of doing right now, to cut a long story short(ish)… I bought a Skype handset, bought a SkypeIn number and thought hey, technology is great, this will do my business proud. 3 months later I’m wishing I’d not been so ambitious, the line quality is very often below acceptable and on many occasions clients simply cannot get through and resort to calling the mobile. Goodbye Skype, Hello BT (Although there’s another whole story about why I went with BT over my local Cable provider).
Challenging
MamoriesMemories; I stumbled across some old websites I designed way back when I started out in the industry (1997). These sites were all based aroud ‘challenges’ and were mostly done as freebies by the agency I worked for at the time to help build a portfolio. I guess you could say these are the sites that I cut my teeth on (espeically considering I was using Frames, Tables and Frontpage – Oh how things have progressed!).
Drew beat me to the punch; writing up a nice article about Auto Selecting navigation for 24 ways. A trick he tought me at Mirashade and one which I like to refer to as The neatest CSS trick in the book.
Setting up my LAMP server – Part 1, well I wrote that some time back, I started writing Setting up my LAMP server, Part 2 but got bored. Sorry guys, maybe next year.
Well, this will probably be my last post now until the new year, I’m taking next week off to spend some quality time with the family before getting stuck into 2006. See you all on the other side. Have a good one. :)
412 Precondition Failed Nov 01. 051
Why do I get a “412 Precondition Failed�? error when submitting a comment on your site?
If you’ve been having problems submitting comments to my journal, then this could be the reason. Seems that my host (Textdrive) have some server side stuff going on to prevent comment spam, hack attempts and such like, trouble is it actually just breaks my site, which I think is probably worse. :?
Re-writing history May 17. 056
Tackling this re-design has prompted me to consider dropping some of the older less valuable posts from the site, many of these originate from the days when I used a totally different domain name and had a tatty little hand written CMS cooked up with ASP and Microsoft Access (urgh!).
For some bizarre reason I thought it’d make total sense to manually import all my old blog entries when I started out with Textpattern. I guess I felt as though I needed to maintain the information for the good of my readers (er…?) but looking back at my old posts they just totally suck. I mean I couldn’t write a half decent blog post if my life had depended on it… come to think of it, is this post any better? No, actually.. don’t answer that question.
So, getting back to the point… Would I be breaking some unwritten ‘blogging’ law if I was to ‘“step back in time”:http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kylieminogue/stepbackintime.html’ and start ‘editing’ or ‘deleting’ old blog entries or do you think that’s totally cool?
Actually I’m not even sure why I’m asking you, this is my blog, and I’ll delete what I want when I want. God I’m far too considerate, asking permission from my readers before I make some minor content change. Someone slap me quick before I start asking if I can leave the table to go to the toilet (Sir?).
Getting on Google Maps May 03. 054
So, my mission should I choose to accept it, (which I have) is to have myself (or my domain name) appear on a Google Maps search for ‘nathan pitman berkshire’. Right now I’m listed... well, my work place is anyhow. But I want my house to be highlighted! That would be super neat.
So, here’s how I think I’m going to make it happen. The business look up is provided by yell, this is how google know what to display in the business list on the right, so I’m thinking I just need to be listed on yell right? Right!
I trot off to yell.co.uk thinking that this is going to cost me some £‘s but discover that you can actually apply for a free basic listing that appears not only on yell.co.uk but also in ‘the book’. Wow, how neat is that.
I enter my details, list my business as ‘nathanpitman.com’ select the relevant categorisation, enter my address… blah blah blah… eventually I get to complete my listing and then get my confirmation email. My listing is being ‘processed’!
All I can do now is wait, will I get listed, and when I do, will I show up on the Google Map… only time will tell!
Update: I’m listed on yell but still not showing up on the google map… :/
Re-design Step 3: Er… start again? Apr 21. 055
So, I kinda went back to the drawing board. I scrapped my previous concept and came up with this.
Ok, so it’s not the worlds most amazing website design ever, but I like it. It’s simple, it’s easy on the eye and there’s flexibility for change, which my previous designs simply didn’t accomodate. I’m part way there with the build (as you can see) with just bits to finish off on title styling, comment invites and comment formatting.
Right now I’m still debating whether to add an ident of some type, or whether the domain name itself says it all… it’s me, you typed my URL so why should I shout it back at you.