Internet matters – Page 60 – a sibilant intake of breath

Third Oxford Bloggers’ Gathering Wednesday

To all those who run a blog in Oxford:

I encourage you to attend the third informal quarterly gathering of Oxford bloggers, to take place this Wednesday (May 31st) at 8:00pm at The Bear.

This was announced previously, but I am trying to encourage a good turnout. In the past, these gatherings have been good fun: with enjoyably conversation and a surprising amount of affinity between those connected by only this one activity.

Oxford bloggers who want to earn my thanks might consider posting something about this themselves, so as to broaden the scope of who might attend. Feel free to direct any questions towards me.

Bug report thread

Found something wrong with a sibilant intake of breath or an associated site I run? Please report it here. I try to get everything operating as well as I possibly can, but there will always be oversights. Right now, when people report them, they tend to do so all over the place and it’s hard to keep track.

This covers all types of errors not directly related to a particular post: compatibility errors, access errors, formatting errors, etc.

Those who contribute here will earn fame and fortune. Well, my appreciation, at least. If you posted an unresolved issue on another post, please copy it over here.

Many thanks.

[Update: 8 October 2006] This is no longer the proper location for reporting bugs. From now on, use the bug reporting page within the Sindarkwiki.

[Update 2 September 2010] Unfortunately, due to terribly spam problems, I had to lock down the wiki. Now, only authorized users can edit it. For anybody else, please post any problems with the site on this comment thread.

Oxford bloggers’ gathering: May 31st

After another debate about dates and locations, the following compromise has been reached for the third quarterly Oxford bloggers’ gathering:

Place: The Bear
Date: Wednesday, May 31st
Time: 8:00pm

As with the previous two such assemblies, anyone who runs a blog from Oxford is most welcome. Feel free to indicate the intention to attend, by means of a comment.

Another Oxford bloggers’ gathering?

The first Oxford bloggers’ gathering happened on 29 October 2005.

The second, on 21 February 2006.

If they are to be quarterly, the third is due fairly soon. Provided, of course, people are still interested. I am perfectly willing to shift from the format of meeting in the evening at The Turf, if people prefer something else. Indeed, meeting at The Perch on a sunny afternoon seems much more spring-like.

Remember, those who show up automatically get a spot at the top of my list of Oxford blogs.

[Edited on 15 May 2006 to add] I propose Wednesday of sixth week (the 31st of May) as the date for this event. Additionally, I propose that it take place at The Turf, as in the two prior instances. I’m not sure many people would be willing to make the trek to The Perch, much as I think it would be nicer. How is 8:00pm for a starting time?

[Edited on 17 May 2006 to add] Because The Turf will probably be packed with finalists, we have decided to relocate the gathering to The Bear: south of the High Street and fairly close to Merton College.

PS. On an unrelated but amusing note, thanks to the new Google Trends service, I can prove that more people are searching for love, but there is consistently more news about money.

WordPress has taken over

As you can see, going directly to www.sindark.com will not take you directly to the new WordPress blog. I encourage people to register for a user account that will let you comment without leaving you information, and perhaps let me do fancier things later.

If you want the RSS feed, it is: http://www.sindark.com/feed/ Please update your BlogLines accounts and such. There is even a feed for comments, at: http://www.sindark.com/comments/feed/

Should you want to look at it, the old blog is still available at www.sindark.com/blogger/. It probably will not be updated any longer. I will not be moving the post pages or archive pages for the moment, so Google searches leading to entries on the old blog should still work.

Groceries, papers, and PHP

Thanks to Kai’s initiative in driving Shohei and I out to the big Tesco’s near the BMW plant, I now have more food than at any previous point while in the UK. I have five kinds of cheese and even two kinds of tofu. I have my doubts about ‘Beech Smoked’ tofu, but it’s the only kind other than plain I’ve ever seen in Oxford. I’ll publish a verdict on it here later. I also have fruit, vegetables, three kinds of juice, yoghurt, and Nando’s extra-spicy hot sauce. Collectively, it cost more than two weeks of my standard food budget, but there’s a good chance it will hold out that long, while simultaneously providing a more diverse diet than my standard of cheese sandwiches and bean-and-pepper based stir fries.

The big Tesco was utterly awash with expensive organic foods. Indeed, it was hard to find anything genuinely healthy that wasn’t also organic. Personally, I’d much rather have it 10% cheaper and grown with pesticides. While there are real problems of agricultural runoff and such, my scholarship-free self would appreciate some tofu that isn’t ten bucks a kilo.

For Tuesday, I need to finish my first paper for the core seminar. The obvious choices are to write about nuclear deterrence or the end of the Cold War, since they are subjects I already know a bit about. Since Alex recently gave a presentation on the second of those, he might even be able to point me towards some sources once he gets back from the marathon. I was trying to direct miscellaneous universal energy towards Vienna today, during times when I expected him to be running.

So, the attempt at shifting the blog ended up as a desperate three hour struggle to get things back to how they were. I hope that has now been accomplished. I’ve made a full backup and will make another attempt at finishing the migration after I submit my Tuesday essay. With the new banner and colour scheme, I think the WordPress blog looks really sharp.

Lots more glitches to be worked out

It seems WordPress wasn’t ready for the prime time. By which I mean that I horribly broke it within minutes of the move and simply cannot get it to work again. We get to stick with Blogger for a while yet.

Dear computer gods: I think I did something wrong, with regards to the .htaccess file. I know that’s how WordPress manages it’s bewildering system of Permalinks, and now mine are all broken. I’ve tried re-creating the file in every way I can think of. Any suggestions? You won’t be able to leave comments… because the Permalinks are broken!

Second summer day

With Kai at a party in London and Alex in Vienna for the marathon, this is my first night alone in the Church Walk flat. It follows a day that was excellent in many ways. The weather had the same brightness and warmth of yesterday, and it was accompanied nicely by the Feist CD that Jonathan recommended to me, called “Let it Die.” A few weeks will be necessary to really comprehend the style, but I could tell immediately that I like it. Already, the CD strikes me as unusually versatile – with a style that’s hard to pin down. The tone is similarly liable to shift dramatically between songs: from playful to forlorn. I rather like the song in French.

After meeting with Dr. Hurrell and reading in the Wadham MCR for a few hours, I spent the evening walking and conversing with Roz. At one point, we got excellent veggie burgers from a place on Walton Street called Peppers. The smell and clientele reminded me of the Jamaican place across the street from the hostel in Manhattan where I stayed in the days after the blackout in 2003. Their burgers are both very filling and surprisingly tasty, for a vegetarian product in the UK. Given that it’s just a few blocks away and is open late, it risks becoming the Pita Pit of this place of residence (a reference that anyone from UBC should understand).

Earlier, Rosalind and I wandered through Trinity College, which I had previously seen only from the outside, and the Wadham gardens. They have begun to change dramatically, with the coming of sun and longer days. For someone who arrived in Oxford in late September, it’s still something of a surprise to see groups of trees with leaves on them. I am looking forward to a summer of working, cycling, and researching here.

Migration news: geeky stuff

The migration from Blogger to WordPress is going well. I have the colours and formatting on the new blog more or less where I want them. I already much prefer the commenting and management system of WordPress. I just need to come up with a sharp new banner and tweak a few small things. Then, I will shift the WordPress version to the front page. I think I can do so without breaking the links to the old Blogger posts: at least until Google indexes them on the basis of their new permalinks.

Now that I am getting used to it a bit, I prefer the cleaner lines and overall layout of the new blog, as well as the greater versatility of the content management system.

Between the 20th and 24th of June, the Oxford Playhouse is staging Paradise Lost. I shall make a point of going. Roz says that she is also keen to come, if she hasn’t headed off to Rome for the summer by that point.
Tomorrow afternoon is the first OUSSG executive meeting, meant to sort out what to do about the dinners this term. It will be good to finally meet the rest of both the new and old executive in a context meant for planning.
I got a quartet of very diverse fictional books from a free box in Nuffield that Margaret directed me towards, when I was waiting for my supervision. I’ll have a look through them in the summer.

WordPress migration timeline

Beta period:

Finish fixing photos
Change colour of links and the search box
Generally finish tweaking template
Add Google Analytics tracking to WP blog
Find a photo upload plugin akin to the Upload Photo tool in Blogger

Release:

Shift Blogger blog to www.sindark.com/blogger
Redirect from www.sindark.com to www.sindark.com/wp/
Update any technorati style services as needed
Discontinue updates to Blogger blog
Fix internal links within WP blog

Optional:

Fix internal links within Blogger blog

If done properly, this will only really cause turmoil for the search engines, which should be able to sort it out in a few months, regardless. Relatively non-technical people who have seen the new WP site detect little difference, as it is. Is there anything else I am missing here?

WordPress migration, photo trouble

As part of the process of Blogger to WordPress migration, I really need a plugin that acts like the ‘Image Upload’ function in Blogger. It needs to be able to take a 1024×768 JPG file, upload it to my web server, create a thumbnail in one of a few sizes, and insert the thumbnail into my post as a link to the large version.

Does anyone know of such a plugin, or another easy way to do this?

Also, how can I configure WordPress to automatically mail new posts to an email account? I like having all my blog entries in my GMail account so that I can search them from within it.

Another strange and very annoying bug: on all posts that begin with photos immediately followed by a heading in bold, the WordPress version leaves an open [strong] tag that makes everything below it formatted in bold. I can fix them manually, but there are dozens and dozens.