Earlier this week I removed the Twitter posts from the main blog feed. Even though I worked quite hard to get them to integrate in the way I wanted, the output just wasn’t working how I would have liked. Instead, I’ve subscribed to FriendFeed which achieves exactly what I wanted to achieve in the first place. The “Other Activity” section on the right-hand sidebar shows other activity from me around the web, including Twitters, Flickring and adding bookmarks. It’s not as easily accessible as the Twitter integration but I think it will work better.

Of course, you can always work the other way and look at my FriendFeed instead.

It’s been a while since Justine was posting to Juzzyweb, but recently she has indicated that she wants to get back into blogging again.

It took a few hours, but I’ve managed to tease the posts from my bespoke blogging software into the Wordpress database.  It was a lot easier this time around since I’ve done it previously for my own blog; indeed it was a lot larger task last time since I had a lot more posts to bring across.

Even though I tried my hardest to leave the theme Justine had chosen alone, I had to make a few minor changes.  The new site has many of the same features as mine — Gravatars (hopefully now all will see the value of them!), the reCAPTCHA spam prevention, microsummaries — which hopefully will encourage more readers to comment.

So, welcome back Justine.

(Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back)

Just a reminder that, even though the Mr X icon is funny, one of the features I thought was really cool with my blog update was that each commenter could setup their own avatar.

All you need to do is to head over to the Gravatar signup page and in around five minutes (assuming you can choose that picture that is just so you) you’ll be done, and Mr X will be no more.

Since I’m using the Gravatar service; once you sign up any site that uses Gravatars will also recognise your same avatar. This means that if you setup Gravatar on your blog, the same icons will appear there when people comment!

Isn’t it interesting how many song titles can be used inappropriately?  The hours are swiftly passing us by now.  Things are packed, bills are paid and we’ll shortly be stepping out of the house for the next seven weeks.

I’ve mentioned to a few people I will be writing our planned itinerary before we leave, so here it is.  Note that we’ve intentionally left it open (i.e. not all our hotels are booked) so if you see a post from us saying we’re somewhere not on the list, or we’ve left a place early or late don’t be surprised.

Aug 9 - London (baby!)
Aug 12 - Paris
Aug 15 - Amsterdam
Aug 19 - Munich
Aug 23 - Prague
Aug 27 - Vienna
Aug 29 - Venice
Aug 31 - Rome
Sep 5 - Pisa
Sep 7 - Bern
Sep 10 - Barcelona
Sep 15 - Paris
Sep 19 - London (baby!)
Sep 24 - Bangkok

I honestly can’t think of the place I’m most excited to see, though at the moment I’m excited by Paris, Prague and Vienna.  We’ll see how that pans out.

Right, well, that’s it then.  Bye!

You’ve probably noticed at this point that the website (again) looks different. Over the past few months I have been installing, customising, tinkering and fiddling with Wordpress to get it”just so”.

If you are a technically-minded user, you may also be wondering why I chose to go with Wordpress versus my own blog that I wrote a couple of years back. The answer to that is both “interoperability” and “functionality”. Since we are going overseas soon (I’m sure you’re all aware of that now), I wanted an easy way to update while away.

Wordpress has an email-to-blog function which means all I need to do is to send an email, wait a bit, and have it posted. I’m sure I could have coded it myself, but it would have taken a while and Wordpress already has it. There are a bunch of other great features I’ve introduced including Gravatars (which allows you to have a picture beside your comments), Flickr integration (whenever I post a photo from Flickr, the data is read as well as the comments on that photo — this is my attempt to integrate both my blog and photoblog) and a bunch of other stuff designed to make it easier to get in, read what you want and find more content that makes you want to stick around.

At this point, I will step back and give a quick history of bludger.org, since the old site will soon come offline and I won’t have pictures of it any more; indeed, I only have pictures of the most recent versions of the site.

• 2000 - bludger.org is registed primarily for me to have an email address I never have to change again.
• Early 2001 - The first blog is created, though I didn’t know it as a blog then. A gaudy bright orange and dark blue colour scheme are used (based on a Microsoft Access database running with ASP, hosted at www.brinkster.com).
• Late 2001 - The site switches to mike.bludger.org as I’d decided to create a “global” website and a personal one. As well as a blog, it also had book, movie and restaurant reviews (still on Microsoft Access and ASP).
• 2002 - 2003 - Not a lot of blogging goes on, but I was attempting to revamp mike.bludger.org. It never really materialised.
• Early 2004 - My first use of software I didn’t make. I used PHPNuke after setting up a Linux server at home. The server was a paltry P133 and couldn’t really handle running Apache, mySQL and PHPNuke together.
• Mid 2004 - After 4-6 months of using PHPNuke I decided to again build my own site. I used mySQL and PHP this time and created a simple site with a “blog of doom” and “links of peril”. A dark blue colour scheme with the first appearance of the couch.
• Late 2004 - I decided to recode the entire blog from scratch as blogs are becoming more popular and I decide to make my blog more “blog like”.
  
• 2005 - A few problems with the style sheet on the new site prompt me to change the look and feel again. These problems are mostly due to Internet Explorer’s poor handling of transparencies.
  
• 2006 - A small visual refresh of the look/feel to the site.
  
  
• 2007 - (Where we are now) I install Wordpress, create my own custom Flickr integration using PHPFlickr as well as creating my own custom Wordpress theme.
  

This is actually not the first time I have installed Wordpress. I installed it late in 2006 with the intention to moving across and using lots of AJAXifications, but became bored with the look and feel of the site I’d come up with.

Getting the data in posed a problem, as I had to take my data from my database and change it around to suit the database structure for Wordpress. Since I’ve done plenty of database stuff both at home and work, it wasn’t particularly taxing but was time-consuming. Speaking of time consuming, I went through every single post and painstakingly added tags to each one. Some are better tagged than others, but they’re all there.

Since I have been working mostly on this site, I decided to simply ignore my other site. I was updating both simultaneously for a while, but thought getting you to read a number of older posts might be a good way to get you to explore the site.

So there you have it! Explore, enjoy and let me know what you think.

Blackie
07/2005 - 27/07/2007

Earlier today, Blackie passed away.  Although he wasn’t sick in the same way that Whitie had been, he was not in the best of health for the past few months either.  Even so, he was extremely long-lived, for a mouse.

In contrast to Whitie, Blackie was an extrovert right from day one.  He ran on the wheel as soon as we placed it in the tank, and seemed to enjoy it’s exclusivity, but after Whitie started on the wheel, Blackie seemed to lost interest.

However, Blackie loved running around the house in his transparent ball; he was forever bumping into this or that and really seemed to enjoy his time exploring in the ball.  The recommended time to spend in one of those balls is around 20 minutes, but Blackie could easily run around for an hour without getting bored at all.

Blackie had a great trait, where he would stand on his hind legs and paw at the glass of his tank as we approached.  It was as though he was excited to see us.

Blackie is buried just beside Whitie in our backyard.  RIP Blackie.

Over the past month and a half, Richard has been kind enough to show me the ropes when it comes to playing guitar. I’ve also been lucky to have my uncle’s old guitar (which is older than I) to learn on.

Tony’s (my uncle, sadly long deceased) old guitar is an acoustic Yamaha FG-75 and hardly top-of-the-range, but it seems that “everyone” has learned on this guitar so it’s an honour for it to be sitting in our lounge room just waiting to be called into action.

I have learned the C, A, G, E, and D chords, as well as some variations thereof (Am, A7, etc) and can even play a couple of songs; not well, and hardly keeping good time (there a lot of “hang on” moments while my fingers struggle to position themselves) which is encouraging.

I was amazed at not only the amount of pressure involved to get the guitar to play a sound correctly, but the amount of pain that is involved. Luckily, after playing for a few weeks, callouses began to build up on the tips of my fingers and it hurts a lot less than before — still a little pain but I can play for a while without even noticing now.

That is, until Richard showed me Barre Chords. The pain has started all over again — all be it in a different place — and makes me feel like I’m back at the beginning. I can see the value of using Barre Chords (if you’re not familiar with playing a guitar, a Barre Chords basically allows you to retune on the fly — at least in the most basic terms — by placing one finger over all the strings).

There’s a hell of a lot more to learn, but I thought I’d thank Richard publicly for his help so far not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because I am grateful!