Due to popular demand, my photoblog theme — the creatively named Reflection — is now available for download.

I was quite shocked by the amount of people that said they wanted this thing. I thought it was actually okay, but not good enough to publish. However people seem to think otherwise so I decided to put it up.

Design-wise it’s all very simple. There’s a heavy amount of AJAX behind the front page, but it’s handled in a graceful way should JavaScript not be running. Everything on the site uses mootools for any AJAX requests or effects, which is a cracking little library. By far and away the best 3rd party JS library I’ve ever seen.

Anyway. If you want it, go grab it and tell me what you think.

5:33 pm | Posted in Photography, XHTML/CSS | 7 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

A couple of months has gone by now since my initial review of CheapVPS, and I think it’s about time to finish it up with a fairly quick follow-up.

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Continue reading “CheapVPS: A Full Review”…

11:23 pm | Posted in Computing, Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »

Like pretty much everybody else out there, I use Google Analytics to help me figure out how much traffic I’m getting and where it’s coming from. And finally, I’m starting to get some more visitors!

Until very recently, it looked like this site was pretty much blacklisted by Google. I’d type in my name - in quotes - and find this site on about the tenth page. And hell, it’s not like my name is even common. But I noticed a week or so ago that I was getting 30-40 visits per day, which is far higher than is usually logged.

Pretty much the most common keyword is linked into my CheapVPS review; in fact, I was pretty surprised to see that it’s actually the fourth result for CheapVPS. I’ll be writing a follow-up to that story soon.

Other than that, better photoblog integration is on the way, just as soon as I can find some time. We’ve got about ten different things going on depending on the day thanks to Christmas, and finding the time to sit down and figure out something to write is pretty slim (hence why I”m writing this at 3am… whoops).

3:22 am | Posted in Personal, Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »

After a week of toiling over JavaScript, Mootools and a heap of other IE rendering bugs, the finished photoblog is finally here! You might also want to check out the cool mosaic feature which shows all the images I’ve posted.

Now unfortunately I ran into a few problems, and so the photoblog is now running on a separate instance of WordPress, but that’s not too bad. In fact, the user tables are shared so that if you do have an account here already, it will automagically work over there as well.

Anyway, go check it out. The plan is now to integrate it a bit more tightly into this blog right this minute, so enjoy.

3:08 pm | Posted in Photography, Site Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

I’ve not really been too happy recently about how this blog’s set up. Personally it’s a bit confusing to have my personal blog entries on here, but in-between them have a load of photos that serve no real purpose other than to look good.

So things are going to get mixed up a bit. The photos will be in their own separate website (probably under a subdomain), and the posts will be on the main site. But they’ll all be stored centrally under one WordPress installation - the plan is to use the power of WordPress templates to do this.

More news later when I actually finish this off!

2:34 pm | Posted in Site Development | No Comments »

Many of the readers of this blog will know that I am a giant, giant Apple fanboy. In fact, whenever I’m in Birmingham it’s an absolute necessity is to visit the Bullring Apple Store (as Sarah will no doubt painstakingly tell you). Unfortunately for me — or rather, my bank balance — a couple of weeks ago, I got a first-hand chance to play with the new iPod Touch. And, at this point, I think that you may see where this blog entry is going.

Rather surprisingly, however, I didn’t purchase the Touch. Since it’s quite large and my pockets are reasonably small, I decided that I’d wait a week and combine both the lovelyness of the Touch with my phone by getting the amazingly-hyped iPhone.

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Continue reading “New Toy!”…

7:37 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing | No Comments »

The lack of activity from myself has been quite profound lately, but regretfully the thing that’s made me finally get around to writing is the closure of Sayonara’s blog. Unfortunately he feels that he can’t dedicate either time or money to maintaining the site and giving it the attention it needs, hence he’s shut up shop and called it a day.

I believe we’ve both been around for a similar amount of time, and personally I rather enjoyed reading the site so it is a big shame to see it go. So if you want some free hosting, then send me an e-mail me or something.

I can certainly relate to his position. I find that the main problem is finding the motivation to sit down, think about what needs to be said and then actually write the damn entry. The last two paragraphs, for instance, have taken approximately twenty minutes to write because I am only writing in-between simulation runs. Even then I’m not entirely satisfied with what’s been written, and unfortunately most of my posts come out either as rather dull or overly sarcastic - hopefully I am neither in real life!

Another, somewhat different problem is that half the reason for this blog existing is the photography side of things. With all that’s been going on at Warwick over the past few weeks, I just haven’t found enough motivation to get out there and take some shots. However this will change soon, as I have enough money and justification to get myself a shiny new 40D in the next few days!

But fear not - I will soldier on and continue to blog about useless, dull, and mostly meaningless things because I enjoy doing it. Watch this space.

7:07 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development | No Comments »

So, after nothing for almost two months, the first post is going to be about changing servers! How interesting? No. But read on for a review of my new hosts after two weeks.

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Continue reading “CheapVPS: a 2-week Review”…

11:15 pm | Posted in Site Development, Web Development | 2 Comments » | Show comments » | Hide comments » |

Thought I’d test out the latest Firefox 3 release (codenamed Gran Paradiso) to test out the apparent speed increases. Have to say that I’m bloody impressed - there is a very noticeable speed increase, especially with the JavaScript effects on the homepage. Apparently that’s all thanks to Gecko 1.9’s usage of Cairo as a new backend.

Funnily enough, I also downloaded and tried out Apple’s Safari for a few sites. I think it lasted about 20 seconds before it got closed and completely destroyed from my computer. Don’t know what it is about that browser, but I absolutely hate it.

Anyway, even though it’s currently at an alpha 7 release,  everything’s reasonably stable at this point so you might want to try it out.

9:32 pm | Posted in Apple, Computing, Web Development | No Comments »

Actually had a pretty productive day today, which makes a change. All of the photoblog photos are rejigged in a very exciting fashion so that they all contain the proper shooting information. You can take a look by clicking on the titles of each photo. Some more on that tomorrow, as I have some more code to post up.

Otherwise, did a lot of optimization of the MySQL/lighttpd/FastCGI setup that we have on the server today, and so I can finally get around to cancelling my DreamHost account after migrating the last bits and pieces over.

However right now, I’m going to get back to tidying up the blog and fixing things that have been on the cards for ages - like a complete lack of any decent archives. Brillo.

12:00 am | Posted in Site Development | No Comments »