chrisg.org

You may have noticed I have been tweaking my template. I am reasonably pleased with it despite my meager design skillz.

One addition I am trying out is the little form in the top right (which is confusingly next to the search form, hmmm). This allows you to sign up and subscribe to my blog via email. I realised that the majority of my readers will be friends and family or flickr contacts who will not necessarily be using feed reading software and can certainly not be expected to visit the blog every day, thus having this email subscription form makes it easy to keep in contact.

I am also trying out feedblitz, I am not sure which is the better option. The wordpress plugin is free but feedblitz offers more control (no point in using the free feedblitz option as it is not as good as the free WP plugin).

Here is a few of my current favourite photographs found on Flickr. See if you can spot a theme ..

I have just been spending an enjoyable hour remotely visiting Calgary.

I started out earlier in the week seeking out the best flickr photographs I could find, found a few nice blogs (not nearly as many as I had hoped) and added some great folk to my contacts. Aren’t tags great? Also tried finding blogs with Technorati and Del.Icio.Us but they were not quite as good. Livejournal was far too noisy with adolescent girls whining about their boyfriends.

Google Earth though, that kicks bottom. I have been wizzing up and down, zooming around, it is not quite like being there but still lots of fun. It makes a change to be looking at somewhere they actually have a decent resolution for.

If anyone has any recommendations for places, blogs or activities of the virtual tourism variety in the run up to our trip please do tell

I also think I found a couple of nice places to live, McKenzie Towne and Tuscony developments. We visited the former summer 2004, wish we had bought then as the prices have rocketed. Tuscony is near olympic ski park I think which would make it convenient for the boarding

Ah well, back to grim british reality … for the moment

Well I just found an old RSS feed for my blog and imported it. Wish I hadn’t, what a bloody waste of time that was, there are hardly any posts and what I have look like a dogs breakfast. Joy.

The rest of the performancing guys are livin’lavidaloca in Chicago at the SES show. Well, they are also working but this is my blog so I will whine if I want to. Had I been working in an office I would probably have noticed the silence a great deal more but as it is I have only MSN and Email to communicate with them anyway so it’s just like everyone is busy.

When Clare is pottering about I have someone to talk to, otherwise it is just me and The Cats. The office banter isn’t quite so good with those two. Here is something they pointed out earlier though.

How cool is this? The best. zombie. movie. evaaah re-enacted in knitting.

You have to be friggin’ kidding me, this is so funny

How many blogs have I had? I have lost count.

My first was probably static HTML, a personal website. My personal sites have lived on a few hosts but after 1998 they will have been on chrisg.com or .org .. mostly .org I think.

Had a “blog” on most of them. They weren’t called blogs until … well, I dunno. Probably around the time “blogger” started. I do recall they were called “weblogs” and “journals” for a while before “blog”. My site definately had a “journal” because the index was called journallist (.cgi, .asp, .jsp, .php, etc).

My first blog that I didn’t code myself was the most recent, various versions of DasBlog. Which is a fine piece of software, it just hates me. Which is partly why I am starting all over again, the other reason being I lost my server and everything on it all of a sudden. Don’t ask. Really. Don’t ask.

Which brings us to WordPress. I did some reviews and WP came top. I thought I might as well take my own advice. I am also starting two or three other blogs over the next couple of weeks, they will be multi-author blogs and therefore will be Drupal based. Could this be the end of my infatuation with Microsoft platform software? We will have to see ..

While I get some content back you might want to visit Performancing.com

Seeing as I need the spare room as my office I have been doing a bit of a tidy round. I found some interesting historical artifacts, just check out these magazine covers!