I’m getting there on the website rebuild, but it’s slow going! It’s quite fun, though. I’d forgotten how quickly time passes when editing websites - I barely noticed this afternoon.

We spoke to my solicitor this morning. The flat situation is worse than I’d realised, as it turns out the lease specifically states that I have to pay all of the maintenance fees, instead of 1/6th - I thought that was just a possible interpretation. The landlord’s solicitors are still refusing point blank to change it, too. There’s also the matter of upcoming asbestos searches on the building’s communal areas. My solicitor says that if damaged asbestos is found and the other 5 tenants leave or declare themselves bankrupt, the landlords could legally demand I pay for the repairs. As such, her professional opinion is that I should not go ahead in the current position, and the Halifax will not sign off on the mortgage without her approval¹. We spoke to my estate agent later - he’s hoping to be able to convince the landlord’s solicitors to change their minds. On the bright side, anybody’s solicitor should pick up on this issue, so it’s unlikely the buyer seller² will pull out. I hope.

1. not that I’m planning to, but even if I stated I’m happy to go ahead this would be irrelevant - my solicitor has to give her professional opinion to the Halifax regardless of what I’m willing to accept [↩]
2. edited for muppetry [↩]

Ok, the server move is on hold as I’ve discovered a major problem. Something’s seriously screwed in my Wordpress theme, and it’s going to need some careful analysis to debug. It must have been there for *ages*, but something’s different on the new server and is causing major slowdowns if more than two people try to browse the site simultaneously So that’s tomorrow taken care of! Ah well, it needed a cleanup anyway…

If you fancy heading over to the newly-minted wongaBlog Frappr Map, and adding a pin at your location, that’d be just lovely. No signup or anything needed, just a nickname and nearest town. Thank you!

Just going to play around with the layout a little…it’ll likely be broken for a while
Update: It’s working in modern browsers. Guess which one can’t handle CSS correctly. Hopefully it’ll just be one or two tweaks…

Later: With the help of this very useful article, the content finally loads before the sidebar. I’ve wanted to do this for ages, but it’s tricky when you want a full-screen layout with CSS. Turns out negative margins are the key - with them you can set an element to take up 100% minus 270 pixels, which is handy! The search engines should be far happier with content at the top, and if the sidebar stalls, like happened with the blogmap recently, it’s not really a problem. IE6’s layout still isn’t perfect - I have no idea why the right-hand sidebar margin is slightly larger than in Opera or Firefox - but it looks ok, and that’s all I need. As Simon noticed in the comments, elements no longer underlap the sidebar in IE6. I’d like to pretend this was deliberate, but it was really a happy accident I also fixed a problem with blockquotes that was requiring me to add blank paragraphs if I wanted gaps.

Feeling much better today, happily Haven’t done much, though.

I’m altogether fed up with my website going down all the time. I’m registered with a service that tries to download a text file every minute or so and emails me if the server doesn’t respond for a length of time. Over the last few weeks this has been happening anywhere between four and fifteen times per day, for anything up to twenty minutes. Various people have commented on my website being down recently, I contacted my hosts - IXWebhosting - and they deny any problems. My hosting is up for renewal in a couple of weeks, so I’m going to be moving providers (again), this time to the very highly-regarded Textdrive. It’s a little more expensive than before, but I think it’s worth it to get decent service. I’m hoping it’ll be faster, too. I’ve transferred ballisticduck.co.uk to their servers today, and once I’ve figured out how their system works I’ll move the whole blog over. That’s no small job, so I’ll work myself up to it.

Played around with the blog this afternoon: just tidying up a few things. The poll should now work properly, and no longer requires a page refresh. The times on the front page are now displayed slightly differently, and the archive pages now display related posts and a smaller tag cloud. Nothing very exciting. The webcam software was causing my computer to spontaneously restart, weirdly, so that’s still disabled while I try to figure out the problem.

Just looking through web-guru Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Design Mistakes for Weblogs. I don’t do very well

1. No Author Biographies
   I’m ok here: the in-need-of-revamping About Me page covers that
2. No Author Photo
   Really? That’s a problem? I’ve added one to the bio page - there’s no need to put it in plain sight
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
   Ho hum. Quite often they only make sense to me.
4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
   Well, yes. I do that too. I should probably work on that.
5. Classic Hits are Buried
   I.e. the best posts aren’t easily accessible. I have the tagging options, but I guess this could be better.
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
   Again there’s the tagging, but it does need improving.
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
   Heh. Think I’m ok on this one.
8. Mixing Topics
   Bit of a dodgy one if you ask me. I have no problem with mixing topics as I like the conversational style, although will separate anything that takes more than a paragraph to say. Ish. Sometimes.
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
   I really don’t care. Maybe I should, but I don’t.
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
    Oh, bollocks. This seems like pure snobbery to me. The argument is that other people control your website, but that only applies if they do anything that bothers you. Blogspot has no pop-up ads or other annoyances currently. If you’re hosting with them and ads are introduced, you can leave if that’s not what you want. This reminds me of the people I’ve heard complaining about the newly-resized Guardian because ‘they can’t take it seriously’ - I’d suggest judging websites by their content rather than the domain name.

In an attempt to reduce my parentheses habit, I’ve installed a Wordpress footnotes plugin¹, which should help me keep to the point in posts². This is just a test to see how well it works…

Great, seems to be working well. It adds a ‘footnote’ quicktag to the Writing page, which makes things easy as pie³.

1. there are a couple of other implentations available [↩]
2. James Joyce never was my style [↩]
3. blueberry, to be exact. There’s more pi here [↩]

Happy Birthday to wongaBlog, which is two years old today.

The lucky winner of The Pirates! In an Adventure with Whaling is my sister. I only had the one entry, but it was an extremely high quality voicemail complete with accents and much piratical language. Congrats, Jane! Your copy is winging its way…across the room

Cover for the ‘print edition’ of my blog. Created using Flickr Magazine Cover, which I originally found via Boing Boing. It’s strangely fun!

Edit: Hmm, just spotted that I mis-remembered my own tagline. Oops

Ok, all done. What do you think? I’ve implemented a proper tagging system so I can have fancy folksonomy diagrams, as well as tidied up a little. The blogmap is back, the header bar has changed and I removed extraneous information from the post headers too. Do let me know if you think it looks kak!

At the moment you can’t click on the goddamned links in the top right, in either Firefox or Opera. I have no idea why this is the case, but it’s infuriating!

I’ll be changing things behind the scenes this morning and it’s rather likely something will break. There’s one particular button I have to click that could screw everything up quite spectacularly, should I get the preparation wrong. I’ll post again when I think things are working. To tide you over, here’s a picture of a very cool parrot:

How’s that look? Feedback on the del.icio.us linkage has been…how you say…polarised, so I’ve changed the look of them somewhat. It looks far better in Firefox / Opera than IE, mind. RSS readers shouldn’t notice any difference.

Thanks to the people who left me audio comments the other day. I got a couple from people I know, and one ‘hello!’ from somebody I didn’t. Which was cool. I’ve put up my Skype details on the right now. This is risky, but I’ll see how it goes…The graphic was created using the Brilliant Button Maker.

Speaking of graphics, I’m just trying out Paint Shop Pro 9. I used to use PSP years ago, then moved onto a, ummm, dubious copy of Photoshop 5. I grew a conscience soon after and after using Photoshop LE for a bit switched to Photoshop Elements 2, which I’ve been using for a few years now. It’s slow and clunky and lacks many of the useful tools, so I figured I’d play with PSP. First impressions are ok.

1000 posts! In 22 months, that’s just under two posts per day. Not bad.

I wish I had an exciting announcement to make. Really I do. I considered a re-design, but I’m actually quite happy with the website at the moment. A couple of bugs need fixing, most notably the category links, but other than that it’s going well. I’m also not moving to Australia, gay, or pregnant. In lieu of anything terribly exciting…metablogging!

Would it be wanky of me to go through the most popular posts? I’m going to do it anyway. Comment-wise Stepping Backwards, regarding an apparently common display problem, holds the crown; then there’s Data Protection Agency Services, an early post warning about a scam letter that a good number of people are taken in by; and finally The Face of Local Politics, in which we were visited by a Famous Person. Views-wise, I’ve only been collecting stats for a few months so can’t supply anything very useful. Google Earth is currently way in the lead, though. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, gets regular traffic too.

1000 posts comes at an interesting time. A year ago this Friday was the worst day of my life so far. It completely wrecked me for a long time, and I don’t pretend to know whether I’m over it yet. Blogging has helped - even if nobody had been reading, it still felt good to say it. Since then many good things have happened, as well some unpleasant ones. I went to America, started dancing, grew a beard, shaved the beard (few noticed), and by pure chance came across somebody rather lovely. The website got a major redesign; I discovered flickr, the power of RSS and podcasting; I Joined, evangelised, flew, was published and spent more time than is healthy looking at penguins. It’s been a busy 12 months!

So what am I going to do now? I’m going to get serious about writing, at least until christmas. It’s always been there in the back of my mind, and nothing compares to the satisfaction I get from it. I can afford to support myself for a while, and if there’s ever an opportunity to really go for it, now’s the time. So I will.

Before christmas, though, I fancy a holiday. Probably in August, after my A-level results come in. I was looking at New York, but it could be a little pricey to stay for a week. Anybody have any cunning tips / suggestions / tickets?