All Entries In Bloggage Category
By This is the second version of this entry. The first was a rather cool Star Wars type scroller. However, Lucas has requested that it be taken down due to infringing on their properties.
Anyway, after just over 5 years this is the 500th entry and there have been over 350 comments in total. If the current posting cycle is maintained then entry 1000 will appear sometime in mid-late 2009.
This blog was officially launched five years ago today.
In those five years I've made over 400 entries and received over 300 comments. Topics I've covered include my job, my health, my relationship with my ex-girlfriend, my roleplaying experiences, my music tastes and the gigs I've attended; including Download festivals, my tv tastes, the movies I've seen, the games I've enjoyed, tech that I've thought worthy of note, websites that I've come across, Manchester United and other sporting topics that interest me.
For about the first year of the blog's life I used zShaped as the backend before moving over to using Movable Type in 2004. I've also changed hosts twice. I originally started with Fasthosts and then moved to Easily before settling in December 2006 with Compila.
The main reasons for going with a dedicated host rather than using an ISPs provided space were:
- If I moved ISP I wouldn't need to worry about having to upload the website and database to somewhere else.
- It was also a case that ISPs didn't provide the sort of php, perl and SQL support that I needed.
From April '03 until April '07 I made 191 entries. This is entry 227 in the year since then and 193 of those have been made since the start of January this year. I never officially announced an intention to blog as regularly as I have in the last 4 months but the fact that I lost my job kind of motivated me and has given me more free time. Sometimes it's been hard to find anything to blog about and I've just ended up posting links to sites that I've discovered and enjoyed. At other times I've had loads of things to talk about at various times of the day and ended up posting 3 or 4 entries in a day.
The next milestone is 500 entries and then in 2 years time; 12th April 2010, it will be the tenth anniversary of the launch of the domain. You never know, I may, by then, be celebrating 1000 entries.
I've recently made a couple of minor tweaks to the blog:
- Category archives now display all the entries in a category rather than just the last 20 entries.
- The links and blogroll navigation on the left now uses a cascading menu rather than displaying a huge, long list.
After being afflicted by a serious case of wanderlust in the past it would appear that my good friend, Mondrak, has finally settled upon a home on the web. His email address hasn't changed in at least six months; okay, it's more than a year, but people who know him will know how often we used to receive emails saying he'd changed his email address. He's also moved his blog over to WordPress.
There's an updated link on the left if you're interested.
I have reimplemented one of the features that I used to have on the site; namely the Snap Shots™ preview. The way that this was originally set up, prior to the upgrade to MT4, was that you could hover on any link on the site and it would preview the page the link was connected to. Now, since they have upgraded their system, you can selectively alter the way that this works.
I've enabled it on the external links in the main body of the site and disabled it completely in both sidebars and the footer. Additionally, rather than the preview being available on the entire link it is just available on the little icon that appears after the text of the link. Hopefully, this shouldn't distract too much and gives visitors the chance to see what I'm linking to before clicking on the link.
I've spent a good couple of hours tweaking a lot of the backend of the blog. A lot of the tweaks just involved updating plugins and are just to help tighten up and streamline the way Movable Type manages itself and will not be visible or noticeable by the site visitors.
The only really visible frontend change is the addition of author and commentator images. I did have a go at trying to get pagination working to allow browsing backwards through the entries but couldn't get it to display past the first page. I'll have another look at it when I have more time and try again. In the interim, the archives pages will have to suffice.
Although I was fairly content with the minimalistic look of the blog since upgrading to MT4 I felt it lacked something. Therefore, I spent long periods of last night playing with various styles until I found one that I was relatively happy with.
After a wee bit of further tweaking, including adding a local header image, I think I've come up with a personalised version that I'm happy with. Other than potential slight tweaks in the future I'm sticking with the new look.
I've also incorporated an updated "About Me" page to bring that inline with the rest of the site's overall design.
If you're logged in and you get an error about requiring registration just log back out and then log back in. This should solve the problem. There is also the possibilty that some MT3.x cookies may be persisting. These are not compatible with MT4. Might be an idea to check what cookies you have referencing bowch.co.uk and deleting them.
After it had originally appeared that the move to MT4 had gone fine it transpires that the commenting system has broken.
I've had reports of people trying to post, only to receive an error stating that registration is required.
Could people try and post comments on this entry.
Please drop me an email at bowchuk(AT)googlemail(DOT)com if you can't post.
After upgrading to the latest version of Movable Type I decided to shuffle things about.
All the blog links are still on the left but all other links, including links to pages still on the site are now on the right.
I've also added a calendar for the current month and expanded the monthly archives to show all months rather than just the last 12.
Upgraded to the latest version of MovableType.
Whilst I was at it I thought the text on the blog was a bit on the small side so tweaked it to be a bit bigger.
I think it looks a bit better.
Had some problems with a virus popping up on here a couple of times over the last couple of days. I've played safe and deleted all the entries since it started showing up.
Hopefully, things are now sorted...
I will be moving to a new web host in the next couple of days. This means the site will probably be down for a day or two at least. I might even change a thing or two. See you on the other side...
Just upgraded to MT 3.2 and what a pain in the neck it was to do.
Been rather busy the last month and a half; especially with the end of the financial year. Lot's of preperation work for the year-end audit; and I got a pay rise and promotion. Although promotion is probably a misnomer; it's just a change in Pay Grade.
Well, not totally anyway. Just reshuffled the existing content in to a slightly different format.
I have had reports of problems recently whilst attempting to post a comment to my blog. Could everybody try and post a comment to this and if unsuccesful, mail me.
Took the plunge and decided to move my Blog from the old zShaped format I was using, which was rather basic to say the least, to Movable Type, which has options for comments etc...
For a while now I've thought that my blog could do with some design work to it.
Well, got bullied in to creating a Blog by Mojo, who didn't want to be the only person adjudged to be daft by his friends and peers. Hey, anything to help my insecure Southern friend...
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