The Blog of G

Wow, is it really August since I posted last? Well, seeing as how I know the answer is ‘yes’ that’s a bit of a dumb question really.

Anyhow, how to start back? There is the old reliable ‘what have I been doing?’ format or the ‘ignore it and pretend it never happened?’ format (Well it’s too late for that one now) or how about the ‘come clean with the reason you haven’t been blogging’ format.

Well the last one’s easy, I didn’t feel like it. :p and that’s because a lot has happened in my life since last August. I guess that brings me into the ‘what have I been doing’ format but not for long.

So what have I been doing?

August was spent working, September was spent travelling all over Europe, October was spent visiting mum, November didn’t see an improvement for mum and she passed away peacefully at home on the 11th, December saw a Christmas of adjustment, January until now was in general a bit quiet and mostly about connecting with some old friends online, getting ready for the move into our new home, oh and I went to Creative Camp.

So am I likely to change my posting schedule? Well, let’s just wait and see

Yeah, It’s monday and I have the day to myself, Elly has to work so I’ve got the house to myself. Now what am I going to do with myself?

Well I’ve already caught up on all my blog and news reading, my Google reader has no unread feeds left for the first time since I switched from Newsgator. although it seems to not want to allow me to add more feeds which is odd cause I know I don’t have as many as the likes of Robert Scoble but I can’t add anymore now

From my reading frenzy this morning, I see Grandad has Blognapped Granny’s Blog to wish her a happy birthday, the oul romantic! Well at least he didn’t head off tourist hunting for the day

Gizmodo seems to be getting less about the gadgets and more about the gags, these days, so much so that I hardly seem to read it anymore, could it be that the volume of posts is costing them quality? Surely not.

And Finally, over on the Blather Zeitgeist, Damien has posted a brilliant short film from Blur Studios, very funny and well worth the bandwidth and time it takes to view it.

So am I going to mow the lawn and fix the Media Centre PC today or just laze around the house all day and do nothing, It’s my day off after all.

While I was playing around with this blog at the weekend I decided there are a few things I would like to change here, hopefully I’ll find the time to do them, soon.

• Make my “Archive” page work
• Make a “Category” Page
• Make an RSS news feed page

This probably sounds fairly simple and straightforward but unfortunately my knowledge in the whole coding area isn’t the best, so these thing’s may take quiet some time

Yup, that’s how I feel about it right now. I spent some time with my blog today for the first time in ages. I upgraded to the latest version, installed a few plug-ins. I also tried to sort out my sidebar issues again, I had hoped that the upgrade might fix it for me but alas no

So I’ve been investigating and it seems that there is something in certain posts that is causing the sidebars to vanish from the page. There are a few common threads with these posts…

1. They were all written in WordPress “rich text editor”
2. They all contain images
3. They were all saved as drafts and edited over an number of sittings

For now I’m just not going to use the Rich text editor, hopefully as I post more and the effected posts move off the front page the issue will become less prominent. I guess I’ll just have to live with it, until I work out whats causing it.

On the upside, the new plug-ins mean people can now digg my posts if they feel the need and I have some added colour thanks to the images feed. The new category cloud in the sidebar looks so much better than that horrible mess that I used to have and I finally have a functioning Spell-checker, I’m sure I’ll hear all about it if it’s not up to the task

It’s one of those things that bugs me about technology at times, it’s just not as simple as we’d like it to be. There’s a lot more going on with modern technology than most of us realise and it just doesn’t always do what we expect or want it to. That said It’s great to have the technology working for us… most of the time anyway.

It’s been a few weeks since Tim broke the news that Pandora would be blocking non US Ip addresses. I was so disapointed, I love Pandora‘s service and I will miss it. I mean don’t get me wrong I understand the reason’s behind this decision but it’s still a hard one to get used to.

Good luck Pandora, I can only hope that you can resolve the issues soon. I would be happy to signup for a pay per play account if it meant I could use Pandora’s service again. I’ve blogged about Pandora before and it has helped me find some great music I would never have heard without your service.