I love getting comments on my site, and getting some discussions going. I know I have a couple of friends who read this ‘blog (or who did, anyway), and I have also had several “out of the blue” comments and e-mails to certain posts. I am still very sorry that these historic comments are currently in limbo – it is still my intention to migrate them.
That said, since moving to WordPress, and doing the “advertise” thing, I’ve suddenly started getting spam comments – something I’ve never had before.
Just so it’s clear; my policy is to moderate all comments that are left, to ensure they are not offensive and fit with the spirit of this site. I will only approve genuine comments – that is comments that seem to be to have been written by a human and have some relevance to the post to which they are attributed.
I will not edit any that are left – it’s “all or nothing” – and constructive criticism and disagreement is welcomed, as long as it’s civil!
I get e-mailled when a comment is left, and aim to approve all comments within a day at most. People I know and who comment regularly will get flagged to be able to post without moderation, incidentally.
My Mum had a stroke 3 weeks ago, and while she is making a reasonable recovery, still can’t speak (and may never again), and has limited movement down her right side. With her being so far away, it makes it difficult.
The younger boy had Chickenpox before Easter, followed by a tummy bug afterwards. The elder managed to catch head lice from somewhere, and then got the tummy bug, and the younger appears to have forgotten how to sleep through the night. We reckon we’ve probably also had it, but thankfully it’s impact has been limited to discomfort.
More positively, the weather hasn’t been too bad, I’ve finally launched with WordPress (and the RSS feed is working, by the way). Shifting around our working and childcare patterns seems to be working really well (although various bits of time off and Bank Holidays have made it an unusual period anyway). Still enjoying my photography – only 22 more photos to go, and I’m a third of way through the DSLR skills course again.
In fact, as special treat, here is the first picture I submitted as homework (brief was “black and white”).
Well, that’s it – I decided to go for it. You’re only young once (and for me that was some time ago).
My site is now run by WordPress. I haven’t got the theme entirely to my liking – the archive pages and individual post views aren’t great, my twitter feed has vanished off the front page, and the formatting is a bit squiffy.
I will get around to fixing these things!
Other things to note are that the reviews are now all shuffled into the blog entries, and that the old RSS feeds don’t work no more. (sorry).
Oh yes, and unfortunately I’ve lost any comments people left along the way. I still have them in the old database, so I will investigate if there’s a way to transfer them. Apologies – it won’t happen again.
I will sort out the new RSS feed shortly (hopefully).
Ash Wednesday seems to have come around quickly this time!
I toyed with the idea of giving up social media, but e-mail, Twitter and Facebook are the way I keep in touch with several of my friends, so it would be a bit like giving up on those relationships for 6 weeks. I’m aware this is probably post-justification!
So this year I’ve decided to me more down to earth, and give up snacking between meals, and indeed snacks in general. Things like crisps, biscuits, cakes, scones, chocolate, sweets, etc. I’m allowed to have a pudding after meals, and allowed to have toast or fruit between meals (for instance if I come home from work and am starving).
The motivation is to stop buying snacks (and hence save some pennies), but also to try to increase my self-control. I find that if I buy a 6 pack of kit-kats, which I think I’ll have one a Friday and it will last 6 weeks, I often ending up eating 3 or 4 of them the same day!! Pretty poor really. If I don’t buy them in the first place then it’s not a problem – but if they’re there, I find it very hard to resist.
So anyway that’s me. I’m also pondering about moving my site over to WordPress! This would be a fairly major undertaking as I’d have to get to grips with themes, and transfer 500 odd entries (and work out what to do with my reviews), so we’ll see…
Anyway, wishing you a peaceful and challenging Lent!
Finally made it climbing again yesterday – first time since September (and I felt it!).
Rather over-did it on the bouldering at the start, and so had all but run out of arm when I moved onto some pitches, but I did manage 4 ascents, ranging from 5 to a 6a (which I was chuffed with).
I did 10 or 12 bouldering problems, but all down the bottom end of the scale (VB-V2).
I’ve booked up the next 2 months of climbing evenings with my mate, which will provide the motivation to get off my butt, and hopefully I’ll be able to return to form again!
Well. No. 2 is now well and truly walking. He still stumbles and lands on his rump, but now toddling around is his preferred means of locomotion.
He is a complete climber as well. He always has been that way inclined, but now he can climb up onto the sofa and the futon. These aren’t quite shoulder height for him (probably chest height), but his technique is to grab on for dear life, hook his leg up, and kind of drag himself up onto it. Pretty impressive.
All he needs to do now is sleep through the night consistently!!
No. 1 son has his final week of Beaver’s next week, and his first week of being a cub. We also just heard today that’s going to be another dance show later this year.
Their Mum and Dad – both pretty tired, although did some major dusting and hoovering today, which felt good. 272/366 of my photos done too.
It also snowed today – big proper snow. I’ve been doing a mini-series on my 365 about Danbo trying to “find himself”, and today he was going to pause his quest in order to go and play in the snow. In the end, I opted for a different snow picture for my 365 that I’d taken earlier, but I couldn’t waste my Danbo shot, so here he is making a snow angel:
Can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this before!
One of the things I came across a few years back were six word stories. The story goes that Ernest Hemmingway was once challenged to write a complete story in 6 words, and he came up with the following:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
He apparantly referred to this as his best work.
Wired magazine ran a feature where the asked various writers to have a go, and the results were very good. Computing also featured them from time to time in Backbytes, and I sent some in to them (5 years ago!!). They are unashamedly nerdy/computingy, and are attempting to be humourous…
“Don’t worry, no-one would try that…”
Turned out that disk was important.
Local prompt was actually remote shell.
Paged at 4am. Nigerian fortune awaiting!
The last one is slightly obscure, and I think is a reference to having e-mails automatically forwarded to a pager. I thought it was funny at the time. Some new ones? Go on then.
“Backing up? We don’t do that.”
Broadband down just before anniversary. PANIC!
Ex-girlfriend wasn’t until I recorded snoring.
Facebook. There’s always tomorrow for jobs.
Seeing as I’m now into photography a lot more, I’m going to have a go at some photography six word ‘stories’…
One of my pictures has made it into the Harrogate Advertiser again this week.
There was a particularly amazing sunset, and they invited readers to send in pictures.
So I did.
And there it was on page 6!
I’ve decided I’m going to start a photographic scrapbook, where I can put bits and pieces like this that come out of my photography!
I also found out this week that the
St Robert’s, Pannal Photographic Competition is running again this year. This was the competition I won last year – I think I might try my luck again!
The Great Yorkshire Show are also running their Woodland Photographic Competition again this year, and I might have another stab at that. Last year I didn’t make it past the first round – maybe this time I’ll do a bit better?
