Whopee someone has invented yet another “social networking” website. Yeah, this one also has AJAX and DHTML boxes in it.

I don’t normally go for these types of thing, being quite happy to babble on at the world in here. Facebook and Myspace can go and sit in their emo-infested corner with a box of razorblades for all I care, and I only have a LiveJournal because Wordpress can cross-post to it.

This Pulse thing seems a bit different though. It aggregates crap interesting content from all the other websites I use and puts them in one convenient place. And then does the twee social networking guff too.

If I’ve understood it right, I should be able to give potential stalkers one web address and they can see everything. I really can’t work it out though, best go RTFM maybe.

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.

Oh damn…

Hey piku org uk! About your photos…

You’ve run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you’ve uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.

None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they’ll all come back unharmed.

That’s a bit irritating. I don’t particularly want to pay for someone to host “random crap I take with my cameraphone”. Think I’ll need to configure my own system and tell Shozu to use an FTP upload instead.

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.

Do this…

piku@vortex:~/www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-content/plugins$ ls arkayne-site-to-site-related-content/
arkayne-options.php  arkayne.php  readme.txt
piku@vortex:~/www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-content/plugins$ less arkayne-site-to-site-related-content/readme.txt
piku@vortex:~/www.piku.org.uk/diary/wp-content/plugins$ mv * ..
mv: cannot move `themes’ to a subdirectory of itself, `../themes’

Yes, I just moved  the contents of my WordPress “plugins” directory into the main WordPress directory. This has the effect of totally breaking WordPress beyond repair.

All I can say is thank god for scrollback in PuTTY, Notepad and a tiny bit of shell scripting.

PEBKAC PEBKAC PEBKAC!

When not writing eye-melting games for popular home consoles those crazy Llamasoft people like to try and out-geek the rest of us. To quote from the forum:

.. and finally, after LOT of work and a lot of week ends spent ..

The Llamasoft weather station is up.

As you may remember or not more than 1 year ago we got “caught” in
all this thing about weather satellite images, it all started because our
instructor at the Ham Club told us “once I managed to pick up a satellite
with my hand held scanner close to the window”.

Whereas most people are content to watch the weather reports on radio or TV, Giles and Jeff took it upon themselves to grab the images directly from the satellites orbiting the earth. And no, they didn’t just stick a mast on their roof, this setup is much more interesting, involving bringing ethernet to a tree and installing a webserver in a field. Maybe it’s some sort of rural broadband initiative to bring the Internet to farmyard animals, who knows.

Follow this link to read about how it was done, and then click here to see the images that they’ve pulled down. Beats the usual things involving webservers and kitchen appliances, anyway

I came across this post while on a random Stumble session. On there you will find a little program that can crawl an RSS feed and give a reading ease value. Point it at your blog’s feed and see what it says. My blog has the following results

• Syllables per word: 1.49
• Words per sentence: 19.50
• Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: 60.90
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 9.61
• Gunning-Fog Index: 20

which probably means half of you can’t understand what I write, since supposedly you need 20 years of school education to understand this. I think it just shows I’m not the most organised of writers when I put things in my diary. I do have a habit of just typing away with no real planning or ideas.

The English language is a tricky beast. Being a mixture of various other languages, mixed with some grunts and the importance of context it’s no wonder people get it wrong. In fact I’m sure there’s grammatical errors creeping into this post as I type.

Most people won’t notice the odd missing comma, the time you used a semi-colon rather than a full-stop, or missed off the period from the end of “etc”, etc. What stand’s out a mile though is that damn apostrophe. Their like a giant flashing beacon that say’s “Err… I have no clue where it goes so it goe’s in everything”. Same with “their”, “they’re” and “there”.

I’m quite glad I have English as my native language; learning this loosely structured mass must be quite hard. So, in the true blogging style, rather than write about ways to improve our typing I thought I’d simply link to someone else.

Five Common Mistakes That Make You Look Dumb

Technorati Tags: grammar blog writing

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Yeah, my school protects its inmates from the horrors of the Internet through the use of a web proxy. This web proxy is pretty useless - ask any of our kids how they get around its filters and watch.

About the only people it seems to inconvenience is us, the teachers. I just tried to visit my Google Analytics site and… nope, that’s porn that is. So is trying to search for Scunthorpe.

I bet now I’ve put those words in here my website will be blocked…