A Matter Of Style #1

While I'm not, (unlike many I know), a hater of all things American, it's seldom that I adopt Transatlantic gramatical shorthand. But in my recent blog travels, one thing I have noticed is the use of the # sign to represent a member of a numbered sequence. It has the advantages of simplicity and visibility, so I'll be using it when I want to signify one of a series of posts.

A bit of an obsession of mine at the moment are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). I'm on a self imposed mission to improve the layout of several websites I run - for fun not profit [you never know, I may get round to updating the look of this one eventually]. I've spent most of today (a Bank Holiday in England) playing around with the layout of the menu system, trying to produce something similar to a design that I saw the other day.

Lots of head scratching as to why the top of the menu was in different places in Firefox and IE and why both had a thin white margin at either side. Up to my elbows in a variety of books particularly HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS". Tried various things but what eventually cure both things was:

CSS Tip #1:

body {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}

In future I'll start all my stylesheets with this.

Just When You Thought...

...that you had found enough things on the internet to waste your time, along come Kitten War and Puppy War.

Bunny Suicides

I still haven't tired of BlogExplosion. Sometimes it isn't the blog itself that you arrive at that's worth a look, but a link that catches your eye. That's how I found the wonderful Bunny Suicides.
[UPDATE] It's been pointed out to me that the web site cartoons are not originals but stolen from books by Andy O'Reilly, so I'll link there instead

Weight Watching

It's not that I'm obsessed by my weight, but since I found that my blood pressure was too high (5 years ago), I've kept a record of it on a more or less regular basis. At the momment it's as high as it's ever been in that period (18st 10lbs = 262lbs = 119kg).

In al my recent blog-surfing, I haven't come across a single weight "gadget" - is that the right word? Something which regularly shows the status of something like the Weather Pixie at the bottom of this page. Perhaps I'll create my own.

Creative Writing

I've always felt that I could write if I tried (who doesn't) and of course I do write. What's much more difficult is writing to order as practised at 100 Words Or Les Nessman (found via RedSugar). I think I'll lurk for a few days before attempting an entry.

Four Days In Limbo

I've just spent four days in limbo. One of those places which is part of this world, but not of this world. I've been part of a panel evaluating supplier presentations for some software we are acquiring. The evaluations took place in a disused school. Over the four days we were located in three different rooms which looked the same but turned out to be unsettlingly different, one day a smaller screen, one day bigger desks, one day a smaller room and so on.

One thing that remained exactly the same was the lunchtime food (calling it "lunch" would be stretching things too far). The same number of sandwiches of the same varieties on the same plates, placed in exactly in the same order on the table.

The format of each day was naturally identical which meant that half way through asking a question one had the awful feeling that it had already been asked. This was made worse on the final day as the software being presented (albeit by a different implementer) was the same as on the previous day.

Unbelievably tiring. Now we need to get it down to a final two and then site visits.

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrG (The Power Of Archives)

As soon as I'd posted about the missing comments something stirred in my brain. It was too much of a coincidence that the template screw-up and the missing comments happened at the same time. What other customisations had dissappeared and could that explain the missing comments. Looking at old entries shows that I'd installed Haloscan to give me Trackback. Then looking closely at the Haloscan site it seemed that for some reason they take over your comments as well as trackback, so I reinstalled Haloscan and the comments are back.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr (Part Two)

I'm not sure whether it happened at the same time as I lost my template, but I've just noticed that all my comments have dissapeared. None of them earth shattering or in any way important. But they did show that people had actually read posts rather than arriving here by accident and moving on rapidly. Maybe they'll reappear at some point. I'm not really sure how or where they are stored. Perhaps a Google will yield something

Gone, Perhaps Forever.

Back to how it was now. Except. I know there was two entries under links and I can't remember what the second one was - nope, gone, perhaps forever.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

Blogger just ate my template all my various edits - gone. Roll on the move to WordPress, but in the meantime, let's see if I can remember what went where.

Weather Pixie

There are many little gadgets (perhaps too many) designed to sit on one's blog. My explorations via BlogExplosion led me to the WeatherPixie, which I rather like.

Waking Ambrose

One of the many place that BlogExplosion has led me is Waking Ambrose. I'm not usually a fan of this type of redefined words thing, usually people trying to show how clever they are and failing dismally, but this one is very good - Particularly like the definition of "Achievement": Chaos, misconstructed or misconstrued.

So Why Am I Still Here

So why haven't I moved over to WordPress yet?

Reason one the football. Grippping was hardly the word for it. It really took me back to the seventies and eighties, when there always seemed to be an English team in the European Cup Final (of course being old enough to remember them - plus a little cider) meant that I slept through Liverpools three goals - never mind, I'm sure I'll see them many, many times.

Reason two, I can't remember how, but I came across BlogExplosion which is not only stupidly addictive, but exposes one to hundreds of different design influences. I'm in no rush, I'll experiment with a look or two before I move this there.

Move Looks Likely (Because I Can)

After some messing around with WordPress yesterday evening, I'm pretty sure that I'll be moving over to it in the next day or two.

There's nothing wrong with Blogger, in fact it's an excellent starting place: I'd thoroughly recommend it. But for a number of reasons I'd prefer to have more control over the way the blog is published. Yes I know I can host the blog myself rather than through Blogspot - in fact my fantasy football blog is hosted in this way, but WordPress seems to have better separation of content and presentation, with the result that changed templates are reflected instantaneously, rather than a publication process. Plus (though I haven't investigated them properly yet), there seems to be a lot more built in tags and well documented APIs etc.

I did look at Moveable Type, but I just couldn't get it to work with my ISP, whereas with WordPress it literally took less than five minutes to install it including the ftp.

On the Move?

I'm thinking of changing over to WordPress for this Blog, my testpad is here

No , Surely Not?

It can't possibly be twenty four days since I last posted here. But it is. I don't read many other blogs, but ones I do seem to either have entries either (a) every day or (b) every day and then they suddenly stop without warning or reason. I suppose what happens is that something happens that takes up the time which the blog used to occupy.

In my case there's been several things that have taken up the time. Busy, busy at work which ahas left me tired at home; working on other websites particularly next season's fanatasy football and just life in general.