Tag: blogging

Can you see me now? Good!

It’s always funny looking through the referrer logs for this blog. Especially the searches that seem to turn up my blog. Here’s a random selection…

From AOL Search:

MP3s are for previewing purposes only

From Google (obviously the most)

pylons fluorescent tube
neena gupta+hot pics
download arul in wma format
hindu flickr
lesbian lj icon
shivanee blogger

Getting shifty

James and I had a bit of a chat today and he’s been considering reviving the shiftx blog.

We spent some time hashing out so called “straplines” and couldn’t agree on anything nor find anything as catchy as Metafilter‘s “more addictive than crack.”

In any case, it’s meant to be an “eXtreme weblog” or a “hardcore weblog.” Right. Stop that giggling you. I’d suggest you take a look at what’s on there first.

I’ve been added as an author there although I’m not sure when, if ever, and what I’d be posting there.

A change will do you good.

An idle mind is the devil’s workshop, eh? Well, then this devil has been busy. Very busy.

First off, reading a post on James’ blog, led me to Hanni who was offering webspace for free. Moocher that I am, I took her up on her offer and she very nicely set up the space along with Movable Type for me.

I was all excited about setting up an MT blog except that Blogger went and upgraded their services. So there you go. What was I to do? Well I loved some of the new templates in Blogger, I quickly appropriated one and modified it to what you see here. It took me all of half a day (including the photoshopping!) and I am, to be honest, quite proud of what I’ve done.

Blogger has added commenting but after a day of experimenting with it, I’ve decided to stick with Haloscan.

So what happens to the webspace that Hanni so generously gave me? Well, as of now, I installed Gallery there and I have some pictures up at http://oook.pinksocks.co.uk/gallery. At some point in the future I might finish my languishing personal website and have that hosted at pinksocks. And who knows, if I ever get off my butt and do something useful, I might just start writing another blog (something less personal and more themed possibly.)

Damn Blogger!!

No, I love them. I really do… but darn it! Just as I got some free webspace and a Movable Type installation to play with, Blogger goes and adds new templates and spruces up their site and services. Now they have commenting also. What do I do with Haloscan? Just lose my old comments?? *sigh*

And of course, it looks very nice, but it’s still a little buggy. It randomly refuses to publish and sometimes the progress is just stuck at 0% or 44% or whatever.

Blog crawl

That’s what my posting frequency has slowed down to. So, to fill in the silence, here’s a couple of entries from my friends’ blogs.

First up, from Heidi‘s blog, Katya’s cooking show!

Next, a link I have shamelessly stolen from James at Nomen Luni.

And if that weren’t enough, I’m even stealing most of the text of his entry.

Field is comprised of 1,300 unwired fluorescent tubes in a grassy field in Bristol. The piece, by artist Richard Box, warns of the dangers of living in proximity to electricity pylons: the tubes glow from the power of the electromagnetic field created by 400kV overhead cables. More worrying, were you to approach a tube, you’d find that its glow fades because the human body is the more efficient conductor. The resulting installation has an unreal quality—so much so that photographs of Box’s work look almost as though they have been fabricated.

I found this idea incredibly cool and not really worrying. It would be interesting to to see the patterns of glow fading or brightening up if, for instance, a few people were dancing amongst the tubes. How’s that for changing this installation art to performance art? 🙂

On a totally unrelated note, I’d gotten very tired of hearing people arguing needlessly over the Presidential Daily Brief (WashingtonPost.com, free registration required I think.) Tom Tomorrow has an interesting point to make on that.

And now to more mundane and not so fun things. I have deleted my orkut and LiveJournal accounts as they seemed to be more troublesome than necessary. Abrupt yes, but what has to be done has to be done.

GMail!!! and more!

So then, this blogging has paid off in one way at least! Today, Blogger (as a service owned by Google) has invited me to sign up for GMail. Woooo hoooo!!

/me dances around in joy!

So yes, I went right off and created my GMail account. It’s quite nice and I like it. Maybe in a future post I will post some screenshots and more impressions about it. For now suffice it to say I’m very excited!

What’s more then? Well, I was poking about Jason Shellen’s blog and at the bottom I saw a link to bStats. This is a website stats thing provided by Blogger! And I never knew about it!! It used to be only for the Blogger Pro (read paid) users, but since Blogger Pro has been eliminated, it works for everyone now! Wooo hooo again. I went and installed that into my blogger template too. I’m not removing my eXTReMe Tracking counter yet. But If I grow to like bStats (which I think I will), out goes the eXTReMe tracker!

The Panda’s Thumb

I decided to skim through the blogs of my GNE contacts today and was reading Outis‘ blog and came across this post.

The post speaks of The Panda’s Thumb, a community blog “dedicated to explaining the theory of evolution, critiquing the claims of the anti-evolution movement, and defending the integrity of science and science education in America and around the world.”

Great reading, go visit there NOW!!

Doing my bit (as usual, ;-)) I have duly added in a badge into my navbar on the right.

IE is dead! Long live Firefox!

No, no… mozilla.org is not paying me to publicize them… I just like Firefox so much and have got used to a lot of the features now that there’s no way I’m going back to IE.

I only use IE for some sites that have ActiveX controls (usually the Windows Media Player control.) I know there’s a plugin that will allow WMP to work in Firefox, but the last time I installed that it messed up my Firefox install after a couple of days and I had to wipe it and reinstall.

Readers of my blog that use IE will probably notice there’s two things broken. The “currently reading” list is literally broken into two bits in IE. I’ve yet to figure out why. It renders perfectly on Firefox. The second thing is the GNE neighbourhood browser. In IE it opens as a pop up window rather than as a drop down menu type thing.

I can’t really be bothered, if you don’t like the way my blog looks in IE, learn to live with it… or… get Firefox! 🙂