marramgrass

Just before midnight a couple of days ago I took the dog down to the garden. This is what I saw:

I had to pack the camera away quite quickly as it started to snow again, and the next morning it looked like it hadn’t let up all night. It also carried on, on and off, for much of yesterday.

I’ve never seen snow like this, but as of this evening it is beginning to melt round here. Oh well…

Some good news if you like doing things the old-fashioned way.

Added to the sidebar. I’m not totally happy with how it looks - I’ve never been altogether convinced by big blocks of serif text on-screen. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever used serif fonts for body text on a website.

So I’m trying something new.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: I think it feels a little cluttered and overwhelming. Needs some space. Also, I really should settle on serif or sans-. And match the logo to the body text :-) You see, the graphic came first, and then when I was writing the stylesheet I thought, “Hey. Let’s try a serif font.” I want it to work, because I like the slightly more classical look. Perhaps I’ll try some of the ideas over at UsableType.

Actually, while I’m here, for those of you with an interest in design and usability together on the web, I can’t recommend UsableType enough. Some good ideas, and some basic info, all in one place.

UPDATE II: Some adjustments a la UT. An improvement already.

Check it out, you get to watch me fooling with it as I go! How embarrassing…

This post will likely be of no interest to most (all?) of the people who read this site. But, it’s information I really needed to know, so someone else may find it useful…

I’ve been playing around with the XML-RPC API for MovableType, and was having serious bother with the mt.setPostCategories method. I just couldn’t get it to take.

What I needed to know, and the little bit of knowledge I state plainly and clearly here and now, is that the categoryId is not the category label (in the case of this post, ‘G33k’) - rather, it is the numerical ID by which your MovableType install recognises the category (for this post, ‘4′).

To find this out for a specific category manually, have a nosey at the URLs linked to in the categories page of your blog control panel. To do it in your script, muck around with the mt.getCategoryList method.

There, I told you you weren’t interested :-)

And why did I need to know this? I’m working on a little project that likely serves no useful purpose, but is fun to play about with. All will be clear once I get it going…

I think it’s time to give the sidebar - specifically the links - some attention. There are quite a few on there that haven’t been updated in months, and if you want to read them then you’ve probably read them by now, so I think they shall be ruthlessly (yet caringly) pruned. If one is yours, and you feel you have been unjustly discarded, do drop me a line - email address at the bottom of the page.

But, in order to preserve a little bit of history on here, here are the ones who go (in no significant order):

Big White Guy: I’ve just kind of stopped reading this lately.

Georgina: Who I worked with during my gap year. Nothing has happened on her site for a long, long time.

Little Fluffy Industries: Once the best place to waste a coffee break, it has now stagnated to nothing. A shame.

Peet: Explicitly stopped updating in September. This probably should have been removed long before now, but hey…

PhotographyBLOG: The gear-headedness of Gizmodo, only without the tongue-in-cheekness. I never click the link, so away it goes.

My Technorati profile: I started the Technorati signup/claim process, but to tell the truth I can’t really see any reason or need to finish it. So, g’bye then.

The Shoe Project: A typically webby, geeky idea that was maybe kind of fun. I even have a pair of shoes on there. But last post was June 2004!

Twoshoes: Is mine. My hub site, if you will. You may have come here from there. It is in desperate need of a redesign, or at least some new copy. There’s a bunch of other stuff I want to put on there. It will probably grow another link from here, but it doesn’t belong in this here list, anyhow.

I’m struggling with the thought of The Zoo Of Small Plastic Animals. Nothing doing since November - is married life keeping you that busy?! However, for now it remains. Family is different, you see.

In the meantime, perhaps I will spend some time introducing those links that remain. But that is for another day…

The Scottish Parliament building at Holyrood. All the fuss aside, I do think it’s rather cool.

These two images brought to you courtesy of the film scanner that fortunately still works after I dropped it. Oo-er.

Today is the 2nd of February, which means that this blog (or rather, my blog in it’s different forms since then) is two years and one day old. I don’t see it as particularly significant, and wasn’t really looking out for it - hence the two-years-and-a-day as opposed to two-years), but I glanced at the sidebar and noticed that the archives began in February 2003, so had a look to see when the first post was. So there you go.

On a different note, it’s a beautiful day outside, the kind on which I feel the almost inescapable urge to go outside and find somewhere to take photographs. Really gorgeous.

But I’ve got to escape that urge, as I have today finally succumbed to the voice of the nasty not-a-’flu-but-it’s-really-got-to-be-more-than-a-cold-to-do-this-to-me and am not going out. To do so may have dire consequences. So I sit here in bed, with the dog on the floor beside me, putting the flat wifi to its intended use, letting my fingers say whatever they feel like. And looking out the window at the fabness.