Just checking in...

My blogging has been put on hold as of late. I've been spending a bit of time with the new layout design and of course sorting out the logistics of getting a podcast working. What I will say is that I'm almost there. I've set myself a semi-target of getting the first episode out this weekend, so we'll see how that goes.

A lot of recent twitter tweets have involved progress on the blog and podcast, but there hasn't actually been a lot of change here. Checking out a few blogger hack sites earlier in the week and a very sensible recommendation is to set up a test blog to trial new features, layouts etc. So I have set up a beta blog as well it's not like there is any extra cost of having an extra blog.

I'm not going to link it here, as well it's quite messy. I rather annoyingly spent about 2 hours fixing the layout as IE is still a pain when handling CSS, it still has a different interpretation of paddings and margins arg. It looks fine in Firefox, and exactly how I expect it to but not in IE. Anyways, I got it to a point where it looks the same in both browsers, so I stopped for then.

I was planning on watching Clerks 2, my other lovefilm pick this week, but I completely crashed - one good thing is that I got a lot extra sleep so should be refreshed for the weekend.

IE is still a pain when handling CSS

Hopefully that means I might be able to make good on my promises of delivering the podcast + new layout this weekend, we'll see.

So basically, the blog will resume normal operation soon, I'll get one episode under my belt, move the changes over. One thing that has been set up here and not on the beta blog is the ratings widget which should be seen at the bottom of each post. Sometimes it takes too much effort to throw in a comment, saying how awesome the post was, but clicking on some stars should be something everyone can do.

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New header image...

O
h my god! I've just spent a fair chunk of the morning, sorting out the header image on this lurvely blog, and man am I fed up with Internet Explorer. I was getting the image being rendered perfectly in Firefox but I was getting rather bizarre behaviour from IE7. Thankfully, with Microsoft copying Firefox, there are addons available in much the same vein as extensions in FF. So I went off and downloaded my first (and probably last) addon for IE7. That being a DOM inspector much like ones already available in FF.

Anyways, firing that up and returning to this blog page I started to diagnose the problem. Strangely enough it was flagging that there were margin and border properites being applied although I knew from staring at the CSS in another tab that those attributes had long been commented out. Seems IE7 does some weird caching of CSS stuff. Anyways, I went back in, explicitly told IE7 not to stick any margins, borders etc in places and voila! both browsers render it pretty much the same.
Man, it's like having to guide a child round the shops. "No! We must go down this aisle dammnit!"

Time to recover from IE-induced stress *sigh*
Take it easy

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Smooth with a capital Smoo...

Two posts in one day, I truly am on a roll. Again, I have been on a search to spruce up my blog. I found this little method to largen and indent the first letter here. It's a shame that you have to physically force the style settings. Perhaps with a bit more research, I could get a little script to do the hard work for me when I hit "submit" in Windows Live Writer or an alternative offline blog writing tool thingy.

I'm also looking into lobbing on a chat widget into the already crowded sidebar, which makes me think it may be time to adopt the 3-column layout hack - again there
's no simple high level way to do that, you have to physically go in and play about with the CSS styles, and in my experience it gets a little awkward getting a layout that renders well in all (majority of) browsers. I would just develop in wonderful Firefox but the n00bs that buy their computers from PC World enforce Internet Explorer development on us and that's always fun, although not seen how vers 7 renders - if you ask me it is so much closer to FF now, I'm of the opinion that as FF is open source, the lazy Microsoft boys went in and reverse engineered 7 from it, mmm...

Here's wasting time looking for Blogger hacks...

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Earning as you blog, an interesting concept...

Hey peeps, it's blogging time again, and I finally uploaded some of the backlog onto the site. I've added a few things as I've already mentioned earlier, and I reckon it's looking quite spiffy so far. I have even got a comment from a monkey! Well Ape to be precise, but monkey is a funnier word. Although I will take this moment now to break the dream and say that the guy isn't an ape much to your and his dismay probably - to quote Stewie "It's fun to pretend".


Moving on, and every couple of months or so, I get excited by the idea of paid blogging, or more accurately blogging and receiving money thanks to placing Ads on your site. There is fact a blog dedicated to promoting the idea of achieving a respectable income from blogging - Problogger.net if I have remembered the address. Most of this income comes from ad clicks generated by visitors to your blog as I just mentioned, but some more extreme ideas come in the form of being sponsored for blogging on particular subjects. I found a semi-old post on a WoW fansite, it may have even been theinstance.net, but it mentioned that the site WowInsider were looking for people to blog about aspects on the game and get paid for it. This sounded a tempting prospect, but I'm not in a good position to do this as I'm not supremely interested in the Lore aspect, and my raiding experience is minimal, and despite putting in a healthy (read: unhealthy) number of hours, I still don't feel quite expert on it.

I have actually already signed up for an adsense account so when that gets sorted, I will have google ads on my new blog, despite me not feeling 100% comfortable with trying to force products and/or services at people.

I can't go without saying that if anyone out there wants to sponsor me to blog about any particular subjects, am I prepared to throw in my 2 cents. Like when I started the participation in stumbling with StumbleUpon, there is a possibility of being sponsored to "stumble". This idea intrigued me, so I wrote a quikc sponsorship blurb, but there were so many "asking" for sponsorship giving quite lame and uninspiring reasons like "I need the money, I'm broke!". I tried to make mine as witty as possible, but I've heard nothing since writing it lol.

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