20
Posted 11th June 2008 at 9:33pm by M1ke, tagged as Blog | Commenting Closed
I intended to post this on Thursday 5th, but everything's been moving at light speed since then. On the 5th I successfully completed my 20th year and have been allowed to enter the 21st. Obviously this is the first year in my third decade, my first outside my teens and everyone has been telling me I'm old. Thankfully most of them are older so its no biggie.
I've decided that as this year should be something special I'll make extra efforts to chart it through my various websites. I've begun a 365days attempt on Flickr (where one posts a photo every day for a year), and also intend to post every day here at least once. Some may argue I've already failed, but I'll just write some post-dated entries about my birthday, my cousin visiting, my most recent (track-turns) skydive and our college's amazing Summer Ball last night/this morning.
However on top of all that I'm also feeling really ill right now - it seems three friends and I all rapidly developed symptoms for a very bad cold during last night's ball (likely aided by the lack of sleep and drinking) so it would seem prudent to get to bed and leave future whitterings for when I'm not sneezing every few minutes and can sit up for more than 10 minutes unaided.
Old Content
Posted 17th March 2008 at 5:10pm by M1ke, tagged as Blog | Commenting Closed
I've had this stuff sitting on my local server for a while now, but I've just copied all the old content (stretching way back before this site was even a blog) into the database. I've also (as you can see beneath this post) added my old guestbooks, which are fun to read (though I'd advise people not at my sixth form college to steer clear due to the confusion reading them may cause). Some of the old tags are a bit outdated and I'm working on integrating everything nicely.
In the same spirit of nostalgia I've dug up an old theme from back in the day and converted it to work with 1-Log (incidentally the conversion took about 20 minutes, despite it not being made to work with any blogging CMS). At the same time I've added many new 1-Log upgrades as I close in on a public version (yet again), these include separate pages (the "About" page is currently a placeholder), better permalink structures (just need to get pagination working), improved search (searches posts and titles, case insensitive) and some more admin tools.
It's holiday now so I'll try and write a few more posts, and though I won't be skydiving much over the vacation I've yet to talk about my bad canopy ride last week or my brilliant 15 second with altimeter jump on Friday. More photos are going up on my Flickr page as usual, and the 1-Log site should be live soon. Finally I'll plug Gary's latest site which aims to raise money for charity by cycling from Land's End to John-O-Groats - Fundriding
Websiteness Once More
Posted 22nd February 2008 at 2:05pm by M1ke, tagged as Blog | Commenting Closed
I've finally given up on hosting myself on the Durham webspace - the servers are unreliable and seeing as it was free there was nothing I could do to make it better. It also didn't work with my domain properly, leaving my site in a horrible frame that made it all sluggish. So now you're viewing the real deal - a paid domain running on paid hosting.
I chose to use Hole in the Wall Hosting because $10 for 400MB for a year is amazingly cheap. I had thought that going with a larger company for more money would give me more in terms of reliability, then I remembered why I use open source software instead of programs form a large company and decided I'd apply the same thinking to hosting. How right I was proved, as I received a personal email from the owner within minutes of paying through PayPal (which itself took at least 10 mins, compare the speed of a company versus a dedicated individual once again) and then had a protracted email conversation as I tried to get various things working (the conversation was due to not knowing what I was doing, rather than the service being bad). So I've already got my $10 worth with the support on the first day and hope that my glittering praises can get some other people to sign up to a small independent host rather than a big corporate machine.
Finally one advantage of having my own system is that I can be more constructive with other sites, as well as better monitoring my own statistics. So once again I'm using Google Analytics to see all kinds of stats for free, publishing my RSS feed through Feedburner (so update those subscriptions!), and have begun to create the page that will become 1-Web for high-quality website design, creation, administration and consultancy. Finally the installer and latest version of this content management system will soon be available at http://1log.co.uk, so anyone can use my system free of charge to make their own website. These are exciting times indeed for the internet :D
Newness Of Sorts
Posted 7th January 2008 at 1:36am by M1ke, tagged as Blog | Commenting Closed
There is actually nothing new to see on the blog (not just yet anyway, but I am currently posting using a program called Windows Live Writer. This program uses a fancy technique called XML-RPC. To geeks this is a wondrous thing that allows for much greater interaction between the websites that you and I use everyday. To non-geeks it is six letters and a hyphen. Nevertheless what this basically means is that I can now blog from my desktop without even opening a browser, and can take advantage of numerous other methods of getting content here - even mobile by texting to my blog. So next time I see a monkey walking down the street (I'll dig out the photo and shove it in your face if you don't believe me) I can let everyone know right there and then. Which I'm sure comes as a relief to most people.
(Oh, and it also has a spell checker :D)
Theme Theft Thingy
Posted 21st December 2007 at 10:21pm by M1ke, tagged as Blog | Commenting Closed
Alliteration aside I just nicked this nice dark theme from Gazz's new website and converted it to work with 1-Log. That should give some indication of how easy it is to use Wordpress themes in 1-Log, the conversion took a leisurely 25 minutes. I'm going to get around to making an original theme (for once) pretty soon, I just need that little bit of inspiration. I'd like to do a dark one, but also green without looking like The Matrix. Hmm...