Miscellaneous Blog

I was wondering why I wasn’t getting any hits from Google for recent posts.  Turned out I had a bug in my .htaccess file that caused the web server to return a 500 error rather than a 404 when looking for robots.txt, which meant that the Google spider skittered away rather than indexing my site.

I’ve fixed it now.  The above may be complete gobbledegook to non-technical people, but it does mean this weblog is now the #1 search result for the string “Stoat eyed acolytes“.   Which it wasn’t before…

I’ve added the Subscribe to Comments plugin to this blog.  If you ask it nicely (by checking the checkpox when you post a comment), it will email all subsequent comments for that post.

One way to tell the lawn needs mowing:

• From the upstairs window you can see next door’s ginger cat asleep in the middle of the lawn
• From downstairs, you can’t see him at all

Useful things, strimmers.

Wonderful rant by Charlie Brooker on the subject of fashion

Last week, hardcore idiots across the nation stood in rows at dawn, desperate to get their hands on a cotton bag with “I’m not a plastic bag” printed on it. Right now, a group of determined oafs is camping out in preparation for tomorrow’s launch of the new Kate Moss clothing range at Topshop. If Grazia magazine printed an article declaring it fashionable to smack yourself in the forehead with a limited-edition ball-pein hammer designed exclusively by Coleen McLoughlin, a mob would form outside your local B&Q before the ink had dried on the page.

It’s a mystery to me. If the whole point of fashion is to distinguish yourself from the herd, why queue up to be part of it? Am I missing something here? I suspect not. But then I don’t “get” fashion. I once went out with a girl who was obsessed with dressing up; a real clothes nerd. While we were together, she developed a serious jeans habit. Each week, a new pair. She’d bring them home and show them to me, bubbling with excitement. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between one pair and the next, and I was staring pretty hard, in case there was a quiz at the end of the relationship. Doubtless a fellow jeans spod would’ve been thrilled by her purchases. To me, it was like trying to spot minute discrepancies between two marked playing cards.

I’m with Charlie Brooker here. Last Friday night we had a works do which ended up at some dreadfully trendy nightclub full of fashion victims, everyone just posing around, with a DJ playing ‘cool’ (i.e. crap) music. I felt totally out of place, as if I’d landed on an alien planet, and just stood around wishing I was somewhere else, like the gig the week before.

When I moved my blog from Moveable Type to WordPress, it broke all the permalinks, which mean any old incoming links end up at my 404 page.

Unfortunately I’d chosen an archive/URL structure in MT that’s impossible to reproduce in WordPress. I have generated a 1500 line text file that translates old URLs to new ones, which leads me to my techical question – will adding 1500 lines to my .htaccess file put a heavy load on the server and slow my site down?

Yes, this blog looks a bit different. After all the troubles I’ve had upgrading to Moveable Type 3.3, I’ve decided to give WordPress a try. It installed straight out of the box at the first attempt, and slurped up the entire 1500+ post MT archive.

At the moment it’s still the default templates and style, apart from the header image, and looks just a little bit bland at the moment. I had a heavily customised template in MT which was accumulating cruft and getting harder to maintain.

Sooner or later I’ll get round to customising this one, once I get my head round the way WordPress templates work.

Yes I do know that all the archive permalinks are currently broken. The new installation has a completely different archive structure. I believe it is possible to fix this, and this is currently on my to-do list.

Sorry, The Reasoning, but it’s true. Especially when your entire site is unusable unless I’ve installed a version of Flash that’s not even available on my combination of browser and operating system. Flash is evil; Dack.com explains why.

Comes from Captain Electra

Jade Goodie and her loathsome clan are just another product of our moronic popular media and Chav-culture.

The hypocrites in government are constantly hand-wringing over “yoof” behaviour and trying to instill a “Respect” agenda whilst our youngsters are being fed role-models like this shuddersome creature that resembles something from HP Lovecraft’s most fevered dreamings.

And I thought she was just pond life; you’re telling me she’s really a prawn from outer space?

Iä! Iä! Jade Goodie Fh’tagn!

It seems there are absolutely no limits to human stupidity. From today’s Guardian:

A man has suffered severe internal injuries after trying to launch a powerful firework from his bottom on bonfire night, it emerged today.

I suppose it’s one way to cure constipation.