My blog turns four today! That first post four years ago (when the blog was called stormy petrel) wasn’t actually very interesting, but hey-ho.
Mmmm, Smarties.
» The picture, from Flickr, is © Luke and/or Kate Bosman and used under a by-nc-nd licence.
After a quick and dirty winnowing-out, here are what might be the best of the links which I posted last year.
Arctic artefacts — Attack of the GIANT NEGROES!!
Bait-Fishing Crows — Beautiful Specimens — bird-eating bats — Building Stonehenge
C19th London snail-gatherers — chilled bees & yellow rain — Chinese building blocks — College Republicans [...]
The sixth picture is up at my new photoblog Clouded Drab.
I’m just sayin’.
The release of WordPress 2.3 is my cue to release my photoblog onto the world.
Since this blog, which is comparatively simple in terms of layout, still isn’t working properly in Internet Explorer, I shudder to think what Clouded Drab will look like. But hey-ho, let’s press on regardless. There’s only one photo at the [...]
Could anyone with copies of IE7 and/or IE6 please check to see whether something is working?
The menu on the right is supposed to move up and down as you scroll the window. If I’ve done it right, it should still look the same in Firefox, Opera etc; but in Internet Explorer, it should start in [...]
I just got around to testing the new design on Internet Explorer via browsershots, and what do you know, it’s completely fucked up. And for most versions of IE I got an error message; I don’t know what that’s about.
It’s so bloody irritating; why can’t all the various browsers agree on how to render simple [...]
I’m in the process of changing stuff around on the site: you may encounter occasional weirdness.
EDIT: OK, the tweaking process is still going to be ongoing for a little longer and some things aren’t finished, but the new design is now basically live. This is more or less how I want it to look.
I’m itching to do yet another site redesign—I have a pretty good idea of what I want and a working test version of it, allowing for a bit of tweaking—but I think it makes sense to wait until the release of WordPress 2.3 so I don’t have to worry about any compatibility issues. I’m considering [...]
Apologies for the slight messiness: I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.2—don’t know why, really, it’s not like there are any compelling new features—and at least one of my normal plugins is broken. I should have a work-around up soon.
EDIT: OK, I think everything’s just about working now. If anything seems broken, give me a shout. [...]
I’ve posted a few thoughts on the books I read in Crete (a couple of novels by Kazantzakis, some Marquez, Seferis, books on the Battle of Crete and resistance, Aristophanes), which can be found via my ‘What I’ve been reading’ page.
If you’re very observant, you may noticed a new link in the sidebar: Music and Books. I’ve been gradually tweaking it to my satisfaction, and you can now not only see a list of the ten most recent songs I’ve listened to and the ten most recent books I’ve read, but click through to see [...]
I think I might kill off The Poetry Wiki, since no-one is using it and it just provides an opportunity for spammers.
With the help of a neat little application called PictoBrowser, I’ve tarted up the page with my Flickr photos. PictoBrowser should work even if you prefer reading the site with one of the old themes, but to get the full effect of my redecorating, you need to be using the ‘scallop‘ theme.
And no, I’m not referring to Cansei der Ser Sexy. I’m referring to the ingenious way I hacked a WordPress plugin and then did some CSS wizardry to make it display the way I wanted, so that, for a short time only, you can see my Archives By Date the way I want them.
Only slight [...]
As should be obvious, unless you’re reading this via the RSS feed, I’ve redesigned the site again. I was just a bit bored with the old look, basically. As usual, I haven’t tested it in Internet Explorer for Windows, so if anything looks obviously wrong, let me know.
Julie and Rik have both posted on the subject of what makes a good poetry ezine. Since I’ve spent rather more time recently thinking about web design than poetry, here’s some thoughts about that side of it.
Don’t try to be a print journal. The real print journals do that already, and you’re never going to [...]
Which isn’t actually going to happen. I was working on a new look for the blog a while ago, but came to the conclusion it was going to be just too memory-intensive. It’s heavy on the graphics, and because it uses lots of sharp-edged high-contrast shapes, you can’t compress the images very much without getting [...]
You’ll have noticed the daily ‘Links‘ posts.
They’re done through the ‘daily blog posting’ function on del.icio.us, which automatically posts a list of new bookmarks I’ve added in the past 24 hours. I’ve also added a new page where you can see all the tags I’ve used and browse my bookmarks that way. I’m not really [...]
I’d try to create this kind of googlebait on purpose if I thought that any of those hits were likely to become return visitors. As it is, it’s mainly going to eat my bandwidth (not that I’m in any danger of running out).