It’s not that I go out of my way to use non-standards compliant HTML or CSS, but some of the specs seem pretty petty (tags must be lower case, img tags must have an ‘alt’ quality, you have to close your break tags), so I certainly can’t guarantee that the site will remain valid for long. And I’ve only checked the front page. But, just at the moment, the front page does validate both for XHTML and CSS.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about – it’s not important.
As should be pretty obvious, I’ve re-designed the blog. Again. If it looks peculiar on your computer, let me know. I’ve pretty much decided not to make the extra effort to make the site work on early versions of Internet Explorer, but if it’s not looking right on IE6 I might need to do something about it.
Can I just say how fucking annoying it is that CSS doesn’t seem to support blocks where the bottom is defined relative to the bottom of the webpage (i.e. the document rather than the screen).
The swifts are taken from this picture on Flickr.
Google have just launched a free web-traffic analysis service which looks pretty damn good. At the moment, they seem to be struggling under the weight of people joining up, so it hasn’t recognised my site yet. Presumably they’ll get it sorted soon enough. I don’t quite see how they’re going to make money at it, though; it’s only free up to 5 million hits a month, but that’s *a lot* – about 800 times more traffic than this site gets, for example. Even if you go over that, you only need to make a $5 deposit and open a Google Adwords account to get unlimited stats. Mind you, given the sheer staggering oomph of computer power Google must have, perhaps the extra processing is fairly trivial.
The Royal Academy’s own website doesn’t seem to be working at the moment (Tibetan hackers?), but Goldman Sachs, the corporate sponsor of the show, have a Flash slideshow you can see here which gives an idea of what it’s like.
I found it a bit dull. The exhibition is huge and the quality of the items is obvious, but it seems a bit same-y; and (because it’s all court art?), it’s all rather formal and grand. I also found it surprisingly un-surprising, somehow. I don’t know much about C18th China (anything, really) so I would have expected it to be more interesting just out of novelty value, but somehow it all seemed rather familiar. Perhaps I just haven’t got the enough knowledge to see the subtleties, or perhaps it actually is all a bit repetitive. It might have been a good idea to get the audioguide. These very big exhibitions are always a bit off-putting anyway; if it was a quarter the size, it might have focussed my mind a bit.
Well, it’s not actually a meme unless anyone copies the idea, but hey-ho. Or at least, I guess technically it still is a meme, just an unsuccessful one. Don’t get me started on evolutionary theory.
Search Flickr for photos tagged with your first name. View them ordered as ‘most interesting’. Post the most interesting photo to your blog. The most interesting photo tagged with ‘Harry’ is a Dutch cuckooflower:
Free bit of trivia – cuckooflower is also known as ‘milkmaid’ or ‘ladies smock’.
I’m looking forward to the footy this afternoon. The only question is whether Sven will manage his usual trick of taking all the fun out of friendlies by creating an atmosphere where no-one cares enough. Surely even Sven can’t take the sting out of England vs Argentina?