Tag: WordPress

bookmark_borderFlock this

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The name of this site —Informationally Overloaded— isn’t just a witty title. Firstly, it’s not that witty, and secondly it’s becoming increasingly true for many people. There are two things you can do to counteract the growing feeling of “I must be missing something” that I’m sure some of you can identify with:

  1. Turn off the computer (obviously not right NOW)
  2. Streamline your online habits

The first cure is the most obvious, and something I’m trying to do as much as possible these days. If the computer doesn’t NEED to be on, it’s not. Not only am I saving electricity/energy, I’m also reducing the temptation to “just check my email” which inevitably leads to “just checking some sites” and from there it’s a short click to “yes I KNOW it’s 3am, I’ll come to bed in a minute!!”.

The second cure is, arguably, the harder of the two. Why? Well I’d say guilt has a part to play, especially if you’ve been blogging for any length of time and have built up a long list of sites/blogs run by people you “know” and which you valiantly try and visit every day or two, primarily to save face. Terrible habit and one I’ve been slowly curing myself of for a while now. It’s similar to the “must post everyday” nonsense of which many of us bloggers fall foul. Life is too short people, so don’t waste it doing things that are of no consequence (and yes, I do believe that blogging CAN be of consequence, as can commenting on blogs… maybe not the highest value item in the chain of life but it’s still of some value).

I’ve posted before about getting organised, and I consider this post a successor, a natural step beyond previous efforts.
Continue reading “Flock this”

bookmark_borderNew, old, sleeping

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A couple of new blogs (links on the right in the ‘overflow’) to play with. The Big Brother one might be interesting, and Unreliable Witness already has shimmers of possibility.

The update to WordPress and the activation of … er.. one of the spam plugins seems to have done the job. Well worth it.

And in other startling news my headache has gone. It finally gave up around 6pm last night, although I still tried (and failed) to get to bed early. Sorry Zoe but thanks for the advice, although there is no way I could sleep with the window open.

I just can’t do it, it’s the same if there is too much light in the room, I need peace and quiet and darkness before my brain will finally accept the fact that I should be asleep. This holds true for the first few hours after I’ve fallen asleep where the smallest noises can be enough to waken me from my slumber. A few years ago a new fridge heralded a couple of nights of frustrated tossing and turning, the dull whirr and click from downstairs enough to keep me from gaining a comprehensive degree of unconsciousness.

But after the first couple of hours, well just you try and wake me! You could turn our bedroom into a parade ground, or allow an entire African savannah to stampede across the bed and you’d be lucky to get more than a murmur from me. In fact, and this is according to Louise as… well I couldn’t tell you about this because I’m asleep at the time… if you didn’t know me you may think that I’ve slipped away in the night. Between the lack of movement — I have an entire double bed to myself at the moment yet still find myself occupying the usual third, hanging off the edge like some large hairy mountain goat — and the s l o w n e s s of my breathing I can appear to be in a state of complete torpor.

This state remains until the radio switches on at blurry o’clock in the morning, bringing with it the slow painful progress to normal awaken-ness. This process takes until around 9am and includes breakfast, a train journey and two cups of coffee.

So, in an effort to collect some truly awful puns I’ll ask you: How do you sleep?

bookmark_borderQuiet

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Dropped Louise off at the airport at 3.30am on Sunday morning. Wide awake when I got home so I upgraded WordPress, everything went very smoothly indeed (or you wouldn’t be reading this!).

By 7am I was wilting and fell asleep on the sofa for a couple of hours kip, something I think contributed to my stiff back today. I spent the rest of the day going through weird phases of high energy and complete lethargy. Most odd.

And this morning I awoke with the beginnings of a monster headache. One of those “please stop tightening this metal band around my skull” types… and the painkillers aren’t budging it.

bookmark_border2 questions, 1 comment

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Question 1. WordPress users – all of a sudden I’m getting loads and loads of spam comments — 536 overnight. This is despite the fact I don’t USE WordPress for the commenting here (yet). I’m still on version 1.5.2, which spam plugin is best?

Question 2. XP users – I think I have a virus. The internet ‘outage’ I experienced the other night may have been a symptom and there is SOMETHING that is using a variety of outgoing TCP Ports. But I can’t figure out what it might be.

I’ve udpated and run AVG Anti-Virus, SpyBot and Ad-Adware. My firewall is Symantec and isn’t reporting anything odd, it’s only when I call up netstat via DOS prompt (“netstat -s”) that I see the number of “Active Opens” rising. I’ve just re-booted the PC, fired up Firefox and started typing this post and already the number is at 61.

I’m stumped. I can’t even think of what to look for, and if my anti-virus can’t catch it, the firewall isn’t flagging it (despite changing settings to ask for every teeny tiny movement in and out to be flagged), what else can I do?

The comment: Andy and I have swapped emails and I’ll happily state here that he did not mean anything nasty. Looks like it was a combination of bad days and misreadingness. All is well with the world again (bar the above, obviously).

bookmark_borderSnippets

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Can’t believe it’s Friday already. This is despite both Louise and I thinking that YESTERDAY was Friday, something we are putting down to the lovely weather we HAD (grey and with a slight chill in the air this morning… welcome to Scotland).

~

My “should I post when I’ve nothing to post” post was interesting. I’m fully aware that it was completely contrived but it was still interesting to read your comments so thanks for that. It was borne out of habit rather than need… you see I’ve been a bit busy.

In fact I think I would go far as to say that I’m a little stressed at the moment. The POTW site is dragging WAY beyond my deadline and is now a burden rather than a pleasure and no, this is not a call for help as it’s more that I’ve lost motivation to tackle it because I have two paying customers waiting for some movement (one is time critical, one isn’t). Another factor is the bigger project I’ve mentioned before which has seemed to hit a bottleneck. This weekend will see me taking the bull by the horns methinks (something I probably should’ve done a couple of weeks back)

All of this sits beside the fact that, at work, I’m down to one. Me. The other member of my team (which was already one short) left a couple of weeks ago and I’m picking up his work as well as trying to start some new stuff. Now I know that EVERYONE is busy, and I hate to moan. So I’ll stop.

~

Tonight Louise and I are out for dinner to celebrate the 70th birthday of her Aunt Mary (her Mum’s sister). It’s at the Cruin, somewhere I’d recommend if you ever make it to Loch Lomond…. ohh balls .. just remembered that I’ve left my camera at home. Arsebuckets.

Anyway, a late night drive home will mean we have the weekend to ourselves. Gardening is on the cards, as is a visit to the cinema. And yes, a fair chunk of work as well (at least five or six mockups are the aim).

~

Ohh and whilst I remember, this site will slowly start to evolve over the coming months. So far I’m planning to upgrade to WordPress 2, import the overflow posts into WordPress, import comments from HaloScan and switch to WordPress commenting (both on main posts and overflow posts), and return to a more minimal design and then promise not to change it for at least one year. Yes I’m hoping to create a ‘brand’ that I’m happy with. Fingers crossed.

bookmark_borderSlimline

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There are two things I’ve been meaning to fo with this website for a while.

1. Slim the number of categories.
I went a bit mad when I first installed WordPress, and I’m pretty sure I can trim the number down from the 22 I currently have (although not all are used, grand plans and all that) to a more manageable and sensible 6 or 7. More on that in a minute.

2. Categorise all of my archives.
I started this about a year ago and after slogging through some of the backlog – I’m tidying up, and adding titles as I go – I began to realise that I should have slimmed the number of categories FIRST. Yes, it’s obvious now but I was all caught up in just HAVING categories that I went a bit OTT.

Weird. Just got a massive dose of deja vu…

Anyhoo, onto the task at hand. Firstly I’m going to list all the categories I have available to me at the moment, and then I’m going to take a stab at a shortlist. If you have the time or inclination, I’d appreciate some feedback on the shortlist. Is it too short? Too long? Do you guys even USE the categories? Etc etc. I’m sure you know the drill by now (e.g. you leave comments stating your opinions, and I come along later and either correct you or ignore you!). First up, the current list of categories:

  • Articles – in a pretentious moment I deemed some posts should be ‘articles’. Usually the long waffling ones that no-one reads.
  • B.B. – the stuff I wrote before I had a blog.
  • Blogs – posts about blogs and blogging.
  • Books – reviews of books and posts about books
  • Diary – posts about stuff wot I have done in my daily life…
  • Firefox – posts about Firefox
  • General – the default category, used for stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
  • Gigs – reviews of gigs
  • Meme – posts about… ohh you get the idea…
  • Movies
  • Music
  • My site – stuff about this very site
  • News – commentary on current affairs.
  • Personal Musings – largely written B.B.
  • Software
  • Technology
  • TV
  • Web
  • WordPress
  • Writing – writing about writing… again with the pretentiousnessness!

Phew, far too many. What WAS I thinking? So, let’s trim that lot down, merge a couple and see what we end up with:

  • Articles – in a pretentious moment I deemed some posts should be ‘articles’. Usually the long waffling ones that no-one reads.
  • B.B. – the stuff I wrote before I had a blog.
  • Diary – posts about stuff wot I have done in my daily life…
  • General – the default category, used for stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else and the posts with multiple topics.
  • News – commentary on current affairs.
  • Personal
  • Media
  • Books – reviews and whatnot
  • Gigs (not strictly media I guess…)
  • Movies
  • Music
  • Technology
    • Software
    • Firefox
    • Hardware
  • Web
    • Blogging – posts about blogs and blogging.
    • Meme – posts about… ohh you get the idea…
    • My site – stuff about this very site
    • WordPress
  • Writing – writing about writing… again with the pretentiousnessness!

    • Right. Looks OK to me, over to you ladies and gentlepeeps. Set your inner librarian free!

    Actually there is a further question relating to the usage of websites. Categories can be found all over the place these days… how useful are they? Do you use them regularly or only on certain types of sites? My own opinion sways on this. For my site I think the categories are useful as I tend to veer onto different topics as my mood takes me, so finding similar topics as the one you are currently reading can be tricky as there might not have been one for a couple of weeks. For sites that are a lot more focussed than mine they can sometimes seem like overkill, but then again, if you are surfing a knitting site and don’t want tips on needle choice, then a “patterns” category would be useful? No?

    And then there are tags. Useful? Perhaps. The ones listed on this site should fire technorati searches allowing you to find other sites with similarly tagged posts (hmmm should maybe make that a bit more obvious), but maybe they’d be better used to navigate this site. Tag clouds are possible, but are they better, or worse, than categories?

    Comments please (ohh and the bit below is just to remind myself that I am occasionally capable of reasoned discussion, it’s all a bit ‘overly analytical’ and may bore the pants off you.. if you are wearing any..
    Continue reading “Slimline”