Currently using a development version of WordPress as it has a few features I want, that I would usually use plugins for. Overall the new version has a much better looking admin panel and seems faster. So far my favorite feature is the customizable links widgets and the new widget management. It’s also much easier to navigate some sections, such as plugins. You can filter views, such as activated plugins, or plugins that need updates. Looking good so far.
Tag Archives: blog
Looking Back and Forwards
I thought I’d step back for a bit and reflect on the progress and success of my blog, after re-reading Jonathans 2008 New Year post.
Like Jonathan, I like to measure my personal success, not the amount off visits or clicks I get. What I was aiming to do, was have a constant flow of blog posts. At first I thought that was every second day, then every 3.5 days, and then eventually weekly, followed by monthly. What I realized is blog worthy information isn’t constant. It seems to follow the financial climate more than anything else, in the sense that blog worthy topics are typically new toys to show the Internet, and the like.
So for the last few months, my schedule has been some what random and based around life’s clock. That said, I still try to make an effort of finding something to blog about at least once a month. I still declare my blog as alive, and not dead, however slow or fast the updates be.
To me, I will call this blog dead when I feel that blogging is a chore, and not after 3 months on inactivity. Summing up, I have enjoyed writing these blog posts, and I am amazed at the amount of readers and subscribers to my blog. I’m hoping to keep this running until the end of this year and onwards. Lets see how this goes.
WordPress
I thought I’d give wordpress a go now since I have a much more stable server to run it on. So far I’m liking the new interface (I know alot of people that previously used wordpress didn’t like it, however I like it compared to the old).
With a bit of tinkering it was pretty simple. A few plugins didn’t play nice, and mod rewrite was a little harder to do on lighttpd than apache, but with the help of another blog I was on my way to a happy start to wordpress.
I’ve used the wordpress blogger import and it has done a wonderful job so far :> Lets see how this goes (I’m still keeping a copy of my blogs in blogger just for history sake)
Autocad pump assignment
Autocad pump assignment
Originally uploaded by TheSkorm
The assignment is to pump water up the hight of 6 meters using manual labour or the wind. I’ve talked about this in a few blog posts, this is basically a test to see how well motion path animation is on AutoCAD, and how well flickr video is.
This also tests how well, flickr blogs it to my blog, let’s see how well it goes.
[Update]
Looks like it’s blogged alright, and it looks all pretty, which is nice.
Cravings
crav-ing |ˈkrāvi ng | |ˈkreɪvɪŋ| |ˈkreɪvɪŋ|
noun
a powerful desire for something : a craving for chocolate.
Cravings are weird. An internal impulse to do something, sometimes something you typically don’t do, or dislike. This morning I had a craving for drinking a glass of plain milk. I hate milk and I am also semi lactose intolerant. I didn’t end up drinking the glass of milk.
Earlier in this week I craved playing Douglas Adams Starship Titanic, which I started playing while I was at my Nan’s several years. I got most of the way through the game, but never finished it(I think I was up to the musical instruments part [possibly]). I found it really enjoyable, and I believe it has a quality many new games are missing, that is, letting the user think for them selves.
New games I’ve seen focus on “Kill 50 bores and get their blood” (The grind-tastic ones, World of Warcraft and the like), “Shoot and kill everything on the map” (Unreal Tourny, Counter-Strike ect..) and the “Go save this person, along the way level up, loot some mad weapons and gain guest points” (Similar to the grind-tastic ones, but a little less grind and more game play, Diablo ect..). Don’t get me wrong these are great games and I like to play them, but I really like to think now and then.
Starship Titanic is an excellent game, even if it is a little bit out dated (Made is 1998) but the graphics, sound and game play is still awesome. It lacks in features , but who cares, when the puzzles are so awesome and fun. I feel that I should buy the Mac version and play that, however their shop seems to be down at the moment.
My last note, I thought my blog theme was getting a bit outdated so I decided to change it. (Another craving). It’s fairly basic, which is what I like. Now to make the changes to my MySpace profile, to make it look the same.
In the time it took me to write the post, I got 3 RSS feeds and 8 Plurk replies.
New icon
IS IT A BIRD, IS IT A PLANE, NO IT’S A NEW ICON.
Decided to quickly update the icon so it looks a bit more appealing, instead of the standard blogger icon. Also Firefox 3 is looking good, hopefully by Firefox 4 they’ll have decent OS X Keychain support.
Or maybe Opera will beat them. The race is on Firefox and Opera.
New Blogger Comments
Flickr
I’ve decided to start making all of my posts from flickr, with a flickr picture that suits the article, just to make things look nicer. Hopefully most of the photos will be taken by me, however there will be some from other flickr users, friends or what not.
Flickr is my choice in photo sharing on the net. Mainly because it’s free and easy to use. It has a really good API and people are always mashing up new sites to use flickr differently. I did prefer flickr when you didn’t require a Yahoo ID to sign in (mainly because all the good yahoo ids are taken :<) but I suppose yahoo has to do this to survive.
Flickr doesn't have many ads and pages look clean and nice, from what I've heard flickr survives on the use of the Pro membership profit .
Pro allows you to upload more photos to your web album and comes with other nice features. I don't use flickr nearly enough to need to worry about becoming a pro member luckily.
Blogger Dasboard Widget
I’m not typically one that has a lot of desktop widgets, as the two I do use are ones I want to be able to check quickly, and widgets take of so long to load on first viewing after a reboot, but using the Blogger Dashboard widget is really handy to have if you don’t want to login to blogger or load up Safari. It’s simple to configure and use. I think’ll be using this a lot.
PS. This blog post was written on the widget.
Blogging days
To substain a good source of freshness, I’m changing from daily blogging to Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. This gives me a few more days to write blogs up (I struggle to find the time at the moment to blog).
Ps. One of my assignments got extended so I’m not “assignment free” :<, although It’s not like I’m going to change the assignment so I’m not worrying.
Now Blogger has woken up and gotten their bums into gear and made up what they call embedded comments. If you’ve been to a non Blogger blog before, you would have seen how easy it is to comment. It’s all on the same page, and with all the previous auth methods, commenting is even more easier.
It’s a shame blogger hasn’t done this for so long, but I know feel that my blog is perfect. (I now expect a comment from zzap, telling me to conver to wordpress)