Pat Condell’s take on religion…
These videos by Pat Condell are good. I’ll let them speak for themselves.
Blogging
The Edge question 2007 – What are you Optimistic About? Why?
Each year The Edge asks prominent thinkers a simple question. This years question was What are you Optimistic about? Why? The responses are up.
I’ll have to have a think and decide what I’m optimistic about. I’ll post it in the comments.
Update: I’ve posted my optimistic predictions for 2007 in the comments.
ecto and SOHO Notes it is then
I wrote previously that I was testing MacJounal as a replacement for ecto as a blog tool and SOHO Notes as a personal journal app. Whilst MacJounal has some nice touches, and does have a nice Mac interface, I’ve reverted to ecto and SOHO Notes for the two tasks respectively. I really missed being able to drag a picture into a blog entry window in ecto and have a thumbnail automatically created that linked to a full size version when uploaded to my Soapbox. I also like the ability to specify a target when creating links. On the SOHO Notes front I like the way it automatically enters the current date as the title of a note when you create one in the in built Journal folder. Hardly Earth shattering I know but the small touches are nice.
Site update
You may have noticed that I’ve changed the theme in use by WordPress for the Soapbox. The new one is based on Man~ja. I want to change the colours of the entry headers to blue and the colours of the links in posts to a different colour as well. I’d also like to change the Posted by… text to a different colour as well. However no matter what changes I make to the style.css file the colours won’t change. I’ll sort it out later! I like the new theme. I think it is cleaner than the previous one. A few more tweaks and I’ll be happy.
UPDATE: Looks like the colour changes I made to the CSS file are working today. I think the blue is a bit bright so I’ve changed it to be Dark Blue (#00008B). I think the style sheet must be getting cached somewhere between me and the Gradwell servers. So I’ll see tomorrow, after the cache has expired, how the new colours look.
Testing MacJournal again
I’m having another look at MacJournal to see if it’ll work as my personal diary tool and also as a blog editing tool. I’m writing this entry using v4.1d4, which is the latest available development build from Dan Schimpf. The editor is nice. Probably a bit better than ecto form a Macintosh GUI perspective.
I was able to download all 190 entries from my Soapbox okay after pointing it at the base URL. When I tried this in a previous version it only downloaded a subset of them. Not sure if that was as result of something I did wrong or the program itself.
In theory I should be able to use this one program to compose and store both personal entries and public entries for the Soapbox. Anyone want to take bets on how long it’ll be before a private entry gets posted here 🙂
Here is a screen grab of this entry being composed in MacJournal. If picture uploading is working then you’ll be able to see it. If not I’ll need to do some more tweaking!
Click on picture for larger view
Update: Obviously pictures are being scaled to fit the column width. Have to fix that. Three options:
• Find out if MacJournal can mimic the behaviour of ecto. The latter will include a thumbnail of the image in the post and will display the image in a new window when it’s double clicked. This would be my preference for a fix.
• Amend the CSS templates for the WordPress theme to stop images being scaled. If anyone knows how to do this post in the comments.
• Change the WordPress scheme to not use a single centred column. Might be time to go to a normal full window width theme anyway.
Update 2: The images are okay in the RSS feed from the site. Which is how everyone reads blogs anyway! Right?
Update 3: I’ve edited the picture to make it a thumbnail with a link to the larger version.
Chemistry World Podcast
The Royal Society of Chemistry have started a Podcast, hosted by Chris Smith of Naked Scientists and Nature Podcast fame. You can get the RSC podcast here.
Mark Morford is happy
And has every right to be. The march of the religious right in the USA has taken a few knocks. Read his thoughts, and celebrations, about it at SFGate.
Another mission
The Tibetan Yak Fur guy, or Story Guy as he is properly known it seems, has another mission.
WordPress upgrade
I’ve just upgraded the version of WordPress that is used to deliver this site from version 1.5.2 to version 2.0.2. I think every thing is working okay but if anything breaks use the email link in the sidebar to let me know. Or comment on this entry.
The reason for the upgrade, bearing in mind I’m a fan of the if it ain’t broke broke, don’t fix it maxim, was a result of installing the Akismet anti-spam module. I wanted to make sure I was using the latest version of both to ensure they worked okay. In the last week there has been about 50 or so attempted SPAM comments to various entries here. All have been blocked as I have to approve all comments. I’ve never got any attempted comment SPAM before about a week ago. The start of it is probably related to an influx of twats in uk.comp.sys.mac Usenet group I read and post to. Recently we’ve had an influx of not very intelligent script kiddies who think posting offensive comments and thousands of SPAM posts is smart. Apparently they are not smart enough to know that people just get their software to automatically delete and/or ignore their posts.