I’m migrating nathanpitman.com from my old Textdrive VC account over to my dedicated Memset server, so expect some temporary weirdness.
Update: From where I am the update seems to be complete. If somethings not working for you drop me an email at hello [at] nathanpitman dot com.
Well, I started faffing about with what was intended to be a small ‘re-align’ or whatever, now it’s turning into a ghastly mess with content flailing wildly all over the place and background images wandering off without any intention of returning to a sensible or desired location.
It’s all gone Pete Tong. I hate the set up of page templates which are stored in a CMS database field, and the same goes for the CSS, that sucks too. It just teases me into toying and tweaking live, on the trot, until disaster strikes, then I realise it’s a year or so since I did a backup of my CSS, and the page templates well forget it, those changes are lost for good. No handy little tab to roll back to the previous version, no sir!
It’s like 1 step forward, 2 steps back.., great I can manage my content from anywhere in the world, my pages are made up of neat little re-usable snippets of code and my CSS is served by a clever little call to a PHP page, but the interface for editing it all, it stinks… I can’t have code colouring like I can in a text editor, and heaven forbid if I should want to ‘tab’ a line of code in a few spaces.
Bah, I’ve had it, it’s ghastly, it’s horrible, is there not a CMS out there which is designed around storing my templates, snippets and CSS in the normal manner, in a simple physical folder.
Rant off.
Don’t get me wrong, *I love you Textdrive*, after all I got me a VCII account when they were about, hosting for life for $200, what a steal.
But. Recently service seems to be slow and sporadic, and when your arsing about with your templates and CSS ‘live’ (read my previous post) then regular ‘Timeouts’ really start to grind.
Just a bit of a heads up guys. Hopefully you can sort it out sometime soon. Either that or throw me a free Mixed Grill.
Mmm Peppers…
I know, you have to ask why… but now you can subscribe to the podcast of my journal (spoken with Talkr) using iTunes.
All a bit convoluted, but it kept me amused for a couple of minutes.
I stumbled across this great little free online service for converting your RSS feeds into MP3 files for podcasting goodness. Talkr might not have a trendy logo or backing from Yahoo! but they got themselves an r on the end of the name and a pretty neat little service to boot.
All you have to do is set up a free account then register as a ‘partner’ and add your RSS feed URL. They trot off and grab the feed and you can slap a nifty little link into your page template which links to your ‘Talkr-ed’ mp3.
The tricky part wasn’t getting it to work so much as temporarily defaulting Textpatterns RSS feed to 999 articles so that Talkr could provide audio for even my oldest posts (Sorry if you did an update with your RSS readers during the process!).
So, let me know what you think, click on the Listen to this post link below any artcile title to give it a whirl.
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. :)
Why do I get a â412 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. :?
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?).
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… :/
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.
I thought I should post to let you all know why this re-design is taking so flippin long.
Contributing factor #1: Little Miss Pitman has not been so well, in turn this means that the missus and I are not getting a great deal of sleep, which in turn means that I really can’t be arsed to get off my backside and decide what to do with this site.
Contributing factor #2: At work I am incredibly busy. An employee of ours decided to leave part way through a major project (always a pain in the backside) so what little free time my brain has is mostly spent working out how to juggle the immense workload I now have on my hands.
Contributing factor #3: Having evaded the cold and flu ‘thing’ which the two ladies of the house have had, last night my immune system finally gave up the fight.., I guess it was just like, “ok that’s it… I’ve had enough… I want some sympathy”.
So… as I type I have a tissue stuffed up each nostril. That is why this re-design is taking so long. Sorry.
Sorry things are a little silent on the blog front, combination of a huge workload at mirashade and lack of sleep at home due to a teething daughter is taking it’s toll on my ability to blog reguarly, normal service will resume some time soon, hopefully! :)
p.s. Just finished work on ‘“Point of Snow Return”:http://www.pointofsnowreturn.com’ (Flash Christmas Viral) for a client, give me some feedback if you have 5 mins.