August 2008 Archives

I was intending to start writing up films I’ve been to see, with an individual entry for each. I haven’t quite managed that, so here’s a grab bag of things I’ve seen recently.

I recently read a talk by the founder of GitHub saying that I (and everyone else) should start a side project. I’ve been thinking that I should do this for ages now, and the author made some good points that provide me with even more reasons to do so. One of thing things that he points out is that you need to allocate a chunk of your free time to working on your project. Fine; that isn’t the problem.

The problem I encountered was when I tried to implement one of his time-freeing suggestions, which was to stop reading RSS, and instead keep up with things on Twitter. This sounded like a good idea, and I’m already on Twitter, so I decided to give it a go. I started to follow John Gruber, author of the excellent Daring Fireball, and ran into the problem of the title. John lives in Philladelphia, which is on the east coast of the US (I admit I had to check this on Google Maps). This means that he’s five hours behind GMT. Given that Twitter is a more-or-less real-time service, the difference is immediately apparent. He doesn’t get up and start twittering until fairly late in the day where I am, and he carries on way past my bedtime. The upshot is that I get up and have a bunch of unread tweets, which isn’t all that different to my usual habit of reading RSS over breakfast. I’ll give it another few days, but I suspect I’ll be back on RSS before too long.

After bashing out a little HTML and CSS, and tweaking Apache config files a bit, www.rho.org.uk has a new front page, which points (amongst other places) here, so this site it now visible to the outside world. I’ve also created an archive of the previous (Blosxom-based) site on the off chance it’s of any use to anyone.

Now all I have to do is write some blog entries about something less tedious than configuring blogging software. Hmm…

Just finished tinkering with the look of the new blog; currently, I’ve settled on the standard “Minimalist White” with a custom header background. No doubt it’ll evolve as time goes on, but I’m happy with it for now. For what it’s worth, the Movable Type Design Assistant proved very useful in trying out ideas. I was less impressed with the way MT itself kept throwing away my changes to the stylesheet when I hit “save”, but that seemed to stop once I turned of syntax highlighting. C’est la vie.

I’ve also added an initial bio page here; it’s not complete yet, but at least it’s more up-to-date than my last one.