Aquarionics

As of this date (28th of Febuary 2002) I, Nicholas Avenell, and my housemate Charles Cooke do hereby hand in my one – month’s notice of vacation of this property.

That’s it, we’ve handed in our notice. Within two weeks we want to have found a new place to live so we can start moving. Any ideas on where I should move to? ATM I’m looking at Norfolk or Reading, but what’ll happen – probably – is we shall find somewhere really cheap to live while one of us can find a job…

I’ve been doing this Online Journal thing for a while now. Three years, in fact, plus a month. In One month, One week, and One day’s time I will be celebrating three years since I started using Blogger, but my first posts, written in plain HTML with an orange colour-scheme, were over three years ago. Before the Blogging Revolution. I remember when all this was text-fields…

There is a point to this. Over the years, Aquarionics has gone though at least ten major and hundreds of minor redesigns, Five weblog management systems (Notepad, Blogger, test.php, Klind & Epistula), a number of total rethinks and three servers (Soon to be moving to a forth). Two things have remained constant over that time. The first is the Aquarionics Wibble/Circle logo, and the second is me reading Melissa’s Weblog. The fact that I’ve read Melissa’s weblog for longer than I’ve known my girlfriend is very slightly scary :-)

The reason for this slightly pointless retrospective is that Melissa appears to have a new toy at Slanted.com, and a new article on why we should fall down and worship Bjork, for she may be the USA’s only hope.

Icelandic Swan Impersonator Keeps World Safe for Democracy. Go read.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, One of the only two shows that I follow semi-religously, has been staked. Season 7 will be the last. Rumours persist of a Faith spin-off series and the Giles spin-off, “Ripper”, is written and just waiting for Joss (Currently still playing with Fireflys) and Anthony Head (Giles) to have time to make it. Rumours of another movie surfaced last year, but if (As the report suggests) Buffy 7 will end with a 5 episode story-arc finishing everything that may have fallen apart.

Not really dead, just resting. I’ve temporarily solved my Linux Text Editor problem at the same time as my “Argh, my computer isn’t networked anymore, I can’t play with AqCom” problem in one fell swoop by installing Apache 2, PHP 4 and mySQL 4 onto maelstrom, my desktop. Then backtracking to mySQL 3 when 4 segfaulted whenever there was more than one line in a query. Gah.

This was done precisely in time for me to get a returned phone call from the letting agency back in Cambs which means I’m returning home tomorrow morning. Gah again.

So, in between plotting dastardly revenge in a story, finally writing another short story (which will appear here once I either get the patience to rebuff those who will tell me that the main charector is secretly me, or completely rewrite the plot. Expect nothing soon) and catching up on the new additions to my parents’ DVD collection, I’ve done a spot of code.

My home (as in “Start”) page is this one here. You’ll notice a similarity of design between it and the last iteration of Aqcom. Or you may not. Anyway, it consists of my daily cartoon intake down the left, all the blogs on my blogroll that have updated in the last week sorted by date updated, and the centre bar of useful links. Under that on your first visit will be nothing, but set a cookie. On your second visit, it’ll show you all the weblogs updated between your last visit and now.

This is fine for times like now, when I’m only checking weblogs a couple of times a day due to it being my dad’s computer, but when I get home I’ll have to rewrite it, because if you check more than once in one hour, you’ll miss all the weblogs updated in that time-period (because the blo.gs file is slightly behind). This will probably change to setting a cookie for the last blo.gs list you saw, instead of the last time you reloaded, but that’s another day’s job.

But the thing, the really truly great example of my life is that when I finally get around to implimenting a textile-like system which will format quotes in comments better than the ones in the entries than DaveDean Allen releases the source. My only problem now is the fact that as a homage, the include file for my textile-like system is called “textile.inc” – as is DaveDean ‘s – and the function to format the text is *also* textile(), again as is DaveDean ‘s, so in order to put it into Epistula like I want to, I’m going to have to go though the comment preview, check and display code and rewrite stuff. Thrice Gah.

And he released Textpattern Beta 1Textpattern Beta 1 which I’m going to have to play with now.

From Troubled Diva via London Mark:

You know you’re a “proper” weblogger when…

You ditch the standard template you grabbed off the shelf when you first started blogging, in favour of a design of your own making

Within seconds of starting my Blogger account way back in 2000, yes.

You start caring about what happens in The Bloggies

yes, Though that one and out the other side. I no longer care again.

You get listed on Daypop or Blogdex

yes, see Meme Creation thing below

You discover that you’re in the Google Top Ten for something completely unlikely and unintended, which generates loads of hits

Yes. Number two hit for “Fuckwit” before most of these new bloggers had even started.

People start leaving you sneery, snarky, anonymous comments

No. Not as yet, anyway.

You purchase your own domain name

Er, yeah, but that was before I was a blogger

You migrate from Blogger to Movable Type

Sort of. Migrated away from Blogger before MT was even released.

You start a “meme” (ahem).

Yeah, the ESF thing probably counts

You stop participating in “memes” (ahem) and online personality quizzes (as well as re-posting chain e-mail “funnies”), because you’re above all that now

I no longer take quite as many tests, and they have their own seperate page now anyway.

You string loads of other weblog names together in the middle of a post, in one great long list of linky-love

Not my style, doll. Apart from the UK Blogs Meet

You start dropping cute little in-jokes into the main body of your posts, which only a tiny handful of other webloggers will understand

I don’t think I do this. Do I do this?

You attend a Blogmeet

Check

You make a submission to the Mirror Project

Not yet

You register your site with Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati, Blogtree, Blogstreet, Blogwise, the Ageless Project, the Eatonweb Portal, GeoURL, Is My Blog Hot Or Not?, the UK Weblogs list

Some of the above.

You set up an RSS feed

Yeah, and define a better syndication format while I’m at it.

You start saying things like: actually, I’ve started to find the whole terminology surrounding so-called “blogging” so limiting these days, because you know, I don’t really feel that I fit the definition of a “blogger” any more, and couldn’t we all start to move away from these wholly arbitrary restrictions, because I suppose that if anything, I would consider myself more of a “personal publisher”, but even then I feel

It’s a journal, some of it is diary, some of it is more classic weblog. Stop it with the bloody monochromatics, people! We are allowed to fit into more than one pigeon-hole.

If that’s what makes a “proper” weblog, then I think I’ll stay improper, thanks.

HTML was broken, so some answers were for the wrong question which was hidden by missing quotes. Ickky