I realise that 2 months have now passed since I last posted anything here. Unlike when I was posting every day, I've had plenty of ideas of things I want to write about. What I have not had is the energy or patience to sit down and write anything.
Initially …
As I was writing my last post, my home server had started to die. An intermittent fault had developed that got worse over time. While none of my data was lost, I did have a lot of downtime until I built a new one. Unfortunately this meant that I could …
So far, I have generally followed the Guardian and Observer style guide when it comes to numbers. That is, write out in full any number less than 10.
There are four lights
I recently found the GOV.UK style guide which advises writing the numeric for any number other than …
Towards the tail end of last year I spent a number of days considering how I spend my time and asking if I am truly getting value for it. For example, I don't spend time watching the news or any other TV shows. I do go to a gym class …
I was recently shared a blog post by someone who was celebrating a streak of posting every day for 11 years. This is an impressive feat. My own attempt at posting daily has had several occasions where I have failed (six days so far this year). How does he think …
I have decided to try and help myself to maintain regular publishing posts. In the last year, the days that I missed tended to be busy days either playing host, traveling or working nightshift.
So to try and help, I want to be able to quickly write a post in …
On this day, one year ago, I started posting (almost) daily. In the last year I have published 358 posts, so clearly I didn't manage to publish every day. Prior to this past year, my posts have been very irregular and infrequent.
In fact my first ‘streak’ only lasted two …
Whenever I have a thought, followed by the thought "I should write about that", I try to write the first thought down as soon as possible.
If I don't write it down, the chances are high that I will forget about it. It doesn't have to be much, just enough …
I have failed to post for the past few days. This has been mostly because our house has been full of a stomach bug for over a fortnight and eventually you run out of energy and inspiration when each day is the same.
There are a few longer posts that …
Today I have added a search option to this site. I hadn't bothered before because I has always assumed Google 1 would be able to search the site better than a built in search. However in early December, I noticed that not every post was getting indexed, so searches could …
To celebrate the new year, I have decided to move this site to a new domain name, www.a14m.uk.
There are a few reasons for the name change:
I am always amused when I check my spam folder to see lots of folk offering to get my site on the front page of Google and to guarantee more business if only I let them redesign my website.
The truth is that I am probably already over Optimised. Considering …
I noticed after posting last night that I now have 300 posts or articles on this site. While the oldest posts were written in August 2006, it would be unfair to say that this has been a continuous blog stretching 12 years. About half the posts have been made in …
It looks like most of the Falkirk area has been taken offline last night at about 7pm. Grangemouth refinery was out, along with lots of ATMs and fuel stations but most importantly, my house and therefore home server was taken out.
I am not sure if I am going to …
On Friday evening, I changed the script that I use to update the site. The new script is much more efficient and faster, however it caused the RSS feed to be modified in such a way that my feed reader thought that every article was a new article and reimported …
So my daily posting streak lasted 90 days.
Last night when I got home, we ended up doing the evening routine in a different order and we swapped over who did the various tasks. As a result, I completely forgot about writing and publishing a post. Annoyingly I have been …
I have been keeping this 'streak' of posting something every day for a couple of months now.
I was keen to keep the streak going during this trip to the USA, but how do you define a daily blog when the timezone you are normally in and the timezone you …
I knew that the certificate of my home server was about to expire. It looks like I have somehow managed to corrupt most of my apt repository. I get lots of errors and I think it has gotten confused over which version of python is getting used.
The result is …
This site no longer used jQuery1. I only noticed that I was using jQuery after I ran some benchmarking tests on the site. The site did well in enough but jQuery contributed a significant amount of the load time.
After digging around, the only place that I found jQuery …
This is the 31st post I have made in as many days. One full month of posting something every day.
I am not sure how much longer I will be able to keep this up but in any case it has been a good run. I have managed to write …
I have decided to add comments back to this site. They were removed when I switched from wordpress to a static site generator (pelican) and I:
If you are following using an RSS feed or look back at the dates published articles, you will notice that historically I have managed short bursts of relativity frequent blog posts, followed by long periods of silence.
Recently I have started trying to post something, anything, daily.
The main reason …
At work, I have been asked to help look into why a web based tool has been having performance issues. I am on the team as an outside person without any direct involvement with the project so far. The suspicion is that it is a server configuration issue however those …
I have not been particularly good recently at updating this site. I note that the last post was made nearly a year ago.
It is not as if nothing has happened in the meantime (my second son was born last October), but I have not managed to get any thoughts …
As stated in a previous post, I have changed the site away from wordpress to pelican.
This post details the reasoning and the process of changing over the site.
In the past the site was just static files, I then moved over to basic php files that would …
Welcome to the new site. I initially started off with updating the site to include the details that I am now a Chartered Chemical Engineer, however this lead on to further updates.
I eventually opted for a complete rebuild using pelican and I will discuss the reasoning for …
On the day Ubuntu releases hardy heron, I have decided to set up this blog.
The main intention of this exercise is to document ideas, hints and tips with technology. I hope that this will not turn into a whining exersize about everyday life, for that, you'll just have to …
