Pete Ashton's Weblog

Okay, you'll have noticed I've been a little quiet these last couple of weeks, especially after all that noise about running a blog for Birmingham. Well, a spanner was thrown into the works of all that, but it was a really nice spanner. Possibly the nicest spanner I've seen for a while as a matter of fact.

As of today, and for the next three months, I'm a professional blogger. Which even this age when every company that matters has people on staff dedicated to blogging still seems a really weird statement, like being a professional tea drinker. So what does Pete being a professional blogger actually mean?

In short it means I'm getting paid a decent amount of money, enough to support my frugal lifestyle anyway, to write a weblog full time.

The title of the blog is Created in Birmingham and its remit is to survey all the creative activity in the city in blog form, from artists to writers to film makers to designers to musicians... all of them and the organisations and agencies that support them.

Which is why I've been kinda quiet of late as I try to figure out exactly what the hell that involves. I think I've got a handle on it though. Best to read the about page to find out more.

The main thing I want to do, though, is to make sure it's an actual weblog and not just a bunch of articles and interviews dumped online. It's quite different to the sort of blogging I've been doing here - I'm talking to people and relating their ideas in my own voice, something I never do on peteashton.com, and the tone is a little more formal - but I'm keen for it to have a narrative and a personality that runs through it as it develops.

In the meanwhile I will, of course, keep running this blog and I'm very keen to keep the Brum Blog going with the aim of eventually spinning it off onto it's own site in the new year. However, while I get CiB off the ground I'm going to be a little distracted, so bear with me.

So, yeah. Professional blogger!

Howabout that?

Okay, time for an update, for reasons that will become apparent.

Before that, though, I should give credit to another inspiration for this Brum Blog thing which didn't really strike me until I'll started - Dirk Deppy's Journalista comics blog. Obviously the subject matter is completely different but I really like the way he structures each day's post into a little magazine that sucks in the links but keeps a sense of personality. (The massive events listing at the end of every single post I'm not so keen on but you can't have everything.) So, credit where due.

Two days in and I've hit a drought - there ain't nothing of interest to report today. This isn't too surprising since I'm doing this completely from the computer and not generating any news myself. The first two posts had the benefit of being able to go back and cherry pick the past. Now I've done that I'm just waiting for something new to come along. Given that my reasons for starting this enterprise was the paucity of online information for Birmingham and given that I'm trawling my usual hunting grounds it was bound to happen.

But all is not lost. While the actual content of those two posts wasn't exactly mind blowing I'm pleased with the methodology used for the Edwards blog roundup, the "photo of the day" was a nice touch and while the Mark McGowan story annoyingly found itself everywhere for a short while I feel I did add a bit of value to the piece by drawing attention to his previous work. Otherwise the second post did feel a bit like newsfilter rather than original blogging and I'm not so happy about that. A bit of news relaying is good but too much and you just become the same as everyone else, regurgitating the same old stuff.

Currently I think there's enough online resources to power a Journalista style post about Birmingham once a week, maybe twice at a push, which has the benefit of allowing time for some deeper research and reflection. Otherwise I'll start regurgitating the Google News feed and nobody wants that.

Actually, a brief word about that feed. While I'm sure it could be fine tuned (and any tips would be welcome) I'm currently monitoring any UK news items that mention Birmingham but don't have the words crime, stabbed, blues, alabama, death, murder, sport or football and even then it's a very depressing read with far too much sport. Footie aside (I just have no interest in it whatsoever so there's no point it clogging up my feed) I've often been perplexed by people's negative attitude towards the city compared to my generally positive outlook (people look at me odd when I say I've walked home through Digbeth at 2am for example), but then I never consume local news and rarely watch or listen to anything other than Radio 4. If your only source of news came from the Birmingham Post and Mail group you'd think you were living in a hell hole, albeit one very keen on football. This is not my city. Still, it has to be parsed.

The football thing is also mildly interesting in that most articles about the sport don't mention its name (thus making it impossible to completely filter out). It's assumed that you know who the players and teams are and why what they do is important. I guess this is reasonable since most of these articles will live in the sports section of the paper but on a jumbled up news feed it's like getting reports from an alien civilization.

(Note to self - add "paedophile" to that blacklist...)

So, in summary, bedroom blogging about Birmingham has its limits, at least until a decent blogosphere develops for the city. That's actually one of my aims for this project - that along with the few others I'm aware of who are thinking along these lines we might encourage more to join us. That would certainly fulfill the Community criteria.

As for me, I'm now thinking of other ways to fill the blog and that's going to involve getting off my arse and out there in the city. Which isn't a problem!

In the mean time, any recommendations of other places to look for regular local information, be they blogs or council stuff or whatever, please leave a comment or email me.

Okay, after those one, two, three posts on blogging about Birmingham it's time to actually start doing something with the idea.

Some notes before hand though.

1) I have no real concrete idea how this is going to work in the long term. This is not a problem. Currently my vision of Birmingham is limited to that which I know. As I start to write about and explore the city this will change and hopefully grow. So no predictions about content.

2) At the same time, no wild expectations on the outset. I don't expect to be doing anything radical to begin with - that will come with time.

3) No trying to set up a group blog. Given the above it'll be hard to lay down commonly agreed rules and guidelines so best not to bother. That's not to say some kind of collaboration might emerge in the long term though. Also, I've become aware of other people planning vaguely similar things. Hopefully we can spur each other on and develop a community that way.

4) There's a rather nice paradox to this whole thing. My motivation for starting this is that there isn't a decent site that tells what's going on in Birmingham. However, to produce one I need to know what's going on in Birmingham. But the reason I want a site like this to exist is because I don't know what's going on in Birmingham. Hello brick wall. Then, assuming I get over that brick wall and find myself knowing exactly what's going on in Birmingham, what is my motivation for continuing the site? (The latter is, of course, silly talk - I'll never know everything and it's always changing, but the former is something of a stumbling block.)

So here's the plan. I'm going to start blogging about Birmingham on this blog. This will initially be in self contained posts comprised of a few links, a bit of commentary, some news and other bits and bobs. Some of this I've been doing already (such as the occasional upcoming gigs posts) but there'll be more of it and it won't just be about music and photography. Okay, initially it's just be music and photography but I intend to expand out from that.

Each post will be suitably flagged (so non-Brummies can ignore it) and normal Pete-blogging will continue alongside. So don't all un-subscribe just yet. This is just an experiment, running for a month or so, to see if this might be viable and to force me to hook into local activity I'm not aware of.

If it is viable then I'll spin it off into its own blog, with all that entails, some time in the new year.

Actually, in a moment of pure coincidence, Diamond Geezer's recent Cultural Update for London is pretty much the sort of thing I was thinking about. (As well as being the best thing he's written for a while.)

It all starts, ooh, some time tomorrow I guess. right now!

I present to you my latest venture, Pete's Print Shop, where you can buy photographic images transfered onto pieces of paper using technology.

Some notes.

It's still kinda beta. Let me know if anything doesn't work or make sense.

The actual selection of photos on there is pretty random right now but it'll change over time. There's an RSS feed which monitors new additions and I'll probably subtly mention them on this blog too. I welcome suggestions as to which photos would make good prints.

I've set the price at £15.00 per print including postage which seems reasonable based on other online print shops I've seen. I may be wrong about this. Time will tell.

Only 16 photos will be on sale in the shop at any given time but all photos from my Flickr stream can be ordered on request.

Order fulfillment is done by Photobox on demand. This means actual processing of orders will take a couple of minutes, if that. This is important for scalability reasons. Payment is through PayPal for the same reasons. I want to commit to this long term so it mustn't become a drag.

If this works I plan to expand the shop to sell prints by other photographers.

Feedback is welcome. As, of course, are actual orders!

"When I was one, I was just begun.
When I was two, I was nearly new.
When I was three, I was hardly me.
When I was four, I was not much more.
When I was five, I was just alive.
But now that I'm six, I'm as clever as clever.
I think I'll stay six now for ever and ever."

Or at least until next year.

At this moment, though not necessarily in the future (he says, futureproofing this entry), you may notice little w's scattered around the blog, if you're reading the blog on the site, and using a browser that isn't IE. Or you may not. If you can see a little w after this link then it's working for you. If you can't then refresh the page. If you still can't then don't worry, life is short.

The w simply indicates that it's a link to Wikipedia. You may find this information useful. You may find it irrelevant. You may find it annoying. If you do find it annoying please let me know. I myself may end up finding it annoying. If we all find it annoying it will vanish, hence the futureproofing of this entry.

For the curious, here's the CSS which generates it:

a.wiki:after {
content: " w";
vertical-align: super;
font-size: .8em;
text-decoration: none;}

In other news, I've been listening to a lot of Melt-Banana today. It's very soothing.

Christ, I'm on a drought! Four posts to this blog in the last fortnight and only two of them actually had any real writing in them. Not sure why exactly - the usual excuses are just excuses and not having anything to write about is no excuse for not blogging. It was suggested to me that the adjustment into actually having a routine in my life might have something to do with it, but whatever, it doesn't matter.

What I do know is this anticyclone of meh will break sooner or later (this may even be the start of it, who knows?) but the silence was deafening even me.

So, what have you been up to? Feel free to use the comments to plug whatever you're involved with. I'm genuinely interested and will post the ones that grab my eyeballs in the blog proper.

When you give a bad review you expect the band in question to not be too happy about it, but even so...

Oddness abounds over at BugPowder.com. It appears it's got confused with the website of one Jimmy Wan who last updated his page in 2003. It's probably a cockup of some kind and will hopefully be resolved soon, but thanks for the emails.

[Update] All better now. T'was a severe hard drive failure by all accounts.

I've saved the mysterious Jimmy Wan page for posterity. When the first email came through, from Rob Dunlop, the subject was "Who the fuck is Jimmy Wan" and being none the wiser I assumed it was the title of a new comic or something. I liked the sound of it and still do. So t-shirts commemorating this momentous blip may well emerge. And mugs. Maybe even so photoshopping.

I think comments are working okay on the Linklog and Podcast pages. Feel free to test them, if you have something to say.

If you're upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 you should be okay unless you've got your own custom URL setup which uses MTEntryDate for the Monthly archives. In previous versions you could get away with this but seems they've fixed this anomaly, and rightly so, so you'll need to change it to MTArchiveDate. Because this is a rather obscure use of the tag, probably only implemented by me and some guy in Bulgaria, the error messages won't explain it properly and it'll only be when you've decided to rebuild the whole site from scratch that you'll figure out what's going on.

But then rebuilding from scratch is never a bad idea. This site was getting a bit ragged, not that you'd notice but I was noticing. Three years of tinkering has left a lot of cruft about the place and some of those plugins I'd been using were a little bit rough to say the least.

So here we are. Spangly new design for the main page and weblog inspired by the inside-front-cover of a French comic I was reading (or rather, looking at the pictures of) - Il Pleut by Jean-Philippe Peyraud published by La Comedie Illustree, to give full credit. If it's been translated into English since 1998 I'd like to know.

Most stuff in the new spangliness should be stable and working but there may well be "issues" and I'm aware of some tidying up that needs to be done in places. I'm also trying out a new comment spam prevention system which seems far too simple to be true, so let me know if it's acting like a surly bouncer on your asses.

And I'm not completely sold on this shade of beige, or whatever it is. #fffaee is what we're currently using, feel free to suggest a close alternative.

I'll hopefully give a full guide to the new features later. Or not. Maybe I'll just let you figure it out.

(Not tested on IE / Windows yet. Some things can wait until morning. Works in IE / Windows now.)

I'm about to upgrade this site to MT 3.2. It's a bit of a weird one because while I'm sure the basic procedure will be fine (and they've improved the upgrade system by all accounts) there are enough widgets and plugins I rely on that there's a good chance things will go a bit screwy. So bear with me. All will be sorted by the end of the day. I hope.

This year's Readership Roll Call is over. In the seven days starting on August 12th and finishing on August 19th sixty six people voluntarily identified themselves as being regular readers of this weblog. That's up from 35 in 2004, an increase of (opens calculator) 88%.

Comparing this to the automatic stats gathering, the last full week had 5426 unique visitors. We can discard this figure as being anything vaguely connected to useful as most of them come from random Google searches never to return, but the reading for 2004 was 2110. That's an increase of 157%, implying there is a loose correlation between this site's pagerank and it's actual readership.

Of those who left a comment, 38 (58%) did so on the Friday with another 12 (18%) following on Saturday. This dropped off to between 2 and 4 for the rest of the week. The implication here is that my readership checks in very regularly, probably daily, with the minority checking in now and then.

Of those who identified themselves in a way I can be certain about, I've met 25 (38%) of you in the flesh at some point.

Finally, it would appear my readership is made up of nice people.

And now, since I'm suddenly aware of people watching me, I'd better think of something interesting to write about...

My hosting company, Modwest, who have been quite wonderful and stable in the three years I've been using them, had a rather nasty case of the b0rkage this afternoon. Everything seems to be okay now but I suspect I've missed a whole load of email. So if you sent me something between, say, 10am and 5pm today do send it again. If you want to be really sure use peteashton (at) gmail.com, in fact I'd recommend that for the time being.

I've noticed I'm getting comments from people I don't know. This is a good thing but not something I'm used to. It implies the actual readership of this blog has grown of late. So we're going to try and figure out how many of you there are.

Here's the rule: You have to have been reading the blog for a month and come here at least once a week or so. (or read it by RSS / LiveJournal)

If that's you, leave a comment. You don't have to say anything and you can leave the Name and Email fields blank if you like. Think of it as a raising of hands.

Oh, another rule: Only comment on this page once. Please don't follow up what someone else says. That way I'll be able to add it up easier.

For those reading this in LiveJournal or a feed reader here's a handy link to the comments section so you have no excuse.

Last time I did this there were 35 of you, which was a nice number. Let's see what we've got 18 months later.

Poll Now Closed. I think sixty six is quite respectable!

Blogrolls piss me off. Not in themselves, just keeping them updated. There are automagical ways of managing the list of links on your sidebar but none of them have ever appealed to me and so mine just stagnated. Until now. For the first time in about two years I've updated it. I thought about being all clever and sectioning it all up but in the end went for the really un-useful long-list system which makes me look well read / popular / desperate (delete as applicable) but doesn't really guide you to anything new.

And so it will sit there (main page, right column, down a bit), probably missing some people and gradually getting more and more out of date. Cherish its freshness while it lasts.

[Update: Added a few podcasts down there too. It's the future, y'know?]

Since June 2000

Number of words: 344,250
Words per month: 5,737
Words per day: 188

Number of entries: 1,761
Average words per entry: 195
Entries per month: 29
Entries per day: 0.96

Prior to August 2002

Number of words: 81,399
Words per month: 3,130
Words per day: 104

Number of entries: 710
Average words per entry: 114
Entries per month: 27
Entries per day: 0.91

Since August 2002

Number of words: 262,851
Words per month: 7,510
Words per day: 250

Number of entries: 1,051
Average words per entry: 250
Entries per month: 30
Entries per day: 1

Number of comments: 2665
Comments per entry: 2.53

I don't usually do statistical analysis. Unlike some people I don't really find it that fascinating to crunch the numbers, but I thought that rather than do yet another blog birthday post I'd have an analytical look at what I've produced over the last five years.

I admit I'm somewhat disappointed not to have reached a million words but I'm a third of the way there. At the current rate I'll hit it around 2015 and the terrible thing is I'll probably still be blogging then.

I'm rather pleased to have posted, on average, once every day despite taking a whole month off last December.

The stats are split into two sections for a reason. In August 2002 I'd just switched from Blogger to Movable Type, had come out of a long-ish term relationship and was about to enter a period of work-related stress and depression. Those three things will make a decent blogger out of pretty much anyone, I reckon. I have a constant conflict over whether to keep those first 26 months of posts (so people will know how long I've been at this) or to delete them (so that no-one will ever read them again) but the former piece of vanity always wins out. Quantity, not quality in this game. Anyway, back to the stats.

I was thinking that my average posting length would have increased since in my mind I've rarely written less that 1000 words since Spring 2003 and the Blogger posts were generally quite short while the Linklog takes care of the random linkage since July 2003. Not to mention the enormity of the Farmblog, but it's still down there at 250 per entry, and while that is double the Blogger entries it still seems too low. Guess I'm not as verbose as I thought.

Comments (which from the Blogger days are no more since they didn't import) are as I expected. Most posts get 3-4 comments and while some get loads, more get none.

Um...

I guess I should really do a month-by-month analysis and draw a graph or something. But I can't be arsed.

Happy fifth birthday, weblog of mine. And to everyone else from the elitist old school.

[Addendum: According to the utterly-skewed-by-Google-referrers visitor stats which bear no relation to my actual regular readership and which I've therefore been ignoring these last couple of years, I've had 273,772 Unique Visitors since November 2000 providing 332,115 actual hits, which seems a little low, though it does mean I've had one page-load for very nearly each word I've written. Most of them come here on a Tuesday between 8 and 9pm. And... um...]

I've thrown together a new About Page. It's funny, but even though I keep a weblog that is pretty much all about me I hate writing these things. It seems kinda pompous, like I'm selling myself or showing off about what a talented and groovy guy I am. I much prefer it when other people tell me that than the other way around. I guess that's an English thing, though I feel the same about CVs and job applications and most people seem to deal with them okay.

But these things are necessary. I always go to the About page when I find a blog that looks interesting so it'd be silly not to do one of my own. Of course I'm not at all happy with it but I suspect I never will be, no matter how long I spend tweaking.

Feel free to let me know what you think, even if it's just pointing out typos...

If you go to the comments page you'll notice that there are coloured bars next to each comment. Each colour is unique(ish) to the entry the comment is about. In theory you'll be able to visually match them up but in practice it's not at all clear and sequential entries have very similar colours so it probably won't stay that way, but it's an interesting idea, I think, and has potential for other applications.

Here's how I do it. Colours are generated on web pages using a number of different techiniques, one of which is the "short hex" number where #049 is a darkish blue, #627 is a purple, #483 is a green and so on. Each entry in my database has a unique ID - the previous entry to this is number 4853 for example. In the Movable Type template I put the in this attribute for each comment:

style="border-left : solid #<MTCommentEntry><$MTEntryID trim_to="3"$></MTCommentEntry> 5px"

which gives any comments to the aforementioned entry the following:

style="border-left : solid #485 5px"

resulting in a nice green bar.

Like I said, it's not at all useful as it stands though it does mark out those comments on ages old posts but I only threw it together in about 10 minutes. However, the potentials for this sort of thing are interesting. For example, the colour scheme for this site could change as items are added to it. One month it scrolls through blue, the next green and so on. A dramatic change in colour since your last visit would mean you'd missed a lot (or that I rebuilt the database...) while if it's still the same shade not much has changed.

Another idea would be to take this data and use it to grab a thumbnail from Flickr using something like the Flickr Colr Pickr, keeping the "colour spectrum as time" idea but using more unique icons to differentiate between posts.

Anyway, that's my brainstorm in the shower idea for today.

[Update: there's now a colour bar at the top of most pages (my style-sheet implementation isn't very consistent at the moment...) which will change over time. Be interesting to see if a really gross colour makes me post more and vice versa.]

I got my first payment from Google Adsense this week for those ads I've got running in the sidebars of the archive pages on this site. I'm not allowed to disclose how much it was for but lets just say 6 months of ads would, if I were in the US, buy me an iPod. Since I'm in the UK where we don't have a stupendously devalued currency they'll go some way towards buying an iPod. As it stands I won't be buying an iPod with the cash despite want/needing to replace my aging CD/MP3 player due to the move which might throw up unexpected expenditures and lost earnings. Plus there's the usual quandary of suddenly having a lump of cash that could be spent on any number of kinda-luxury items (new camera, new hard drive, hypothetical laptop fund) but I think an iPod will win out. I spend a lot of time walking and on public transport and that's justification enough.

But back to the ads. As I was watching the money add up I realised I was having to invoke some serious self control. Since, as I've explained, the ads are clicked on by random people coming here by mistake it's very tempting to just put them everywhere I have a big block of text, to integrate them obtrusively into my content and to expand them onto other sites I have control over (all those words on BugPowder just sitting there...). If I didn't have an inbuilt moral distaste for ads stopping me this blog who be positively plastered in them. I had this moment, while looking through the various options available, when I suddenly realised the devil was tempting me and I was starting down a dangerous road, and I literally stepped back from the keyboard. But I still find myself looking at the reports and thinking, "I could double that". I've even thought about writing on subjects that get high paying ads but I couldn't really be arsed.

It's a slippery slope and no mistake. Before Google lowered the barrier to entry I had no way of getting into the advertising game. Now I'm in that game and am technically, but only just, blogging for profit. It's easy to say this sort of thing won't change you but it can if you let it.

For now, though, the ads are covering my hosting bills and that seems about right.

Podcast 5 is out [if you downloaded it on Sunday and it was all messed up, try again. It's fixed now] and along with it some site development. The main thing is Podcast central, a whole new section devoted to the radio shows which now come with fully linked-up tracklistings. Can't make out my mumblings? Check here and follow the links for more info. There's also a comments facility should you want to, y'know, comment.

As threatened, the mp3 blog is no more. It's still archived should you want to read what I wrote about what I posted, but the podcast is the medium for music communication from now on.

While I was at it I finally sorted out a design for the Linklog, adding pages that hold the last 500 links, 1000 links and finally all the links so if you kinda remember me linking to something a few months back you can use these pages to search.

I tried cramming the comments from all three sections onto one page but it just wasn't having it , so it's now a meta-department of its own: weblog comments, linklog comments and podcast comments. As before, this is all summarised on the main page, top right corner. (That said, I think I might just have figured out how to do it - we'll see if I'm right...)

Sorting out these sub-sections of the peteashton experience is effectively foundation laying, or preparatory sketching, for the next big design overhaul sometime in the next few months. I'm trying out layout and navigation ideas (hence the inconsistencies, before you mention it) and while they're definitely not quite there yet, something is emerging. It's all still too blocky, I reckon, but I do like the way the sidebars are slotting in. That pleases me. Anyway, let me know what you think.

I just saw this over on Jez's blog where he's quoted someone. They start off with "Thank G-d I'm not dependent..." and it got me thinking about people who self censor. Usually it's religious stuff or swearing, and I always find it odd. If you object to swearing that's fine, but J*s*s, if you're going to f***ing swear, then do it properly, you c**t. That's what I say. But then people are odd and that's the point of them really.

I have a nice long post planned for the weekend. Some wacky stuff happened at work this week and it's a good one, but it needs to digest a bit first and Friday should put it all into context.

One of the mailing lists I'm on got trolled this week, which was interesting as it rarely happens to places I hang out on. I was surprised that I was one of the first to cry "troll" while other were still giving the benefit of the doubt, not because the others were naive or stupid or anything - for a while I thought I might have been mistaken - but because despite having never been in a flame war or whatnot I was able to spot it for what it was. I guess my net-fu is stronger than I thought.

During a long oops-I-forgot-mothers-day-oh-you-weren't-in-anyway phone call with my mum I realised I'd forgotten how old I was. Turns out I'm 32, not 33.

Thanks to the MyBlogLog service which records how many times links on the main page of my site are actually clicked on (kind of a reverse stats thing), I've actually discovered some accurate information about my users. Of those who have broadband and download 50mb files of music, exactly half use the web site while the others use the RSS feed or LiveJournal. Which was nice to know.

Doctor Who is really good. I know it's a bad thing to download it before it's even been shown on telly, but I was never going to watch it that way anyway and will be torrenting the rest, so my conscience is clear.

So I put out my Fourth Podcast at the weekend and listening back to it I'm not cringing and swearing I'll never do it again. Which is progress. I reckon this is going to be a fixture on the site from now on, moving from a novelty to something I actually try and do properly. However, I'm wondering what to do with the mp3 blog, since it covers the same ground, and unless there's a major outcry it'll be vanishing soon. The Podcast will be more regular - weekly or bi-weekly - and be given an expanded home with an annotated tracklistings on the site plus links to artists and places to buy the music. Other than the duplication of effort it feels more like fair use to actually create something new as opposed to just dumping mp3 files on the server, and since in order to get to the music you have to endure my voice it'll get rid of the leacher issue. Of course this isn't really fair use at all and I'm still breaking the law, but then who isn't these days?

I woke this morning to discover that Modwest, the trusty hosts of this site, have altered their hosting plans increasing my storage from 250mb to Two Whole Gigs with bandwidth to match. That's like living in a tiny flat and paying £100 a week while your neighbour is paying £20 but your landlord is really nice and helpful while his is a dumb mute but even so you could probably cope with a dumb mute but then you wake up and discover your tiny flat has magically turned into a five bedroom detached house with a view of the ocean.

So I think I'll be staying.

Though what I'm going to do with all this space god only knows. Probably fill it up with vaguely infringing media files or something. Longer podcasts for a start, and better quality (sound wise - I make no guarantees about the content). And other people's stuff too. Since I've got all these rooms I might as well have folk to stay. That radio station idea I mentioned at the end of my How To Podcast tutorial? Anyone actually want to take me up on that?

Right now though I'm still stuck in the bizarre solder checking job and while I've got the headaches under control it's still something of a mind-fuck, being stuck in zombie-land for eight hours a day. I've toyed with quitting and asking for something else but the horror is it's really not the worst job I've had this year and it's steady work for the next week or so, something I kinda need. So I'll be staying in my room, occasionally gazing at all the new space, maybe putting something large in the middle of it, just because I can, before the inevitable trip to virtual Ikea.

For the record I can recommend two web hosts. Modwest have been great. Been with them for nearly three years and never had a problem. They're not the cheapest but everything works and their help desk is brilliant. On the cheaper side I've been setting up a lot of people with 34SP who seem to be the host of choice for the UK blogger. They're cheap but their stuff works, running all the weblog software you might want and while the starter package is small you probably don't need more than 50mb to start with.

Jez has always had his comments integrated into the main page of his blog and I've always been in two minds as to whether it's a good thing or not. The other day Mike mentioned the same effect on Tranniefesto saying:

Unless I'm very much mistaken, Siobhan has coded her blog from scratch, using a content management system of her own devising. This gives the site some interesting individual features, including the seamless incorporation of comments into the main body of the post. Siobhan's replies to these comments are then displayed as if they were a continuation of the original post, thus making each entry much more of an open-ended dialogue. Having been following Tranniefesto for the last week or so, I have become increasingly taken with this way of doing things; it suits Siobhan's relaxed, conversational blogging style very well.

Here are the last 15 posts to this weblog with any comments included inline.

In short, it's just a merging of the main page's listing of recent posts with the comments section of the individual archives and it took about half an hour to bash together including tweaking the CSS. There's a fair bit more to do before I consider bringing it over to the main page properly and I'm still unsure about the implications of pushing recent posts further and further down the page as the comments pile on (maybe a javascripty collapse function would work?) but it can be done and it does change the feel of the blog quite dramatically.

Well, after that debacle with the drive swapping I needed some zen time so what better than to add even more functionality to this blog. I'd always been skeptical of master archive pages but I was quite taken by how Hg has his so I decided to rip him off. Of course that wasn't enough of a challenge so I decided I wanted to make the days of the month have the correct suffix, ie 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. This was achieved with the mightily impressive and simple Compare plugin which will be much implemented by me in the future. The end result isn't quite polished yet but I'm happy with the functionality of it. it's nice to have such a condensed index of the site just sitting there without much need to scroll. Anyway, here it is. Enjoy.

Touch wood, this could be a week of full employment, which will make a change. I might actually be able to buy a drink for someone other than myself on Saturday. After a couple of days at the grotty Kingstanding factory I'm off to Landrover in Soluhull to do something or other and the commute means I probably won't be posting anything until the weekend. So taking advantage of that I'll be turning the tables with another survey. This is for regular readers, meaning you come here at least once a week and have done so for at least a month.

1) Last year I asked if anyone read the blog in an RSS reader. Pretty much everyone didn't know what RSS was. Has anything changed a year on?

2) If you do use RSS, do you use the individual feeds or the combined feed (called http://peteashton.com/all.xml)

3) This site consists of 5 sections, the weblog, the linklog, the mp3blog, the podcast and, indirectly, the Flickr photostream. Which do you follow, in order or preference please.

4) What sort of posts work for you, subject-wise? Is there anything you'd like me to write / post about?

5) Finally, and most interestingly for me at the moment, how would you like to see the site develop? I'm thinking about the technical side here - layouts, navigation, archives, that kind of thing. Bear in mind that I can do pretty much anything with this data. It doesn't have to be useful - cool and interesting is good enough.

Answer as many questions as you care to in as much detail as you can be bothered with. You have until Sunday morning. Thanks!

Is it me or is this January proving worse that usual? It's probably me, or at least I've been known to get this ennui in the summer too. Whatever, in an effort to combat the hours of non-workage and nocturnalisms that are exacerbating the long dark stretch from post Xmas recovery into Spring, I'm adding even more features to this site. Maybe it's actually some kind of pre-midlife crisis, the blogging equivalent of digging a hole in your back garden or building something really complicated out of matchsticks. Whatever, feel like I've only just started and it'll take something drastic like some actual fecking employment from the agency to stop me.

So today I'm unveiling my new Comments Centre which expands on that little box in the top right corner of the main page. If you really like following the comments on this blog, like some kind of "lurker", then this is perfect for you. And if you don't then just feel comfortable in the knowledge that it's there, expanding on the little box in the top right corner.

Again, all the coding has been written from scratch because I'm bored and have no motivation to do anything else right now. I'm particularly pleased with how the "From:" bits display. That took me a good hour or so to get right. The column needs a bit of work though. Oh, and there's a feed, naturally. I think feeds are going to be my next project. You can never have too many feeds.

And in a really neat twist, if you comment on this post about the page it'll appear on the page itself! How meta is that?

After a year or so of dealing with its ever growing menace, I seem to have comment spam under control, at least for the time being. I'm still getting hit by the bastards, more and more each week, to the level where a comment is being submitted every five minutes, but none of them are actually reaching the site. That, to me, is victory enough. So, for those of you running Movable Type and suffering, here's how I do it.

I often find, since you're asking, that when life is getting a bit sluggish and you can't get motivated to write or learn anything new, the best solution is to add a bit of functionality to your website. So since I've gotten the comment spam under control (I feel like I'm head to toe in oilskin waterproofs walking round a field of t-shirt clad campers in a thunderstorm being all smug, and I will share my methodology soon, honest) I figured I'd add comments to the linklog.

On the sidebar of the main page they're indicated by a number in [square brackets]. On the RSS feed it'll be a little more obvious.

It'll be quite selective, so watch out for them. The idea is to have comments on those links I think might generate an interesting conversation or am curious to hear from you about.

The page what holds the comments is a relatively new design, so if it's borked in your browser, do let me know.

I'm going to take a month off from journal-blogging (or whatever you call it - meblogging?) partly because I just can't think of anything to write about at the moment, and while I know that's not a problem worth worrying about it's niggling at the back of my brain and potentially stopping me doing other stuff (for if I can't blog then what can I do?) But also, partly, because it just seems like a nice idea. In January I'll come back and for the first time in four and a half years there'll be a gap in the monthly archives which will never be filled. I like that notion.

Though I'm not really going away. The Linklog (main page, left) and mp3blog (main page, right) will continue to run, as will my Flickr "stream" (should I actually take any photos). I'll be posting to BugPowder and maybe even TRS2 along with the usual scattering of comments elsewhere. And of course there are the archives (main page, left, down a bit), though you'll no doubt not bother with them. Why should you when there are so many other blogs around? I know I wouldn't.

See you in January then. Have a good one.

All this email spam for Rolex watches is just so retro. They'll be spamming for 8-tracks next.

Had something of a the writers block this last week, which happens. Often. I did go see The Incredibles and recommend it to everybody for all the reasons you've already heard. Monologuing... Heh... And I got that fluey virus that just everybody who's anybody has been having of late which was kinda annoying because apathy, lack of motivation and a sniffle are just such unusual symptoms for me.

Agency work has been minimal - two days last week, one day this week - and it doesn't look like it's going to get better before the new year so I've taken the plunge and done a Hire Me page. I've got a couple of leads for some web design work and now I've got something to show them. This could prove rather effective as a week or so of web-work will garner the same cash as a month of temping and I'm sure, if it pans out, I'll look back and wonder why I didn't do it earlier. And then I'll remember the apathy and lack of motivation...

Anyway, let me know what you think of the page (by email rather than in the comments please).

When I wasn't virusing I bashed together Imagesmith, a little site for my mate Kath who's making a go of freelance photography. It was quite an interesting experience as she didn't like my original idea and I didn't like her idea and because she's a mate I told her so, but eventually we went with her idea, because it's her site, with a few of my ideas in the mix and I think it's worked out okay. The back-end was fun to play with, integrating Javascript rollovers with Movable Type. I'll maybe write it up later.

And also on the webmaster side I moved my mum's Yoga site over to a new domain because we'd been meaning to for a while but mainly due to her free OneTel webspace had become FTP-inaccessible for some reason OneTel can't figure out and the info thereon was getting out of date. The only problem is Google still loves the old site and despite indexing the new one hasn't ranked it so high. So if you have a weblog that Google likes and want to do my mum a favour...

It gets slightly better in 2001 with a stunning seven decent posts. First up there's the weirdo in the shop story, followed by a fascinating analysis of how the book industry raises prices. It then gets a little more political as I try to explain what "anti-capitalism" means, and then in June I revisit my operation with a gory photo of the scar. A brief but amusing toilet story follows before I weigh in on the Brass Eye pedophile controversy. Finally we have my first attempt to detail all the places I've ever lived.

What's striking is how very dull my weblog was for the first 18 months. I haven't read forwards yet but I suspect it about to get a bit more interesting in 2002 as I am diagnosed with depression, split up with my girlfriend and my job starts giving me panic attacks. It would appear that being happy and content just isn't good for my muse.

I've started skimming through this blog looking for posts worth highlighting or collecting or just doing something with. The first six months worth, that's June - December 2000, have produced precisely two entries that are remotely any good, the account of my operation and the appearance of a crow outside my shop. The rest ranges from the inane to the shite, which I kinda knew but even so, two entries in six months? Here's hoping 2001 produces a slightly better crop.

The Router Help Desk on my blog, which has nothing to do with me or any of my readers and developed purely around Google searches for a useless piece of kit, seems to have run its course with 376 comments. Though I had no idea what they were talking about I'll miss it. However, it looks like a replacement is on its way. I've noticed a small but steady stream of comments coming in on a post I wrote in January 2002 when my cat died. They usually come from a Google search for "my cat died" which is interesting, implying that when faced with a grief that others might not comprehend people turn to search engines to find someone else who might get it. Needless to say I'm happy about this, not only because it's nice to get touching heartfelt messages amongst all the spam but because what I wrote that day is one of the relatively few things on this blog I'm kinda proud of and if it's prompting a reaction then, well, job done.

On a whim I applied for a Google Adsense account. Since Google sends about 5000 people this way every month the chances are a few of them might click on the ads and if they do it'll pay for all the time I spend clearing comment spam posted by arseholes trying (and usually failing) to game Google. I just got the account approved. Expect to see textads on the archive pages in the next day or so.

I so sell out!

This is really odd. The International Atomic Energy Agency is spidering my site.

I've been keeping tabs on my logs of late to ensure the mp3 blog doesn't kill my bandwidth and today I noticed something odd - 1,954 hits from http://www.iaea.org (see for yourself). Looking through the detailed logs it seems last night, between 11:23pm and 11:49pm, a bot from their server has accessed all my category and individual archive pages. This sort of behaviour isn't odd - Google does this on a regular basis as do the more nefarious bots looking for emails to spam, and sites looking to boost their Google ranking the lazy way will sometimes hit the referal logs*. But the Atomic Energy Agency? The only reasonable answer is some spambot is pretending to be from there but the unreasonable conclusions are mindboggling...

*If you're interested... Evil site puts a link to my site on it's page, then clicks on said like a few thousand times before removing said link. Evil site appears on my publicly accessible referral logs. Because they're public Google follows the links and, because Google gives my site a reasonably high ranking and the logs are on my site, passes on some of this karma to the evil site. It's like comment spam only less annoying.

I was looking out the window at the lawn I'd just mowed and noticed how it wasn't perfect. There were random clumps sticking up, odd blades waving in the wind and borders were rough. Thank god I'm not one of those people who spend hours on their lawn with nail scissors making it perfect, I thought to myself. Then I looked back to the screen and realised I am one of those people, only this web site is my lawn. Ah well.

Category and Monthly archives have been moved to a directory structure. The Link Farm is now called the Linklog. I think I'm done. For now.

In summary, the weblog now has one feed and there's a new combined feed containing weblog, linklog, mp3 blog and my BugPowder posts.

The eagle-eyed amongst you (along with those reading via RSS) will have noticed that I've changed my permalinks. I decided to go with the domain.com/yy/mm/dd/title.html format. That was the easy part. The hard part was writing an .htaccess file to redirect the old pages (now deleted) to the new ones.

.htaccess files are wonderful things. Every time a browser comes to a site it checks for an .htaccess file and obeys all the rules therein, kinda like having a sign by your front door saying "take your shoes off, put the toilet seat down, smoking in the kitchen only, toilet upstairs on the right, Jimmy and Sammy have swapped bedrooms". So, when people came here from links elsewhere or via google I didn't want them to end up with a "404 Not Found page". I wanted the .htaccess file to say "you're looking for this file? Well, it's over here now." Simple.

I knew how to get Movable Type to automagically generate an .htaccess file that would do this for all 1400 pages and I thought I knew what commands to put in there. What I've learned is there are many ways to do this depending on a myriad of things none of which I could find intelligible documentation for. After two hours of searching through various FAQs, including the Apache Server site (of which .htaccess is a part), trying a number of solutions which didn't work and digging through the Support pages of my hosting service I was about to give up and write the "I'm probably being really thick but..." email to the help desk, when I noticed a user-contributed comment on one of the pages. Bingo. It worked.

Was it worth it? In the short run probably not, but I've learned something today, which is never a bad thing. Unfortunately I've also reaffirmed my belief that all the information out there on the internet is either aimed at the utterly clueless or the totally clued up. There's bugger all for the dilettante in the middle.

It had to happen, that sidebar was just getting too long. We're back to three columns on the main web page. On the left is the linklog followed by the site navigation and information stuff. On the right is the expanded mp3 blog followed by the projects list and blogroll. In the middle is this journal. I know it doesn't shrink down to 800x600 very well, but that's because there's a nasty big photo of some shoes three posts down. Should be okay in a few weeks. Oh, and it uses that classic CSS hack, the Table tag. Any issues in non-Mac browsers, please let me know. It should look the same as before, only with the extra column. If it looks shit, try pressing F5 to refresh first.

Now, to sort out my myriad RSS feeds into some kind of order...

To celebrate this blog's 4th birthday I'm launching a new sidebarblog, so those of you reading this via the feed go to the website now.

An mp3 blog is something I'd wanted to do for a while but fear of getting my bandwidth smashed always stopped me. Now they're pretty ubiquitous it's less likely that one is going to be swamped by a swarm of message board monkeys and since I'm paying for all this bandwidth that never gets used up...

To keep things safe I'll only be making them available one at a time on a weekly basis. Once the song is off the main page you won't be able to download it. Same goes for the RSS feed - only the most recent one can be gotten - the rest will take you to the website. Unlike the Link Farm you can leave comments on the songs - struck me a good thing to do so please do. Currently it's a pop-up but I'll be changing this to static pages once I've sorted out the archives next week.

Like most things bloggy it'll evolve and mature but for now I'll be using to share interesting and/or slightly odd tunes I've come across plus some I consider important or excellent. In many ways it'll work like a linklog in that I'll try and post stuff that's new to most people. I'll try not to be too obscure or post anything too ear-bleeding but no promises.

Four yeas ago today I started using Blogger to run this weblog, in a roundabout kind of way - it used to be merged with the BugPowder blog before I split them apart. I acutally started keeping an online diary around April 2000 but that was hand-coded and so doesn't really count (plus I can't find it anywhere).

I've written 238,652 words spread over 1,424 entries and some of them actually bear re-reading. Not all, but some. At some point I really should pick out the best bits but god knows when I'll ever get aroud to it. Hopefully sometime before the 5th birthday.

My original post on comment spam back in October just had some comment spam posted to it. I don't know whether this is deliciously ironic or deeply tragic. I was tempted to leave it there but deleted it.

[Update: Its happened again on the same post so I've neutered and left it there as an illustration.]

In lieu of actually getting anything important done (it's been one of those weekends...) I've been tweaking bits of this blog in the hope that it'll make my slightly more daunting projects seem slightly less daunting. I'll write about how I did them at length later but you can now read the Monthly and Category archives in both reverse-chronological and chronological order. Also, when you click on the month in the date-stamp it takes you to that month's archive (unless you're already in the monthly archives of course).

Thanks to Google my stats for this blog are next to useless. I had 2110 unique visitors last week which seems pretty impressive but most of them were from search engines. I've never really worried about how many real regular readers I have but suddenly I'd like to know. Y'see, when I hosted the Grey Tuesday album on Tuesday I specifically requested that only regular readers download it from here. At least 25 people downloaded the whole album, which seems a lot to me considering I never actually endorsed it as such. I used to reckon I had about 30-50 regular readers, meaning people who come to the site at least once a week. I now suspect it might be a little higher.

So, if you read this site at least weekly please leave a comment on this post. You don't have to give your name or email if you don't want to and you don't even have to write anything. Just stick something random in the Name field and post it. Of course if you do want to write something that'd be super keen. How long and how often would be interesting, for me anyway.

If it's over 200 by next Friday I'm going to buy a cake.

Well, golly. I just got chosen as blog-of-the-day by the Guardian Weblog. This hasn't happened to me since BugPowder was a "blog of note" on Blogger back in April 2001. Bring on the book deal...

I'm currently working at that moon base between Birmingham and Coventry known as the NEC setting up a stand for some Spring Fair or other. Rather that write about it now I'm making notes on my long bus journey using the handheld to be written up when it's all over. It's proving quite a surreal one this time - hope I'll be able to do it justice.

In the meanwhile, a user survey, if you please, for regular readers of this weblog:

1) Do you read weblogs using an RSS reader? If yes, any comments on how this blog is displayed? If no, have you got a clue what I'm asking? Would you like to know more?

2) Do you regularly read my Link Farm? If so, do you read it on the sidebar of the main blog page, on it's own page, or via the RSS feed?

Just implemented a minor new feature which won't be that obvious. I've been wanting to include more photos on this blog to break up the text so I'm going to start sticking pictures, some relavent, some totally random, on most of my rambling blog entries. For example, the previous post to this one has a picture of a couple of mail sacks. Or at least it does on some parts of this site.

Just completed the annual redesign of the BugPowder weblog. Well, annual in as much as I last did it a year ago. Back then it was my first real attempt to get to grips with CSS and over the months I've become more and more embarrassed by it, especially compared with my own site here which I've been constantly tweaking. The problem was I'd coded it with my HTML head on so it was utterly inflexible meaning any redesign (other than changing the colours) would involve a total overhaul. Which is what I've now done.

In essence it's just a copy of this site with some little tweaks (the sidebar is on the right). I initially rejected doing this as it seemed a bit of a cop out but then I figured since this site works and since I'd spent so much time on it I might as well exploit that. At the end of the day it's just another weblog layout, there to serve the content rather than to be the end in itself, and it's now a lot more flexible should I or anyone else want to tweak it a bit. In all it probably took me four or five hours to do, and most of that was spent figuring out the colours (not my strength), re-jigging the external content feeds (such as the TRS2 reviews) and figuring out what order the sidebar contents should be in.

And now I can look at BugPowder and not cringe, which is all for the good.

I've imported the Farmblog entries into this main blog (within their own category), mainly because that chapter of my life no longer seems quite so unique - it's just one of the many things I did last year. That said, I've always wanted to do something with that diary and can now work on editing it into something more permanent, to live at the original URI.

I've also created a new category, Agency Worker, and placed any post-farm, industrial-temping related posts in there. You might be able to speculate where I'm heading with this...

Did a bit of work on the Individual Archive template today (that is to say the page you get when you click on "Permalink"). The basic layout mirrors the main page with a sidebar holding information about the post and any Trackbacks, while the main section just has the post itself plus any comments (the form for which has also been tidied up a bit).

Also on the sidebar is an implementation of the Related Entries plugin which lists 20 posts from the same category. For some reason they're not necessarily the most recent entries but that's not really a problem.

The main benefit is that posts do not stretch all the way across the browser window any more which always kinda bugged me.

The other day I was looking for a link I knew I'd posted to the Linkfarm and it took me bloody ages to find it, which seemed to rather defeat the point of linking to it somehow. So to try and rectify this I've put some categorisation in place and added a search function.

Added a couple of things to the sidebar. The first is a blatant swipe from Jez's blog, the second merely correcting an oversight.

Pete Elsewhere is like the Link Farm is operation though it links to other people's blog posts where I've left a comment. Unlike the link farm (which I also copied from Jez) I've not seen this on other blogs but it's a terrific idea. Currently I can track nearly all my web activity by RSS feeds, bookmarks or links on this site, but comments off my own sites have always been a problem - too fleeting to justify a permanent link but important enough to deserve something other than memory to get me to return. A few comments systems offer up RSS feeds for individual post's comments but even if this was the norm I don't want my aggregator cluttered up with them. So whenever I leave a comment I'll be blogging the post in question on this list. Hopefully this'll mean I do more than just leave one comment on someone's blog and never return.

Search: you can now search this site directly from the sidebar. This feature was brought into Movable Type after I'd designed the page and I'd never gotten around to implementing it until now.

Wow, a week without posting. Even with my current blogapathy (if you didn't notice it then I'm obviously just being self conscious about it) that's pretty bad.

Fact is I've been working for the first time since quitting the airport job a month back and while the job isn't so bad (stock picking food for M&S in a cold storage warehouse) and only lasts a week, it's in fucking Thatcham, between Newbury and Reading. Yes, I'm still living in Birmingham. I get picked up from the centre of town at 8.00am, work from 10 to 6 and get dropped off again at a little after eight. Add on my bus journey to and from home and I'm away for a little under 14 hours a day, every day since Friday. The pay is reasonably good (should net £345 before tax for five days brainless work) and tomorrow is the last day but right now I'm fucked. Six hours a day traveling is not good, especially as I find is really hard to get comfortable on coach seats. Moan moan, bloody moan. All ends tomorrow, then Xmas joy (major family stuff for nearly a week!) , then a nice short period of no-work, then back on the temp wagon again.

Here's a question. I know I've got a small band of loyal readers out there. What do you want me to write about? Do you want tales of surreal temp work? The minutiae of my daily life? Strident but ill-thought-out opinions? Diatribes on the role of the outsider-non-artist railing against but dependent upon modern consumerist society? More of those tutorial thingies I started dabbling in? More photos? Brutally honest dark moments of the soul?

This is kinda important to me as I've been losing my way with this blog since moving to Birmingham. Actually, since stopping the Farmblog really. I've toyed with splitting it into multiple blogs, stripping it down to an LMG style linklog, starting up a new, anonymous diary blog somewhere or even just scrapping the whole thing and starting again, but I think the best thing to do is just keep going only with a better focus on what I'm doing this for.

When I read a non-specific mish-mash blog like my own I tend to read it selectively. skimming through some posts (for example ones on poetry) and dwelling on others (for example ones on music) and I imagine people do the same with mine. So, please let me know what aspects of this blog you actually read, either in the comments or, if you prefer, by email.

Thanks. (And sorry for rambling. I'm very tired...)

Hmm, bit of a blogging block at the moment. Lots to write about but it's not transforming into words, probably because there's lots to write about. So I'm taking a short break for a week or so. The farm will keep going though - lunch time blog surfing hasn't lost it's novelty appeal yet.

Well, this site (along with BugPowder) is suffering from comment spam with wankers leaving link-laden comments on random posts to try and boost their google ratings. The only surprise it how long it's taken for this phenomena to kick off and the implications are dire with commenting systems going the same way as usenet, etc.

And I don't have the time to keep on top of it all. I'm currently reluctant to shut off comments completely though it's a possibility.

Arsehole, the lot of them..

The stats service I use gives me the last 20 referers to this site and then the last 20 search engine searches. Currently these two listings are identical give or take two or three. Now, back in the day I didn't mind getting this kind of traffic but it's getting kinda silly when 85% of my readership is coming from Google. It also renders totally void the seemingly impressive increase in visitors this site has had over the last few months. Am I getting more popular? Or is Google just indexing me like a rabid dog? I suspect the latter so I'm running a wee experiment. During the next month Google will NOT be indexing this site thanks to the robots.txt file I've uploaded (more info here). By the start of October all my pages should be off the Google site and by November I should have a good idea of how many actual readers this site has.

In the meanwhile, howabout a listing of non-search engine referals? That'd be, like, useful.

[Update: All better now]

Shite!

Um, you'll have noticed it's all gone MT default on the main page. Due I strongly suspect to something weird the template for this page got cropped losing about 3/4 of the html. And I don't have a backup. At all. So while I re-do it all (which shouldn't be that hard as all the design stuff is in the style sheets) you'll have to put up with this. Ooh, the embarrassment...

If you've been watching the "Posts with new Comments" box on the main page you'll have noticed a post titled Grrrr has been there for a long while slowly increasing in number of comments. It's just past 50 and shows no signs of slowing down.

Back in December 2002 I bought an ADSL Router with the idea of networking all the computers in our flat to share the broadband line. It didn't want to work so I blogged a call for help detailing as much info about the router as I could. Then we learned we were being evicted in a couple of months and it became less of a priority so I popped in a box and thought nothing more.

In May this year "Harry" stumbled across the page via Google and posted his own woes. Ray, John, Nick, Daniel, Proteus, Graham, Gary, Mal, netYoda, Dave, James, Jock, Angie, Niel, Michael, Magi, Chris, Rich, Jimmy, Tic, Duncan, Defcon-1, Steve, John, Andy, Gaisa, Daniel, F0ul and Greg all followed and now Gapsta is the 50th poster.

It's weird having this little support group going on on my blog without any input from me. It's the sort of thing I like about the web. I wonder how many of them realise it's happening on my blog and if they care. I wonder if I should make an appearance. It's like a little bit of my journaled life has gone and seceded from me while I watch on smiling.

If you're looking for yoga classes in Winchester, click here.

My mum has a web site.

Late last year I suggested to my mum that, for her Xmas present, I'd set her up with a web site. She's been teaching Yoga for a number of years now and now she's from school teaching she wants to push it more full time. Using the premise that anyone under the age of 30 (and a fair few above) use Google and the like to find things like Yoga classes (at least both me and my sister did) a web site seemed not only cool but kinda essential.

I was never happy with the "about" page I did in the spring - too negative and sarcastic. So while in the caravan I wrote a new one. It's a lot less general, being more about how I've used computers over the last 15 years, and as such it's, well, I think it's less tedious. That's not to say it's not tedious. Anyway, enjoy.

Spent most of today fixing, adding bits to and generally tidying up this site. I was going to re-do the whole thing but the last time I did that I never quite got it polished, so I figured polishing would be more rewarding this time.

I've rejigged the TrackBack on the farmblog so that any pings sent to it appear in one place rather than for specific posts. In other words you ping the blog itself rather that bits of it. No real reason for posting this here other than to check it actually works. So sorry to bother you.

The Farmblog has been updated! Go read!

Photos to follow, um, later. Hopefully next week. I'm in London for the next week and then back on the Island from next Sunday. If anyone who has my mobile number and is in London wants to meet for a quick drink, do get in touch!

The Farmblog has been updated for the second time. Lots of lovely words for you to read (and pictures to look at). Enjoy!

Yes, I'm on a computer in Winchester for the first time in four weeks and I have about 13,000 words for your reading pleasure in the Farmblog. Also, photos!

The trial run of the Farmblog is now up. Also, the first photos on the Gallery. Both are from my week in Banbury working on my sister's garden.

I've installed Gallery on this site here. Nothing there at the moment - it's for photos from the farm. It was great fun installing it. Took me right back to installing MT what with all that telneting blind.

I've taken the plunge and eabled TrackBack on this site. Like XML before it, it was one of those things that I'd been aware of for a while but never quite gotten my head round. Thankfully, I don't really need to understand how it works too much. This beginner's guide from the MT kids helped somewhat.

Done a new about page for the site. Not happy with it.

Here's an idea. I want everyone who knows me to write a paragraph for an about page for this site. Put them in the comments section. Nothing gushy and nothing too sarkey - just things you think might be of interest. I reserve the right, as ever...

Just completed the templates for the new Farmblog. Normally I'd just unleash it on you and tweak it once everyone complains, but the first time this comes into play I won't be around to fix it. So, does it work in your browser and/or does it make sense? Feedback please.

For the techies out there, it's one of the standard MT templates with some tweaking off the style sheet, mainly the colours.

I'm having great trouble planning the web format for Volume Three of my online blogging thing. Which is not only to be expected - I haven't started it yet - but also probably a good thing. So I'm using this post to try and bash out a few ideas.

As you might have noticed, I've been tweaking the main page quite a bit lately, gearing up for a major redesign over the next couple of weeks. Since I'm off to the farm without a computer, entries are going to be longer and more sporadic, very different to the current weblog.

In other words, Volume Three is about to start. Quite excited about this! The only thing I wonder is, will it still be a weblog, or should I call it a journal? Oh, the semantics of it all are so vexing...

The domain expired. Because it's actually bought from a third party service, I didn't get an email from Modwest, who host the web space for this site. I probably did get a warning from the company in question, but no doubt deleted it as spam. And then the site vanished, along with my email, for 36 hours.

If you sent an email to me in the last 2 days please send it again.

Currently not happy with the whole system but time to move on.

In the meanwhile, since this is going to be at the top of the page for a bit, it's last call for the @bugpowder.com email address. It's now attracting 95% spam so it's time for it to go. Please update your address books!

And so, to bed...

These are taken from the XML-RSS feeds of said weblogs and integrated into this blog using the mt-rssfeed plugin. While this might be technically impressive/baffling, what it does mean is when you look down my list of blog links you can get some idea of what they're about and whether you want to visit them. Which can only be a good thing!

Thank you for writing to Websense.

The site you submitted was not in our database, and is virtually hosted. It is sharing an IP address with another site already in our database, causing an accidental overblock.

The site has been added under Personal Web Sites, and the database modified so that it should no longer be blocked under Sex.

This update should be reflected in the next database published. If you continue to have trouble with this site, please contact us.

Thanks for your feedback,

The Websense Database Services Staff

Any other problems with nanny-ware at work, do let me know.

So, for the third time today, a new thing on the site: Pete's Portal

This is the result of the last three nights hammering away trying to get my not-that-analytical brain around Cascading Style Sheets and then putting them onto Movable Type. This will mean nothing to most of you, but I'll just say on Tuesday I knew nothing and now I know something. Which is always a good thing.

The main change is that each post now has a catagory so if you want to look at all my depressive moans about how miserable I am in one chunk you can click on Head or if you want to see all the web-based stupidities I''ve linked to, click on Distractions.

As well as this, all the comments are now part of the same system so they work quicker and are less likely to vanish. In fact, the whole program runs on peteashton.com so it's quicker all round. I don't have to rely on 3rd party programs at all.

Oh, and there's this Extended Entry thing so when I start rambling I won't clog up the front page...

No posts for a while. And I don't think there'll be any soon. I'm totally imersed in Movable Type, which for those not in the know is a program for running weblogs like this one, only it's a lot more powerful than Blogger which I've been using up until now.

What this means is my preoccupations are rather techy at the moment and my cultural and social life is not much to write about.

(Other than I went to see Talk To Her with Anna on Saturday night and it was tops - highly recommended.)

So, hold tight until it's all over.

The first volume of this weblog, which was taken off the site for various personal reasons which you can probably deduce, and to give me a fresh start, is back. Links are on the right there. A lot of the links and images won't work and I haven't got the time or inclination to sort them out now, but if there's anything glaring that you'd like to see, drop me a line.

Here's the new design, pretty much done with full-on CSS for the first time. Admitedly I did it all in GoLive but I think I've learned a fair bit. It's dead easy really once you start off. If it breaks anywhere do let me know, though I know it looks bobbins in Netscape 4.7. But then a lot of the internet does these days.

I've had a problem with my email from the @bugpowder.com address today so emails sent haven't come through - send them again if they're important.

I've taken this opportunity to change my main email address to pete at peteashton.com and I won't be printing it in full on this site anywhere to try and keep the spam to a minimum. Once it's back up, pete@bp will still work for a few months before I turn it off. So change your address books.

Just a couple of site housekeeping things tonight. I've made a base for the photos I'm starting to take with the new APS film camera (what I got free from a publisher for ordering some books - sometimes it's just too easy this lark...) which will fill up over time with any luck. Also, there's now a permanent link to the Texas Palm Blog down the side there and I've put the first piece of CCS ever on this site up above these words, though you'll only see it if you've got the Arial Black font on your 'puter. More CCS to follow - I like the feel of it.

Got this email from Modwest, the nice people who host this site, informing me that, in August, I'd used 7 gigs of bandwidth when my allowance was only 2 gigs. Normally I use a fraction of that amount so you can imagine my surprise when I discovered those 7 gigs had been used in three days! After picking myself off the floor and dusting myself down somewhat a little detective work revealed that a Betty Page movie I'd innocently dumped in the Library section had been mentioned here, hence the traffic. Not only that, but because they hadn't linked directly to the file, all the other movies in that directory had been downloaded on the off chance they might prove wank-worthy. Hence the traffic.

I don't have a problem with this in the slightest - it's kinda interesting to have loads of complete strangers delving around your site looking for goodies, especially when they started off looking for pr0n, and I might have got a couple of new readers from the thousands who've been through - but the directory has had to go, at least in the short term. I thought about just deleting the file, or renaming it, but traffic will keep coming through that link, so all the movies have been deleted. I'll put them back up in a month or two.

Here starts Volume Two of my weblog. Volume One is offline for the moment but will come back when the time is right. At the moment I want to make a fresh start.