Sunday, September 02, 2007

Hey! Who stole my post!?

Another post and more playing about with some blogger hacks.
This time it's the advent of post summaries. Not long after the birth of this blog, I've thrown some fairly large posts at it, and well even the author yours truly, has found them a bit daunting to go through.
Enter post summaries, hopefully a solution to the whole problem, and also a producer of more clicks on the blog (which for me obsessing over site tracking statistics, can only be a good thing!).
The idea works by again relying on CSS and good ol' "span" elements to seperate up the post in question

and then place a "read more!" link on the page, hopefully just like the one you clicked, and then you'll be taken to the whole glorious post and the treasures that lie within.
Unfortunately, this is just a bit of a trial so there are no goodies this time, but keep clicking and you're bound to win - get hit by lightning a couple of times to increase your chances further..

Here's thinking what else can be done to this blog which is not actually content-based?!?!...

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...

New blog stuff

Hey ho! Here I am putting off doing some work so I thought I'd waste time by playing about with the ol' blog.
Couple of changes, some more noticable than others. First one should be pretty obvious if you were to scroll down, and that's the inclusion of two tag clouds. It's probably the only thing lacking from Blogger when compared to Wordpress is a native tag cloud implementation (oh, and trackable statistics, but that's really for us admin folks). Of course there are a couple of scripts out there that can parse the standard "labels" list; I probably could have knocked up something myself, but why reinvent the wheel??

Yeah, so I found two scripts out there that can do the job, and not wanting to commit to one just yet, I've thrown them both into the sidebar to see what they look like. Also, I'm trying out the (semi-)new blogger widget, the poll widget! Yeah, so it would be great if you could place your vote and after a bit of time I'll commit to a cloud and remove the rather lame looking current list.

Another change is the inclusion of the twitter badge. I've been aware of the micro-blogging tool but had been hesitant to adopt it. Saying that, I was over on Major Nelson's site(Xbox live updates + other news) and noticed he had the twitter badge up and running and thought it actually looked quite neat. It's very much like the "status" feature on facebook, and I usually try and have a bit of fun with that, so thought I'd chuck it on the blog as well - in a small effort to try and get me back into the blogging routine. I have a few more interesting pics taken on my phone which I may well share, but the quality's not great; especially with my shaky arm LOL.

Another small change, hardly noticable, is my swapping of my Last.fm profile. I've been slowly adopting "Jimiminar" for every online handle/identity out there and well my last.fm profile was lagging behind. Cue a shiny new profile and I've just swapped over the quilts/recent tracks but it should be business as usual...

Here's trying to find something else to put off work...

Saturday, September 01, 2007

Toilet graffiti...

Hey, overdue a few posts but for now I will share this pic I took, admittedly a little too merry on the last night of the Rythmns of the World Festival.

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

I'm not sure what it is about it that I really like, but it struck a chord with me and it definitely seemed a step above all the other graffiti scratched into walls which I've had the opportunity to read.

Monday, August 06, 2007

What is your love message?...

Hey, I saw this in my blogger dashboard, and thought it deserved a post.


1millionlovemessages.com



I checked out the blog itself and read this moving story of this guy George and his love Gina and I got a little annoyed that I can never match the words he used. It got me thinking that I should contribute to the project - not so much as to change people's (or a certain person's) impressions of me, but that the main reason I blog is from the theraputic release from venting my anger/frustration or celebrating something I have found to be very ace, or jotting down a few life events cos noone has bothered to ask in a few days.

Here's starting on my love message...

Week 1 (actually it's week 3 now :S)

Very overdue but it seems any free time I've got so far has spent in front of the TV like a zombie, or down the pub with a pint, err... like a zombie.

I did try and write this at the end of week 1, and then again at the end of week 2, and now I'm here on the Monday of week 3 and still nothing, oh dear. I think it's now best to make a number of small(er) entries rather than try and do a catchup of everything that's happened so far.

So, here we are, might as well make this a kind of overviewy exercise. I've started on a course which should train me up with the powers of performing desktop and/or network support in a professional capacity. Along with the lecture and the study towards certification, there's also the help with making my CV better and making a better interviewee of myself as well. That's been one of my probs, so along with the skills, we should hopefully get there.

Along with the course, they've given me a place to live for the couple of weeks. I am currently living in Earlsdon Ave South, quite literally a stone's throw away from where the Red Faction house was when I was back at Uni. Living with 5 others, and they're a pretty good bunch and surprisingly of all different ages.

There's this guy called Dave from South Wales. His surname is actually Hughes which is again a surprise, but then again it's a pretty common name in the land of Wales, so it's time to get over that. He is 32 and has recently graduated from a Music Technology degree and is a bit of a classic rock/metal fan - in particular Guns 'N' Roses. Then there's Aman, a recent graduate of a Computer Science degree and is 24. His twin brother has luckily got himself a job quite recently so Aman's hoping to sort something out pretty sharpish. There's Julian, 29, who currently works at Amazon in Milton Keynes as a problem solver. He's originally from South Africa but is very cool, if a little hard to understand at times (I'm sorry). We then Peter, although that's not the correct spelling - he is fact a Pole national and it's spelt (and pronounced) a little differently, but that's the English equivalent. And finally there's Dal (full name Dalber - remember Dal and "beer" - easy!) who as Julian described him perfectly and concisely as a "party animal" - he is 25, also a computer science graduate, and is often out all night, or gaining points on his licence, usually not at the same time.

So that's the guys, and it's not that surprising that there are no girls living in the house, although there is a single girl in her course - Aeyeisha (sp) who seems nice enough, not really spoken to her much, and unsurprisingly, Dal has made it a bit of a mission to lay her - to his credit he did invite her back to the house late one night, not sure what came of that, she wasn't in our house in the morning, and now Dal has moved out because of Asthma problems into her house, she better watch out lol.

It's probs best to save anything else for another post, but it's worth adding that some of the material in the course has been covered in my previous academic pursuits of computing, whether that be at A-level level (err..) or at degree level, so that's a bonus, although I think the most useful stuff will be the practical stuff plus proprietary hardware/software like Cisco and Windows Server 2003 etc. Also it's worth noting that a couple of the lecturers (Andy and Alex) are also party animals, pissheads at the least, and they are often out on the lash. I actually managed to make it out once so far with them, but that's another post right there.

I will finish up by saying that I've signed up for random free photo hosting accounts (photobucket and flickr actually) and mean to get snapping with my mobile phone with pictures of the room, this Strongbow glass I managed to swipe (another post), random shots of Cov and if you're lucky, me in my formal robes (read: shirt and tie).

Here's spending another night decomposing in front of the TV.