Category: Editorial

I was having a tinker with MarsEdit last night, trying to get it to run a preview of my blog posts as I work on them. Still can’t get it working but in the process of reading up on it I read found a very interesting post on the developer Daniel Jalkut’s blog about his attitude to ‘approval seeking’ as facilitated by the likes of Twitter and Facebook. It so closely echoed my feelings on the subject that it could have been written for me or even by me. Here’s where it really hit home:

Many folks use the internet as a valuable tool for research and connectedness, but also as a dubious source for ego-validation. Some of us are more vulnerable than others. How many of the following questions do you care to know the answer to?

How many people are following me on Twitter?
How many hits on my home page?
Has any high-profile blogger linked to me recently?
How many people are @responding to my tweets?
How many comments on my latest blog post?
How early does my name show up in a Google search?
How many people are buying my app/t-shirt/CD/craft?
Who left positive feedback on eBay/Amazon/iTunes?

If you’re interested in the answers to these questions, it’s probably because you are concerned on some level about whether you matter or not. But more specifically, when it comes to the internet and other people you may reach by way of it, all these questions boil down to whether you have pleased anybody lately.

I ticked ‘Yes’ to five of those, but only because the last two don’t really apply to me. Ouch.

I like to mess about with my websites – gives me something to do during the holidays/days off other than watching TV, drinking beer at 11am or arguing with idiots on Eurogamer. 🙂

This week I’ve latched onto a lovely new theme called ‘The World in 35mm‘ for Pixelpost. It’s working nice over at The Daily Exposure and it basically solves my long-standing problem with comments and photograph info in that it elegantly hides and displays both below the photo, on the same page, with no fancy stuff that people using browsers like IE will struggle with.

My current info/comment solution was a hand-tweaked version of Lightbox, which is pretty cool but apparently doesn’t play so nice with said stupid browsers. I think this will work a lot better.

As I haven’t really got any idea how to run a test-version of my site privately while I tweak, I’m going to have to start faffing around with the live version so if you visit over the next few hours and days you’ll probably notice it looking a bit odd. Feel free to laugh at my appalling coding skillz as I tweak and tweak again!

Cheers, folks.

UPDATE: I’ve had a good look at how the template is written and the work that would be involved trying to make my current look fit into the way 35mm does things, and it’s far too much effort.

So, new approach: I’m going to try and rip out the info/comment code and implant it into my baby…

UPDATE 2: Holy crap this is far too much effort all round. I’m going back to my original plan – make 35mm look like my glass eye…

UPDATE 3: And it’s done! I need to tweak the About page as it’s not ideal (how the heck do you do columns properly without forcing their position?) and the News page needs to be tweaked to match the top menu properly, and I need to do the Dark CSS sheet so that the Styleswitcher works, but to all intents and purposes, BOO-YA. That was a whole morning of fun 😉

Further to yesterday’s unpleasant discovery that something in my back end was b0rked, I went ahead and upgraded all the Pixelpost files to the latest version and that appears to have fixed it. Who knows what I did…

I hope your Christmas week is going nicely. I’m off to do some food shopping and to think about how to rejuvenate my blog sans comments and try to make it fun for me again…

See you round!

Apparently this image to the left is all anyone’s seen of my blog for almost a week now, but seeing as I haven’t updated it in almost a month, I had no idea. I was tinkering with it last week and took it all offline deliberately for a couple of days, but I thought I’d fixed that. Evidently not!

Well now I know what I’ll be doing all day today… 🙁