Note to self: I realised I forgot to mention it here (although it is self-evident, I really should make a post for my own future reference) that after ten years of "i5m" I fancied a name change. A new beginning (of sorts) for the new year. And so I did.
Spring Cleaning
As I mentioned in my last post, I've taken the opportunity to use Google Buzz to clean-up my website. I've removed the side bar that featured Twitter, Delicious, Google Reader, Last.fm and Flickr widgets and instead have replaced with a simple link to my Buzz profile page. Makes for a much cleaner site. The only thing Buzz doesn't do yet is pull in info from Last.fm, but I wasn't keeping the sidebar around just for that. And hopefully Last.fm will make some changes to their site so it works with Buzz.
Since I had no sidebar I moved the remaining about/description and 'meta' links up into a header. I'd already HTML5-ified things awhile ago, but I'd never really fixed the CSS from when I started from the Pro-White theme. This time I've made a concerted effort to 'fix' the CSS; I've gone through and changed everything to EMs, and made a load of tweaks to make the text layout more readable (I was never keen on the line spacing, etc before). I'm pretty chuffed with how it looks now. I'm sure I've still got some redundant CSS, or stuff I could consolidate, but that will do for now.
Domain name changes. Back to the start.
About a year ago I got the i-5-m.net domain name, because I was in a bit of a strop, fed-up, and wanted a proper domain name again.
About the same time, I found out I still owned the i5m.me.uk one (the benefit of 2 years renewal on UK domains), but because I'd de-tagged it, thrown the registration certificate away (in another huff), moved address, and changed email addresses, etc, I wasn't sure I'd be able to prove it was mine. So, not wanting to wait (re: strop above) I went for the new .net one. A bit later on, thanks to the helpful folks at Nominet, I did manage to get the i5m.me.uk one properly registered.
A bit later on still, I finally managed - after four years (The downside of 2 years renewal on UK domains) - to get back my original i5m.co.uk domain from when I first ventured onto the net with my own site sometime in 2002. In my naviety I'd registered it through my webhost, who'd registered it in their name, went down the swaney and took my domain with it. Someone promptly nabbed it and sat on it for two years and then the same happened two years later.
However, because I'd splashed out (well, hardly 'splashed', a few dollars, maybe) on a new domain, I just pointed the .co.uk and .me.uk ones at the .net one.
Cue today, and my i-5-m.net domain is up for renewal soon and I have to face facts that as a domain name, it's a bit pants and all, what with the hyphens in it. And since I do now have my original domain name back I should just switch to using that.
So I have.
i5m.co.uk will reign supreme, and i5m.me.uk will be a webhop to it. And until the i-5-m.net one expires it will also be a webhop to here.
Almost Valid
I've tweaked the (x)HTML and CSS so it gets as near to validating as it ever will. Tumblr use an iframe to insert the 
and 
, etc into the top right hand corner of the page. This throws a validation error. There's nothing I can do about that. And it's of no big concern.
The CSS is valid apart from the use of border-radius. Which is more an issue with the Jigsaw validation engine than an actual error.
All, in all, I'm quite impressed that Tumblr allows you to get syntax this good. It's a shame you can't use the HTML5 doctype with Tumblr, but again, not the end of the world.
Although almost valid, the mark-up still requires a fair bit of work. It's all a bit of a hack and could benefit from some tidying up. I'll do that in the meantime.
What to write here
Interesting personal blogs are written about things the writer is passionate, knowledgeable and opinionated about.
However, sometimes the things you are emotive about aren't best served by blogging for every man and his dog to see. In the space of a few years things have changed a lot. I certainly won't be mentioning anything to do with work. I think the only bloggers that seem to get away with that nowadays are public sector professionals. Maybe because it's seen to be in the best interests of the public on some kind of level? Also, over the years my interests have changed; The main one being dropping video editing for photography.
So this time around, I think it'll be a bit of a art+code slant. Photography and (listening to) music making up the art side of things. And whatever geeky things I find myself doing for the code side of things.
There vs Here (before Tumblr)
The only 'old' post I'm going to import. For a bit of fluidity. Although I've had to edit it a bit for context, and in the process made it more incoherent than it started.
There
I loved my site. I really did. It was made with my own fair hands. I liked the look of it. And it almost did everything I wanted (It was a portal for what I do on the net). And it allowed me to geek out in getting it setup.
In thinking about moving to something else (tumblr), I thought I was going to loose a lot of what I had, but all I've lost was my custom Appletalker integration.
I did lose some of the geeky stuff. I did that site for me. I enjoy the geeky side of things, but I don't have time to do the geeky stuff anymore. E.g. posting comments didn't use Ajax. And it was never going to. Even though it is relatively simple in Rails. I just didn't (and still don't) have the time.
Here
So, as much as I loved there, I don't post here (that's confusing, but I mean my website in general. A bit lost in translation from there to here ;-) ).
That was/is mainly to do with time. I had/have ideas for blog posts, but rarely the time to write them out. That's kids for you. :-) That site might have been hosted locally on my mac, but that wasn't the thing preventing me from posting. I don't think. The uptime was good enough for me, although it would have been lovely to afford proper hosting again - never going to happen though. So although the main problem is purely finding the time to post, I think convenience plays a big part as well - I posted less than 30 times in the last two years on my home hosted website.
And I still have my domain names. And wanted to do something with them. And I do want to post somethings sometime. Just more quickly. So in the same way I stopped with my own web gallery and let flickr do it, I thought why the hell have I half-arsed built my own website? Hence Tumblr.
Back to the party
A few years ago now I first got on the net (Isn't it scary how much of this stuff hangs around?). I accumulated a lot of posts about a lot of nonsense. I was using Blogger as a back end to manage 'dynamic' content, serving it up via server side includes. All in xhtml goodness. I made a beginners mistake and let my webhost register my domain name in their name. So when they went down the swaney so did my domain name. I relaunched using Nanoblogger and served it all up statically on (what was) dotmac. That was fun for awhile until I couldn't justify paying for any kind of hosting for what is a poxy personal website. So I decided to roll my own, hosting at home using everydns, mongrel and a custom site built in Rails that used html5 instead of xhtml. A lot of fun, but hosting at home on a laptop(!) is a bit silly really.
So we get to today. Which must make this the 5th or 6th re-incarnation. And I've decided to have a go with tumblr. The price is great: free. It is fairly customisable, and you can use your own domain name; You can pretty much give the appearance you are hosting yourself.
Only, thing is. I'm not exactly sure what I'm going to write here.
Mine Again
I was first on the web in 2002 with i5m.co.uk. In my naivety I let my webhost register the domain in their name. And so when they went down the swanny, I lost control of my domain in early 2005. It was then I went for i5m.me.uk.
Well after 4 years of watching (missed it 2 years ago), I've finally got it back.
Hurrah!
I really should do a proper website again.
Don't know what to do about redirects. I've now got three domain names (i-5-m.net when I thought I'd also lost control of the i5m.me.uk one; lost registration documents, and it was detagged).
In theory I should pick one and redirect the others to it. But I don't know which one (Vote now - Ha!). Mind you I don't know how to do permanent redirects on local hosting. I think it complicates things.
Down. Back Up.
Back up after being down.
Ooops, for some unknown reason my mysql instance had stopped running, killing my website. No idea when that happened - I don't check often.
If I was clever I'd at least have some kind of notification if someone tried to reach my site. But I don't know how to do that.
But then I start thinking, what is the point of this site? I don't have many big things to say anymore. It's all Twitter now.
I should at least fix my error page.
I wonder if I could transfer to using SQLite?
A couple of tweaks
I'm not entirely sure why I persist with this website, but I do. I've just made a couple of little tweaks to the Twitter part (i.e. the tagline up above) and also to the flickr images pulled in.
The tagline uses the Twitter gem and used to simply pull in my latest status, but then I realised displaying @replies wasn't really great so I used my kludging coding abilities to loop through my timeline and find the first thing without an @
twitter.timeline(:user).each do |t| tweet = t.text if t.text.match('^(?!@).') break if t.text.match('^(?!@).*')end
The flickr images use the rflickr gem (sadly development seems to have died). Which I've already modified once to include the privacy_filter arguement of the flickr.photos.search call, the fact that I managed to do this is a testament to the rflickr gem and the flickr API. I decided to modify it again to include the content_type filter so I could exclude screenshots, etc. After, naturally, initially assuming my coding abilities had mucked up, it seems there is a bug in the flickr API and it ignores the content_type setting. So for now this change is not working.
Oh, and I think I have just fixed my RSS feed as well so that it actually shows as updated in feed readers. I'd missed out lastBuildDate.
It's all good news. Well apart from the flickr bug.
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