Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

After much tinkering around with other peoples’ WordPress templates, I figured that it was time that I wrote my own one.

That sounds like it would be a major undertaking but in reality it’s not nearly as difficult nor timeconsuming as you’d think basically because a lot of the groundwork has already been done so it’s effectively tinkering around but on a slightly larger scale.

Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with that off and on for the last month or two over at SevaTeem and it looks like it’s getting close to the time when I’ll be able to release it on an unsuspecting public. As a bit of preparation for that day, I’ve started to roll it out on some of my little family of blogs with the one over at Our Inns probably being the closest representation to the final product although as it’s going to offer loads of options it could well look quite different and Personally Chosen is also using it.

What’s needed next is the addition of some options to avoid people needing to dive in and edit the code itself.

Most of the time you don’t really notice the rate at which technology moves along but when you dig out a piece of not-that-old technology and try to bring it up to date you can really be surprised.

Take my old SuperVHS tapes for instance. I was recording my holiday trips on those for nearly ten years and thought that it was time I sat down and got them copied onto the computer before the old SuperVHS player packs in and I lose them.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to do that for a while now but only just got around to making a serious start on the task a few weeks back thanks to a new version of a TV to PC interface I bought recently for another purpose. The first surprise was that although the new device is much smaller than the PVR that it replaces, there’s now no noticeable delay after you press the record button and when it begins recording. Well, it was bound to be faster so I suppose that shouldn’t have surprised me.

What’s more amazing though is that although each 45 minute tape takes up around 1.2GB, that’s no longer a large chunk of disc space. At the time I bought the SuperVHS camcorder, the largest amount of space that I had available was 20MB (in 1993); the machine that I’m typing this on has 200GB ie ten thousand times the storage capacity. I originally thought that I’d have to copy the “tapes” onto an external drive but in fact the internal drive has more than enough space to hold all of them.

Shouldn’t I be copying them off onto DVD? I will be in due course but I think it’s more reliable to keep them on the internal disc and make them part of the normal backup process. There’s much more chance that I’ll be able to view them years from now if I do that: on DVD chances are that 1) they could get scratched and rendered unreadable and 2) DVDs may become obsolete and therefore unreadable in perhaps as little as 10 years.

And I did buy that new external drive but then I buy a new one every year as part of my normal backup plan. 250GB in a nice pocket sized drive is fantastic.

Whilst there seems to be a vast number of WordPress themes around in reality many of them are simple variations of a single theme.

Consider for example the theme I’m developing over at SevaTeem. I’ve started using early versions of it on various blogs to see how it flies. If you didn’t know that, you might think that the theme at A Time of Magic was completely different but in fact the only differences from that currently on SevaTeem are that the text is white instead of black and the background is different.

All being well, I’ll be releasing the theme to the world in a few weeks time so you’ll be able to play around with it yourself and perhaps create variants that even I wouldn’t recognise.

For the first time we find ourselves splitting a blog in two.

The reason is simple really: a while back I started An Age of Magic for a bit of fun and some time later Wendy started writing some pieces on it too. Roll the calendar forward a lot of months and her stuff has ended up swamping mine so we thought that we’d be better splitting the blog in two with stuff she’s written staying in Age of Magic whilst my strand of the blog moves to A Time of Magic.

Taking the posts out of the original blog was easy enough as the WordPress export facility lets you select by author and the import was easy enough. However, it’s not quite so easy to get rid of the original version of the posts as they were written under the admin user which can’t be deleted so I ended up having to do that in MySQL which means that the post counts still reflect the number of posts which I wrote even though they’re no longer in the old blog. Still, I imagine that’ll sort itself out at some point.

Up until quite recently your choice was between paying $5 or so a month for a web hosting service or running with one that plastered adverts all over your site.

No longer. Take for instance PinkPaper. You get a quite respectable 300MB webspace (more than enough for many commercial sites and lots more than most individuals need), 10GB/month bandwidth (you’d need a lot of traffic to use that up), five addon domains (more than many paid for services offer) and all the usual stuff like MySQL databases and so on.

If you’re debating whether to go down the freebie blog route with something like blogger.com, this is a much better way to do. Your only cost would be $10/year to register a domain and you’d get a personal POP e-mail mailbox too.