Subscribe in a reader

I read a lot of things in Google Reader, it being possibly the best RSS reader on the planet. One of its main benefits over traditional readers is the ability to share feed items. And the true power is the ability to make an RSS feed of your shared items. Since some of you might find the feeds I read interesting, here’s an RSS feed of my favourite things.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/piku_random

It’s constantly updated, usually daily, as I find new things to read and tag. Consider it a meta-feed of other feeds. Each item in the feed will take you to someone else’s blog or website. I track 88 different sites using Google Reader, quite a lot of them being technology related or just plain weird.

This is more than simple, mindless blog regurgitation that the web is full of. I’m offering no commentary, no explanations of the stuff I find. If I read something interesting I’ll share it and it’ll appear in the above RSS feed. Subscribe to the RSS feed and you can also get a nice flow of random, interesting stuff.

Some of the sites I regularly visit include

• Coding Horror
• Daily Dilbert (in colour, without Flash!)
• Hack-a-Day
• XKCD
• Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

So open wide and accept the firehose of incoming data

For some bizarre reason I woke up at half seven. Even more bizarre is that its now half eleven. Where did those four hours go? All I’ve done is fiddle with my website a bit.

Wordpress has been upgraded to the latest version, and I think I’ve managed to make the OpenID stuff work again. It seems to like my LiveJournal ID and my Flickr one. It positively hates the OpenID I created myself using phpMyID but it probably doesn’t make sense for me to log into my own site using my own… site My own OpenID worked with Blogger, so it’ll do.

For some reason the Subscribe to Comments plugin isn’t working either. It’s hard testing this stuff, browser caches and cookies tend to get in the way. I spent ten minutes debugging this stuff only to find my proxy had cached the site and wasn’t really serving the updated content.

This is my first post in the Blog365 challenge, as found on Island In The Net. All I have to do is post something every single day for 365 days straight. Shouldn’t be too hard since I’m allowed to retro-post entries if I’m away from my PC or I forget. To help find them later I’ll tag them all using a “blog365″ tag. Should at least provide some amusement when I utterly run out of things to say

I’m on Freecycle, a mailing list that lets people swap and give away their unwated items for free. The idea being to prevent them going into landfill. That old telly in your loft? If it works, Freecycle it, someone will have it. Got some old games consoles? Give them away (to me).

There’s a running gag between me and a few others about utterly useless stuff that pops up. The favourite being bags of coathangers. Everybody has a bag of coathangers somewhere in their house, they must breed. Tonight someone just tried to offload some…

Offered - WF3 - Large bag of Coat Hanges (mostly trouser hangers)

Must be collected tomorrow or will be taken to the tip.

Short, concise and guaranteed to receive no offers

I’ve just finished updating my website. It’s got a better theme, the Wiki has gone and the CMS software has been replaced with something much better.

Also, my Photos website has been altered to be better. Rather than just being a load of pictures, i’m now choosing the best and writing about them.

Bear with me, I’m learning the art of making Wordpress themes. It’s not too tricky but the design of this site will look quite strange for a while.

I found these really good links though if you want a go.

How to convert any template into a Wordpress Theme

Pieces of Wordpress themes

How to add widgets to your theme

Open Source Web Design

I’ve just installed the WPG2 plugin which integrates Gallery2 into Wordpress. This means I can finally have my photo gallery inside the template for my photography site, rather than a disjoint blog-thing and gallery as two separate items.

Now I’ve got the site working, what I intend on doing is uploading photos, and rather than just pushing them up I want to explain where they were taken and give some background. I’ll also add a few pages on the hardware I use.

I won’t cross-post entries into here, it’d defeat the point of having a separate place for talking about my photography. I’ll instead mention it when things get updated. I also have an RSS feed so there’s not even any need to keep visiting my site in the hope something has changed. Of course, you should keep visiting, but RSS readers are so much better.

As some of you might remember, I went on holiday to my parents’ apartment in Spain during the beginning of August (which doesn’t feel like a month ago!) and have just finished collecting the diary entries and photos that I took. Follow the link below to begin reading. It has been split into several pages, one per day with a few pictures in each. I’ve done it as pages, rather than diary entries so that it doesn’t get lost.

Last year my parents bought an apartment outside Orihuela in Spain. It’s now finished and they have been going out to it every few months, bringing back photos. During the summer I also went out there for just over two weeks with my dad to see what it was like. We also went into the Sierra Nevada mountains to do some walking. In keeping with the last time I went to Spain - when I was about six - I wrote a diary and took some photos.

Spain 2007

No idea why, but the RSS feed of this diary is totally messing up my website’s front page. It looks like there’s an HTML tag that hasn’t been closed properly.

Hopefully this post will knock off the one that’s causing the problem as I have no way of finding out which post is breaking my site.

I’ve transferred my .co.uk domain from my ISP to my web hosting provider. It seems this has now happened which is why you can’t see any of my photos at the moment.

Normal service will be resumed once I’ve re-installed Gallery and copied the data across.

Then I can include the images directly into this section of my site without using RSS. The data for both sites lives in the same database, so the various Gallery plugins will work properly

You can now also log into my Wiki using an OpenID identity. It’s quite good, users of this site can now register with my Wiki and use their identity there to log into my Diary.