Tag Archives: blogging

Rambling update

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Made it through to Friday, pretty tired today generally.  Lovely weather outside, bright sunshine, crisp.  Bubbles is out there somewhere baking herself in what are probably the last few days of warm enough sunshine.  She’s got conjunctivitis the poor bugger.  We’ve got some ointment to put on twice a day, she’s been pretty good about it despite the whinging.

Watched Fright Night last night after recording it on Sky+.  Classic movie, how on earth did we find those special effects ((special in the loose sense)) scary?  Not even sure why it’s an 18, I guess some of the more fleshy scenes are the cause of that.  Evan watching stuff like that the experienced is improved with the surround sound, we’re still really pleased with it.

I got sick of paying for a Sky Movies subscription and not watching anything.  It’s because we don’t sit in front of the TV these days unless we’re doing so to watch something we recorded, so I went through the entire week ahead and set 4 movies to record (Clerks II, Fright Night, Deja Vu, American Gangster) and I’m going to try and do that every few days and record anything I’ve not seen or not seen for a while.  Pan’s Labyrinth was on a week or so ago too, so recorded that and not watched it yet, and Hairspray was on Sky Anytime so I’ve ‘recorded’ that for Grete.

Still pleased with the 5.7% HbA1c result.  Found this nice little chart in case you wanted to know more about the test,

HbA1c
Normal/abnormal
Average blood glucose
4-6.5% Normal for those without diabetes 3-8mmol/L
6.5-7.5% Target range for those with diabetes 8-10mmol/L
8-9.5% High 11-14mmol/L
Greater than 9.5% Very high 15 and above

I bought a Marathon bar ((yes, yes I know, but I like living in the 80’s)) on Wednesday to eat after I got the results, either as a celebration or a commiseration depending on how the results went.  Celebration was a good option.  I never ate a lot of chocolate or sweet stuff before being diagnosed, but I did enjoy a Snickers bar every now and then.  Almost amusingly, they don’t have a totally terrible effect on my blood sugar because of the high fat content, but as you can imagine I’ve had about three since I was diagnosed.

Roleplaying tonight, 4th edition D&D, first time we’ve played (rolled characters up last week), so should be interesting.  Always takes a while to get ‘into’ any campaign, never mind one with a new ruleset so I’m expecting tonight to be pretty slow.

My good friend Simes blogged about some TV he’s been watching.  It certainly feels like the TV schedule has picked up, mostly stuffed with American TV.  The Fringe pilot was cool, the Burn Notice pilot was also interesting and we’ll be watching that to see where it goes.  We’ve got quite a wait for the new series of Criminal Minds sadly, but Bones is back on and is as good as ever (I think).

And I’ll leave you with this,

And I think Pirates would kick both their asses.

Blogging about blog blogging

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I’ve reduced the number of blog categories down to 9 (Fiction, Games, Health, Internet, Life, Movies, News, Politics, Reviews, Science and Technology), although there’s still a 10th category (Uncategorized) as a hang-over from the blogspot import.  I may shrink that down further if I find the Fiction, Politics and Science ones don’t get used much, and I may add a ‘humour’ one.

Alongside that, I’ve tagged posts which had other categories with new tags, based on the category names.  For new posts they’ll probably get a lot more tags, but it’s a start anyway.  I’ve tried to configure the tag cloud in a useful way without having the text be too big, but I run a pretty small font in browsers usually so it’s not always easy for me to tell how it looks for you guys.

I’ve removed the Twitter sidebar, as expected (self-fulfilling?) I’m not really updating Twitter and not finding myself drawn to read it, so having 8 lines of dead text on the right isn’t useful space.

Postmove reflection

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It’s nineteen days since I moved away from Blogspot and onto a self-hosted WordPress install, and I’ve not missed Blogspot one bit.  The move was pretty smooth thanks to the built-in WordPress migration tool thingy.  The hardest part was finding a template I liked which was up-to-date, modern and had all the features I wanted, and I really struck gold with Mandigo.  The old site is slowly falling off google’s index and the new site is starting to show up, so my enlightened wisdom shall soon be available to all to search for.

Now I’m struggling with maybe the greatest dilema of all blogging-kind.  Tags vs Categories.

And so it begins

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Depending on the time of day and the direction the wind blows, this site is now 4th or 5th on Google if you search for perception is truth, and second if you search for “perception is truth”.  Google is fickle so those positions will change over time naturally.  Obviously, individual posts that are slowly showing up on Google have different page ranks and show up in different locations.  But the spam comments have finally begun.

This is both good and bad, it means the site can now be found on Google, maybe even by people ((although as a personal blog I have no idea what value finding it might bring)) and of course it means that robots and automated spamination machines can find it and start posting comments.

So far, Akismet (the default spam plugin for WordPress) has spotted the 14 spam comments and I haven’t been forced to deal with them.  I was amused to find which posts they latched onto.  The last 11 comments were all attached to the post I made about recipe books.  They all link to a single cookery website (according to the URL, I never visited to check).  Two insurance links on my post about Bacon Cobs (!), and so far a lone single mortgage spam (geddit, lone? loan?) on my post about being in positive equity.

As long as Akismet keeps catching the spam, I find the whole thing quite amusing and the stats/analysis quite interesting.  Obviously, once the load is so high that my bandwidth suffers or that I have to start manually dealing with the spam I’ll be less amused, but for now it’s ok.

Comment etiquette

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So, comments.  If you leave comments and I reply, do you come back and read them?  Would you prefer if I replied as a blog posting so it’s more obvious I replied?  Do you use the comments RSS feed to track replies?

I’m stuck on comment etiquette.

Blathering

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So I’m not feeling so well today.  As I already blogged, up early feeling sick, but I had a 2 hour meeting that I really needed to be at, at work.  I went in late, attended that and then came home again and then slept until around 4:30pm.  I still feel pretty crap but not quite on the same scale.  I get little waves of nausia every now and then and have to be careful not to drink tea too quickly.

I only recently discovered the pure delight of Google Reader (or any RSS reader for that matter) even though I sort of knew I should be doing it.  It wasn’t until I found a few sites I really wanted to follow that only had a few postings a day at most that it really came into its own.  Before, I’d try to use it for Slashdot or the BBC News site, but there’s so much stuff being publised there daily that I just used to click ‘mark all read’ and move on.  So anyway, found some sites I enjoy reading and using Google Reader.  Thought I’d share some random stuff.

Most of these sites I’ve found either through friends, or through cross-linking on a small number of sites initially and I often have no clue who the people writing them are, I read them for the articles anyway.

So anyway, I’m to about 57 subscriptions and I need to go down the links on Hot Chicks Dig Smart Men and check out some of those (since her blog links to some stuff I already read, so they may be my taste too).  I have LifeHacker and Fark RSS feeds, they generate a tonne of links every day and sometimes I read them, and othertimes I just hit mark as read.

And now it’s 7:40pm and I need to find something to eat which doesn’t disagree with me too much.

Queasy

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Woke up at 4:30am in a cold sweat feeling pretty sick.  You’ll be pleased to know I haven’t been sick (yet), but we’re both still awake and I’m trying to take my mind off the messages my stomach is sending to my brain.

Also, love the pullout quotes, thanks to Mr Artiss for pointing that one out.

Crazy Linkage FTW!

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So I signed up to Twitter (yeh yeh) and connected it to my facebook status thingy and added a wordpress plugin thingy so it’s even harder to hide from my random crap.

Twitter updates in the sidebar on the right, I promise not to just tell you what I’m eating for dinner, and I’ll try and refrain from updating twitter every time I blog, but for this one I wanted to check how it works.

Comments

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Firstly, thanks for the comments, while I blog mainly for myself it’s nice to know people read the posts and feel they’re worthy of commenting.  I do enjoy the feedback obviously.

With blogspot, I *think* you guys got a notification, or had the choice? to get a notification when your comment was approved and/or if it was replied to.

With WordPress out of the box, I don’t think you get that.  I’ve been looking and looking at comment plugins but can’t find a small unobtrusive supported plugin which gives that functionality, so if you do comment on a post, for now I think you’ll just need to check it every now and then to see if I’ve replied, or if anyone else replied.

Edit: There’s also the recent comments widget on the sidebar, so you can see if someone’s commented and you can subscribe to the specific comment rss feed too I guess, which might be useful if you want to track comment updates.

The circle is complete

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So, welcome to the new blog at perceptionistruth.com.  The circle is now complete, I’ve gone from running my own blog, to trying livejournal, to running my own blog, to trying blogspot and now I’m back to running my own blog using wordpress.

I’ve intentionally left the site pretty open, you can leave comments without having to register, we’ll see how much spam I get and see if that needs reviewing.  You’re welcome to register of course if you wish.  For previous comments I’m slowly going through and adding in a URL against your name so it goes to your primary blog/site, but there’s no way of re-associating those comments with an account (as far as I can see, at the moment), so you won’t be able to re-edit any of them.

Feel free to comment on the layout and design, just don’t expect me to do much about it!  I’ve spent about 3 months going through a lot of WordPress templates, from dark with light text to light with dark text and everything in-between.  Traditionally I prefer dark backgrounds and light text, but I can’t deny that the inverse somehow looks more professional, and at the moment Mandigo (the template I’m using) doesn’t offer an inverse colour scheme.  I may play with Mandigo and see if I can hack the mighty amount of css it uses to invert the colour scheme somehow, but no promises.

I’ll miss the neat feature on blogger which included the last entry from each link in your ‘blogroll’, but I’ll cope with plain old links.  However, I’m sure there are plenty of funky plug-ins I’ll end up playing with on WordPress that fill my need for toys.

Welcome aboard, please update your book marks and links.  The main site is perceptionistruth.com and the rss feed can be found at http://perceptionistruth.com/feed/.