meish dot org: life, unfolding

I’ve finally got around to updating some bits and bobs on and around this blog, including adding a couple of upcoming speaking engagements in the sidebar over there on the right (there are more coming up, which I’ll add in due course) and doing some behind-the-scenes tinkering with WP plugins, plus claiming my blog on Techorati. So now meish.org has a Technorati profile, which I’m led to believe is a good thing, for reasons which have yet to reveal themselves.

Things which I haven’t made too much headway with, but am going to (honest):
– sorting out the categories
– SEO stuff
– properly incorporating all the various standalone bits of the site (and of my distributed digital identity…how many URLs does one woman need? Don’t answer that…)

I put these things here not to whet your appetite, but to guilt myself into action. It’s never worked before, but there’s a first time for everything…

Three things, in brief:

1. This blog is now a stonking seven years old. Although the archives on this site only(!) date back to April 2000, there were three months of postings prior to that powered by notepad and html, which are now forever lost to time, though I’m fairly sure that posterity will cope fine without them.

   Blimey. Seven years, eh? Long time. Lot of wibble, there.

2. At this time of year, some people’s thoughts turn to the Bloggies awards, as a way to recognise blogs, bloggers and blogging technologies for doing what they do anyway. Which is fine.

   I mean, if you did it the whole year in the hope of winning a bloggie, there’d be something wrong with your priorities, I’d think, but if a community of peers want to nominally recognise and reward several amongst their own for doing something they do every day, passionately and without being motivated by awards then fine, I say.

3. Which brings me to the shameless whoring portion of this post. See, as I mentioned above, this blog is seven, and has been going since January 2000. It’s not one of the best ones out there – and I always think there’s something pretty weird about saying “best” blog since blogging is so distributed and multifarious these days – and in fact, as it has been since the very beginning.

   It’s not the most humourous blog out there (my vote goes – admittedly with great bias – to little.red.boat, my lovely sister, who makes me actually LOL on a daily basis), and it’s not about politics, food, technology, entertainment or anything else, particularly. When all this were fields, you see, blogs didn’t have to be about anything.

   Anyway, I digress. The point is, that while others are much better qualified in the many categories on offer, this blog is at least old, in blog years (which are like dog years, I think).

   So if you feel so inclined, and you’re going through the various bloggies categories anyway, then I’d encourage you to plonk my name in the Lifetime Achievement category – if only to demonstrate to the world that an achievement isn’t always being best or brightest or spangliest or sexiest or newest or most controversial, but it can also describe tenacity and commitment. And keeping up this level of wibbling for seven years is nothing if not tenacious.

Or, y’know, don’t.

Update: Someone who wishes to remain nameless (thanks) mailed me to say that blogging in itself wasn’t an achievement. My dear, I totally agree. So bear in mind that for the past seven years I’ve been doing far more than wibbling about my breakfast here – check out the projects list, for starters.

Just a reminder that The Mayfly project is back again for the end of 2006.

Can you sum up the last year of your life in just 24 words?

It’s been brought to my attention that the comment button doesn’t work when people come to this site via //www.meish.org, though it’s completely fine when people come via //meish.org – probably because it thinks a spambot is auto sumbitting because it looks like the request comes from a different URL – but it isn’t different! It’s just the same with WWW in front.

I’ve looked in the comments.php file and changed things so that it sniffs the user referral string and substitutes that for the siteURL set in preferences (currently set to //meish.org), but that doesn’t seem to have any effect.

It’s driving me potty.

Can you – and this is not just a trawl for comments – please try to comment on this post and tell me what the URL in the address bar at the top of your browser is when you do? With any luck we’ll start to see a pattern and that will help to resolve it.

On the other hand, if anyone out there’s a php whizz and would like to help out briefly, please let me know.

*sigh*

Update
This problem was first spotted on the mayfly project page (linked above), but I think it must actually be sitewide, only not noticed until now.

The big difference between the mayfly page and normal comments is that when you go to //www.meish.org and then click on a comment link for any post, it takes you to //meish.org/postname etc, which means it always matches the siteURL. However, that’s not the case for people going to www.meish.org/mayfly, where the comments form is out in the open already.

Update update
Fixed!

Paul, my lovely husband, to the rescue (once again). He dove in to the templates and spotted that it was the usual horrid lack of synchonicity between PHP, Javascript and the browser that plagues Ajax apps. So, for those who want to know what the fix was, and for posterity:

He edited the parameter in the Ajax constructor that was getting the stylesheet directory path directly from WordPress’s config as that was using meish.org as an absolute. So he hardcoded the local path, but the hostname comes from the server’s HTTP headers and so will always be right.

And now we know.

Thanks also to Simon for spotting the problem in the first place and Steve for being so quick off the mark with feedback.

Gather your thoughts and focus your words: The Mayfly Project is back once again, this time powered by WordPress in an attempt to curtail comment spam activity.

The aim: sum up your 2006 in 24 words.

Can you accept the mayfly challenge? If you want to have a go, buzz off over there and leave a comment.

With the caveat that this post is written in the middle of a frustrating session in which it feels like I’m trying to wade through treacle, let us continue:

While I love the way my iMac
a) looks
b) handles music/movie files
c) is whisper-quiet and
d) takes up a fraction of the deskspace my old PC used to

I must confess that at this moment in time I’m on the verge of flinging it against a wall, HARD.

You see, I’m big into photography. I take loads. You may have spotted them over there on the right, in my ever-growing Flickr stream.

For years, on my PC, I used Google’s Picasa app to import, tweak minutely, organise and export/print my images. It did me well. It struggled a bit with a gazillion images, but it managed. I liked the way it
a) allowed me to save modified images in the same place as the originals
b) allowed me to create temporary workgroups
c) had one-click gmail integration
d) integrated with photobox printing solutions to allow me to upload direct to them from the app
e) preserved file structures and showed them – so a folder name was a roll name
f) auto-discovered images on my machine. Hallelujah.

Yeah, it had its problems, but overall it was a good application.

The trouble was, in early summer, that the rest of my PC was crumbling – too many rogue apps, ridden with viruses and trojans and spyware, plus bloated and crappy in the way that windows can only be. So I succumbed to the hype and got myself an iMac – a switch which I mentioned back here. But, you know, from day one I’ve been struggling with iPhoto and its stupid quirks like
a) file handling and
b) version control (I know I’m not supposed to care where files are on the mac, but I DO) and
c) rubbish interfaces
d) the fact you have to tell it to show certain files within iPhoto: if it’s on my machine, let’s just assume that I HAVE imported it and I WANT to see it, shall we?
e) the way that everything you want to do (from opening the damn thing up to closing it down and everything in between including organisation and printing) takes about FOUR TIMES LONGER than it really should.

And it’s driving me potty. I think the main problem is that iPhoto is designed for people who want to dabble occasionally into the odd snap of their grandkids or whatever. Read the rest of this entry »

Actually, I think Richard Wright’s poem Close says that September is the turning time, but the way life’s been going recently, it’s understandable that I’m a wee bit late.

Went to Burnham Beeches again yesterday with S, to see whether the leaves had started turning yet.

They had – just – but even if the woods weren’t stained umber, on a cold, sunny day it was good to get out into the fresh air and play with the camera. I’m especially happy with the shots from yesterday as I was working in 100% manual mode under tricky lighting conditions – bright skies and shade under the canopy, plus lots of strong colour and no tripod.

Oh, and speaking of seasonal changes, if you’re visiting this site on the web (rather than via the feed) you’ll have spotted that there have been a few costmetic changes around here. Hopefully this will make the page a bit lighter to load, and fix various problems with feeds and archives. Let me know what you think!

Long-term readers of this blog may be overjoyed to hear that I’ve created a special category for posts pertaining to the Deli-from-Helli, the somewhat random Armenian sandwich emporium that I’ve been frequenting on and off for a number of years now.

Those who have no idea what I’m talking about should visit that collection of posts and catch up. There’s more to come, I promise.

Or is that a threat?

Update: Wah. Categories not working for some reason. Will sort out. Hold that thought.

Update Update: Categories fixed. Feast away.

I’ve been trying fairly fruitlessly all day today to better integrate the album cover challenges I did a few years ago into WordPress.

There are a bunch of image gallery plugins knocking about for WP, but pretty much every one is overly-complex and polyfeatured. I just need something which creates a different album for each directory, and then shows thumbnails, and allows prev/next on each image view. That’s it. I don’t need comments on every image, or captions, or even flashy transitions between images.

The hunt continues.

In the meantime, I’ve added a contact page to the nav bar above. Say hello, why dontcha?

Since I’ve implemented a random header at the top of this site, I thought it might be good to list out what the various images in the current array are, since a few people have asked already. So, without further ado, here are a few…

Organic apples at Borough Market

The struts of Brighton Pier at dusk, taken from the beach

Side of a multistorey carpark in Hammersmith, London

Stack of folded deckchairs, Brighton beach

The rest can be found on this dedicated page, which is also listed permanently in the header nav, above.

Let me know if you think there are any which work/don’t work particularly well.